It’s been about fifteen years since I last played this one.

I remembered it being the crunchiest strategy RPG around and that reputation mostly holds up. From building your units’ stats dependent on the class they currently take on level up, to equipment choices making a huge difference, to how you build your ten-person squads, Tactics Ogre is extremely tactical! Maybe the systems are held back by how infrequent you make those kinds of character building choices over the game’s campaign, but it’s still one of the best strategy RPG systems out there.

This is a Yasumi Matsuno game and has a pretty granular story about politics and war. You can see a lot of his talents and potential here but this is a first swipe at his style so while it has a lot of theming about class warfare and the trials of having ideals, there are problems. The story has a pervasive gritty tone and the plot gestures at a lot of political machinations and, but the narrative moves very quickly and a lot of country names are thrown at the player without much context to what they mean. It might be because the story isn’t good at tying its characters to the plot. Denim isn’t a compelling character either.

What’s impressive, especially for a Super Famicom game in 1995, is that the game keeps tracks of a lot of variables, like who’s alive in the story and not and that can be dependent on the player’s performance in battle. It’s wild to think that Canopus’ appearance in the story can rely on whether the player gets him killed in a random battle while travelling across the world map.

And it needs to be said, there is substance to this story. There’s real discussion about the difference between a regular person who just wants to live their life and not involve themselves in war and a “hero” who wants to change the world for the better and fight. The game asks, can a person live up to their ideals?

It fits for this game because it is hard. I will say that in this latest playthrough, I used save states and even cheated at times, so a lot of the difficulty was mitigated but this is a lethal game. You can avoid a lot of difficulty by rushing the enemy leader’s in a lot of battles and not even deal with a squad of enemies, but that seems against the “feel” of a strategy game. There’s a lot of things you can ignore to finish battles quickly but Tactics Ogre is a game where those compromises add up to longterm problems, like not caring if an NPC (who often have bad AI) dies in battle, or like finishing a battle before reviving all your units.

The game uses permadeath, which is intensified if your party doesn’t have any revival abilities. The consequence for letting a character die becomes too great eventually, because you will likely need to have someone equally as levelled to replace them and it takes time to train them.

Maybe some players can get through Tactics Ogre without grinding, but I assume it’s a guarantee. Characters will fall behind levels, and if you actually lose some soldiers, they will need to be replaced and you recruit new ones at level 1 so you need to spend time in the pretty cool but very tedious training mode. Maybe it’s a limit of the Super Famicom’s power but it would have been so much nicer if you could recruit pre-trained units.

Overall, though, this game deserves it’s praise because it is a pretty great strategy RPG, even now. There are a lot of moments in the story that stick out, like the heart-wrenching bits of dialogue that enemy leaders give before they die, or the fate of Lans Hamilton at the end of Chapter 4. The story stuff would be done better in Matsuno’s next game Final Fantasy Tactics, but even if that’s a better game overall, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a better strategy RPG.

I went back to this one to finish off the Neutral route and get the "best" ending so I'm feeling confident to call this one Mastered. In the future I will check out the PSP and Reborn versions of this game. Hope they're just as great!