I've been playing the first Ogre Battle a lot recently, and I'm impressed by how the game reinvents a lot of tactical RPG gameplay. Locking the best and even the good endings behind restrictions that actually discourage min-maxing and purely tactical thinking is really interesting. For instance, every time you capture a city from the enemy, you get a powerful buff called a Tarot card. You can let a city get recaptured and then take it again as much as you want to get a ton of these, but then your reputation with the public goes down and you get locked out of important units. It's probably the only game I've played where the "good" story path is the more difficult one. Are there any other games like this, that seam moral decisions into the gameplay? I imagine Ogre Battle 64 does something similar.
>reinvent Is a boring grindfest that doesn't nothing new.
>>3655704While I can see why you like it, I consider it bad design. The game punishes you for playing good. You have to do this autistic thing where you use squads explicitly for fighting and town capturing, which limits playstyles.It would have been better if they tied the good and evil aspects to ingame events or even pseudo-random events like you would get in some strategy games. For example, accept a bribe from a corrupt noble.
>>3655719*does nothing>>3655730>The game punishes you for playing good.Yeah, that's what makes it compelling. It's the closest thing to a narrative theme established in a gameplay loop I think I've ever seen. Of course your guy isn't going to be a good ruler if he's letting cities be sacked. In the context of the story "playing good" means being a callous tyrant.>You have to do this autistic thing where you use squads explicitly for fighting and town capturing, which limits playstyles.Personally, I think playing "optimally" is a lot more limiting with these types of games.
Play it's successor, Unicorn OverlordIt's an evolution of the Ogre battle / Grand Knight History gameplay
I like Ogre Battle for being what it is - a very complex rpg personality quiz game. The "true" ending of the game, in my opinion, should not be canon, it's more of a 'debug'/director's cut of an end than anything else.Like OP mentioned as before, I think it did something that few games have done even to this day: making the road to being a good guy a very difficult one. The reputation meter is one of the hardest to appease mechanics in any game I played. Spending too much time in one map = reputation drop (you're taking way too much tribute from the common folk by galivanting around). Getting fully overpowered units to manhandle everything = reputation drop (you look no better than the evil empire by just remorselessly smashing the opposition). Liberating low align cities with high align groups = not as much rep as you could gain (it would come with mixed feelings to see a bunch of bible thumping jesus lovers to "liberate" Sin City, as an example). Trying to be the idealist that Destin sets out to be is very difficult and the player is constantly hit with decision making you gotta do on the fly to keep the morale high.It's a shame we don't get cool games like these anymore, where choices matter and every little thing plays a part into our character legacy.
>>3655704>It's probably the only game I've played where the "good" story path is the more difficult one.Tactics Ogre does the same thing, sometimes achieving less but it is still there. Basically every route makes you really feel like a ragtag group of rebels in the difficulty, but one route is significantly more challenging than the other for a story reason that you yourself choose.
>>3655704Ogre Battle just has way way too many things you figure out once like 5 maps into the game and then do by rote hundreds of times until the game is over, too many tedious annoyances, and too many gruesomely overpowered options. E.g. searching for hidden items without a guide by zooming a high flier around for a few minutes to the obvious voids they usually put them on after you have pacified the map is damn boring. I wonder if anyone has thought through some good self-restrictions that would make the game more fun.
>>3656539If you just liberate every city with a 100 alignment canopus or something similar you will always have a maximized reputation.
