.... yea, it's good... .... BUT......
HOWEVER, it's not excellent. To anyone who's ever played the original Ogre Battle, you know what I mean. The original game was excellent, one of the best RPGs for Snes, and the best Strategy for Snes. But, since most people wouldn't dare touch an old Snes game via the Vimm ("ewwww, 16-bit...."), let me elaborate:
-the maps in 64 are very small. Most of them it takes your characters only a day or two to walk across. In Snes: Expansive.
-Less characters then the original. (I feel all the 64 characters are from the original, yet not all the original characters are in the 64. Where is the Vampyres?)
-in the Snes, you kill a group leader and the team would retreat back to homebase. Here, they sort of wander around, running away from your guys but otherwise pacing. It was more realistic in the original; Commander is dead, retreat.
-confusing class system. (This is just me being stupid and not realizing for half the game that it's identical to the original class system; the buttons were acting funky on me so I gave up. ... so this is a complaint about the buttons used to get to the class system.)
-ill-defined maps; instead of being a fixed region, it's a fixed region next to more area. (WTH?) For example, when you corner somebody in the 64 version, it looks like they could run a bit more, but since you don't know where the map ends, you don't realize they can't.
All-in-all, shouldn't a sequel be an improvement? I mean, if you ignore the graphics being kicked up a notch, is there any improvement to this game? (I am graphics-blind; if they made a rendered version of the original Super Mario Bros with identical gameplay, I couldn't tell the two apart.) .... I think what they should've done was ported the Snes version, then improved that, not stolen some features and twisted them around.
and finally, the biggest problem/the absolute best part of the game: PLOT: There's a lot of it. And considering this is a strategy game, Plot isn't supposed to be that big a deal. But it is. Sometimes you'll have 30 or even 40 windows of character-speech between levels. So if you like that (which I do), delve in. Or if you get bored easily (which I do), start mashing the A button.
(This review written by someone who has beaten 18 of the levels, but then lost interest.)