Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together

Overview

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a remake of the Super Famicom/PS1 game of the same name. The project is to be headed by Yasumi Matsuno, the lead designer of the original Tactics Ogre, Ogre Battle, and Final Fantasy Tactics. Despite him leaving Square-Enix in 2005, he is working with them and a coalition of other Tactics Ogre developers to complete this game. With revamped 2D and 3D visuals, refined gameplay systems, new characters, and new story chapters, this game is more than a straight port or remake. Square-Enix is going through great lengths to modernize the game. Here's some of the known changes:

New Features

• The World Tarot card (system) allows you to go back and view a timeline of the events so far, re-watch cutscenes, replay previous battles, and even explore alternate branches of the game and to play and re-play those missions as well.
• The Chariot Tarot card (system) allows you to rewind the battle as far back as 50 character actions to go about the battle differently. It creates a branching path such that you can even go back to previous alternate actions should you desire.
• Tarot Cards are special items you can use to grant yourself special abilities. They can grant your characters a wide variety of skills and can be picked up off the corpses of fallen enemies.
• Every class can now be male and female, with unique art for each gender. There can now be female warriors, for example.
• New classes, such as the Rogue. The Rogue can steal from enemies and place traps on the battlefield.
• A new script that's over doubled in size from the original. The new script is purportedly even larger than Final Fantasy XII's.
• New graphical system that is inspired and made to look like the classic SNES games but beefed up. There will be 3D battlefields with lighting effects and snazzier special effects. The character designs are still 2D, but enhanced from the SNES originals.
• More magic spells and special abilities, including the new "Battle Skill" ability.
• A rearranged soundtrack from the original composers as well as 15 new songs.
• The distribution of experience has been overhauled. Characters do not level up individually, rather classes level up, and all members of that class will be equal to that level. So if the Rogue class is at level 15, then all of your Rogues will be level 15, in addition to any incoming members of that class. However, individual units will still possess unique traits. Units participating in battle will receive skill points which can be invested into talents that can boost stats, or allow use of new abilities.
• Characters now have 3 lives each over the campaign. In battle, if a character reaches 0 HP, they will be downed. If you do not win the battle or revive the character within 3 turns, the character will lose a life. Once all 3 lives are lost, the character is lost for the rest of the campaign.
• Characters that do die permanently can have their skills "scavenged" if you retrieved their corpse. This means you can recover all of the skills the dead character had and transfer them to a new one or other character in your party. Of course, in order to scavenge from a dead character you must still pay a very nominal cost.