#TACTICS OGRE NYBETH HOW TO#
I get who’s best with what and how to tap the square button and use the d-pad to cycle through tiny screens with teeny icons to check item-class compatibility. Five hours in, the between-battle stuff’s coming together. I’m all about climbing the mountain, but it’s a minor buzzkill after years of smarter game design (see Level 5’s Jeanne D’Arc) that ramps up gradually. Figuring out who does what and why, what’s best assigned there, or where that thing goes, takes hours after you’ve only just started. That’s a big party and a lot to think about just getting going. Tactics Ogre holds your hand (actually, your arm behind your back) the first battle or two, then drops you out in the world with upwards of a dozen characters and twice as many travelogue, shop, and stat screens. It can feel like charging a forcefield, and it’s the case here. Tactics-angled games emphasize what goes on off the battlefield, sometimes forcing you to pore over reams of data before the game takes off. If I had to complain, it’d be about what I’m doing between battles. The only stat that’ll draw your attention away from the battlefield is recovery time (RT), which determines who goes next. Element-based magic hews to classic this-beat-that tropes. Battlefield conditions and terrain types dictate movement rates. Fighting from above is better than below. Concentrated fire gets faster results than dispersed. Head-on assaults are bad, sidewise better, and from behind, best. When you maneuver your little sprite knights, warriors, wizards, and rune fencers around the game’s Q-bert-like battlegrounds, you can sight things tactically. Battles feel less like collating swarms of feuding digits and symbols before clicking “next turn,” and more like fast-play chess.īattles move, in other words. The learning curve’s notably lower than Final Fantasy Tactics (technically Tactics Ogre’s descendent) and that’s not a bad thing.
#TACTICS OGRE NYBETH PSP#
That’s without using the Chariot Tarot, one of the new PSP version features that lets you rollback the clock, one turn at a time. After 14 days on the road (comprising just five battles, but “14 days” sounds livelier) I’ve slain 19 bad guys. I have a party of 12 and the game’s letting me juggle up to eight in battles. I’m only a few battles in, hovering over Krysaro, about to march on Qadriga Fortress and The Necromancer Nybeth.