Ogre Tale Reviews

sadly this isent the first time mages has let me down. my overal rating would be 4/10 to sum up the good and the bad good- 1. good music and good art 2.a simple but fun to follow story 3. a very simple combo system 4. no punishment for losing overal the game is good for somone that just wants to button mash a bit the bad- 1. no combo system whatsoever 2. enemies/ bosses are tedious and offer no challange 3. constant reference and 4th wall breaking ruines the immersion 4. certain mechenics are just plain dumb. such as a room restarting when you re enter it. the weapon shop and the rng behind weapon drops 5. level length is very inconsistent there are other factors in play as well but this is to give you in idea

Steam hates my computer because I probably played more than the 8h shown. Long story short it is a good arcade game with a couple of flaws. Some achievments are buggy and I ended up using an achievements manager to fix them (slotting a jewel in a weapon never registered) and some there are two skills I cannot upgrade because it will simply not register the kills/combos with it. The story is "funny" but you can tell some of it got butchered by the translation team, some horrribly dated memes are proof of that. Overall a decent brawler with interesting characters. Game doesn't get fun until you unlock the skills at about mission 4 or 5 I think, can't remember, but it make it rather dull until that part. When you have everything available (special moves et all) it gets pretty addictive to rake up combos and see the numbers go up. Would recommend on sale at best though, as the community is non-existent (good luck playing with peoples online that aren't your friends, and even then it won't be story mode once again).

Did a playthrough and here's my 2 cents: Good - Pixel Art is a nice step up from Phantom Breaker, which was already a looker. - OST is really solid. - Characters have fun movesets. - Local and Online Co-op are present which is always good to see, and also very necessary for niche genres like this. Mixed - No plane switching. Not to say single plane BEU's are bad but, but why change what isn't broken? - This is a Progressive BEU, so you don't start out with your full kit. Not A fan of these types but at the same time I acknowledge many people need it to stay invested. - Writing makes heavy use of fourth wall/memes, though I did enjoy the cast overall. Yuck - Movement. If there is one thing they should focus on fixing let it be this. Characters are way too sluggish be it turning around, jumping, or just plain walking. - Weapon/Skill System is a chore. Unlike PBBG you no longer have a skill tree and instead focus on slotting skills and attributes to your weapons. Problem is once slotted you have to way of removing them, which is way worse than the previous game's system. -Off-Screen sniping is here and it sucks just as you imagine. Bullets are literally flying at you before get to see what you dealing with, leading to cheap hits. Probably could list more, but the main takeaway is the game is fun but unpolished. And like I said if they could at the very least make the character movement, that would do so much for this game.

THE POSITIVES Ogre Tale has been fun and the story had me laughing the moment it take us to present day Japan. The 2D sprites are beautiful and the OST is really good. Combat is frantic as a brawler should be. If you've played Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds, you'll appreciate familiar locales like the "KING OF BURGER" restaurant. You can start off playing on Very Hard difficulty to challenge yourself early on. But you're very limited to what you can do combo wise at the very beginning until you progress further in the game. Once you've reached mission 3, you can finally earn currency to purchase weapons, jewels and talismans. That is the best time to grind and earn rare weapons that will help you immensely in combat. THE NEGATIVES There are localization issues such as missing a word during a sentence for an example. The music can often times overpower the excellent voice work so I lowered the music volume to 3 and raised the vocals to 10. That helped but not as effective as you would believe to be which is strange. Once you can earn weapons after mission 3, you quickly discover all the offerings on sale are nowhere near as good as what you earn, after completing missions on harder difficulties. It doesn't have a proper "Quit Game" or "Exit Game" option so you'll need to press "ESC" and use your mouse to confirm. There's no way to change resolutions so it's either "Windowed" or "Full Screen" to choose from. THE CONCLUSION Despite the flaws, I feel Ogre Tale is a fun spiritual successor to Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds and one of the few games to support local couch and online co-op in 2020. It's only $15 USD if you get the bundle and already have Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds. Even at $20 USD for Ogre Tale itself, it still gets my recommendation. The issues for me aren't enough to dampen my enjoyment of the game. I've been waiting on a Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds sequel and this is the next best thing. I hope the publishers and developers will iron out the flaws with patch updates in the coming weeks so we can potentially appreciate Ogre Tale the way it should've been experienced; polished.

I wanted to like this, but honestly, just play Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds. I actually am confused as to how the same studio could release a game this vastly inferior to its predecessor...

The art is gorgeous, the girls are adorable and the dialogue (for me at least) was laugh out loud hilarious. The combat is good, but as many others have noted, it's not as satisfying as it was in Phantom Breaker BattleGrounds and feels a little clunkier. If you've played PBBG (and you SHOULD) to death and just want some more of it like I did, Ogre Tale will scratch the itch nicely. It just doesn't have the variety and depth of its predecessor. The up shot is the great writing. If it's on sale at all grab it and never look back.

The only thing in this game that can engage the thinking part of your brain is a maze they make you do at least three times (with the game slyly winking at you and admitting "this sure sucks, huh?"). It's a loot game with one equipment slot. The controls aren't good enough that you can do cool fluid combos and all the enemies die in one hit anyway. The bosses either arbitrarily autoguard all the time or are ridiculously easy. This is purely for the "looking at nice stuff" part of the brain. Barely even a video game.

3 months has passed, the core game machanics still don't have a proper update, not even bug fixes. I think I already give developers enough time to improve this game. It's a good time to leave a negative comment. Edit: Another 3 months passed, 6 months in total. Only add chinese localization, still no bug fixes and improvement. 2021/7/13 Edit: Another 4 months passed, 10 months in total. Developer finally leave a comment about the delay at June. After that, no signs of updates. 2021/9/27 Edit: Another 2 months passed, 1 year in total. Congratulations! Guess I won't buy any product from this company anymore.

I wouldn't recommend this game for multiple reasons, so I'll just state the biggest ones. 1. Movement Mechanics Somehow they managed to make movement in a single-plane 2D video game bad. Movement has pretty much been a solved thing in gaming for decades so It's super rare to see a game where the movement mechanics are so bad. Like most games dashing goes a set distance, but the dash distance in this game is seriously running across the stage and has to be cancelled with an attack because it has a ridiculous amount of recovery frames otherwise. So it's either choose between a terrible walk speed, or a flawed dash mechanic. Additionally, the input buffer on the game is either terrible, or basic options just have absurdly long startup frames. The amount of time it takes for your character to jump after pressing up is something else. 2. Level Design Most beat em ups are literally point a-b, but this game will often have levels that have you run back & forth or it doesn't matter, some levels are literally one screen long and you're back into going through the dialogue again. The game is practically self-aware of how tedious it's pacing is. Here's a quote from the game: "I totally get it, It sucks when you're itching to fight but the dialogue just keeps dragging on" 3. UI/ Game Mechanics The UI is pretty bad, I'm guessing you have to unlock CO-OP by beating the game but it doesn't tell you. The UI consistently just doesn't tell you things. A lot of the game is based around getting weapons to be stronger to deal with the bosses, yet in the shops you can't see the weapons stats and there are also drops, it feels pointless to use the store when you can get better weapons seemingly randomly. The gameplay doesn't truly take off until you learn your special moves, but the enemies and gameplay just aren't interesting, the game is pretty much all based on your equipment rather than focusing on any element of the combat mechanics what so ever. Not worth buying, I've honestly never played a beat em up this bad before, it's a pretty simplistic genre that doesn't need to be that complicated to be fun. Amazing art team, but plagued by bad - to very mediocre gameplay/design choices

I really want to like this, I really do. I was big fan of phantom breaker battlegrounds. The controls of this game are just way too clunky for a beat'em up. None of your attacks connect smoothly, your character movement is janky as all hell, the smash attack is counter intuitive and happens when you don't want it to and the auto run, oh god why is there a default auto run when you dash? This had killed me more times when I care to count. The art is nice, music is great but it is trying too hard to be a vanillaware game aesthetically and it picked up all the clunky combat along with it, I just wish I had the phantom breaker battle system back.