Eight guys versus a very powerful, very annoyed satan. Only one of us gets out of here alive. Fight It Out.
Zodi Plays: Tactics Ogre The Knight of Lodis [35] [FINALE] Saher, the Fallen
Video Length: 57:31
Saher has finally embraced his fallen nature, giving himself over to the forces of Bane to become the Sacred Demon. I LOVE this design, it looks brilliant. There’s so much that could be said about it. In this demonic form, Saher uses the power of Descent to summon up the denizens of the void, two dark-stalker ninjas and two hell-gigantes. Other units he can summonare dragoon Predator’s, who are probably the most dangerous minions he can summon since they come with a Brionic spear, that has a chance of inflicting instant death on things! That’s not super great! All the denizens of the void have Blood Reign and Sniper, meaning they’re theoretically a problem. They will at least be making you weaker. Like with the last battle, killing Saher’s adds so he wastes a turn making more is good…though unlike last battle, Descent here always summons up enough to max out his side. If you kill all four dudes, he revives all four dudes (and they get their turns!).
Of course, the minions aren’t the real threat. Saher is. Saher has the unstated ability to counter all adjacent squares, even diagionally, meaning he’s the only character in the game capable of doing that. He also does it automatically, for free, at the start of his turn! There’s nothing you can really do to avoid Shear if you’re within range to get hit by it, and I believe it’s counted as an AOE so it can’t be dodged or guarded. In addition to this retaliation we have Day of Reckoning (a global spell which puts random status effects on your entire party), Apocalypse (a single targeted high damage AOE spell) and Cataclysm (which is a global AOE spell that hits everyone, friend ad foe alike, and also pushes them around for good measure). These abilities are all fairly ridiculous, especially since he has no cost for all of these! He could Cataclysm every turn if he damn well wished too, which he thankfully does not. But still, it’s a bit of a concern. Also a concern; until someone hits him with the Longicolnis he cannot be hurt. Hope you brought the super spear! This is why I made Gaston a dragoon, even though I actually forgot this was a thing by the way. So he could use spears as his signature weapon to get a little extra boost.
All that said…it’s time to do it. We’ve got a satan to stab, and it’s about time we do it. And…well, we do it! Huzzah! We beat Saher! And then…then we get into the plot. I’m going to put this in spoiler tags for length and also for spoiler reasons.
All of a sudden Cybil shows up, not dead, and basically insults Saher to death, then swears to stay with him in hell until he dies I think??? She tells Eleanor she better be thankful for Gaston, and asks her to take care of him because she loved him but could never get her feelings across, and also dun dun duuun Eleanor and Cybil are sisters who were from the same destroyed village! Please note that none of this makes sense for the following reasons.
Cybil is not on our side and is in fact a bad person, so having her live and go on to…be the one truly responsible for defeating and pacifying Saher is a weird tack to take on this one. Importantly, in the A Route, Eleanor is who does it, but not to kill him. She hangs out with Saher so he’ll never be alone, and her pearl necklace relates to this in some way. It’s interesting and makes sense…whereas this one, where Cybil who has died and is not our friend saves us to kill Saher. And all this, just because we told her we’d rather not torture a mermaid.
And with that, things are good! Everyone has a happy ending where no one is in a bad mood and everything is fine. Rictor proposes to Ivanna which I mean sure whatever, fine. Euphaire and Elrik get their closure. We get to look at the empty space where Aerial would be if the game’s dumb mechanics didn’t murder her. And of course we learn that Gaston has some stuff to attend to before he returns the spear, and that stuff is hanging out with Eleanor for most of ever after. THEND.
But as the credits roll, and as I so helpfully talk about in the video…this is not the good ending. The good ending, the CANON ending, is Path A. Because the secret that I’ve been (trying) to keep from you the entire time is; Gaston is not a good guy. I realize given he’s a knight of Lodis, proven evil idiots, makes it hard to not realize it, but…that’s the twist. Gaston is actually evil, he just is a holy knight while also being evil. In the canon route, with the loss of Eleanor and much of his innocence during this adventure on war-crime island, he eventually becomes a man from other Ogre Battle games, Let Us Cling Together specifically…Lans de Tar-Tar, otherwise known as LANCELOT OF TARTARUS. We get a cool little image of Lans in the credits, implying that he still will hit that end (and I threw in his official art as a better example of how he looks for fun). So yeah, that’s pretty neat. I actually love this twist, especially if you don’t know about it…with the caveat that it is actually impossible to get the ending where you get the super special scene that confirms Gaston has become Lancelot of Tartarus. You must be on the A Route for one, and for two you must do all those requirements I mentioned. The 50 kills, the under 25 hours, less than 10 die, etc etc. All that stuff needs to be done to get te bonus scene that shows that Gaston’s time on the island (which was spent NOT torturing mermaids, but being somewhat okay with it as a concept, and that being the only real difference!!!) has turned him into a jaded monster who will kill his own men to push Lodis’s power forward.
And uh…that’s it. That’s the ending. Hooray!(?)
And with that, it’s time for my final thoughts.
I really did enjoy playing this game, even if I did sound negative at times. This is my first fully voiced LP, and that was exciting and fun! I’m glad I was able to finally reach that specific threshold of confidence. Having it be a tactics game that I first do voice for was tricky, since topics to talk about can dry up PRETTY quickly, not least of which because I don’t know this series nearly as well as other people likely do. But on the whole, this was very enjoyable and I’m glad we could have this adventure together. But there are things that need to be talked about, both positive and negative.
The first thing we NEED to talk about is the Emblems. There are two, technically three, types of Emblems in this game. The first is the useless ones that mean nothing, like much of the biorhytem ones (you can barely tell if things are happening) and the class stuff that doesn’t work if you’re the wrong gender, and some of the auras (the undead aura doesn’t matter since all undead units you can have are bad). Then there are the the Literally Required Emblems, that if you don’t have the game is less good overall. Sniper, Miracle, all the class based ones that do nothing but give you access to the class if you’re the RIGHT gender, all of those are basically required in order for the game to be even remotely reasonable. And then there are Traps, like Don Quixote and stuff like that, where if you get it it’s actually bad.
This is not a good way to balance one of your game’s main mechanics. Having emblems EVERYONE needs to have to give you the edge you need means that that you don’t really have a unique way of growing your characters, since all of them get all the emblems. Having emblems that are actually just straight up useless is also bad, since there’s no real incentive to get them. With the class requirement ones, it’s even more frustrating because even for the ones where you ARE the right gender, except for Dragon Scales literally all of them do nothing for you BUT give you access to the class, which just sucks. It’s not really a reward in that case, which invalidates the point of having it be an emblem, really. The Emblem is there as a stat tracker. And speaking of, we don’t get an emblem for when someone is invalidated for becoming a priest, which feels weird. The Trap emblems aren’t necessarily bad, they’re probably the best executed Emblems since you WANT to avoid them so not getting them on purpose is actually a mechanical thing that has some interest in it. And you can do early game alignment shenanigans by having your cleric murder people to lower their alignment due to Gib of the Fallen Angel, which is probably the best actual Emblem interaction in the game. The only other actually good thing I have to say about the Emblems, beyond them being a good proof of concept for a mechanic, is that the final rewards for the “be every class you can be” being a +2 permanent morale emblem is actually really good? You’ve gotta jump through a ton of hoops but it gives you something absolutely worth it. It’s cool.
Another negative that immediately jumps out is that uh, the game balance is really really bad? You all saw the fight against Lethe and Cervantes a couple videos ago. That was miserable. And we were barely lower level than them. And then last Monday we had to fight arguably stronger versions of them, but since we had grinded everyone up to a proper level, it was basically a cakewalk. That’s basically this game in a nutshell, it’s either far to difficult or far too easy, because of how defense and dodge scaling works and how it relates to the enemies always trying to stay at par with Gaston and the party average. Related to game balance; they EXPECT you to grind in Quest Mode, given how little actual equipment they give you. Either that or it expects you to persuade a bunch of people to strip their armour off and then toss them to the side, which is entirely non viable a strategy. If we didn’t have the stuff we got in Quest Mode, we’d have…maybe two suits of magic armour between our entire party? It’s ridiculous! The game starves you for loot, and in Route B starves you for gold too! I looked at some FAQs and Route A drops like, thousands of goth in each plot mission and has some better loot drops. Pointedly, in Route B the Hunting Ware set is ACTUALLY incomplete-able, there is no way to get the boots! It’s ridiculous!
Adding to this, given how little there actually is in terms of unit variety, there isn’t very much going on in this game mechanically. It does have some good stuff, the special skills you unlock via Quest Mode being a fun addition, but overall there is a sort of optimal class build and I did kinda fall into it. It’s not the absolute best, because I didn’t snapdragon my best units to make my second-best units into overall better units, and I removed Gaston from Swordmaster which is from a raw numbers standpoint just a mistake, Swordmasters are better. It’s not bad for tactics games to have optimal strategies, but there are just some classes that immediately drop off. Knight and Archer being the main big ones, which matters since you have unique plot characters who are those classes who stop looking like themselves if you change class, which is just terrible. Witch in general is NEVER actually good, with Deneb being the only way you can use a witch at all and even she drops off eventually. Wizards are the only early game class that is worth using, but even then you should be using Sirens instead of them, and if you want a Lich you should use a Siren as well. I don’t mind playing suboptimally though, because it gives some fun variance…I just wish the game had a little more variety in itself. But then I always have this problem with every tactics game I play really, I always want Slightly More. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a contemporary of Knight of Lodis that I should have been comparing it too far more often, doesn’t have gendered units but does have far more variety (but also has the caveat of it being stupidly hard to get abilities due to it’s mechanics but that’ll be for a later LP, hopefully never).
THAT ALL BEING SAID, there are some positives. I do like the plot, or at least the concept of it. Playing through a dude’s start of darkness is really cool. I liked some of the characters, though my little snarky image at the end is me railing on how uh…non characterized they really are throughout. I like the mystery up until Gaston stops telling the player clues he finds. The game also LOOKS beautiful, like that’s undeniable. This game has some amazing sprite work. But ultimately, it feels mostly like style over substance on the whole.
So yeah. That was Tactics Ogre The Knight of Lodis. Thank you to all my fans, all my patrons on Patreon, and special thanks goes to the patrons willing to let me use their names in my army. I hope hearing me yell at you for missing wasn’t too traumatic. Have a “nice guard” from me.
Next up, I’m taking a week off! I’m very tired due to work and also hoo boy we just finished a tactics RPG. Join us once again on Monday, May 20th, for the beginning of our next video playthrough. And I say ‘our’ for a reason. It’ll be Kirby’s Dreamland 3, and I’ll be bringing a special guest along!
But yeah. I hope you all enjoyed. I’ll see you guys next time. Take care!
@moderators you can put this into the finished LP place, but keep it open on the (very rare) chance we’ll be getting a response =p