All alone on a forgotten beach...
Eleanor sat next to him, gazing up at the sky…perhaps at him…no, just a trick of the light. What of it, anyway? Just a lowly priest, right? Of course not…of course not. All this bloodshed and war, there's no time for such feelings.
Why was he questioning himself so much lately? Perhaps after seeing Odis laid before him in plain light…truth seemed so bitter. A wind swept through the beach, and Alphonse looked back at the sea. If only it could be like it once was…
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Tactics Ogre: the Knight of Lodis is a spinoff story of sorts in the ambitious Ogre Battle series, a varied and diverse group of Strategy games. This one appeared on the Game Boy Advance in 2002, and was critically hailed as one of the first great handheld games in the time. In fact, it is possibly the deepest portable RPG ever made, still to this day: it's an epic tale--and while its age does show--it's a must-have for all fans of the genre and series.
The game consists of many, many battles played out in turns between two opposing sides. Each unit does some sort of various action to use their turn, and most battles have around sixteen people on it at once. Using magic, swords, and other weapons of the sort the characters duke it out on maps that vary from large to small, in various circumstances. On the overworld, the party moves around small tiles and towns and may encounter further battling, and advance the story.
The battles themselves…they are chock full of details and things to think about. Environmental hazards are just insane: water, grass, dirt, rocks, height of the land, etc, it's all accounted for and is taken into account whenever a character does anything. Plus, death, much like in Fire Emblem, is forever: units are dead, which adds to the tension. There are great little things everywhere to be taken into account when playing this game, and that's what makes it as complicated as any console game has gone.
It goes beyond this even further with a great customization capability for your party management needs. The first awesome concept is the job system, which allows your units to change and adapt as the game progresses into difficulty. Whenever your unit does some certain objective, it gets an emblem for its efforts, similar to Xbox Live achievements. When it gets certain emblems or (combinations of them, for more complex jobs) it can modify its profession to a different class. It's really fun to the typical RPG fan to collect and discover the emblems, and the jobs system works well because it rewards those who work for their power.
But that's not the only thing that the game gives you control over: magical elements, a wide variety of things to equip, and other such things that make every detail yours to control and manage. It gets especially fun in the latter half of the game when the choices are mostly laid out for you, and all you have to do is experiment with them.
Then there's leveling. Oh, boy. The thing about this game is that the enemies level really fast, and even in the first section of the game you can get your head beaten in the ground really quickly. So the programmers decided to use "Training Mode," which is a mock civil battle within your units, all controlled by the player. It's basically pure level grinding that happens in other games, until you realize that if you hand off the system to a friend and you each control a side it becomes actually a fun little pastime. Doing it alone, however, not so fun. At least your units don't die in training, and if they do inside of battle, more can be bought. Only a select few cannot die, thank goodness.
The battles that actually matter--the campaign battles--are pretty well put together for the most part, though they level too fast. But after you can look past that (which isn't very hard; it's surprisingly easy to look past) then you see a great, full campaign with a lot of cool locations and instances. Some will be on water-filled worlds, while others will force you to split your army and flank the sides. It doesn't vary enough to warrant any true notice, but it sure feels varied, because both you and your enemies are gaining skills as everybody grows.
The campaign itself is well stocked at an easy twenty hours, with a few differences here or there. There's also a multiplayer, if you happen to have two copies of the game and a pair of GBA's to link. There's also a little side set of missions called "Quest mode" that are unlocked through scrolls via the campaign. The quest missions are a LOT harder than the rest of the already somewhat difficult game, and they add a bit of value to a game that's quite into the worthy status.
How is it different from other strategy games, you may ask? Past the pure complexity and unashamed niche status, the game plays more or less as a combination of what made Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem great. It takes the eternal death scenario and fast-paced and intense battles from FE, and took the rest from FFTA: customization and battle setups. It actually feels like a pure fusion of the two, though it has something that separates it well into its own category, one being the story.
The game is epic. By epic I mean, the story is one of the deepest, wide spanning plots on any system. The Tactics Ogre games have had a lot of material to discuss from past iterations, and while the few first hours of gameplay will have the gamer spinning with names and locations, once it all gets laid out it suddenly reveals itself as complex as any fantasy novel.
The country of Lodis has been attacking neighboring nations will a crazy vengeance, taking many territories by surprise. The land of Odis, a far spread area with many smaller states, was one of the victims of this brutal attack, and the effects were far past ugly. Many leaders openly agreed with the dictations, while others were "dealt" with quickly.
Meanwhile, Alphonse, a Lodis soldier who friends with Captain Richter, joins a crew as they go complete a vague mission from high command. But things go wrong (predictably) and Alphonse gets swept into the sea. As he wakes, he finds himself in Odis, faced with a wide world full of hatred and even more mysteries. He goes through a very long and developed quest to figure out what really is going on in the land of Odis.
Not only does that story seem enough, but it's also amazingly cinematic. The opening cutscene for the game explains the plight of Odis, and it's one of the most heartfelt isometric storytelling moments (which is its own contradiction entirely). Most of the dialog of the game takes place on smaller, cut versions of much larger maps, and they are used as stages for the larger picture. Each person uses the stage to the story's full benefit: as a character leaves the area, for example, a door sound is heard. The full passion of the words is felt through the tiny screen, and it's one of the best.
The ESBR rated this game an Everyone, citing Mild Violence and Language. Considering how deep the gameplay and the story is, younger audiences won't really benefit from the game's rating anyway; besides, there is quite a bit of mild wording thrown around pretty quickly in text. The violence is pretty much the same as any other RPG: pretty cartoon-like and simple.
The game is old, yes, but it's also really well done, and the polish put into it five years ago really pays off. While it's up to GBA snuff in terms of presentation, the Japanese version was practically a launch title. Thank god this doesn't affect the rest of the game, and for really good reasons.
The graphics are fair for a GBA isometric game, with fake-3D battlefields and plenty of animated units running around. The units sometimes look way too similar (such as the "buckethead" soldiers that buzz around everywhere in the first five hours) but each has its own portrait and looks--on the whole--well detailed and drawn. They look a little dotty and bland at times, but at others they appear grand and intimidating as they are supposed to.
And that's what really matters: it's one of the first GBA games that I've played in a long while that's really able to get over its GBA limitations and give great, well crafted maps and sprites that just still evoke the coolness factor that they did when the GBA was just coming out of its infancy. Every little thing just seems to have a place, and it all meshes really nicely, which is something even console games struggle with when coming to terms with art design.
The sound, at first listen, sounds awful. It brings memories of the Game Boy Color sound channels, playing bleeps and bloops, and some fuzzy, uninspired voice clips to make it all worthwhile. I was ready to write it off as another lost potential soundtrack, until I listened more carefully. While it did repeat a little more than the typical soundtrack, I was shocked.
The music is some of the best written portable music. Ever. Each song has such a great, distinct quality to it; it feels and sounds just like it should. Battle music is intense and booming, with low tones setting the best and high tones blaring and squealing in warning, while menu melodies are moody and brooding, yet hopeful. Headphone worthy? Probably. Once you look beyond the horrible quality, what you find is a great work of art.
And that's what Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis stands as. It's a celebration of all handheld and strategy games, and it's one of the few underrated GBA games lost in the early years of the system. Every single detail about this game just seems to be clean and well done; showing what everybody what we all know what was true before: handheld games kick butt, and they kick it hard. This game gets a huge thumb up.
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...if only it could be like it once was...
Alphonse looked behind him at the house behind him, full of his comrades, his friends. Through everything, could it go back to what it once was? Eleanor was looking at him. Of course. And Odis was there, right in front of him, just as it always had been.
He turned around and stepped off the crunching sand, back into the cool grass. The he sighed and walked back up the rocks, the sun setting behind him.