Hey, good luck with the game. Been out two and a half months and I am still obsessed with it. :)
Well, it took me three and a half months, but I finished it, and had a blast right to the very end.
So… I am interested in some of the earlier games in the series, but I gather they were all on assorted consoles, which I know nothing about. I asked around and was told that emulators are the way to go. Which I also know nothing about, other than looking them up online and seeing that some claim to work with games originally on a wide variety of consoles.
Is this console route legal? If so, how do you go about this? (Remember, I know zip. As best I know, you buy cartridges to play console games? No idea how an emulator gets a console game onto a PC. Nor whether the result is actually playable.)
So first, what do you mean by “earlier games in the series”? Because Tactics Ogre isn’t really a sprawling series – the main game came out at various times on Super Famicom, PlayStation 1, and PlayStation Portable before the new version, but all of them tell the same story, albeit with various visual and mechanical improvements made along the way. Some related games:
- Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis (GBA). The only “Tactics Ogre” game that has a different story. It’s a side story that came out on the Game Boy Advance. You should feel right at home with it, though it’s definitely much smaller in scope and presentation.
- Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (SNES) and Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. Set in the same world and sharing a lot of the tone of Tactics Ogre, but with a very different, more zoomed-out gameplay system, where you’re sending parties out in real-time across a large regional map spanning multiple cities. Very cool games that don’t really feel like anything else out there, but expect some obtuseness and learning curve.
- Final Fantasy Tactics. Developed by much of the original Tactics Ogre team after being acquired by Square. Different setting, but lots of overlap in story, presentation, and mechanics. The War of the Lions version on PSP and mobile phones is a big improvement over the original. But note that there are persistent rumors of a new remake version in development, so you might want to wait for that.
Yes, emulators exist and work great for the vast majority of old console games these days. They are programs that literally “emulate” old systems. As far as the game knows, it’s running on the original system, but every command it sends to that system to process or display something gets translated into code to do something equivalent using your PC’s hardware. And when you press a button on your keyboard or a PC gamepad, it translates that input into telling the game that you pressed the “A” button or whatever on the original console.
So be aware that you’ll have to enter names with a slow on-screen keyboard, and you can’t expect any sort of mouse control. You can do some things that aren’t possible on original hardware, such as speeding up or slowing down time, saving and loading your “state” (letting you return to a specific moment freely, bypassing the normal save/load mechanisms), or in some cases rendering the graphics at a higher resolution. Purists still sometimes prefer original hardware for various reasons, but on balance the emulation experience is nicer and more convenient.
As for legality, the technical answer is that it’s legal to emulate the hardware, and it’s legal to “dump” a game cartridge or CD that you already own, making a backup of its data onto a computer, which you can then play in an emulator. The catch is that dumping games requires specialized hardware to read the cartridge, so in practice almost nobody does that. They download "ROM"s (copies of the game data that someone else has already dumped) from the Internet. This is not legal, but it’s also not enforced against individual users (and only occasionally against the people running ROM sites). As for ethics, that’s between you and your conscience, especially when talking about games that aren’t currently commercially available, so there’s no way for you to give the rights-holder money in exchange for playing them.
So the practical process is just to download an emulator for the system of the game you want to play, put a ROM of the game onto your computer, use the options menu of the emulator to set up the graphics and input to your liking, and then use the emulator to open the ROM. Finding an emulator can be confusing since there are often multiple different projects, but a few searches should let you find people recommending the best current versions. I’d post some recommendations, but for the most part these days if I’m emulating anything I do it on my phone for the sake of portability, and the emulators are different on PC.
If you wanted to stay completely legal, one option would be to download Bluestacks (an Android emulator for PC), and then in it, use the Google Play Store to purchase Final Fantasy Tactics: WotL. The other games mentioned above are not commercially available in any form right now, unfortunately. You can try and buy a copy on eBay or something if you feel so compelled, but a) none of that money goes to the game rights-holder, b) there are counterfeit cartridges being sold in some places, and c) you’d still have to download the ROM to actually play it, and even owning your own copy doesn’t make that technically legal.
Thank you! That is extremely helpful!
Decided to start with this, in large part because it is readily playable on BlueStacks, and properly paid for through GooglePlay. Looks good, and the differences between this and Ogre Tactics are less daunting, because I have seen much of this before with Fell Seal. Now I know who Fell Seal borrowed their system from. :)
My main problem probably sounds silly, but… During the battle, the relevant facts are difficult to see. Which units are mine, which the enemy? Which units are low on hit points? TOR solved these two problems together with the HP bars, but if such a thing exists in FFT, I cannot find it. Am I missing something? Or do I really have to resign myself to continuously clicking on units to determine these facts? Perhaps this is just one of the costs of playing an old game, but I do not want to resign myself to this unnecessarily.
Be careful with FF Tactics - the same leak that correctly predicted dozens of games from NVidia last year (two years ago?) - and also correctly predicted we are getting a Tactics Ogre Remaster - predicted what has become the industries worst kept secret - a Final Fantasty Tactics remaster.
Previously I’d have given the edge to FFT for my favorite game of the genre, but Reborn changed that and now TO is firmly in first place. But I’m obviously quite excited to see what a FFT remaster could look like, so I wouldn’t get too crazy playing the older version of this - especially after coming off Reborn, which is such a great update to the game.
EDIT: If you are looking for an alternative while you wait for FFT to get a remaster though, there are two I would put up as top-tier for the genera just below FFT. Those are Triangle Strategy and Fell Seal.
Yes, I have read the rumor, too, although until you wrote this I did not know that it was so solid.
But still, not sure why to be careful about playing the old version? Certainly people who had played TO previously could still enjoy Reborn? fwiw, I have no problem with game mechanics now considered overly detailed and outdated, but I might well be driven to give up over outdated UI difficulties – I am poor at comprehending UI’s under the best of circumstances. :)
You mostly have to remember what your characters look like. This gets easier as you go since you ultimately use the unique characters since they are more powerful than normal ones. Groom the uniques to the type of character class you want (magic or physical). This is easier than Tactics for example since you have fewer max characters but it is still a relic from the gaming UI past. Ramza changes slightly as you go through the acts, but you can always tell him by his blonde hair.
Sorry, to clarify, I love FFT and if you are having fun with the old version, by all means! My point is mostly “don’t play the hell out of this and get burned out only to find we are 3 months from the remaster and you aren a bit tired of FFT by then” - the same advice I’d give someone who wanted to replay a game right before its sequel (which looked to play the exact same) dropped, for example.
Ah, makes sense. But in my case, the problem is that TOR seems to have ruined most games for me. :) I have tried a couple really well-regarded current games, but they feel pale by comparison. So it’s either start a new game of TOR or pull out an older game from these people. So I think that the risk of ruining FFT for myself is fairly small.
Makes sense. The couple discussions I have read focused on the importance of choosing wisely in regards to generic characters (especially zodiac signs) so I assumed that as the game went along I’d be using a lot of units. But if the max characters is low and I am mostly using uniques, that will help with recognizing units. But it sounds like no HP bars for quick recognition as to which units are on the edge?
They crouch down when they are low hp but that is the only indicator.
Like Fell Seal. I guess I’ll have to adjust. Thanks!
FF Tactics is my 3rd favorite FF game so I am really excited about this remaster. Plus, I got the PSP remaster a few years back but didn’t put many hours into for some reason, but I really want to replay it (only finished it once, at release on PSOne way back in 1997).
I finally started playing TO Reborn a few days ago and am really loving it and thinking it could definitely top FFT, but still need to play some more. I will say the soundtrack for TO Reborn, as great as it is, is no match for Tactic’s. Also picked up Triangle Strategy this week so looking forward to that.
What I’d really kill for is a remake of Vandal Hearts. I played it shortly after Tactics’ release and loved that game to death, but it was extremely short. Think I finished it at around 12 hours. Still have my disc copy and tempted to dig up my PS2 to replay it.
Really loving FFT. Tense battles, interesting decisions pre-battle, and the story is off to an auspicious start. However, a couple mysteries regarding the interface, playing with keyboard and mouse using an emulator, and since there is no thread for this very old game, I thought maybe I could pick the brains of experienced players here.
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With archers and mages, I really need to be able to see the upcoming unit order during combat. I know there is supposed to be a key to do this, I’ve read references to it on console, but I’ve tried everything, and no luck. It’s a pain checking every unit separately for CT!
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I am also not seeing how to look “into” enemy units during battle, to discover their abilities and equipment. Now that I have a thief unit, I might be especially interested in the latter. :)
Thank you for any help you can offer!
Tap the “AT” button in the lower left.
Tap on a unit once to select it, again to open the unit menu, and a third time to open the status screen.
Remember that the game thinks it’s being played on a phone, so there might not be a “key” that does a given function unless it supports external control devices (I don’t remember if it does or not) AND you’ve set up a mapping in bluestacks between your keyboard and an emulated controller.
Oh, that helps sooo much! Thank you!
Grabbed finally the game, after I was done with a cataclysmic Fire Emblem Awakening playthrough (only a dozen of characters survived, Reflet watched his own daughter die, but then had an ice cream in a post scenario event. Ah, Fire Emblem!).
After FFT, I didn’t expect the game to be this challenging. But it sure is. One of scenarios so far even had me fail it 4 times, as I was actually drawing plans and strategy to get a chance at accomplishing my objective. Probably the first time this happened to me in a SRPG!
I remember reading the level limit being frowned upon by ancient fans, but I love it very much. Keep me challenged, game!
Ultimately this is where I mostly landed as well, though I have some reservations with regards to the end game, those reservations didn’t stop me from putting more than 40 hours into the game post credits. I’ll likely revisit and play it yet again in a year, I suspect. Incredible game.
Agreed. The one spot where I managed to circumvent the union level limit was the one part of the game that wasn’t totally gripping. (And anyway, given how many of the enemy units lack finishing moves, gaining levels on them is really unnecessary.)