I'll be honest: after Romancing Saga 2 took me six months of confused slogging to get through, I was mildly demoralized to say the least. Flailing Through is the point, but so's being entertaining, and Saga was pushing it at the end. I did some demos for a while, some shorter projects... and then Isstvan82 so generously did two long-ass games in a row, Dragon Quest VI and Pokemon Gold, while I juggled projects and got my bearings. But it's time I got back in the game.
Which game?
That would be Quest's immortal classic, "Densetsu no Ouga Batoru," AKA "Ogre Battle Episode V: The March of the Black Queen." This is a favorite of mine, which only halfway counts as cheating because it's an incredibly odd, dense game. Half RTS, half what-the-hell-is-this-game-trying-to-be, Ogre Battle is a strategy RPG like no other. It begat Tactics Ogre, which plays absolutely nothing like it, which in turn led to Final Fantasy Tactics and the entire isometric strategy genre. I love that genre.
Ogre Battle meanwhile is in a class unto itself. There are only a handful of games that ever worked remotely like it, and half of those are sidestories and spinoffs of the game itself: Ogre Battle 64, Ogre Battle Gaiden for Neo Geo Pocket Color. The other Ogre Battleish games I've played are Soul Nomad and the World Eaters for PS2, and... Yu Gi Oh: The Falsebound Kingdom for Gamecube. Yes, really!
Meet Warren. He's a seer by trade, a wizard by unit class. He's going to give us a quiz in Japanese to determine what kind of person the main character will be. The two big factors up for grabs this way are the hero's special attack and his Alignment score, which we'll get into later.
Yay, comprehensible text for my name!
Since Cosmo doesn't exist in the Zeteginean/Xytegenian Age, Warren plies our hero (FLAIL) with a series of personality-test questions. They are all Kanji, all the time. So I wing it, and even break the Flailthroughs rule of picking the first answer every time. I just know I'm gonna end up being a dick...
...I am not a dick. I am in fact one hell of a nice guy, with an Alignment of 65. My special attack is "Ice Requiem," translated for the US as ICECLOUD, an ice magic attack that hits all enemies. It's one of the better ones! My unit also features a Cleric, which is another great sign of how damn sweet and cuddly my Opinion Leader is. Hopefully this alignment will hold...
So tomorrow we'll tackle the introductory stage, and meet Lanselot!
Oh man, I love Ogre Battle. Have thought about playing this in Japanese...
ReplyDeleteIt's not too bad if you've played it before, I'm finding. Well, the basic mechanics aren't- story stuff I've resorted to checking walkthroughs already. I wanted to be damn sure I got Canopus. :)
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