It has been ten thousand years.

I used to do this series of posts on here where I talked about all my favorite obscure games I had discovered exploring the various retro libraries out there. I didn’t run out of games, obviously, but my focus has been elsewhere recently. But one of the first posts on this I did was Ogre Battle 64, and I finally beat March of the Black Queen this week. And I want to talk about it.

If you know me in any capacity, you know my love for Ogre Battle. I talk about it at least once a week. But when I say Ogre Battle, I mean Ogre Battle 64, which is in my top 10 favorite games of all time. But the first game in the series has always… escaped me. And I want to talk about it.

This post is gonna be different. A lot of it is gonna be like, personal stories about my experience with the Ogre Battle series, so if you don’t give a shit about me and just wanna hear about the damn video game, scroll down a bit. This is a post that’s kinda just a rambling review of an old game, after all.

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I wanna set the scene first. It is summer of the year 2001. I am 9 years old. The N64 is still hot shit to me, and my family, and my neighborhood. We are a Nintendo community, none of that Sony stuff. Anyway, my brother and I are hanging out at the neighborhood pool with our neighbors, who are about our age, and they’re telling us about this brand new game they got yesterday, called Ogre Battle 64. After some swimming and relaxing, we go back to their house, and they show off the game. My first battle I remember seeing is a fight with a bunch of Pumpkin Heads in the back throwing their heads as meteors, and I thought it was the coolest video game I had ever seen.

We were a kinda poor family (both my parents are teachers so that’ll tell ya what thats like). My parents couldn’t just up and buy us a game willy nilly. But we had BLOCKBUSTER! So we rented Ogre Battle 64, over, and over. We’d get into chapter 2 dozens of times. But we never beat it, and we never owned it. It was just a special part of that summer and fall, before the Gamecube crashed down and erased the N64.

But anyway, fast forward a bit. It is now 2007 or so, and my brother has his first job as a cook at a local restaurant. He’s not making bank but he’s living at home so the couple hundred a week is nice. He decided he wants to use it to buy games he had heard about as a kid, but never got to actually buy, and build up a retro game collection. He obviously gets Ogre Battle 64, in box (which even then was fucking expensive). But he also picks up another game, one even MORE expensive, one I had never even heard of. We were not a SNES family growing up, we had a Genesis, and an NES. He buys it, despite how obscenely expensive it is, in box, and shows me how it’s the prequel to one of our favorite games we’d never heard of. The two of us excitedly play it

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And then we stop playing it.

It’s sometimes hard to go backwards in a series. Some of the innovations and little changes are obviously missed, and it’s a bit clunkier, a bit more primitive. We weren’t DISAPPOINTED, but it absolutely did not capture us like OB64 had. But the game always nagged me, in the back of the head. I could go back any play OB64 any day, that aged amazingly. What was making me bounce off this so much? I wanted to play it. I wanted to finally beat it.

Which I did, this week, finally. Let’s talk about it.

Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen is the fifth episode in the Ogre Battle Saga. By that I mean, it’s the first game, but Matsuno, the creative head and writer, pulled a Star Wars. It was made by Quest, and released in 1993, to a very limited run in North America.

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(this is the PS1 version but it looks basically the same)

First, I want to talk about vibes and aesthetics. This game has them in spades. The Mode 7 overworld, the sprites, the art style, the freakin’ tarot cards. From the VERY START, you see Warren, the Seer, fortelling your fate by the cards. This scene is awesome. It also helps decide your starting stats, which is neat. Your character can be one of like, six classes depending on this. Also, your character, known as The Opinion Leader, can be a GIRL, HOLY SHIT. Does this all seem really ambitious for 1993’s Super Nintendo? Fucking YES. YES IT DOES.

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This game is like, 95% ambition. The very ideas of it are ambitious. It was unlike ANYTHING ever seen before, this shit is a new fucking genre. Ogre Battle basically takes place in three parts, a big battle map where you move units around in real time to liberate cities and counter enemy battalions, the battle screen which plays like auto chess depending on what classes and placement your units are in, and the battalion setup screen, where you choose you units, place them in their squads, change their classes and item load outs. There are 75 different classes. Each has different stats, different requirements, different attacks that also depend where they’re located. And some units are special, and require items to class up, like the lich requiring a lich ring. It is important to note, however, the balance is kinda shit. Some units range from bad to straight up useless, like the octopi, golems, and evil ones. You gotta kinda explore all your options.

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This is all so fucking much. But it’s all an AMAZING idea, and it’s all wrapped in a politically heavy storyline. You, as the Opinion Leader, are leading a revolution against the evil Black Queen of the Xyteginian Empire, who conquered this land 20 years ago after she killed the King of Xenobia, your true leader. As you liberate each region, you meet dozens of characters, and learn countless stories. Like the story of Gilbert, a proud and honorable man who rules the local region fairly. Everyone loved him… but he surrendered to Xyteginia with no resistance, and now he is actively seeking you out to fucking kill him, because of his guilt. He did it to protect his people, but he can’t forgive himself for letting his king die. You need to find his old friend Canopus, hidden on the nearby island, and convince him to join you so he can talk some sense into Gilbert. All of this is missable.

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This is a map of the region. I don’t see and towns on that island, do you? No, that’s because they’re HIDDEN. This game has countless hidden cities that you need to explore around to find, and these are REQUIRED for any kind of really in depth, good story telling, like the Gilbert storyline. Otherwise you hear the cities say how Gilbert betrayed his honor, then you fucking kill him, and move on. This game is FILLED with shit like that. Countless guide dangit situations.

On top of that, there’s a bunch of little things that just rub me the wrong way. The tarot card system is cool, but as a kid, I found it annoying. You want to engage with it, but it keeps giving you bad cards that hurt your alignment and reputation. As an adult I realize they don’t effect you that much, but that also is a negative. If they’re barely effecting you, why are they there? I guess they’re kinda cool. But the MAIN thing I dislike is the enemy AI.

So, I’m gonna go back to OB64 real quick, which plays exactly the same, with some minor additional tweaks. In that, all of the enemy units are set up ahead of time and patrol areas, guard towns, go after strategic zones of control. They move like an army. Here, the enemy can have like 8 units out at a time. They all spawn from the enemy base, and basically make a beeline towards your base, or maybe the closest liberated town. There’s no real strategy, they just feel like mindless zombies. And then, once you beat a leader, it’ll run back and be fully healed. You have to surround and kill them utterly. But if you do that, two things will happen. One, you’ll be overleveled, which is very bad for reasons I’ll talk about, and two, they’ll just respawn. The same unit. Each battle has like 20-40 units, all copies of those same 8 units. And it gets real tedious killing the same unit over and over that’s respawning, as you’re trying to explore around for the good story bits.

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Just use a guide, I guess, but even a guide can’t save some of the annoyance. This is the main reason I stopped playing. I’d get to Pogrom Forest (Yes, they really called it that, a literal pogrom happened there in the story’s lore), or maybe Deneb’s Garden, and it would all become too god damn much. But even if you do deal with it, you’ll become over leveled. Why is that bad? Well, the alignment system. If your unit is “bullying” the enemy and is way over leveled, they’ll drop alignment. Alignment effects what classes they can become, and it effects whether you’ll gain or lose reputation (the number that gives you a good or bad ending basically) as you take cities.

The issue is, in the middle of the game, there’s a section where the game breaks into like, 8 possible paths. You have to do all of them eventually, and they’re all around the same level as you’re constantly gaining levels. By the end, your characters will all be hemorrhaging alignment, OR, you’ll have a few flying good units who are COMPLETELY useless in combat, flying around taking all the cities, and a few murder hobo death stacks who, as soon as the battle starts, you command them to camp in front of the enemy base as the enemy AI just stupidly walks into The Walking Death, The Dark Lich Warren, who immediately wipes out the stack cause he’s 10 levels above them.

That’s not very fun. It’s mostly just sitting and waiting for the battles to end, with no strategic element. It’s literally the speedrun strats to Ogre Battle 64, which I found to be the most boring speedrun ever, but as what is required to beat the game, instead.

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Even now, after beating the game and getting the world ending, I feel bad. That I’m bullying this game. I finally beat it, and I DO like it, but more for what it would become as Ogre Battle 64. Almost all of these problems will be fixed in OB64. But the stories and ideas in March of the Black Queen shouldn’t be ignored. All in all, I’d give it an 8/10, which might seem high for how much I was just complaining, but I have to compare the game to the world it came out in. This was an AMBITIOUS game, and nothing else was like it at all. It’s no wonder it had some cracks and rough spots.

OH, one more thing I forgot to mention: I actually played the Saturn version! There are a few different versions of this game, namely, SNES, PS1, and Saturn. None are the “definitive” version. The SNES version is the original. The PS1 is graphically a bit different, and makes it so when you class up people they keep their unique color schemes instead of just looking like generic units. The Saturn version looks more like the SNES version, but has voice acting and a few bonus stages, none of which were really that worth playing I’m NGL.

Anyways, I’m glad I finally beat it. It’s at least worth checking out. But absolutely use a guide. I just had my boyfriend tell me what to do for the entire game lol