Tactics Ogre/YMMV

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• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • There is a bio for every single enemy leader you fight. Some of them were architects, philosophers, mothers-to-be, and so on. Sometimes they will even tell Denam who they were when they die.
  • If you played The Knight of Lodis, it's not hard to feel bad for how Lanselot Tartaros turned the way he is now.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: A rare-in universe example. You get to see different personalities of different characters, often drastically changing depending on what path you take. A few examples, where Vyce Takes a level in Jerkass in the Chaotic and Neutral route, whereas in the lawful route nothing changes. Xapan becomes a Disc One Dragon in the Chaotic route, but playable (And much more sympathetic) in the Lawful route, where you save him and he joins. Even if you don't recruit him and he fights you later, he only fights because he was paid to do so, and you can recruit him afterwords anyways. Leonar also has great variance too, being a Manipulative Bastard, Disc One Final Boss, or (in the neutral route) a genuinely sympathetic character.
• Complete Monster: Nybeth Obidlord is easily the entire series's best example of this trope. What he's done to his wives and children alone should be enough to convince you of that, but then there's his raising Guildas from the dead in Neutral Route, as well as Vyce in the Chaotic route. And all of this is supposedly in the name of "knowledge".
• Crowning Music of Awesome: This is a soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto. Even the SNES/PSX version, although the PSX version has slightly improved audio. The PSP takes this Up to Eleven, even adds comments about how these songs were done. Even better, the PSP version rescues music from the original Ogre Battle.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Canopus is a returning character from The March of the Black Queen, but the added personality he got both in the original and remake, as well as the way he easily forms a friendship with Denam and his status as the resident Game Breaker, earned him a sweet spot with everyone who has played this game.
  • Dame Ravness. About half the fanart of this game is of her, and many new players choose to go with the Lawful route simply because Vyce kills her if you choose the Chaotic route.
    • Parodied in this fanart with a piece of What the Hell, Player?.
• Game Breaker: Both the original and the remake have many ways to shatter the difficulty apart.
  • The Ninja/Kunoichi class. Fastest human class (meaning they rarely miss and frequently parry attacks), most mobile (can climb three steps and jump down four, and have higher Move distance than other classes), highest evasion (and can wear decent armor on top of that). In the remake a Ninja gets an ability that makes them nigh invulnerable for a turn, gets their own mana-less series of spells that do three times the listed damage, and can dual wield doing full damage with both weapons -- usually enough to instant-kill a cloth wearer, which their agility allows them to get to almost unimpeded. There's a reason the PSP remake added abilities to the various tanky type classes to stop people moving past them.
  • Denam's Lord Class (in the remake at least) can only learn a few skills... because he can use almost every other skill from the other classes. One popular combo is Phalanx + Dual Daggers. Daggers due to a odd formula do a lot more damage and is the fastest weapon. Phalanx weakens attacks on you by 90%, meaning you could wreck the enemy while only suffering single digits of damage.
  • Series vet Canopus can also be quite the game breaker -- since he can fly, he can get into very good positions to be a sniper, which is one of the weapons he defaults to in the remake. Mid game, Canopus is best used floating around the edges of the map, taking pot shots at enemy cloth wearers and archers... for 80% of their life a shot.
    • Oh God, where to begin? He has the lightest step on the battlefield out of all your beginning characters, has a good strength stat, possesses the widest range of abilities, and has the greatest weapon versatility short of Lord or Astromancer.
    • In the original Canopus had other ways to be broken. At Level 10, he learned Windshot, an ability exclusive to Gryphons, but at Level 20 he gets Tornado, an ability exclusive to him, which has fairly high hit chance, stupidly long range and doesn't depend on a trajectory to land. No wonder he gets all those MVP prizes with all the killing he does...
  • Archery in general is rather broken. Due to avoiding No Arc in Archery and being able to go past its attack range, it's fairly easily to hit (or possibly one-shot later on) squishies. Direct-fire weapons and magic have to strictly obey their ranges.
    • All those above? Arycelle/Aloser, being a unique Archer, amps it Up to Eleven and is generally one of the most favored units due to her broken-ness. And the last Bow Finisher in the remake just happens to be the element she thrives on...
  • Summons in the original are savage. They would work by summoning a spirit that would fire bolts onto random targets in the area. Not reliable for taking out groups of enemies (that's what Dragon Magic and true Area of Effect magic is for), but say your target is just right so that there is only one enemy in range... seeing as the summon attacks random enemies, not spaces... guess where they all go? Oh yeah.
  • Almost everything gained in Hell Gate (SFC/PSX version) qualifies, ESPECIALLY Dragon Magic, which can give you hit-all unlimited range nukes - yet Retissue stands out among even Dragon magic for gamebreaking utility. It allows you to convert undead back into basic characters - at Level 1, but with most of their stats intact. Even if the undead used was level 50. This can be cycled with training/Necro/Retissue to produce an arbitrarily strong character with near zero WT and insanely high stats.
  • Hobyrim in the SFC/PSX version is no slouch. As a Swordmaster he has an extremely high Dexterity stat that makes him able to cast status debuff spells with extremely high accuracy. Give him a spell like Petrify and he can disable the enemy team with ease. In the PSP version, due to changes of mechanics of the Swordmaster class, they cannot wield the Petrify spell, severely nerfing Hobyrim's capabilities.
• He's Just Hiding: Warren couldn't really die while sealing back the Chaos Gate at Heilingham Pallace, right? CODA 2 confirms he ended up working his way into another Chaos Gate at the Palace of the Dead, and Denam has to get him out..
• Hollywood Pudgy: Due to how her sprite is drawn, Cistina has been the butt end of many fat jokes, when she's just wearing a rather long and fluffy skirt. That is, unless you're listening to the other half of the fandom.
• Lawful Good: From the perspective of Lodis, Volaq is this. Being loyal to his cause rather than his own views of the world, and perfectly willing to give Balxephon in to the authorities once he's done with Valeria in the Law Route, surely helps his image.
• Magnificent Bastard: Balxephon betrayed the senate of Lodis, killed his father, and blamed it on his brother so he could get political favor for the Loslorien unimpeded.
• Narm: It's probably a good thing the remake retranslated the names, especially Lanselot Tartaros because "Tartare" is a kind of meat dish.
  • Narm Charm: "Aloser".
• Older Than They Think: Because of the timeframe the Playstation version of Tactics Ogre was released in English (when internet was beginning to become a bit more widespread, before all the information was as easily accessible as it is now, especially the ROM of the SNES version), some people thought it was a clone of Final Fantasy Tactics, when the latter was actually a Spiritual Successor to Tactics Ogre, made by the same development team. Square was so impressed with Tactics Ogre that they asked Quest to make them a Final Fantasy themed variant.
• Player Punch:
  • Letting a unit die generates a random dying line. Some of them blame you for your poor leadership.
  • Selling monsters in order to get their unique items on the shop? Expect them to send you an emotional gut punch before that.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny:
  • Tactics Ogre got bashed for being a carbon-copy of its own Spiritual Successor, which came out in America first.
  • Inverted with the PSP Version; which actually incorporates many features from its spiritual successors such as skills... and ended up being considered superior to Final Fantasy Tactics.
• That One Attack: Faeries and Gremlins can use Virtuous Dance, which inflicts Bewitched in an Area of Effect with high probability. Bewitched is like Charmed, except that it's much harder to get rid of, and comes with a permanent drop in Loyalty. Since your units always start every battle clustered and the enemies don't, and the enemies don't need to care about Loyalty, the AI finds this skill much more useful than you will.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Some veteran players didn't like the changed names used for the PSP translation, preferring the PS1 names. Arycelle/Aloser is probably the best example.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Not that any of the other characters are bad, but in the SNES and PlayStation versions, Canopus identifies Andoras Gaffryn as not being a Lodis native (in case the fact that he's a black guy among the Lodissians wasn't enough) and actually points out he's a member of the royal family... of a country that Lodis invaded. You don't find this out until the game's within the last hour. This was averted in the PSP version which has him show up earlier, and feeds you this information about him then.