Finish Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (SNES) and I have mixed feelings about it.
On one hand it's captivating and addicting and a load of fun
On the other, it's very much flawed in that typical Matsuno-creating-an-obtuse-game-system-with-little-explanation way. Sorta like Vagrant Story's whole weapons systems but a bit less in your face.
In order to get the best ending you really have to manage your reputation, which means you can't have strong units killing weak enemies, you can't lose a city you've taken, and you have to make sure the right type of character takes over the right kind of city. There's really very little about this in game, you have to look up a manual to get any sort of explanation about it, but at the same time given the nature of the game it's totally possible to get royally screwed on reputation through no fault of your own. For example: Every time you take a city you get a tarot card, these can help with increasing stats like +1 STR but can also hurt. In one chapter I drew three cards in a row that lowered my reputation by 3 each, then in a bit of further bad luck I messed up and left a city sparsely defended and it got taken over for <1 minute but the damage was done. My reputation went from Hero to Villain in one chapter and largely through no major fault of my own. Further still, you don't have complete control of your units, you do tell them where to go and such but the game will punish you for having high level units kill low level ones, but the thing is your unit can totally get attacked by a low level unit all the time. So by just playing the game you ruin your reputation, or you have to essentially hold your higher level characters, put them somewhere where they wont fight anyone then fly them around taking over towns after your clear the board. Which brings up another issue in that in the last level it totally undoes the whole flow of battle from other levels in that usually you would bring up your units. Start staking your territory and defend it from the enemy while growing your take until you've cleared out enough enemies to go to the boss. However, in the last battle there's an infinite number of enemies, and there's nothing that will tell you that. I tried to stay away from the internet on this game to enjoy it, but after being on this level for hours and still seeing enemy after enemy come I looked it up and saw it was practically infinite and instead of staking out a claim I should've just rushed the boss. And then while you're fighitng the boss it'll still be spawning new enemies so that whole fight was really long and hard.
But despite all that, I still really really love the game. And I can totally see how back in the day I would've loved to spend the time to get the perfect run and get all the endings (of which there are 12). But not enough time as an adult to chase that all down. Think I'll move to Tactics ogre: let us all cling together next.
