Preface

I was going through a streak of completing a bunch of games in the past couple of months, mostly from the rush to complete 2014 released games to evaluate for my Game of the Year 2014 List, and was looking to knock out an older dated backlog game at the start of this year. I was debating on a number of JRPGs and decided on Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together over Rune Factory 4, SMT Devil Survivor Soul Hackers, and Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God. I thought it was going to be more of a lengthy, semi-challenge, but leisurely game to play. Instead, it ended up being a very lengthy and challenging game that probably didn’t do my health any good combined with my already stressful schedule and workload at work so far this year. But through continuous perseverance and luck, I saw this game to (one of) its end.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together has been heralded as a cult-classic in the crowded JRPG genre, with Greg Kasavin giving it an enthusiastic review on Gamespot and naming it his number one game in 2011 GOTY list here in Giant Bomb. The game’s director and some of the development staff of this game went on to develop the well-known and revered game in Final Fantasy Tactics. While I still enjoyed much of what the game offered, there are flaws in my opinion that makes me differ from the majority of opinion of TO: LUCT being a really great game.

---

You and Your Army

After the first couple of battles, you are given a number of free recruits from a number of different classes to start your order. You also can recruit a number of story-driven characters into your order if you choose the right choices and save them in their respective battle(s). For a good first 60% of the game, it didn’t seem if you didn’t have a lot of members under your order. But starting from Chapter 3 onward, the importance of having a sizeable order consisting of numerous soldiers under each class becomes essential. Certain battlefields and enemies calls for the player to counteract with his/her best team of soldiers to win the battle.

It would be nice to know what enemies you were going up against to choose. When you go to the next area to battle, you are basically blind picking your group of soldiers and hope they are the correct mixture of soldiers that can best navigate and win the battle. Numerous times I have to quickly restart the game (luckily an easy process to abuse with the Vita) in order to put forth the best group for the upcoming battle. Fire Emblem’s method of showing the map and enemy locations would’ve saved a lot of time for me to survey the field and enemies and field my best group right then and there, instead of having to do it over twice over.

There is also a significant difference on acquiring non-story soldiers into your order that the player needs to know and consider on approach throughout the game. The player can hire/buy certain recruits (warriors, clerics, wizards, knights, and rune-knights) at a shop to add into their order. The player can also recruit soldiers by convincing them in the middle of battle. Either method has their own advantages and disadvantages, but it’s still essential for the player to build a significant army no matter which method is done.

Joining In the Fight

Throughout Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, you’ll come across numerous story characters that you can eventually recruit if they’re still alive at the end of the battle and if you meet certain conditions. Some of the early story characters quickly join in as long as their alive at the end of the battle. Others will require a ton of effort, especially for new characters that join in the second half of the game. An extreme example of a tough story character recruit is Sherri, who is only joinable in a particular story path, must not kill her in your battle against her, and have her sister Olivia a high enough loyalty level to recruit her in a specific time and town. Other recruits require having a specific character in battle in order to recruit them either right then and there at the battle’s conclusion, or to be recruited in a future battle/event.

In my run-through, a number of story-driven characters ending being my strongest/go-to characters in many battles, especially the ones who join in early into the campaign. Outside of the OP, Canopus is my MVP in my party. His ability to be strong in melee and ranged combat and the ability to easily navigate the battlefield with ease makes it hard to keep him out of any battle. All story recruited characters come with the latest equipment and their own set of assigned skills, though new story recruits who are brand new classes into the game will have their pre-set equipment unequipped as their class level reverts back to level 1 as they join your order. It’s odd and a bit frustrating to recruit new class characters into your order even as late as right before the endgame, making the task to know the classes’s skills and leveling them up an additional and annoying challenge.

I Like You, I Hate You

One of the little gameplay elements I missed early on before I caught on later was that every character in your order has their own morale/loyalty level. All members of your party will have their morale/loyalty level change throughout the game depending on your actions. One item that drastically effects a member’s morale/loyalty is how many of which clan you defeated/killed in battle. If you kill too many members of a certain clan, members of your order who are from that clan will have their morale sink. It can sink so much that they can actually leave your order on their own.

In learning that interesting tidbit, I try my best to mitigate killing many enemies if possible if the battle objective is to simply defeat the enemy leader. In many instances, standing pat and only killing off certain other enemies before plowing the enemy leader with finishing moves. I actually went back to an earlier save after I learned about this because numerous members going deep into chapter 2 were actually hating my guts and threatening to leave. I did much better going back and continuing onward from there. Maintain high morale with your characters can help, especially with your story recruited characters as their morale affects being able to recruit other story characters toward the end of the game.

Gonna Pump You Up…

As you’ll be encountering new classes throughout the game, it’s a challenge to get the new classes to catch up with the levels of the rest of your order and the enemy’s levels. A class that is not represented in battle will not receive any experience points, so in order for an under-leveled class to level up, they have to be called into battle. It’s an added challenge for the player to combat as their party is handicapped with one under-leveled member against the enemy army, all at top level. As long as the character survives battle (don’t “die” in battle, can still earn experience points in an incapitated state and end of battle). The other important item to account for is that the game awards a majority of class experiences points to the lower-leveled classes, so it’s up to the player to be mindful of what classes each character is in every battle.

But Not Too Much

Another reason why I restarted my run to an earlier save in chapter 2 was that I noticed that overleveling your members is actually BAD in TO: LUCT. The main reason why is that the game packs enemy AI with the top equipment and skill set. Even if you manage to go over the enemy levels (particularly in the story battles), that doesn’t mean the battle will be easier for the player. In fact, at the final stretch of battles, the enemy AI actually matches your levels, which makes grinding for it very moot. The magic number is to match the enemy level throughout the game with the latest equipment and best group of skills for your best soldiers.

In the Heat of Battle

I wrote a lot of text on the importance of having a great constitution of characters and classes in your order, that’s because it ultimately results in every story battle. There are some battles where you need to have swift offensive-minded party, other battles requiring strong defensive-minded party, and everything else in-between. There’ll be battles where you’ll be skewed in a few classes and other battles where you employ a number of different class soldiers. For most battles, a simple gameplan is sufficient enough to win the day, but Tactics Ogre throws a bunch of twists with its battlefields and scenarios to ramp up the difficulty in numerous instances.

There are different approaches to tackle those special instances. In battles with an AI-controlled ally, sometimes a group of agile melee solders with one of them with a HP healing ability and long-ranged soldiers to quickly reach the AI ally. In cramped/small fields, the best strategy was the employ all outside soldiers as melee tanks, protecting the ranged/magic soldiers stuffed inside, and in a few instances, no soldier moved a spot! That’s right, sometimes the best strategy is to let the enemy army come at you, with the magic/ranged members slowly peppering the incoming enemy offense as much as they can the the melees holding them off until the time users can employ their finishing moves to end the battle.

The thing that will drive some folks nuts is that some of the battlefield and enemy placements make battle against the enemy seemingly an impossible task. There are battles where the enemy army already has a severe advantage in their placement of soldiers. Only ugly results happen in these battles. In these battles, it’s basically being able to have your party survive as long as possible to employ their finishing moves at the enemy leader. Luckily, in most battles, defeating the enemy leader usually results in the winning the battle. It gets a lot tougher if the battle requirement is to defeat all enemies, which does occur a few times. There are numerous times that I thought it the battle presented was just too challenging for the player to overcome. I overcome them somehow, but it wasn’t pretty and never intended the way it would play out. Many times of battles of that sort, a lot of luck was involved as well.

The Weight

The anchor of the game for me was surprisingly its story. It ends up being a simple fight for the cause of their hometown clan and implodes into something much bigger. There are three different paths and different endings all around the characters you recruit and how well their morale are and all the choices made throughout the game. The story goes on a huge split at the end of the first chapter, where you either had to choose to slaughter all of the village’s civilians or not. Though there are some story characters that are available to recruit in both paths, many of the story characters you meet and are able to recruit into your order can only be recruited in one path.

For my run, I chose the chaotic path (not participate in the slaughter). The story gets pretty bleak as the MC’s order is on their own confronting all warring factions in the land after the event. The MC’s sister continually gets fed up with all the fighting and actually leaves the party for a section of the game, and his childhood friend going psycho and joining up with the cause, while convincing others of his innocence of the slaughter and convincing others to join in his own personal cause. I really liked the sudden turning tides found throughout the story and it stayed emotionally dark and heavy throughout the game. Though I managed to get a good ending from my run, the bad endings sound pretty damn terrible.

Though I am interested to see how drastically different the story from the law point-of-view and the cast of characters you meet there, but I am not going to pour in another 30-40 hours to do so. I’ll read a playthrough FAQ or if someone managed to upload a Youtube run of it to get what happens in the law side of things.

Through the Grinder

I’ll be blunt on this point, but TO: LUCT is tough! Even writing about it easily recalls the headaches of the lengthy and retackling battles and constantly managing over my ever-growing group of characters in my order (I ended up with 41!). I instantly felt the grind starting from the second chapter onward and it was a challenge to oversee everything and continue to battle onward from that point. While I took the game’s intense difficulty to mesh with glum atmosphere and the wear and tear of war, it actually took a lot of tear on me. It did not help that my time with this game was running concurrent with my already insane/hectic workload at work so far this year. It made TO: LUCT’s pace seem sluggish to me because there’s so much to keep track of in everything before, during, and after each battle.

---

And Finally, The End

It’s always been challenging for me to discount some of my own feelings/bias in evaluating games, especially this one. I think it is a very good game and I can see why it’s been highly regarded, but ultimately having to manage a lot of things at every turn can really wear folks out who aren’t prepared to handle the numerous trek and continuous management of your order at every turn. The battles themselves, the heart and soul of TO: LUCT, present a lot of neat but extremely challenging affairs throughout the campaign. I adore that the story maintains a gloomy, harsh atmosphere though I wasn’t a fan on how the plot was wrapping up in the final chapter before its end. I would make the similar notion on TO: LUCT with the same summary I used on Guilty Gear: Xrd on my GOTY 2014 list, where the game’s positives really shine through if you can learn all of its elements and see how it all presents itself throughout the game’s travels, story, and battles.

Would I recommend it to others? Even though I ended up enjoying the game, I’d probably would not recommend this game to others unless they have the time, some patience, and being able to not feel overwhelmed with a the game’s numerous elements of army member management, equipment and skills, recruitment of new members, and a ton of numerous challenging battles ahead. In short, TO: LUCT is one of those really grindy games that you just have to power through to persevere.

Onward to Final Fantasy Tactics Then?

Oh hell no. I hate to say this about Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but that really pushed me to the limits where it was really affecting my enthusiasm for gaming as a means to mitigate the work stress. I’ll probably play a little bit of gaming in the meantime, but I feel like I overwhelmed myself in gaming for a good couple of months and now is the opportune time as any to step away from gaming for a good amount of time (eyeing two weeks or so). I also will not jump into Final Fantasy Tactics anytime soon, even though I would like to see the similarities and changes the direct made from TO: LUCT to FFT.

Thanks for reading.