I just don’t know about this game.
Other tactics games, you take your best guys, you win a fight, you’re done, grats, everyone cheers. Sometimes you save someone, sometimes you condemn someone, sometimes you take the left path and other times the right.
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen weaponizes fighting itself. You could win the battle and lose everything. That’s what happened to me in the Pogrom Forest.
The Pogrom Forest is the site of mass killings by the necromancer lord Kapella. He’s been raiding the towns and villages of the forest and, through dark rituals at midnight deep in the woods, turning innocents into undead. Undead which can only be harmed with white magic, impervious to every other attack.
Since only two of my squads could fight with white magic, this meant that I ended up retreating a lot and giving up towns I’d liberated. This sent my reputation plummeting toward necromantic hell.
But the unit that was best at undead killing grew too powerful. In Ogre Battle, having a powerful unit kill a weaker enemy unit is an evil act, as bullying should not be rewarded. So in the middle of the map, I had to send my best unit home and remove it from play. Otherwise its alignment would drop and it would then become an evil unit.
So, let’s review. If you do too well, you are a bully and your alignment drops and now you are evil. If you liberate towns but cannot keep them because the enemy is playing dirty, then you lose your reputation and now you are evil because you gave the towns you liberated false hope. If you liberate towns but draw bad tarot cards, you are evil because fate just doesn’t love you anymore.
I think the game has something to say about wanting to be seen as “good”. As in, it’s a hard path and you will likely fail.
That said, this game will actually require you to have units with low alignment — evil units. And there are certain things you can only do with a bad reputation.
So in a way, maybe the game is encouraging me to just — be evil. It’s easy and fun, and you can recruit Deneb and her army of pumpkinheads without feeling any guilt whatsoever.
Did I mention that each town has a morale rating that you must beat with your alignment rating when you liberate it?
This game. Literally impossible.
