Frontline Gaming Japan has translated an interview with the developers of Tactics Ogre from Famitsu
The 5 November 2020 issue of Weekly Famitsu includes a 25th anniversary commemorative interview on Tactics Ogre with some of the original developers who worked on the game: Director, writer and game designer Matsuno Yasumi, art director Minagawa Hiroshi, and music composer Sakimoto Hitoshi. Though unable to participate in the interview, illustrator Yoshida Akihiko also answered several questions outside of it.
Conception
The interviewer begins with pointing out how the first proposal document already had a drawing of island of Valeria, and asks Matsuno about his creation process: Whether he starts with the world, or the characters. Matsuno says that he is actually bad at starting with characters, and has to first think of the history of the world, and then decide on which part of that history to write about, which is how he handled working on the Ogre Battle Saga.
As Tactics Ogre is part of the same world as Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, this means that its world had already existed before they started work on it. The route split at the end of chapter 1, what happens to Lancelot Hamilton, and the conversation between Hamilton and Tartaros were also in the very first iterations of the plot.
Matsuno says that in June of 1992, development on Ogre Battle had ended, and there was some time between that and its release. The NES game Solstice was popular with them at that time, and they decided that they wanted to make a similar action game with a 3D field, and were carrying out technical tests to see if this would be possible.
When Ogre Battle’s release was fixed for March of 1993, however, they got an initial order of 200,000 copies, and additional order for another 200,000 copies, making for a total of 400,000 which was a huge hit for a company that had been nameless at the time. The company of course requested that they make a sequel as a result, and so they stopped work on the 3D action game and instead began work on an SRPG with a 3D map.
Minagawa says that they loved 3D action games like Solstice and Landstalker, and were thinking of them while working, like when making a jump-like functions with three-dimensional feeling to it. They already had a tool running on the SNES which would apply a panel to a 3D map when the panel’s type and height was defined at that point, and the action game they were making would let the player character move and jump around that map.
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen was the first game in the Ogre Battle Saga series to be released
Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos is a 1990 puzzle game made by Software Creations
Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole is a 1992 Sega Genesis game made by Climax Entertainment
Art and Animation
The sprite work is discussed next. Minagawa, who also handled pixel art in the game, says that since they already had the units from Ogre Battle, he just made sprites and animations for these pre-existing characters. He also made the effects and UI.
Creating the tool for maps was also done by Minagawa, but actually making the background graphics and scene composition was handled by Yoshida. Yoshida also handled designs for new characters for Tactics Ogre like Denam, Catiua and Vyce and illustrations for new characters and classes, as well as the in-game portraits. Minagawa says that the portraits, having the limitations of 16 colours and 32 pixel widths, are something that he would never have been able to do himself.
The interviewer brings up how at the time there was gossip on the internet saying that Minagawa worked on pixel art seeing Final Fantasy as a rival, and asks if it was true. Minagawa says that he did of course think of Square’s games while working, but also Capcom’s, especially their arcade games. But the timing meant that Final Fantasy VI and Seiken Densetsu were close, and so he did try not to lose to them.
As Minagawa was the only person working on the characters in the first half of the development process, he also created the template for animations, and with the help of the programmers also made a tool for animations to make it easier to work on them, creating an environment where animations could be defined by the tool before working on the sprites.
The game had many classes and weapons, but would have to fit into a limited amount of space, and so they made the animation tool and sprites early on so that they could experiment via trial and error. There was very little V-RAM available, meaning the game would not be able to load the animation patterns for every single character participating in a battle. As such, only the most simple of animations such as walking or taking damage were perpetually loaded into the memory, with the animations for the attacking and defending units swapped in only in combat. This was also handle with a tool they made which allowed them to manage the animations and memory.
Though Tactics Ogre has many units and classes, they mostly share the same poses. Minagawa says that without an environment where they could put these poses together to see if they formed movements that looked right while switching weapons and classes around, they would not have been able to make the animations which made use of the limited resources, and he says that making development tools to fit the content of the game was very important even back then.
Minagawa is asked if Matsuno had any requests for him during development. Minagawa says that when he used how each unit has its own specialty weapon as inspiration to make a unique animation for the valkyrie class spinning its spear around and showed it to Matsuno, Matsuno asked him if he could make similar special animations for all the classes. In the end he could not come up with an idea for bows, however, meaning that they never got a unique animation.
Minagawa says that the portraits handled by Yoshida, having the limitations of 16 colours and 32 pixel widths, are something that he would never have been able to do himself.
The User Interface
The interviewer next brings up how well-organised information is on the game’s user interface, and Minagawa says that work on the UI would begin with Matsuno coming up with a list of the information he would like to see on the screen, and Minagawa replying with how possible that would be: For example, with the character edit screen, he would actually make something to show how many characters would be able to fit into the screen when lined up. Matsuno would then edit this and come up with documentation on how to fit all the characters into one screen. Matsuno says that while the UI flow and structure were mostly his job, he consulted Minagawa on everything that had to do with graphics.
Next, Minagawa says that in the prototype phase, the game actually had white text on dark backgrounds like Ogre Battle, but he got sick of it halfway through and decided he wanted black text on light backgrounds. He researched how to make it look good, and then remade all of it on his own.
The unique font used for numbers was also an original creation of Minagawa’s, and he says that this slightly wide and flat typeface style is something that he likes and still uses.
Being able to use the select button to get instant help on things shown on the screen is brought up, with the interviewer asking if this too was something they planned on doing from the beginning. Matsuno says that it was a function that had already existed in Ogre Battle, but they decided to go further with it in Tactics Ogre: Instead of just explaining how to control the game or the effects of items, they used it to include things like flavour text explaining the world, or dialogue showing what units think of the player.
System text, help text, and story text added up to 300,000 Japanese characters, and they had to set aside the memory for that from the start of the project. The PSP remake of Tactics Ogre has more than double that amount at 700,000 characters, which is more text than Final Fantasy XII (which Matsuno also worked on).
A remake of Tactics Ogre involving the original developers was released for the PSP in 2010
Sound Design
The interview moves on to discussing the music. Sakimoto’s involvement began after everything discussed previously was done, and he received orders detailing the number of tracks, how long they should be, and a list of the situations they would be used in, and he composed the tracks while referring to these.
Sakimoto says that in the case of Ogre Battle, the characters were more straightforward, and so he aimed for an overall less serious impression, but with Tactics Ogre the tracks ended up more emotional due to the story, and he chuckles as he recalls how Matsuno kept saying that all the tracks were dark. He thinks that he now has the ability to use music that does not sound dark for scenes that are, but back then, his level of skill meant that he could only portray dark scenes with dark music.
Next, the interviewer asks about how sound effects were made, and how Iwata Masaharu, who handled the music alongside Sakimoto, was involved. Sakimoto says that sound effects were handled by Imai Toshiaki (who was listed in the game’s credits under “sound manipulation”). Actually inputting music into Ogre Battle was handled by Imai, but done by Sakimoto and Iwata in Tactics Ogre.
Iwata was with Quest during their NES days, and remained involved with them working on Magical Chase for the PC Engine and other projects after he returned to working as a freelancer, and Sakimoto says that his own involvement with Quest came through Iwata.
Iwata was initially the only composer working on Ogre Battle, and Sakimoto was called in as a helper when the soundtrack shifted to an orchestral focus. The two had worked together multiple times before, and so the way they split their work was very casual: Whenever a list of tracks and sound effects came, they would take turns to choose the ones they wanted to do to split it up evenly.
Tactics Ogre has a considerably more serious tone than Ogre Battle
Creating the Battle System
Battles are next to be discussed, with the interviewer starting by asking whether equipment weight factoring into wait times was something they decided on having from the beginning, and Matsuno acknowledges this.
Matsuno says that they started with the idea of making a game targeting players who were bored of the regular RPGs of the time, but found strategic and tactical simulation games to be too difficult. Fire Emblem already existed, but that was still too hard. He says that RPGs were popular because no matter how tough the enemies are, anyone can win as long as they raise their levels. Though this may lack flavour, there was a huge market for it, and so they decided to make Tactics Ogre a game where everything would go fine as long as the player raised their levels.
He also says that having allied and enemy phases where the player and computer take turns to move all their units was also a hurdle for RPG players, and so he decided to make a game where each unit would move one by one. But he felt that just taking turns would be too simple, and so he came up with the idea of introducing the concept of time to the game, which would be affected by weight and unit attributes.
The interviewer next inquires about how MP slowly builds up instead of starting out fully charged, and Matsuno explains that this is because in his head, magic is far more powerful than magic. If units started with full MP, they would immediately be able to use powerful magic. Thus, he wanted to make it so that if you want to use powerful magic, you need to wait and charge your MP. As an extension of this, he felt that if they wanted to keep bows powerful, they should apply the same principles to them, and this resulted in how they worked in Final Fantasy Tactics.
Designing the Maps
Next, the interviewer asks how the game’s maps were made. Matsuno says that at a very early stage he came up with orders saying what type of maps with what sort of attributes are needed for each area for the entire game, and also prioritised more than anything the looks of each map, asking whether the player would want to fight on each individual one.
Matsuno would first make mockups of the maps, and show them to Yoshida, who would in turn make modifications based on what terrain chips they had in order to make them look better. Matsuno reiterates that they would absolutely prioritise the looks over the terrain effects and strategy, and only afterwards adjust the difficulty with unit placement.
Minagawa adds that they also prioritised looks when placing units, with attackers being on high ground and defenders on low ground, and says that mysteriously, when they test played the maps, they found that they played as if they were placed perfectly.
Bow, Holes, and Stones
Since the topic of height was brought up, the interview moves to discuss bows, with the interviewer recalling that it was said in a past interview that the power of bows and how the player would be able to ignore their shown range was something they had planned on putting in from the beginning.
Matsuno says that they thought that this idea, where players would be able to hit enemies with bows outside of their range depending on their own experience and skill, was a very interesting one. But many found it to be hard to understand, and they dropped it in Final Fantasy Tactics.
Matsuno says that the idea of having knockback attacks which would allow the player to push enemies into holes came from a similar perspective, of them thinking it would be an interesting addition as no other games had done anything like it at the time. The hanging gardens map, he says, turned out as it did solely because of this idea.
The interviewer next asks if the ability to throw stones was something added for training mode, and Matsuno says that this was just a case of players finding it convenient for training mode, and that it was also something they planned on putting in from the beginning.
The idea for throwing stones comes from history, with Matsuno using the story of samurai general
Kusunoki Masashige defending his castle by throwing stones at enemies trying to climb the walls during a siege, knocking them down. He says that he started with the idea that he wanted to make stones a strong thing in the game, but they grew weaker over time as he wondered if it would be appropriate for stones to be powerful enough to defeat enemies entirely in a fantasy game.
Minagawa recalls that stones were initially strong enough that the player would be able to win by just throwing stones at the enemy as they approached, and that there was a point in development where battles on Tynemouth Hill would result in most of the units on both sides being defeated by stones before they could even enter close combat, which resulted in them discussing how they would absolutely have to change things.
Bows are extremely formidable weapons in Tactics Ogre
Balancing Difficulty
The interviewer next mentions how they found maps where the player has to rescue characters difficult, such as in the case of Haborym, and asks if making them difficult was a conscious design choice. Matsuno says that it was: In games like Tactics Ogre, the difficulty tends to drop around the middle of the game when the player gains access to more features and abilities. He says that because it is possible to clear those stages without rescuing the characters, they decided to make it so that doing so would be easy, but they would become difficult if the player attempts a rescue.
The interviewer points out that the characters to be rescued tended to not behave as they wanted, and Matsuno says that if the characters behaved ideally, it would lower the difficulty, and so they were purposely made that way. If making the game today, he would do it differently, but back then he thought it was fine.
Minagawa says that the player’s equipment, levels would affect the difficulty as well, and at the time they considered all that to be part of clearing the game as well. With the harder maps, the entire development team would come up together with ideas on how to get through, and if they managed to do so, they considered the map to be okay.
Matsuno gives an example, where in order to rescue Haborym, someone removed Canopus’ equipment to make him faster and sent him ahead to heal Haborym. When balancing the game they took the stance where as long as any one person on the team could clear the stage at the expected levels, they considered it to be fine, adding that because of the number of stages they could not spend too much time on game balance. He recognises that this is an excuse, but says that there were limits to the way they worked on the game, with the same person handling the story and battles and level design.
The player can recruit certain characters by rescuing them from enemies on specific maps, but attempted rescues can make things far harder for the player
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