What the Heck Does Alignment Mean, Anyway? (Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber Review)

Welcome to the second edition of "Filling GoldenPigsy's Trough", wherein I review something upon his request.  This goes both ways, of course, as I make requests of him for his own blog (check it here, if you dare).  Dunno what he calls his segments; but doubtless he'll find my own title positively perfect.  My first post of this nature was here, for the Playstation 2's Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.  Today's post is, similarly, a review of an old strategy game, so if you don't like the Nintendo 64, then you can stop reading now.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (released in America on October 7, 2000 for the N64 and March 29, 2010 for the Wii's Virtual Console) has the distinction of being the only game I ever bought using money won from gambling.  My brother's father-in-law used to co-own a condo at the race tracks outside of town, so sometimes we'd all go out there to "watch" a NASCAR race (honestly how anyone can sit there and watch dozens of blurry cars turn left for an entire day is beyond me; I'd spend the day playing Army Men games on the N64 and then come out whenever I heard the shouts of rapture that indicated a crash).  At one of the races, we started a pot and picked cars, and out of the 20 or so people there, my car got 2nd place, which was good for $50.  I instantly went and picked this game up.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is a real-time strategy RPG for the Nintendo 64 in which you create squads of 5 guys and send them marching around different maps, wresting town after town from the enemy's grasp until, eventually, you reach the map's enemy stronghold and take down its boss.  You beat him, you watch the story unfold, you fine-tune your squads on a world map, you enter another area, and repeat for about forty missions, each of which can take over an hour.  Your squad of 5 guys (and/or girls) is arranged on a 3x3 grid.  When they engage another squad, you don't control your men directly; rather, they attack based on their stats and location.  So, for instance, your knight standing on the front line of the 3x3 grid will attack twice per squad-battle, and your sorceress will attack twice when in the back row, but both will only attack once when their positions are flipped, and those attacks will be much weaker.  This forces you to plan ahead and mix and match to create the best squads who can withstand getting surprised from the sides or back as well as the front.

As I mentioned earlier, for each map, you essentially take over town after town until all that's left is the enemy stronghold.  Taking over all the other towns before the enemy base isn't necessary, of course - you could just make a bee-line straight for the boss if you really wanted - but, as you'll see, that's not a great idea.  To take over a town, all you have to do is knock the enemy squads out of it and then stop your own squad within its walls, but each town has a different "alignment" on a scale of 1-100, and you will "liberate" or "capture" the town depending on whether or not your squad's leader's own alignment is roughly the same as the town's.

Sound confusing?  It is, and in fact, Rockman24 didn't even know about alignment the first time he played through.  You are allowed up to ten squads out on the field per battle, but what Rockman24 did on his first play-through was use one squad to defend his home base and one super-powerful squad to go out and fight everybody until he sliced his way to the map's boss.  Upon beating the game, he and I learned something very important: Ogre Battle 64 contains multiple endings (six, to be exact) depending on your final "chaos level", which is determined by the choices you make during the story segments as well as "liberating" and "capturing" towns.  Make good decisions and liberate lots of towns, and you'll be fine.  Capture too many and make poor decisions, and your chaos level goes down, as Rockman24's most definitely did.  As an added punch to Rockman24's freefalling chaos level number, apparently it also goes down for each town that is still in enemy hands when you defeat the boss.  Suddenly, Rockman24's strategy of ripping a hole clean through the enemy lines until reaching the map's boss doesn't sound quite so brilliant, does it?

He got the worst ending possible.

By this point, I had secured my own copy of the game thanks to the only good to ever come from NASCAR racing, so when I played through, I made sure to do things right and liberate all the towns.  This is more complicated than you may think.  First of all, you have to have squads with alignments across the whole spectrum: a paladin trio with a pair of clerics ("good alignment"), a dark knight with a bunch of mages and a ninja ("bad alignment") and a small but lively host of sword masters and puppeteers ("neutral alignment", and yes I said puppeteers).  If you kill a paladin or cleric, your alignment usually goes down, and vice versa for dark knights or bezerkers.  If you take out an enemy several levels higher than yourself, alignment goes up, and vice versa for destroying puny weaklings.  Your squads' alignment is constantly in flux, so if, say, a holy paladin is blocking your path to a town with a really high alignment, you'll have to plan ahead and send some ninjas or mages

I got a much better ending than Rockman24.  Where his chaos level was a solid 2 (making for more than a few poo jokes), mine was closer to 85.  On a scale of 1-100, that's a bit of a difference, and all from something that the game never even explains to you.

The storyline itself is typical Japanese insanity.  Magnus Gallant is a blue-haired new captain in Southern Palatinus who quickly discovers that the rich are oppressing the poor, so after a few missions he and his buddies (one a hothead named after the Greek hero Diomedes) defect to the Revolutionary Army.  When the Revolutionary Army starts to win the war (thanks to you, of course), General Godeslas of the Southern Army, under direction of Sir Baldwin from the Holy Lodis Empire (whom I call Arec with a Kim-Jong Il accent whenever I see him), takes extreme measures and summons forth ogres from the nether realms.  Darkness consumes more and more of the land until the only human army left standing is that of Magnus.  Or something like that.  Mostly, it's just crazy demon stuff that gives the Japanese artists a chance to draw huge ape-like things with hammers.  Silly Japanese.

Beyond the main plot, Ogre Battle 64 is rife with countless subplots involving recruitable characters.  There are the foreign knights from other Ogre Battle games who will only join you if your chaos level is high enough.  There's the father who will only join you if you had found his daughter - a young cleric - during a particular mission.  There's a centurion, a rather dishy sorceress, and even a vampire.  And then there's the actually relevant subplot involving Prince Yumil, a real pansy of a guy who was childhood friends with Magnus.  In true Japanese fashion, this white-haired weeny strives as best as he can to be just like Magnus: strong, brave, charismatic, even though he is patently none of those things.  His insecurities drive much of the plot, and even though he is far too whiny for my tastes, his character development is certainly one of the more fascinating elements of the game, psychotic demon-ogres excluded, of course.

Ogre Battle 64 scored high with critics upon its release, but for some reason gamers didn't feel the same way.  It didn't sell very well in America, and nowadays I'm quite shocked to see a copy sitting in the local game stores.  The Ogre Battle series has several other games available in Japan, but this and Tactics Ogre for the Game Boy Advance are the only two that I know of to hit American shelves.  A shame really.  They're brilliant games.  I would love to see more.

It should say something about Ogre Battle 64 that it is now the only Nintendo 64 game that I still play.  Its replay value is incredible.  This is due to its high customization: since there is no voice acting (thank goodness), you can name Magnus whatever you want, along with all of your recruits and even your army itself (its default name is the Blue Knights, but I prefer Ass-Kickers).  This makes for some highly entertaining "accidents", like when my friend's little brother named Magnus after himself but in all caps, so every time someone referred to Magnus they appeared to be yelling (Sir, may I introduce FRANK Gallant).  Coincidentally, Pokemon is much the same way.  You can name your little critters whatever the heck you want, so instead of seeing "Go, Pikachu!" at the start of a battle you may see "Go, dammit!" which I think is a much more accurate sentiment.  I'm a terrible sucker for being able to name your characters.  It anchors you emotionally to your recruits and gives you a reason to keep playing (I just need Jack O'Neill to level up one more time, and then I'll work on raising Darth Vader's alignment before giving T-Pain a few more rounds of training).  Making 5-man squads based on your friends or favorite TV shows is a great way to prove to yourself that you have too few of one and watch too much of the other.

So next time you want to name a meteor-throwing mage after Man v. Food's Adam Richmond and pair him up with Aragorn the sword master, Conan the bezerker, SBD the ninja, and Mr. Deathypants the scythe-wielding dark knight, go to a used game store and find Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, or download it to your Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii.  It's the N64's greatest RPG, and my personal favorite for the entire system.  As IGN put in in their recent review of its Virtual Console iteration, Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber "was (and still is) lordly indeed."