Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis

The short review of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is that it’s Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together but smaller.

Not that it’s a small game by any means, especially for the Game Boy Advance. It’s shorter and has fewer classes and side-quests, but I easily got thirty hours of gameplay out of it, and could see myself replaying it in the future to see the other endings. The graphics and music are both appealing, and look pretty good for a portable game, and though the story and characters aren’t as good as the original game, they’re still enjoyable. The gameplay is very similar to the older Tactics Ogre as well, so fans of that game, or tactical RPG’s in general, should be able to pick it up quickly.

There are some things about the game that annoy me, though. In Let Us Cling Together, I mentioned that I much preferred the large armies in the sister series, Ogre Battle, as opposed to fielding only ten characters at a time for each mission. In Knight, the number of characters on the attack team is reduced further, to just eight at a time. This does force the player to think even more carefully about which characters and classes to use, but also reduces the number of strategies available, especially with the reduced number of classes in this game. As a result, though the game never felt monotonous, there’s less variety from one mission to another than there could be.

Another change for the worse is that in Knight, turns are taken a full team at a time. So, the player’s army moves first, and once every character has done something, the entire enemy team moves, and so on. In Together, turns were taken on a per-character basis, not per-team, beginning with the fastest characters. Furthermore, if the difference in characters’ speed stats was great enough, a very fast character might move twice before a really slow one. This added an extra layer of complexity to planning out a strategy, which is simplified here to no benefit that I can see.

A couple more minor things, the game is very stingy with certain types of equipment. Swords are plentiful, for example, but archers are significantly less useful here than in the original game because they’re using outdated bows for a good 1/3 of the later missions. Also, about halfway through there’s a mission where the player has to split his army. Now, you can recruit about as many characters as you want, but since you only field eight per mission the obvious strategy is to come up with a standard team of eight and only use those. So when you suddenly need to field two teams, you find yourself with eight strong characters and a bunch of bench-warmers.

One improvement over the original is that enemies no longer have a set level, but their strength is set in each mission relative to the player’s army. So, they’ll always be slightly stronger than player characters, which is good because the AI is noticeably dumber than before. Of course, the dumber AI also means that this game is a bit on the easy side; I only had to replay a few levels, and though you can’t just coast through, as long as you stick to a handful of winning strategies there are only a handful of missions that present much of a challenge.

Perhaps the best thing of all is that, because enemy strength is relative to the player’s, you don’t have to spend nearly as much time in the insufferable training mode.

So, overall, The Knight of Lodis is a worthwhile sequel, just not as good as the original. Play Let Us Cling Together first, but for fans of the franchise Knight will be worth your time.