I just found out Ogre Battle is a song

ah
ah
ah-ah
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

wait no i didn't i already knew

The Top of the Ten SRPGs: Ogre Battle 64

What dost thou hold within thy sword? Ardor? Passion? Belief?

Just try to answer that question disingenuously. What player, confronted by that choice, could try to lever it toward a concrete goal? This question, as part of a series, serves as an introduction to the vaunted, Shakespearean tone of Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. This, you know as soon as you start, is going to be a fucking serious game. It wants you to think beyond the notion of dialogue as a minigame.

You know what really struck me about Person of Lordly Caliber when I first played it? The element that made the strongest impression on my 12-year-old brain? It was the profanity. I'd heard the "fucking damn"-word before, but this was different. This was in a video game that my mom bought me. Suddenly I had my hands on something rare and precious. A real adult world. 

Imagine a game where murder is considered bad...

It went beyond profanity. The game portrays bigotry, murder, and even rape with an uncompromising frankness, simply as a part of the unromanticized truth of humanity. Though the setting may be fantasy, the heroes and villains are people, victim to human vices and real-world injustice. The set-dressing creatures, from the titular ogres, to Greco-Roman inspired griffins, gorgons, and cerberuses, are natural beings, simply a part of the earth and subject to humanity's whims. They don't create evil - it comes from men's hearts. The only monsters, according to Ogre Battle, are greed, lust, and ambition.

The dark and pessimistic nature of this tale is magnified by the struggle undergone by the player avatar. While a lawful/chaotic meter does serve as a vague indicator of the character your actions are creating, the consequences run deeper. While the general structure of the plot remains the same regardless of how it's played, the tone of these events is set by choices between revolutionary factions, whether one executes opponents or allows them to surrender, and the manner in which civilian populations are treated. One of the watershed moments for the narrative comes a few chapters into the game, when the player is given a choice whether to release or execute the leader of the enemy forces. Whichever you choose, this enemy survives and you soon find yourself on his side of the war. Nonetheless, the option makes all the difference to the character. Fate is inevitable - so does one take the wheel and steer his own life, or allow himself to be washed along? This is the type of dilemma that Ogre Battle presents.

If I haven't said much about the gameplay, it's because the mechanics aren't what make the work beautiful. It'd be like starting an analysis of a painting by discussing the brushstrokes. Yet don't take that as an assertion that story is everything. Far from it. Everything about Ogre Battle 64 revolves around the themes of fate, mercy, and order, from the battlefield to the dialogue. The game can't be understood as simply a series of real-time unit-based battles or class evolution and statistical systems. We have to go from the top down to look at how these elements are woven into the greater tapestry, how they play into each other to create a whole.

...B, Battle!?

Of course that wasn't much of a discussion of it's SRPG-iness, but I'd rather take the time to properly introduce the game, since it's something I'm going to be revisiting often. It'd be worth writing a thesis if I had time to go around writing theses all over the place.

The day the classic publication died - Nintendo Power, revisited

I've always considered myself a voice screeching for progress and ridding our world of cultural and societal detritus that has long outlived its usefulness. It disgusts me that newspapers and paper mail still exist, I'm baffled every time someone tells me their "home phone number", and the fact that cars still run on gasoline is one of the biggest scams of the industrial world. Likewise, magazines are kind of a joke. They accomplish nothing that can't be done a hundred times better with more advanced technology. I'm not saying the concept of a serialized publication with in-depth articles, features, and columns needs to go, just the dentist office waiting room medium. And if you're thinking right now "they aren't hurting anyone", have you ever looked at a modern magazine? I've found some in the possession of decrepit and irrelevant aged folk and out of curiosity paged through - they are literally more advertisement than content - sometimes by a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio.

This looked so good next to
my Army of Darkness poster

That's why I acknowledge that, though it saddens me to see Nintendo Power go, it had a good life and is better left a memory of the time it served. Sure, I haven't picked up an issue in five or six years, and some will (probably rightfully) claim that at a certain point it became little more than a mouthpiece for Nintendo. But NP was a big part of growing up for me, and of learning to love games [history lesson for perspective: I'm 24, born in '88, first console was an NES that I got at age 3]. It really did teach me how to play, how to break games down and pull them apart at a meta-textual level. Without it, I may never have moved beyond looking at my "Nintendo" as a 30-minute toy. I doubt it affects many kids the same way in 2012. Aren't we glad for GameFAQs (only half-sarcastically I say that). 

The biggest cred I can give the magazine is that without it, I never would have known about or bought Ogre Battle 64, probably the most influential work of art in my life. I remember reading NP's coverage and being so intrigued by what this game could be, so confused and yet excited about how different it sounded from anything I'd ever played, and how the game actually had like a real story! I've played through OB64 a half dozen times since then and you'll surely be reading more about it on the blog (god forbid you stay around for that long), yet one of my fondest memories of the game is being 11 years old and reading the NP preview over and over again, memorizing all the strategies and charts explaining the class system and the branching narrative, eagerly anticipating October 7, 2000.

This boring reminiscence can't be entertaining, so I'll stop there, before I embarrass myself by revealing that I even once mailed a letter into Player's Pulse to correct an incorrectly depicted X-Wing. But if you're like me and have a history with the mag, do yourself a favor and go dig through your closet for an old issue. Can't get a more direct dose of nostalgia than that (legally, that is). And look at it this way: if you're on your best behavior and make sure to ask REALLY politely, maybe Weird Al will write a song about it!