general thread for talking about matsuno games (ogre battle march of the black queen, tactics ogre let us cling together, final fantasy tactics, vagrant story, final fantasy xii, crimson shroud, and other games he’s been involved with like his final fantasy xiv scenarios). i’ve been having a lot of fun streaming fft with friends lately, also got about 2/3 through vagrant story over the summer and was head over heels in love with it, going back to finish soon. how is ogre battle motbq? it’s the one i know least about.
here’s a machine translation of the nightmarish pitch for a romance battle royale xcom-like he posted on twitter a few weeks ago
I love all his other games but Ogre battle is frankly a huge chore
Every map looks and feels the same, it also feels like victory is always inevitable but you have to go through annoying hoops to get there. Also it’s an RTS that makes you control a mouse pointer with a Snes controller
There’s not a lot of interesting story happening until the endings either
March of the Black Queen has an incredible look and feel. Battles are staged like they’re in a curio cabinet, and the player is purposefully kept at a remove from their little soldiers. The maps are, of course, done in the SNES-style ‘wrapping’ but it looks less like a globe and more like a cloth map falling off the end of a table. It all turns purple and gold as the sun sets and rises. A witch appears and the game pulls out its tarot deck because this is a parlor game you’re inventing because you’re a child in the court of Rudolf II.
The pain of mouse control in Ogre Battle is mitigated by grouping characters into units. The game really is a little too large in scope for SNES hardware, though, and you have to do a lot of camera panning around the map, and the menus are slow. Game balance suffers because it’s easy for your flying units to outmaneuver all enemies and then crush even the most dangerous enemies with a combination of tarot cards and overpowered weapons (neither of which the enemy can use), so the lower power of flying characters doesn’t present a practical hindrance. If you abuse flying units and Boots (an item that lets you warp around the map) then every stage is fairly monotonous and braindead. But if you don’t, then every stage is like 2 hours, and it’s also really awkward to train up specialist units like the Octopus or Cerberus when so many stages are kind of low on sea or mountain terrain. Using a greater variety of units is easier once you’ve already mastered the game, but it’s hard to appreciate most of that on a blind playthrough, and even that first playthrough is kinda too long for what the game offers.
I still really like the game, especially for army management and character promotion/recruitment stuff. But it’s hard to recommend.
I’m so starved for Matsuno content but I don’t wanna play FF14 until level 70 or whatever to get to his new questline… supposedly it’s based on his concept for Vagrant Story 2.
Timely thread, I played through Vagrant Story again this week.
I emulated it this time and the input windows for anything above 8-15 chains were almost impossible. So I had to force my fingers to fall out of sync with the visual/audio cues.
you can enjoy your time with other butts in the free trial of the acclaimed MMORPG FFXIV that now lets you play all of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 that includes hundreds of hours of gameplay for absolutely free
it’ll make your time fly by until you buy and finish stormbloodnd then get to the ivalice storyline and scream with joy. its so good. ramza is a fucking ASSHOLE. you get to fight matsunos fursona, the music is tactics music, the thundergod fight and song is one of my favorite parts of the whole game
while waiting to get to level 70 you can also throw your head against palace of the dead
i dont know what datacenter matsuno plays on but he too loves the acclaimed MMORPG FFXIV that now lets you play all of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 that includes hundreds of hours of gameplay for absolutely free, and plays reguarly
he ALSO did the save the queen storyline which is the relic questline in shadowbringers right now, so even if you’re done with ivalice and wanting more you have A HUGE BIG CHUNK OF CONTENT to look forward to
and he’s going to keep making content for it because he cant stop playing, sorry we stole your boy for the best final fantasy
one of my favorite flavors of videogame futility is when vagrant story’s rhythm game chain system works with its arcane weapon and type system to create frequent situations where the flavor text is like COOL! PERFECT! RIGHT ON! and the battle information is like 0 miss miss miss 0 miss 1
