How close is this to the PSP version?

[Pagan Nova]

Got the most experience on the PSP remake of the old PSX classic, so was curious. If it's pretty close or close enough, I'm grabbing it. I just hope it's a good port in general..or remake.

[Pickleton]

This is a remake rather than a port, but imho kind of combines a lot of the "best of both worlds" from the PSX and PSP versions.

Someone will invariably come in to berate me for saying this version is superior to the PSP version, but here's my take.

If your appeal with the PSP version was "the grind", then you'll be disappointed. This version is about as "pick up and go" as the PSX.
- No more spending 2 minutes in the crafting menu to turn materials into other materials into other materials with a 60% failure rate just to make 1 spear.
- No more farming SP to buy skills and skill slots, everyone just gets 4 for their class abilities and naturally get skills as they level up.
- No more bloat stat skills and generic skills like swiftfoot, as those come either baked into the characters or onto equipment.
- No more status-immunity equipment. You can't just slap 5 "-proof" skills in a character's equipment slots in chapter 2 and use those for the entire game.

Also they removed the rogue class (for the player, enemies still have), random encounters on the world map (put back in training mode from PSX), and have a level cap that increases as you progress through the game. The latter tends to be the biggest point of complaint, but it's easily solved by just learning the mechanics of the strategy game instead of just relying on brute forcing levels.
Honestly speaking, though, I don't feel that the first 2 have nearly the impact on the game that people claim (in fact I think the removal of random battles is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome for people who spent 239847 hours grinding/farming at Tynemouth Hill). The level cap also doesn't at all bother me because every Matsuno game attempts to limit your levels in some way, so "that's just how it be" on that end.

Anyway, my tl;dr is that they streamlined the game, but not in ways that people would normally call "making it more accessible".

[Pagan Nova]

it almost sounds a bit more like Final Fantasy Tactics, it had the equipped slots you just learned (but from gear)..but ok. I didn't dislike the PSP's SP farming, I liked that it felt like a natural progression to me. I disliked, however, the PSX's brutal difficulty, like wow, I never found a solution in the early game.

I'll grab it. Thanks

edit: I see what you mean. It's very different. I did enjoy the class levelling thing in the older ones, but..this is fine. and I still got my PSP copy if I want to play that :) thanks for answering.

[Pickleton]

imho the skills in this are natural progression, too, assuming you're not just sitting down and farming at max level for massive swaths of the main story. Every 3-5 battles you'll get a bump up in a couple levels, and every few levels classes get new skills or rank ups, so they'll get stronger as you go.
Sidequests don't get you power in terms of levels/skills, but in items/spells/classes/craftables, so you can take your time and do sidequests without accidentally outleveling the content.
It definitely provides a "curated" experience.

To put it into perspective with the level cap, if you aren't using a massive army (keeping it to a core team of 6-10 units without swapping tons of people in/out), and you don't grind in Training Mode or Phorampa, you'll be hitting the level cap just as it increases, keeping a fluid strength progression throughout the story. If anything, that's most likely how the game was "intended" to be played, rather than people hitting Training Mode over and over whenever cap goes up and then "hurr devs are stupid. Why am I forced to grind levels only to fight battles at level cap?"
Just like in the PSX version, Training Mode mainly exists to catch up members of a larger army or a new recruit.

[jamielefeaux]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Pickleton:

This is a remake rather than a port, but imho kind of combines a lot of the "best of both worlds" from the PSX and PSP versions.

Someone will invariably come in to berate me for saying this version is superior to the PSP version, but here's my take.

If your appeal with the PSP version was "the grind", then you'll be disappointed. This version is about as "pick up and go" as the PSX.
- No more spending 2 minutes in the crafting menu to turn materials into other materials into other materials with a 60% failure rate just to make 1 spear.
- No more farming SP to buy skills and skill slots, everyone just gets 4 for their class abilities and naturally get skills as they level up.
- No more bloat stat skills and generic skills like swiftfoot, as those come either baked into the characters or onto equipment.
- No more status-immunity equipment. You can't just slap 5 "-proof" skills in a character's equipment slots in chapter 2 and use those for the entire game.

Also they removed the rogue class (for the player, enemies still have), random encounters on the world map (put back in training mode from PSX), and have a level cap that increases as you progress through the game. The latter tends to be the biggest point of complaint, but it's easily solved by just learning the mechanics of the strategy game instead of just relying on brute forcing levels.
Honestly speaking, though, I don't feel that the first 2 have nearly the impact on the game that people claim (in fact I think the removal of random battles is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome for people who spent 239847 hours grinding/farming at Tynemouth Hill). The level cap also doesn't at all bother me because every Matsuno game attempts to limit your levels in some way, so "that's just how it be" on that end.

Anyway, my tl;dr is that they streamlined the game, but not in ways that people would normally call "making it more accessible".

I tend to look on older games with nostalgia, but avoid buying them because QoL back then was abysmal compared to now. This sounds like a good compromise, imprpving qol without sacrificing too much of the originals charm.

[ConantheContrarian]

I have not personally played the PSP version, but I have played the PSX version on Chaos Route and am nearly finished with Law Route on Reborn. What I have learned is that systemically, each version is completely and totally different after researching the changes from PSX which in turn lead to me learning about the PSP version. For reference, each version of the game of functionally an entirely different game compared to the last iteration which happens to largely have the same story, characters, and classes.

Here is a rundown of each version:

PSX/SNES:

- Brutal combat where all characters die quickly. Permadeath with very rare resurrection spells. Deep focus on maintaining formations, protecting casters, avoiding counterattacks, and defensive play.

- Interesting class system with both extreme drawbacks and cool benefits. Classes were restricted by both gender and alignment. For example, a lawful male character would be limited to only soldier, knight, swordmaster, and warlock and be unable to access classes like terror knight, berserker, or wizard. This sucked as it was pretty limiting. What was interesting about the system is that each class had different growths and you could create some interesting builds by leveling up in a spread of classes. Want to be more dodgy? Level up in Ninja? Want to be more tanky? Level up in Beast Master.

- Beginning is very grindy. You must spend a lot of time in training battle trying to equalize the levels of your units since story battles tend to scale to the level of your highest unit. In other words, if one of your units gets two levels ahead from your party average, you put yourself at an extreme disadvantage. Since XP was awarded by killing targets that are higher level than your unit, you also had to be careful to make sure your party get a pretty even number of kills during fights.

- Endgame moves very fast. As you get powerful equipment, stat cards and food, mobility gear, and powerful magic, you can end the enemy team pretty quickly with them having little chance to retaliate. Some combinations just trivialize the game (Hobyrim + stun or petrify, any class with Dragon Magic, messing around with Retissue or Snapshot).

- On the other hand, with the exception of the broken combinations I just listed, the rest of the class balance actually felt pretty good, with each class feeling like it performed the role you wanted them to. The only classes that felt bad were Dragon Tamer and Knight because they had sucky growths compared to their counterparts. Almost everything felt quite viable if invested in correctly.

- No abilities, with a few weird exceptions in Hell Gate/Palace of the Dead

- No bonus content (No Ozma, Pirate's Graveyard, Etc)

- Spell animations are slow as molasses

- Hell Gate/Palace of the Dead is largely a slog with 80% copy-and-pasted floors. Loot is really good though.

- Random encounters and training battles where you could control both sides

- Powerful gear and spells is a bit of a mixed bag. On the upside it drops 100% of the time and you can look for the enemies on the battlefield that are carrying it and target them usually. On the downside, you can completely miss it if you aren't paying attention, which is very bad because it is very strong and important.

- The game is very immersive. It feels like you are in a semi-realistic fantasy war.

PSP:
I have not played this one, but it sounds like you have, so you may have more context. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Here is what I know:

- Added lots of content and extra characters that would become the template for the Reborn Version.

- Wildly imbalanced class system where lots of classes were trash while others were completely broken and could curbstomp the game.

- Lots of grinding as you would start back at level 1 if you switched classes. Drop rates were also abysmal.

- Very free skill system where you could equip almost anything you wanted if you learned it. Also a lot redundant or useless skills.

- Added crafting system which took forever to use due to high failure rate and need to craft materials.

- Sounds like you could cast entire schools of magic instead of being limited to 3 spells like PSX.

Reborn:

- Way less focus on grinding in the early game with fast XP from training battles.

- Switching classes has little impact on your character; easy to switch roles.

- There is a level cap that goes up throughout the story now, but I personally find it in keeping with the original since it was very difficult to grind past the level of your enemies in that version due to the focus on kill-based XP.

- No failure chance while crafting.

- No random encounters

- No MP Restoring items can be bought at shops except for some fruit, which can be crafted

- Skills are now earned automatically upon reaching a certain level. Less skill slots (4 vs 10), but lots of skills were shifted to equipment instead.

- Buff cards now spawn on the battlefield, granting significant boosts to whichever character picks them up. They are very important in the early and midgame, but increasingly become less important the further you go into the game. Personally, I consider them pretty annoying because they clutter the battlefield, encourage you to break formation to seek them out, and sometimes lead to weird situations where either your units or the AI's become ridiculously powerful after picking up 2-4.

- All enemies are quite tanky now. Don't expect to one-shot anything in this version until the endgame with defense-decreasing debuffs and criticals. Leads to weird situations where wizards or clerics survive being shot 4-5 times.

- Evasion no longer matters past chapter 1. In earlier versions, some classes could be quite dodgy and have reasonable chances of not avoiding damage. This just does not happen now.

- FFT-style death. 3-turns to resurrect till permadeath.

- Starting in Chapter 3, you must debuff bosses and use effects like strengthen on your characters to be able to effectively inflict damage. Bosses will start with a full set of cards, be set 2-3 levels above your current level cap, and spam finishers almost every turn, effectively one-shotting your units in most cases while you often fail to inflict triple digit damage. Most fights now rely on you exploiting the AI into making shockingly stupid decisions over-and-over again until you can focus-fire the boss and any supporting clerics.

- Speed-up Feature + Voice Acting = Excellent

- Drop Rates are hugely increased compared to PSP, but you still must grind if you want specific drops. Furthermore, there is no indication of who has what, so you must use a guide.

- A lot of skills randomly trigger now when equipped, which can mean that what you do on your turn can be determined by chance.

- If you are a fan of magic or archery from past iterations, then you will be disappointed here because they got nerfed pretty hard. While they are not bad persay, they now have a very specific role and generally fail to be effective if they try to do anything except for that role. Archers cannot really damage anything except for squishy mage-types or things that have been hit with breach or fear. Wizards raw damage output sucks pretty badly with magic and are now limited to weakening enemies at range before they make it to your frontline by inflicting debuffs or dealing minor damage. Summons and large AoE spells are also found pretty late in the game compared to at least the PSX version, around the end of chapter 4. Healing magic is also pretty weak in this iteration in terms of raw power, with clerics being there more for exorcisms and consistently healing scratches. If your unit is dying, you will want a full-heal item equipped. On the other hand, beasts and dragons are very strong now, with large AoE pretty early, ranged attacks, a huge HP pool, and the fact the AI will farcically target them over almost every other unit in your party even though they are very hard to kill.

For all versions:

- Friendly and enemy AI is still consistently dumb as rocks
- Canopus is awesome
- Every version is hell without internet guides


This is not even a remotely exhaustive list of changes. Some of this also may be very subjective. Basically if I were to summarize each version, I would say the original focused on immersion, PSP focused on freedom, and Reborn focused on balancing out some of the extremes of the other two versions.

You should also know that there is actually a fourth of the game: One Vision. One Vision is a systemic overhaul mod of the PSP version that basically took the opposite approach of Reborn to fixing the balance. Instead of nerfing what was strong, they decided instead that they would make every class in the game as strong as possible while granting a lot of room for experimentation and new builds. This increases the difficulty of encounters with the enemy, because they benefit just as much from these buffs as you do. It also added huge amounts of QOL (fixed crafting, almost guaranteed drops, etc). You can even tweak some things if you do not like them. I have not personally played this mod yet, but I will be playing it as soon as I complete this playthrough of Reborn.

[ConantheContrarian]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Pickleton:

Also they removed the rogue class (for the player, enemies still have), random encounters on the world map (put back in training mode from PSX), and have a level cap that increases as you progress through the game. The latter tends to be the biggest point of complaint, but it's easily solved by just learning the mechanics of the strategy game instead of just relying on brute forcing levels.
Honestly speaking, though, I don't feel that the first 2 have nearly the impact on the game that people claim (in fact I think the removal of random battles is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome for people who spent 239847 hours grinding/farming at Tynemouth Hill).

Some people seem to find grinding nostalgic. I am not one personally, but some people enjoy it. I would get upset if they removed the random encounters for a FFT remake, but the encounters in Tactics Ogre sucked anyway, so I don't really care. Only issue I see is it is difficult to access some battle maps that might be fun to replay or grind for stat-boost cards and monsters (Phorampha exists for this though).

I will dispute one point in your post though. I consider the original Tactics Ogre to be a hybrid RPG/Strategy/War Sim rather than a pure strategy game. The PSP remake clearly leaned more into the RPG parts of the original at the expense of Strategy while Reborn leaned into the Strategy at the expense of the War Sim and a little bit of the RPG mechanics. I would not discredit anyone for disliking Reborn since it removed or reduced some of the elements that would have attracted some to Tactics Ogre in the first place. I would also not discredit someone for disliking the original over the remakes for its brutal War Sim mechanics.

[Pickleton]

I dunno about the "war sim" classification. Imho it's more a scale of how viable glass-canon builds are compared to others in the genre. Reborn's much more mundane and "realistic" compared to say a Holy Swordsman from FFT walking around chucking lightning swords every turn for one shots, or "our arrows will blot out the sun" of OG/PSP.

I mean, there's a reason why Haboryim (Aym) and Aloser (Allocer) have cameo appearances as superbosses in Reborn, and that's because the glass canon classes they represented (plus their unique character stat bonuses) made them game-breakingly powerful. Maybe it could even be that Aym was there to represent the strongest of OG (Swordmaster), and Allocer to represent the strongest of PSP (Archer)

[Scrubby Spammer]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Pagan Nova:

Got the most experience on the PSP remake of the old PSX classic, so was curious. If it's pretty close or close enough, I'm grabbing it. I just hope it's a good port in general..or remake.

Sadly they got rid of random battles and got rid of the rogue class as a playable class, and added an annoying buff card system that spawns random cards to give you temporary buffs and it slows down turns and feels like map pollution

Other than that it's pretty close to the PSP version, the only major difference is that all skills are locked in on a class and you can't customize or arrange them, but you probably wouldn't do that much anyway since you always needed the class skills.

[Scrubby Spammer]

Oh and they also got rid of automatic training, but you'll level up so fast you probably won't notice much.

I miss assigning AI to characters and focusing on my main characters while the others did their own thing.

[Pagan Nova]

been playing a bit, not seen the random battles and now i see why :( is training the only non-story way to level people?

[ConantheContrarian]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Pagan Nova:

been playing a bit, not seen the random battles and now i see why :( is training the only non-story way to level people?

Yes, although you can get some limited exp from dungeons like Phorampha and Pirate's Graveyard.

[Pickleton]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Pagan Nova:

been playing a bit, not seen the random battles and now i see why :( is training the only non-story way to level people?

Training and a limited amount of areas that have repeatable battles.
If you're already at the EXP cap on all characters who participated in a battle, the EXP will be converted (albeit at a much reduced rate) into EXP charms which you can use on characters. Funny enough, you can bypass the "0 EXP" part of the zombie status by using EXP charms, though you're looking at like a 1/10 EXP conversion rate when making a charm so a team made entirely of zombies is going to be stuck at whatever level unless you're buckling down with a non-zombie team to farm the charms.

[Zoid13]

i think of the games like this

original (snes, ps1)

remake of the original (psp)

remake of the original 2 + psp's DLC (pc)

to me they are all very different games and i see both Reborn and the psp version both as different takes on the original as opposed to a linear progression from the psp version. Reborn just kept the psp's dlc cos content lol