Matsuno wrote a proposal for a third Ogre Battle Saga game at Quest.
Canopus tactics ogre psp#
Matsuno notes that in the PSP remake the amount of text increased and became equivalent to FFXII at about 700,000 characters. This is unlike Ogre Battle, where the volume of scenario was decided second according to available memory.
For the script, Matsuno wanted to make sure he could tell a big story to compete with FF, so one of the first things he did was asking the programmers to secure space in the cartridge for 300,000 characters of text. However, Yoshida apparently ignored the photos no matter how many of them he was given. For the character portraits, Matsuno gave Yoshida photo references, for example Kevin Costner from The Untouchable for Lancelot. He says other tactical RPGs at the time like Nobunaga's Ambition or Fire Emblem were interesting but too difficult for general players, so he wanted to make Tactics Ogre more accessible. He also says the change is kind of like Ridley Scott making Aliens completely different than the first Alien movie. Matsuno says that the reason Tactics Ogre has different gameplay than Ogre Battle is because he "basically got tired". So Quest cancelled the action game and recycled its assets into an Ogre Battle sequel first titled Lancelot: Somebody to Love, and then Tactics Ogre: The Bequest of King Dorgalha, and finally Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. At the same time, they were in contact with Nintendo who were impressed with the number of orders for Ogre Battle (200,000 shipped copies at the time) and who asked them to make a sequel to Ogre Battle. They made some mockups and Akihiko Yoshida drew a character like Mickey Mouse. After development for Ogre Battle was finished, Quest wanted to make an action game, with an isometric view like Solstice or Landstalker.
Canopus tactics ogre series#
The names he was attaching to his units in that series became real characters in Ogre Battle (for example Lancelot and Canopus). That game series doesn't have much of a story, but Matsuno liked to imagine scenarios when playing it. The transition from overworld to a closer view of battles was inspired by a PC-88/PC-98 game series called Master of Monsters. The overworld screen for Ogre Battle was inspired by an old Amiga game called Carthage.
This is also why the battles in the game are in isometric view instead of side view like FF or first-person like DQ. Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen is a real-time strategy RPG because Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were already huge RPG series at the time and Matsuno felt the only way he could find an audience was to create a niche game instead of a traditional RPG.
Canopus tactics ogre movie#
It was inspired by a horror/film noir movie group project from his college days. One was a horror game about a special investigation team of the police shooting a zombie with a silver bullet. When Matsuno joined Quest, he had two project proposals. Note that he also talked about other things than the Ogre Battle Saga but this thread is focusing on this only. I have zero fluency in Japanese so the summary I wrote below is completely based on Google Translate. Yasumi Matsuno recently did a long interview with the Japanese site DenFamiNicoGamer talking about his career making games.