Forgotten Gems: The Legendary Ogre Battle
Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I’ve covered so far, be sure to check out the 11 previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section.
I can’t look at the box art for Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen without “hearing” Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. From its iconic main theme to the cheers and jeers sounds when liberating towns, and the muffled “fight it out” and “thank you!” voice samples – it all comes right back. I haven’t played this – now sadly obscure – SNES strategy RPG in three decades, but booting up the dusty Japanese cartridge on my Super Nt instantly reminds me why I skipped pesky, non-essential things like sleep when I first brought it home.
Like so many things, my love affair with the Ogre Battle series started in 1993 during my college years in Japan. I had devoured Final Fantasy IV and V, and with the next installment in my favorite RPG series still a year off, I was looking for anything to fill the void. Ogre Battle’s cover art immediately called to me. No surprise, really – it’s the early work of a future master of character design: Akihiko Yoshida. You may not know his name, but you probably know Vaan and Ashe from Final Fantasy XII and have no doubt seen Yoshida’s art style in everything from Vagrant Story and Bravely Default, to Nier Automata.
Developed and published by Tokyo-based Quest, with support from Nintendo, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen faced some tough odds: namely, a vibrant and crowded RPG scene dominated by Square and Enix (still two separate companies at the time). Yet somehow, this virtually unknown studio landed a critical and financial hit that instantly turned heads – and eventually led to Enix itself bringing the game to the US.
If I had written this column a few months ago, as planned, I would’ve told you that Ogre Battle was both the start and the end of a sub-genre branch on the evolutionary tree of roleplaying games. Players don’t control a character or a party on an overworld map, they control multiple teams in real time. There aren’t any random battles. Instead, enemies move across the world in plain view, just like the player’s units. And when two groups bump into each other, the screen switches to an isometric display with the individual units duking it out in turn-based combat. But you’re not actually in direct control – battles are largely automatic, with the placement and classes of the characters determining their attacks and defensive moves. Instead, you assume the role of an omnipotent strategist, intervening with tactics changes and by playing magical tarot cards that you collect during the exploration phase.
It’s a bold departure from Nintendo’s slower-paced, turn-based gameplay in Fire Emblem and Square’s influential active-time battle system that was affecting the design of every other RPG in development. Although you can pause the action during both overworld exploration and battle screens, Ogre Battle feels fast and relentless by comparison, driving you to make choices and adjust your strategy on the fly like in a modern real-time strategy game.
On top of the combat and exploration elements, there is an economic element – freed towns earn you money that you need to finance additional unit deployments – as well as the clever, but sometimes hard-to-understand interconnected reputation and alignment systems. You can be more lawful and raise a character’s alignment by attacking enemies of higher level or of lower alignment, or descend towards chaos by picking on those of lower level or more lawful than you. Take too much time during your conquests and your reputation – known in the Japanese version of Ogre Battle by the awesomely flowery name “Chaos Frame” (later adopted by the localized sequels, too) – will drop by the day. Meanwhile, liberating or capturing towns with characters of high or low alignment will similarly influence your reputation in the world of Ogre Battle, which ultimately impacts what characters you can recruit and what ending you’ll get.
Despite the fact that you never directly control a singular character, each warrior has a detailed set of stats, including RPG staples like Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Charisma, Luck, and hitpoints, in addition to the aforementioned alignment. Plus, there are many different character classes – including powerful monsters that cause a lot of damage but cannot lead a party. It’s a surprisingly deep system, given that its main gameplay loop unfolds in real time. Well, accelerated real-time with different speed settings – and there’s even a day/night cycle that affects certain units. Have a vampire on your team? During the daytime, you don’t! You just have someone snoozing in a coffin who can’t attack. If that sounds daunting, know that it does take a bit of time to get into and understand it all, with even expert players trying to puzzle out all the nuances over multiple playthroughs on how to master the reputation system and get the best ending.
Sounds like the beginning of a new, lasting series that would surely be around forever, right? This is Forgotten Gems, remember?
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen sold more than half a million copies – a fifth of that via a PlayStation limited edition re-release some three years after its Super NES debut in 1993. But creator Yasumi Matsuno had big plans for his new roleplaying saga, even before it emerged as a surprise hit. March of the Black Queen is subtitled Episode V and was meant to be the first story in a seven story saga, with chapters I-IV acting as prequels.
As a newly-minted fan, I didn’t know all that and searched in vain for the previous games – there was no internet in the early ‘90s to tell me “five really means first”. But I also didn’t have to wait long for a sequel to Ogre Battle to be announced. But instead of a direct sequel and a sixth or a prequel episode, the next Ogre Battle game would be Tactics Ogre: Episode VII.
If you’ve played Tactics Ogre, you know it’s a huge departure from the original Ogre Battle in everything from the story focus on politics over high fantasy to its slower-paced, chess-like gameplay. Which may relate to a character trait of Matsuno’s that he himself has highlighted in interviews with the Japanese press over the years: he tends to get bored with his creations, even if players don’t.
Inspired by games like Solstice and Landstalker while finishing up development of Ogre Battle, Matsuno fell in love with the idea of making an isometric action game. That game idea morphed into a full-fledged pitch for an Ogre Battle Saga game called Lancelot: Somebody to Love, which would eventually turn into Tactics Ogre: The Bequest of King Dorghalla, before settling on the final, once again Queen-inspired, subtitle: Let us Cling Together.
“Someone will make something better, so I’ll make something different”, Matsuno said in a 2018 interview with DenFamiNicoGamer when asked about the change from Battle to Tactics. “It may be a strange analogy, but the first Alien, which was made by Ridley Scott, and the second film, which was made by James Cameron, have completely different ‘tastes’, right? It changed from being a sci-fi horror movie set in space to an action and war movie. I really like that transition.”
“When making a sequel to Ogre Battle, I intentionally aimed to create a completely different style of game rather than a ‘2’. I didn’t have any particular proof, but I was convinced that hardcore fans would probably be more happy with that.”
Unfortunately, nobody really stepped up to make a “better Ogre Battle”. I was initially disappointed in the new direction the Ogre Battle series took by abandoning its real-time roots, but grew to appreciate it and the many games like it that have followed over the years (Final Fantasy Tactics, Octopath Traveler, and Triangle Strategy, to name just a few). Matsuno left Quest after Tactics Ogre shipped and joined the company he was initially competing with: Square. At Square, he would go on to make Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, before moving on again to, erm, redder pastures, such as working on slash-fest MadWorld from PlatinumGames.
But despite its creator’s departure, the core Ogre series wasn’t over yet. Quest programmer Tatsuya Azeyagi replaced Matsuno in the director’s chair and led a team with Megami Tensei Gaiden designer Koji Takino to fill the gap between Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. The game: Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, the sixth chapter in the saga. Published by Atlus and Nintendo, the excellent and ambitious sequel featured polygonal maps and 3D-modeled, pre-rendered character sprites a la Donkey Kong Country and clocked in on the second-biggest N64 cartridge with 40MB/320 megabits, second only to Resident Evil 2’s 64MB cart.
If you’re up-to-date on Nintendo 64 history, the bigger the cartridge size, the bigger the risk for the publisher because cartridges had to be manufactured – and paid for – way in advance. That requires advance cash and can mean betting the studio’s future on a single game’s success. The result was that Ogre Battle 64 was impossible to find upon launch. It sold a more modest 200,000 units, but given the positive reviews and word of mouth, its fate was no doubt caused less by gamers not being interested and more by it not being available to purchase. I vividly remember the many frustrated letters we received at IGN64 during those days.
Quest needed money. It sublicensed Ogre Battle to SNK, who were looking for hot properties to adapt for the new NeoGeo Pocket Color handheld system, a capable and underappreciated competitor to the Game Boy Advance. The result was that Ogre Battle suddenly saw a bit of a renaissance. Two “side story” (Gaiden) games from two different developers followed Ogre 64 in quick succession: SNK’s Ogre Battle Gaiden: Prince of Zenobia for NGPC and Quest’s own Tactics: Ogre: The Knight of Lodis for Game Boy Advance. Both games’ stories run parallel to the events in the very first game, Episode V, with the GBA title bridging the events between Episode V and VI.
The NGPC title – more of an imitation of the original than a game that could rekindle the flame – was a mere blip on the radar, while the GBA Tactics Ogre saw respectable sales, certainly for a strategy title, with more than 380k units sold through. Yes, it outperformed its 64-bit brother despite the GBA’s rich RPG and strategy library and a total lack of them on Nintendo 64. Was I the only one who preferred the classic Ogre Battles to the isometric tactics variety?
But what seemed like a rebirth actually proved to be the end of the line. In 2002, Square acquired Quest – and despite our wildest dreams of a reunited team working together to finally give us the first four chapters of the story, we only got a Tactics Ogre remake for PSP – and later, with very little fanfare, a new take on the same game again via a 2022 remaster called Tactics Ogre Reborn.
But before I leave you on another downer of an ending because nobody is working on another true Ogre Battle game (at least, that we know of) and somehow, neither the SNES original nor its N64 sequel are easily accessible, have you heard of Vanillaware? Well, the saints behind Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown seem to have a soft spot for Ogre Battle as well. Unicorn Overlord arrived as an absolute highlight for SRPG fans in early 2024. If you missed it, give it a shot! When it was first revealed in Nintendo’s September 2023 Direct, I had to do a double take because I genuinely thought it was a new Ogre Battle game.
So perhaps Matsuno was right all along – it just took a few years to get there. Somebody did make “something better” and a promising new RPG sub-genre continues under the banner of a new queen.
But back to the classic Ogre Battle RTSRPG titles. In case you lost count, the 16-bit Tactics Ogre – which was never localized on Super NES – got a Saturn edition in Japan, then a translated wide release on PlayStation, then it was remade for PSP, and finally remade again in 2022 on everything but Xbox. Sadly, the original Ogre Battle was last seen in the west on the Wii Virtual Console in 2009, though Wii U and 3DS saw Virtual Console editions in Japan in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Ogre Battle 64 hit the Virtual Console on Wii in 2010 and saw a late release on Wii U in the US in 2017, as well. Neither title has seen multi-platform or compilation releases nor an announcement for Nintendo Switch Online. Given that Square titles have been entirely absent from Nintendo’s subscription service, it’s unlikely we’ll see them added anytime soon.
Which leaves the possibility of a future compilation – or, the old-fashioned way to legally play them on the platforms they were released on. Bad news, folks. The original Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen cartridge commands a price of almost $200 (loose) on eBay. Ogre Battle: Person of Lordly Caliber is a steal, by comparison, costing $100 for just the cartridge (no box or manual).
A copy of Ogre Battle Gaiden for NeoGeo Pocket Color could be yours for just $30, on the other hand – and thanks to the new NGPC core and converter you can play it on the Analog Pocket’s gorgeous screen, too, if you own this fantastic retro handheld. In general, Japanese versions of all three Ogre games are way cheaper since more carts were manufactured, but know that you can’t switch the in-game text to English.
What about you? Are you interested in replaying either one of the three Ogre Battle games on a modern device? Or are you content with the torch passing to Unicorn Overlord as Square’s prime medieval-based strategy RPG series?
Peer Schneider heads up IGN’s Guides, Tools, and Map Genie teams and hopes to one day see Square bring back Matsuno to give us Ogre Battle: Episode I – The Show Must Go On.
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