Ogre Battle

Alas, the Kingdom of Zenobia lies in a state of despair! Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since the mighty ruler Gran was slain by the wretched Rashidi, who has joined forces with the Evil Empress Endora, thus giving rise to the villainous Zentegenian Empire.

You are the chosen one, the last hope for the remnants of the rebel forces. They look to you to guide them into battle, however, you must first seek the help of the Great Wizard Warren, who helps determine your destiny as the new leader of the rebellion.

Armed with a map of the land and Warren's magical Tarot cards, you and your rebel compatriots wage battle against the Evil Empire. Your mission - liberate towns and ensure that the land is freed from the shackles of oppression. However, the quest is a long and difficult one which demands the most of your bravery, physical prowess, and tactical thinking. Succeed and be revered as a hero, fail and meet with your demise. Remember to keep an eye on your finances - deploying unite costs money. Your daily expenditures and income appear on screen exactly at high noon each day.

Restoring freedom to a town grants you money, a Tarot card, and the chance to increase your reputation. Your reputation determines your later success and ultimately the ending of the game, so choose your battles and tactics wisely.

This RPG is very complex and requires a great deal of preparation and memorization. Nevertheless, I loved it! It was a huge success in Japan, and I think it should do equally well over here. I suggest that you get this game today! But I must warn you... this game is highly addictive.

This summer, Atlus is releasing a game that is going to cause plenty of excitement in the gaming community. Ogre Battle, a Super NES strategy title that some gamers hold in high regard, is about to be rereleased on the Sony PlayStation.

The Super NES game is pretty hard to get your hands on. Enix America didn't make very many of them, and what little they did were picked up immediately. Currently, used cartridges are selling for upward of $150, if you can find one. Atlus, realizing that supply failed to meet demand, is now making the classic available to many others, although the new game will also be released in limited quantities. Don't expect this to be a sequel. The PlayStation Ogre Battle is almost an exact port of the original. The few changes (see sidebar) do not affect the story or gameplay.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it takes place during a magical time of unrest and turmoil. You must lead a rebellion to free the empire of its evil and corrupt rule. To do so, you must take your band of adventurers across the countryside to liberate towns and temples, one at a time. Along the way, you will meet more mercenaries and recruit a bigger army to help your cause.

Each stage has one Boss that you must defeat to advance. But before you do so, you should liberate towns by simply travelling to them. Each location you free up may give you a magical tarot card, which you can use in battle offensively or defensively. Each city also brings in more income, which you need to hire more troops. You can also buy new equipment and magical items in certain cities. Then as you advance on to the Boss, you'll have to defeat the enemy troops he sends your way.

The strategy aspect comes in deciding who to send into battle, and to a lesser extent, where and when. Each military unit can be made up of up to five characters of various classes: knights, Valkyries, wizards, clerics, amazons, golems, witches, etc. You must make decisions on how each unit is arranged, how they attack, who makes them up, what type of terrain they should attack on, when they should attack (day or night) and so on. Once you are in battle, you make very few actual decisions. The units will fight it out themselves, but you can intercede with a decision to cast magic from one of your tarot cards or to retreat shamelessly.

Ogre Battle is a very original strategy game that came from a time when strategy games were rare. It was a big hit a few years ago, but how well will it do today? Make sure to catch the review in this issue to find out.

Ogre Battle, one of the most addictive and fun RPG's on the Super NES, is coming to the PlayStation with enhanced (and gratuitous) bloody fun. Both the graphics and sound have been remastered, including additional musical scores and new eye-popping, Ogre-decimating spells. Ogre Battle features non-linear gameplay and 12 possible endings. It also gives you the opportunity to be good, neutral, or evil as you march your army through the Zeno-bian Empire and try to reclaim land that's been stolen through war and treachery. Throughout the game you recruit up to 75 unique warriors to help you win back your nation's land. But with victory comes this question: Do you give the land back to its rightful heirs, or keep the land and its power for yourself?

This is a huge RPG, with an intricate storyline, complex characters and lots and lots of territory to explore. There's even bookkeeping feature to chart your costs!

This is a huge RPG, with an intricate story line, complex characters and lots and lots of territory to explore. There's even a bookkeeping feature to chart your costs!

Have you ever wanted to play a board game where the pieces move around automatically! Ogre Battle is an RPG with a little blend of strategy rolled up into one exciting cart! You may choose from a variety of strange beasts from dragons, ogres and dwarves. The more battles you win, the more land you can conquer to overthrow the world!

This is a huge RPG, with an intricate storyline, complex characters and lots and lots of territory to explore. There's even a bookkeeping feature to chart your costs!

Part RPG, part war sim, and part strategy, Ogre Battle stands alone as a unique RPG. But you may stand back when you see the immense work involved in the game play.

Ogre and Under

The Sage Rashidi has murdered the king of Zenobia. Now Rashidi has joined forces with the Empress Endora, and trouble is brewin'. You're a warrior who gathers forces from liberated towns and battles the enemy. You win the trust of the people, buy supplies, and deploy parts of your massive army.

If you're the type of RPG player that can't even keep your alignments in order, then you're not going to like all this war-sim machismo. It requires organizational skills and lots of patience.

Once you wade through the assorted menus and study the manual, control is usually not a problem. But there's not much to control. The fighting is all generated by the computer -- all you do is take care of the troops.

This game has a mystical element as well. When you liberate a town, you receive a Tarot card that can boost your party's strength or act as a one-shot weapon. When you pull the Hanged Man from the Tarot deck, for instance, your party's INT goes up a point, and during a fight, the card takes the defenses of the opposition down a few points.

Somewhere Ogre, The Rainbow

The graphics in Ogre Battle consist mostly of the map and a 3/4-overhead battle view. They're not bad, but there's so little action that you see more of the map than anything else. The battle view is so small that you'll wonder when the Munchkins will start singing. Some of the spells are nice to watch and the Tarot cards are beautifully illustrated.

The heroic, stirring music is matched with standard sound effects. More voice-overs would have gone a long way, and the death groans when you finish off an enemy are unsatisfying and feeble.

Trolling Through The Park

This RPG is definitely different. For players looking for a well-rounded, interesting, and involving game, this game's the ticket. But purists of the role-playing genre may sense that this game was ogre before it started.

Ogre Battle is a real-time strategy role-playing video game released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The game is the first installment of the episodic series and was developed by Quest for the Super Farmicon originally, and also for Sega Saturn later on, in 1996.

The published only provided the market with 25.000 copies of SNES version in North America, and it was pretty difficult to purchase such a game. Critics rambled over this and were angry with the fact that the game couldn’t be found in the stores in the United States. The game was released later on for PlayStation in 1997, under the name of Ogre Battle: Limited Edition.

The PlayStation edition was easier to find than the one for SNES. The game was also re-released in 2009 for Wii’s Virtual Console, but also for the iMode mobile phones in Japan one year later.

The game was inspired by the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, including the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The name, Ogre Battle, was inspired by Queen’s second album, which features two songs titled Ogre Battle and the March of The Black Queen.

The story begins in the outskirts of the Zeteginan Empire. The main character is leading a revolution against the empire. Several questions are asked in the beginning of the game, when Warren uses tarot cards to ask questions for determining the player’s suitability as leader of the revolution. Each question has three possible answers: one righteous, one evil and one neutral. The game begins after the player answers all the questions. The answers will also determine Lord’s abilities and starting units.

The game is a mix of real-time strategy games and the combat of a role-playing game and consists of a series of battles in which the player destroys units to fight against enemies and liberate towns and temples. Lots of character types can be recruited, including knights, ninjas, wizards, angels, griffins, witches and others.

There are different stages in the game, each one ending with a boss whose defeat will bring the completion of the mission. During and after the stages, the towns and temples can be visited in order for the player to get information on different items. There is a total of 25 stages in the game.

The game was fairly popular back when released and was rated with 8.1 out of 10 by 5 different GameSpot critics. No less than 279 players (at the time of the review) rated the game with a total average of 8.7 out of 10.