Before Final Fantasy Tactics, my favorite fantasy tactical battle RPG, there was the Ogre Battle series. I discovered the franchise the other way around, though: after loving and completing FFT on the PlayStation back in the day, I looked around and found Ogre Battle: Let Us Cling Together, the second game in the series, and was again blown away.
Both games shared a creator — Yasumi Matsuno — who, along with the Ogre Battle series and Final Fantasy Tactics, also went on to work on Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIV, and the Vagrant Story PS2 game (which I also found).
I only heard about the first game in the series, “The March of the Black Queen”, fairly recently. This game came out originally for the Super Nintendo and was later ported to the PlayStation and is a very different experience than the turn-based games in the series where you select your movements and actions for each unit at your leisure. MotBQ operates in real time, and the battles play out without user input, though you can influence the battle by setting the battle tactics (focus on leader, on strong units, on weak units, or on whatever the game thinks of as the best strategy for the fight). You can also cast tarot cards of varying abilities, or order a retreat (which can be in many instances a better path to eventual victory).
I found the game in its original box, though without the manual, in a retro game shop downtown. I started playing through it on my Analogue Super NT, but this is a hard game. Many boss battles require specific units in order to get the best rewards, and it is easy to lose these fights and these units.
So for this playthrough, I am using the Snes9x SNES emulator on my Windows PC. This allows me to save and restore at will. Is it cheating? Probably.
This video shows the start of the game through to the first boss fight. I’ve completed up to the third boss fight.
That last boss fight took me the better part of an hour. I had to travel all over the map to work to unlock a very specific unit, the bird man Canopus, a unit that shows up in the next game in the series as well (the characters from MotBQ that show up in “Let Us Cling Together” will talk about their adventures in this game).
During the initial phase, when you’re struggling to expand your hold on the new map, a lot of battles are happening and it is very chaotic. By the time I was able to run around the map unlocking Canopus, most of the easy experience was gone, and I had to attack the final boss with what was starting out as a weak unit.
Canopus was crushed immediately. I reset and tried softening him up with my group (my character has her own group) or my main commander, Lans’ group, and I had to retreat after just a round or two each time so that I wouldn’t kill Gilbert, the boss. By the time I could get Canopus in (moving slowly since the first thing Gilbert had done on their first meeting was to kill his Gryphon that allowed him to move fast), Gilbert had healed up. After several resets, I just used precious tarot cards to kill the boss and move the plot ahead.
Defeating Gilbert with Canopus makes Gilbert see the error of his ways. The Empire forced him to be evil! All is forgiven, and he joined my army.
Part of my issue with these older games is that they are so incredibly filled with secrets that it is impossible to see much of the game without finding a walk through or strategy guide. Typically, someone playing this game back in the day would also have to buy a strategy guide to find these secrets, or be plugged into Usenet groups and the like where secrets were shared.
The manual that came with the game does answer a lot of questions, but the game that someone with the strategy guide will play is far different from someone who is just playing with no knowledge of the deeper game.
The little thermometer-looking graphic on the upper right of the screen is showing my alignment. Right now, it is so low that I will be locked out of the best ending of the game. A couple hours in, and I may already have forced myself down the path of the bad ending. I’ll be working on that.
I’ll be playing the entire game live on my Twitch channel, but I’ll include the best parts here.
