In a little bit of serendipity, fan site RPG Site posted up on Twitter yesterday that the successor to Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen turned 25 yesterday.
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together turns 25 today, it originally released on this date in 1995 for the Super Famicom. The 2nd entry in the Ogre Battle series with a branching story and multiple endings. It would later release on Saturn, PS1, and finally PSP over a decade later. pic.twitter.com/dUP80du1K1
— RPG Site (@RPGSite) October 6, 2020
As the direct predecessor to Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre holds a special place in my gaming heart. If I hadn’t played TO:LUCT just before I returned to blogging and social media, I’d be playing that now instead of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen (whose title is taken from two Queen songs, “Ogre Battle” and “The March of the Black Queen”. To no surprise, the sequel’s title, “Let Us Cling Together“, is also the name of another Queen song (sung partially in Japanese, btw). Matsuno-san has a serious love for this band).
Sorry, was just listening to “Let Us Cling Together”, linked above. What a beautiful song. The comments from the Japanese fans talking about what the song meant to them and their parents are amazing. It’s no wonder Matsuno-san was inspired by them.
Last night we went to Lake Jannenia, home to Sirius the Werewolf, in an episode the manual calls “Full Moon”. This game is so complex that the manual itself guides you through the first six maps (concluding with the next mission, “Glass Pumpkin”, where we finally meet Deneb, who I was able to recruit after meeting her extensive list of demands in Tactics Ogre).
I’ve been hoping I’d be able to get through more than one map each night, but it just seems impossible for me.
Sirius, the boss of the level, knows full well that you are in his territory. He starts sending units at you immediately. More than that, though, he dashes ahead of you into the cities you are about to liberate and urges you to go easy on “the boss”, that the boss wants to team up to defeat the empire, and most especially, that the boss would be easily defeated if you should happen to attack him at night.
The manual says to ignore the words of Sirius before you meet him in his den, but come on, the name of the stage is “Full Moon”. And, it’s almost Hallowe’en. We know what’s up 🙂
I tried a couple new things with this stage.
First, I removed one of Warren’s hell hounds and replaced them with the two undead (a skeleton and a ghost) that I recruited in Pogrom Forest. They are immune to everything but holy weapons and white magic. Since all wizards (such as Warren) have low alignment, there would be no reason not to take advantage of the chance to do evil things, like cut down lower leveled units.
My plan was to have hawkman Canopus’ team fly around and liberate cities while I sent other units behind him to hold them. This turned out to be impossible, due to Sirius’ immediate attacks. Canopus’ squad had their gryphon up front, soaking up all the attacks. I swapped the back row — Canopus and two fellow hawkmen — with the front row — the gryphon — to give the poor bird some rest. The gryphon then added a Gale to its opening attacks, harming all the enemies. Good girl gryphon. I added armor and better weapons to the front row. Canopus lost some fights but was able to hold onto his city.
I eventually was able to start moving across the map, using low level units as the vanguard to soften up the enemy before being swept by the higher level units.
The last enemy unit had an annoying habit of jumping in, losing a fight, then running back to the boss city to get fully healed and running back. I used Canopus’ greater mobility to get behind it and cut off its retreat. With that gone, I gathered all my units and used the “SUNSHINE” item to turn the night to day.
Led by the low level units, we dashed ourselves against Sirius and easily won.
Next up: We meet our sexy witch, Deneb. And damn my reputation, I will recruit her.
