Before there was final fantasy tactics, there was
Tactics Ogre. And Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a big modernizing rework, of what was considered to be
one of the best strategy RPGS of all time, Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together. So, I went into this
expecting the same old video game just repackaged with a higher resolution like what is standard,
but was really surprised by how much of the core combat system, progression, and RPGs elements
have been completely altered to the point of this pretty much being an entirely new game. For
real. So, to show what I mean, I’m going to give ya some direct comparisons of the old versus the
new, and if YOUR new here, hit that subscribe. First, the class leveling, skill and spell systems
are entirely reworked to give you access to more useful abilities and passives, earlier on in the
game. The old version of the skill system looked like this, with really basic text descriptors,
that you unlock with a slowly accumulating amount of overall skill points. In the new version,
each character themselves individually levels up, instead of their overall class, and they
passively gain access to different skills and abilities as they rank up. Those skills
will then level up independently over time as you use actually use them, and each character
can socket 4 on them right from the go. There's also some entirely brand new skills that
have been added. The Spells went from being pretty basic looking pieces of paper, to now having
unique graphics to help distinguish between them. Above your skills, 4 of those spells
can be assigned to each character. During combat, the old UI had all of your
actions shoved over on the left hand corner. Here, everything is listed right by your
character, and it’s a lot easier to choose between all of their gear, spells, skills and items. Items
are also handled a bit differently here, having to more carefully plan which 4 items a character
takes in. Another huge change, are in the inclusion of spawning buff cards that can be
acquired for temporary bonuses during combat. After you physically move to them, Each
character can have 4 of these active at a time, but there are some with negative effects, which
you can be used against you or to your advantage by using skills or attacks that move characters.
These do add a little bit of visual clutter, but add more depth to your regular
turn to turn placement considerations. In the old version, turns moved at one
speed which played out at this rate. Now, there is a toggleable speed button, which
helps to hasten the overall flow of the game. In the old version, there were two zoom levels,
and 3 ways you could shift the perspective. In reborn, there are 3 levels of zoom and
more ways to shift the perspective. Also, It kinda used to be a bit of a pain to see health
bars in the older version, having to hold down a button to do so, but now, you can toggle them to
always stay active above characters, at all times. Elemental types and matchups, becomes
more of a focus of the gameplay here, even adding a whole new choose to the intro, which
dictates your main characters starting element. In the old version, you made your 5 basic
tarot card decisions and that was it. In the old version, when you target an enemy
to attack, it gave a decent but not a ton of tactical information. In the updated UI, it now
quickly shows you if the elemental type is a good, bad, or neutral match up right inbetween the
characters and gives generally a lot better information on if you're effectively
exploiting that enemy type or not. Originally when hiring new party members, it only
asked which alinement type they would be, but now, you get to manually pick what elemental type each
unit starts as. You can use charms now though, to change their element after you pick this,
along with other properties charms can alter. The class switching system in the old
version, was pretty solid already, and is mostly the same in the new version, except
for levels being tied to each individual character instead of by each class. As for the story side of
things, the narrative used to play out like this… but now, cutscenes are actually voiced… The sound effects and music have
been greatly improved as well. Now, for some of the other
quality of life changes. The equipment screen used to be pretty big and
bulky with alot of scrolling around to find things, but in the new version, the menu stuff
is much easier to navigate with much better info. You can also now highlight just about anything
in here to get more direct information on it. The shop has seen some improvements
as well, now looking like this. Any purely sellable items, will also be
sold now automatically when you enter the shop. The map screen is mostly the same, however, random
encounters that happened sometimes when moving from place to place, have been completely
removed. Now, you can manually choose the train button at a location, to initiate extra
battles to grind up levels. There are also now bonus objectives during combat encounters, which
yield you some extra items in the victory section. The battle preparation screen in the old
version, functioned like this, and it’s pretty similar in the new version but now you
can have multiple pre set formations of troops. You can even now scout the battlefield ahead
of time, which helps you to assign better units that will counter the element,
and type of enemy you are against. And if you want things to be a bit more
automatimated, you can now assign basic AI functions to your party members, if you
want to adopt a purely hands off strategy. The enemy AI has been tweaked and improved
though, so an actual human will be more effective during certain situations. The rewind
turn feature from the old version is here too, and functions mostly the same but provides nice
little previews of the turns you can rewind to. If your playing on PC, keyboard and mouse is fully
supported in the new version, which makes moving and assigning actions a little faster. The options
menu in the older version, was very bare bones. It this version, theres many more options,
like all the normal audio level stuff, general gameplay tweaks, button assignment,
and pretty basic graphics settings. Now, that is not even everything that has
been updated or entirely changed in Tactics Ogre Reborn, but those were the main take aways I
noticed as I just started playing through this new version of the game. Let me know what you think
of the new tweaks to the gameplay and graphics, and for the purists, the old version of the
game will always still exist so everyone wins. Thanks for checking out this real quick
comparison, I’m alex, and thanks for watching.
