Boy, do I ever disagree. TS so far isn’t nearly hitting that bar, which for my money is quite high (in video game terms, anyway; Margaret Atwood this ain’t). I find it to be much more bog-standard JRPG turgidity. FFT/TO actually got on with telling their stories, where TS has to take three scenes and fifty lines to establish an extremely vanilla setup without telling us literally anything about its characters other than that they were written by Japanese people who were instructed to follow anime/JRPG tropes as closely as possible.
I mean, the game still looks to be extremely my shit if it can ever get out of its own way, which I’m hoping that it does. But the sooner the writers decide between shitting and getting off the pot the happier I’ll be.
Fair enough. I think (well, I know) that I’m just a lot easier to entertain than a lot of folks on this board, which I’m grateful for when I can enjoy something like this! :)
I mean, I do agree with you, but for me it’s not the pacing (which is not great so far, but I don’t mind slow burners if they lead to something) but the language. TO had wonderful language here and there. Very evocative. FFT was more over the top, but also had magnificent turn of phrases that really sold the setting, in a purplish Shakespearian way.
Man, I hope we get a remake of Tactics Ogre (and FFT) to play on the Switch again. I sold my PSP last year to help pay for the new OLED Switch, and those are the two games I wish I could have access to again (without using an emulator, I suppose).
There’s a rumored FFT remake. I would happily pay full price for that if it includes QoL improvements similar to Let Us Cling Together and a presentation like TS.
The PSP version of TO is perfect, though and my Vita still works :). For a remake, other than improved presentation (but it was already quite good) I would love for the last chapters to be fleshed out to something closer to the original vision.
I wouldn’t mind some new QoL stuff added to either game, but honestly I’d just be happy if they worked as is on the Switch. I played 10 hours of the latest version of FFT on my iPad Pro and it looked great (cleaner, higher res visuals) but the touch interface drained the fun out of me and I petered out in the early third chapter. I need that to play on the Switch with buttons and d-pads and the like.
TO is probably the best game in the genre, and the one TS has to beat (possible? Maybe not from a story point of view, but from a gameplay point of view it seems very possible from what I’ve seen - at least we won’t have to do any Tactics Ogre style crafting… ugh…), but I’d still be happy with a straight 1 to 1 port of the Vita version that just works on the Switch even.
Allegedly we are getting both, and for the PC as well, as they were on the list of leaked games coming in 2022 for the Nvidia streaming game service thing. Or something. I forget the details, Era has a thread on it somewhere, but when I saw the rumored Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster reveal coming on last week’s Nintendo Direct I got very excited. Of course, nothing came of that rumor, but it seems possible we still get more info in the summer. Fingers crossed there is something to the rumors.
TO is the best in class in part thanks to the improvements in the remake. The original was way more of a chore to play. In particular:
1-Levelling made by class and not by character (but JP per character) was a nice middle ground to cut out grinding.
2-Overall interface improvements and speed.
3- The chariot system.
Those three fixes (and some other minor ones) were able to modernize great but dated gameplay into something that held really well when released and I think still has not been fully improved upon.
FFT needs that to shine for a new audience, I think.
There’s a lot of streamlining in in Triangle Strategy that is pretty clever so far. Let’s hope it all holds up
I never played the original, Let Us Cling Together was my first dive into the game, and I love it. I’ve played it all the way through just once, always meaning to play it a second time and picking a new option, only to play it again years later and realized I was making all the same choices, LOL. I put it away for a bit and then never got back to it - so playing it again is something I’d love to do.
Agreed. I think what I’ve gotten to see so far has me very excited, though I am also thinking this is a bit closer to a Fire Emblem than a Tactics Ogre, in a lot of ways, as well. It’s got a lot of what makes both sub-genres (assuming there is even a real distinction, I suppose) great all rolled up into one. It’s clearly made by people that are huge fans of this type of game, for sure.
Put another hour and a half in on a sick day morning here. The game even let me fight another battle! #blessed
There’s a lot to like so far, especially in the UI. Agreed it feels a little more FE than FFT, though that could be an early game thing as my dudes just don’t have much to do besides “hit bad guy.”
Chapter 2 story was less embarrassing. Still viscous, but at least there’s some hints at possibly interesting conflicts to come.
I think this is going to come down to whether the game designers were allowed to do interesting things deeper in the game, or if this is a tiny baby game for tiny babies.
To me the main difference between a TO-like and FE-like is the possibility space in the battles and unit configuration.
-FE has very few active skills in characters. Most of the time you just attack or use a magic. Some classes have stuff like dance, but it’s not common. TO has crazy number of options at any given turn, including attacks, skills, magics and items. So far it’s hard to tell where TS falls, but it seems it veers towards TO (7 TP skills + weapon skills + items)
-FE has limited direct unit customization (limited resources for class change, limited paths…) While TO has crazy unit customization. TS is definitely more FE here, offering perhaps LESS customization even than classic FE. We have to see the full game to judge.
-FE has a simpler, odds-based combat system where terrain matters, but positioning generally less so. Turns are team by team. No facing, few multi-square abilities, etc… TS definitely goes towards TO in the moment-to-moment tactics.
In general it seems they are trying to channel TO, and it reminds me of that, but have added some streamlining that moves some aspects towards FE.
I played the first battle in hard and lost the first time. Won the second, but lost a guy. I’m uncertain whether I like that it doesn’t have permadeath. I hope Hard is balanced against that.
Someone on Reddit figured out the damage calculation formula and on hard you deal 75% less damage and receive 150% more. My guess is Easy is reversed - I played on Easy to try it out and it’s actually a bit too easy even for a casual experience, I think - I only lost a character because I was being careless and of course, without permadeath, it didn’t mean much. Anyway, I don’t know if that can account for lack of permadeth or not but we’ve also only seen the earliest battles in the game - I have a feeling there is some rough waters ahead if one were to stick with Hard.
In the original prologue demo losing Roland cost me the game - that happened twice to me in two battles - and so I am careful to protect him now, though I don’t know if that’s still a thing.
I can also see some sort of iron man mode being added post-release, now that I think of it.
Yeah, I go back and forth on that with tactics games. The Fire Emblem style of carefully picking apart groups of enemies without exposing your units to anything that they can’t survive is satisfying, but it inevitably means that missions have to be balanced such that the tension isn’t “can you win this battle?” but “can you win with no/minimal casualties?”.
But without permadeath, the opposing force can be much more evenly matched, and you can have battles that are won by the skin of your teeth. In Gladius, it was thrilling to have a hard battle where things went back and forth for the whole time, and I eked out a win with only one character left standing. In a permadeath game, that would have been a crippling pyrrhic victory and probably result in a retry.
The biggest issue with me regarding permadeath is that when I lose someone I’m just going to reload the game and get frustrated having to retry. That’s why rewinding the game in Tactics Ogre was so clutch, I suppose. Now most games have a timer where if you can get to someone to bring them up they’ll be fine and that works as well, unless you can’t get to them in time - then see above.
But there is something very liberating about letting your units go all in and not have to worry about their safety so much (but while still playing well as losing a unit may not having lasting ramifications, it will make that battle that much harder).
Put it this way, when I played Fire Emblem Three Houses I had permadeath off and I enjoyed that game quite a lot.
The trick with permadeath with fixed characters (the Fire Emblem style) versus random characters (the Xcom style) is that the former often gates story and content behind characters. So you aren’t losing just a tool, but part of the story.
Fire Emblem works this by explicitly having differential houses so multiple plays are required to see the full story anyhow. The choices are all mutually exclusive, so losing a character and their story content is a blow, but also it is impossible to see all story beats to begin with so you are ‘losing’ something that you always lose a part of
For me TO and FE permadeath (there was Fire Emblem before Three Houses) works at an immersion level, when playing at the hardest difficulty.
Because it locks up gameplay and story by losing a character. You really, really fight and struggle to get injured people out of harm way (because otherwise it’s a loss). This creates really tense and narratively interesting “player stories” that really help me with immersion. Yes, the true fail condition is losing a single character, because you’ll reload, but fighting to keep everybody alive feels coherent and satisfying.
Moreover, by playing at the hardest difficulty level, once you hit the end game things get so grueling that eventually you’ll let an under-leveled character die so just you can keep going on and beat the game. This becomes specially true in the very last levels, where suddenly truly heroic sacrifices can happen.
It also had rewind, which I feel is absolutely essential, although late game they gave too many charges. If a character still dies in Three Houses near the end of a mission because I’m out of charges from too many earlier mistakes, I feel like I failed the character. When it would happen in the old games it felt like the game’s design is what failed… especially since the enemy AI was often designed to be deliberately suicidal, knowing that you’re going to reset if they get a kill.
I’m still excited by the game after playing the new demo, but having recently replayed about 40 hours of FFT on PS1 there’s a really stark contrast in how tight and efficient the storytelling is there compared to how drawn out and excessive it is in Triangle Strategy. I finished the demo in about 3.5 hours and only fought three times. Hopefully the dialog to gameplay ratio improves once you’re out of the intro and story setup phase.
Ugh, JRPGs and tactics game like FFT and many others used to be my favorite games through my 20s and early 30s. All of the repetitive and tired story that padded the game time finally drove me out. I had this on my radar and will still keep an eye on it, but I just don’t have time or care about someone coming out of a coma, having amnesia and then saving the world with powers that were lost and slowly came back.
