Over the last few years, the strategy RPG has seen what may someday be considered its golden era. Companies like NIS have recently brought out some stellar titles, but those games wouldn’t have been possible without one of the genre’s longest running series — the Ogre titles. This series has been satisfying the needs of strategy RPG fans for years, since the dark days of the SNES.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis for the GBA released back in 2002, and has garnered quite the reputation for being hard to find. With so many strategy RPG options out there these days, one question begs to be asked: is The Knight of Lodis worth your time, or should you move on to something bigger, better, and more readily available?
"... an extremely long and repetitive game."
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The answer really depends on how big a strategy RPG fan you are. The Knight of Lodis is an extremely long and repetitive game. Length and repetition are something of hallmarks for the genre, especially the older games. Anyone looking for a fresh experience will unfortunately find that The Knight of Lodis is cut strictly from vintage materials in every respect.
Anyone who’s ever played earlier strategy RPGs will feel right at home when playing The Knight of Lodis, because the game uses nearly every conventional element imaginable. The player builds a team of warriors, all of varying class. These classes include soldiers, knights, dragons, dragoons, archers, warlocks, and clerics, just to name a few. The player then takes about eight of these characters into turn-based battles against enemy teams, and is required to meet the objective. Usually the player is required to eliminate the entire enemy force, but sometimes killing only the leader is necessary to produce a victory.
Like most strategy RPGs, the environment is divided up into squares. Players will want to move their troops over these squares and towards the enemy forces, and are only allowed to move a certain amount of space per turn. Some squares have different attributes than other squares. For instance, if the stage is set in a field, a bunch of squares may represent a river, and some may have higher altitude than others. These differences aren’t wasted, and can provide many instances where their differences provide advantages. If an archer is on a higher cliff, he’ll have a better shot at someone below him. It’s also possible he’d be too high to receive a counter-attack. If someone is waist deep in water, lightning spells might do more damage. It’s up to the player to not only survey the opposing team for weakness, but to evaluate what the best way is to move his or her troops across the battlefield.
"... the story is dryer than eating a bowl of Mini Wheats with powdered milk."
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The battle system itself is fairly basic, and doesn’t require too much instruction to dive into. Attacking an enemy will do damage, and will produce a counter-attack if the character isn’t either behind the enemy, or unreachable by the enemy’s weapon. Magic spells can target multiple characters and do more or less damage based on a character’s elemental alignment. Equipment is changeable and items are always popping up for usage; it’s really your standard strategy RPG and nothing fans have missed.
Even though the battle system is technically solid, its lack of flavor is sure to put some people off. The farther you get into the game, the more monotonous the game begins to feel, and The Knight of Lodis is one lengthy game. Players can expect to put in somewhere between forty to sixty hours in a single play through, and the game sports multiple endings. One has to ask his or herself how many times you can repeat the same task, because leveling up during random battles is just as important as completing the scripted ones, and even in the required battles the same two objectives are always required for completion. It’s also worth noting that each battle takes anywhere from twenty to forty minutes, and half of that time is spent watching the enemy forces take their turns. This takes the game from "pick up and play" to "sit down and watch" -- something that’s never good for a handheld title.
"...though the battle system is technically solid, its lack of flavor is sure to put some people off."
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The game’s length and wash-and-repeat gameplay aren’t the only things keeping this game from superstardom—the story is dryer than eating a bowl of Mini Wheats with powdered milk. The RPG is a genre where story is king, and a compelling tale can help gamers stomach gameplay that would otherwise be considered sub-par, sometimes even unplayable. While The Knight of Lodis is far from either of those, the story is easily the weakest part of the entire game. It requires prior knowledge of the Ogre series for full comprehension, and while that’s good for fans of the series, newcomers will undoubtedly be lost. The characters aren’t completely without merit, but with such a dull story most players will find them to be dull, flat, and expendable.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis clearly isn’t for everyone, and it’s hard to imagine anyone sinking the required hundred or so hours into unlocking all of the endings. Gamers looking for either tried and true strategy RPG fix or a lengthy adventure will want to check this out, but fans of the genre might want to think this title over before purchase — it’s likely they’ve played this game somewhere before.
