If You Can't Wait For Final Fantasy Tactics' Remaster, Play Tactics Ogre
The tides of conflict.
After nearly two decades, Final Fantasy Tactics is getting the remaster fans have been pining for — with The Ivalice Chronicles adding full voice acting, a new script, a “classic” option, and more. Tactics is one of the most important strategy RPGs ever made, if not one of the most important games ever made, so the game no longer being lost to time is a big deal. And while the Tactics series saw two more pseudo sequels, Tactics Advance and A2, it arguably shares more in common with an entirely different game — Tactics Ogre Reborn. In fact, the link between these two games is so deep that I’d argue Tactics Ogre is the perfect setup for playing Final Fantasy Tactics, if you really want to understand the design ethos behind how one of the most ambitious Final Fantasy games came to be. It also just happens to be the tactical game to tide you over.
The “Ogre Battle” series was created by Yasumi Matsuno, the director and writer of Final Fantasy Tactics, with the first game, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, developed by Quest and released on Super Famicom in 1993.
While that first entry was a strategy game, it wasn’t grid-based like FFT — that came with Tactics Ogre in 1995. In 2010, a remake called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was released on PSP, and then in 2002, a remaster of that came out.
It’s almost ironic that FFT has the same situation, between War of the Lions and The Ivalice Chronicles, as these two games share a ridiculous amount of DNA. Even just a cursory glance at Tactics Ogre will show you the similarities, but it runs much deeper than surface level.
Tactics Ogre takes place in an archipelago called Valeria, united as a single kingdom that worships six elemental gods. But upon the king’s demise, Valeria is plunged into a civil war between two factions, the Bacrum-Valeria and The Galgastan Kingdom. As these two factions fight for dominance, the people of Valeria suffer under the heel of despots on both sides. You play as Denam Pavel, a freedom fighter in the small region of Wallister, fighting to give his people freedom and self-reliance.
From that foundation, there are two aspects that Tactics Ogre excels at: politically-charged storytelling and complex job-based combat. These two aspects feed directly into the creation of FFT, and that’s largely because the games are made by the same person — Yasumi Matsuno. You can see a clear through line between the two, and Tactics Ogre, in a way, feels like a testing bed for what Matsuno would do later.
Valeria is a fascinating setting, loosely inspired by the likes of Medieval Europe.
The narrative of Tactics Ogre is dense — a story with a lot of dialogue to wade through. But it’s a beautifully gripping story filled with political drama and weighty existential themes. While Tactics Ogre has fantasy elements, its world feels much more grounded than that of FFT — and its narrative themes support that. This is a story about conflict and the weight that fighting puts on both people’s psyches and souls. There’s a central question at the heart of Tactics Ogre: can Denam remain a good and “just” person in the face of horrifying brutality? How do you maintain your morality in battle?
Those questions are explored in some fascinatingly compelling ways, while layering in light elements of class and ethnic conflict (ideas that FFT dives into further). But a big way that Tactics Ogre explores its big questions is through an expansive branching narrative. At critical junctures, you’ll have to make huge decisions that alter the entire story. These are often big moral quandries, like your ruler ordering you to massacre innocent civilians so it can be pinned on the Galgastani. Do you follow orders in service to the so-called greater good, or refuse?
The choices you make not only change how the story plays out, but also who your protagonist is as a person — molding his belief system and morality. It’s an ingenious exploration of consequence that you don’t often see in games, not just showing how choices affect the world, but on a deeper, more personal level.
Tactics Ogre embraces hard moral questions with its story, using those questions to illustrate the idea of morality in wartime.
That’s an idea that FFT would embrace completely, but display from a different angle. Tactics Ogre is about how choices mold a person, but FFT staunchly answers the questions that the former game raises — how a single person can strive for the greater good in a world torn apart by strife.
But the foundational elements of Tactics Ogre also apply to gameplay, with how the game layers in dynamic options for building your army, through a robust job or “class” system. While the jobs aren’t quite as unique as FFT, Tactics Ogre really shines in how they synergize together, and fill unique roles.
Clerics function as your healers, but they’re also one of the only classes that can exorcise undead creatures, removing them from the map so they can’t respawn. Rune Fencers blend melee attacks with elemental magic, becoming a hybrid. Fusiliers have an exceptional ranged attack, but are incredibly weak to magic, meaning you need to smartly integrate them into your army.
Each class feels like a small piece of the overall puzzle, and the joy of this game’s combat lies in trying out different combinations and strategies. Tactics Ogre also puts a huge emphasis on verticality, with maps that often have multiple tiers and chokepoints — places that archers and ranged units can take advantage of. Reborn also introduces a brilliant little card system, where blue cards will spawn around the map — and picking those up can give you stat boosts for that battle, but your enemies can do the same. This means you have to factor in your army build along with playing the field, all at the same time.
Tactic’s Ogre’s class system provides a fantastic amount of strategic depth.
Again, these are ideas that were absolutely central to FFT, which leaned even harder into the idea of unique jobs. The synergy found in Tactics Ogre was only amped up in FFT, with highly unique classes that have unique interplay together, and against other classes. That idea of elevation is equally important to FFT as well, as anyone who’s played that game will remember the infamous Dorter Slums level, where archers can easily destroy your forces.
Tactics Ogre is a brilliant gem of a game entirely on its own, but it takes on an entirely different flavor when you view it as a complementary piece to Final Fantasy Tactics — a visionary director truly finding his footing. It’s one of the few examples in all of gaming where playing both titles will legitimately deepen your understanding and appreciation for each one. And that’s not even to mention the profound effect both have had on the industry at large, with dozens of titles taking cues from what this defining tactical dualogy did.
