I wish it was easier to communicate what I see in art. Art is meant to be felt, so it takes a tremendous effort for me to put into words what I feel. Please bear with me as I try to explain some of the themes of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.
Let's start with the premise. Tactics Ogre takes place on the Valerian islands and sees you unite your people and eventually all the kingdoms under one banner in a fight against ever greater enemies.
You start as a group of childhood friends who want to fight back against the oppression of your people. Naive and angry, you attack some passing knights, believing them to be the party of Sir Lanselot who attacked your hometown in the past. It turns out this is a different Lanselot however, but how could you have known the difference? As fate would have it, you find common cause and set out on a quest for the independence of your people together.
The intro sequence lets your draw tarot cards that come with difficult moral dilemmas. The cards empower you and prime you to think that you are a conscious actor in this world - able and free to make your own choices - and that these choices have powerful effects on the world around you. The soothing music creates space for you to dream about who you are and what you could become.
The title «Let us cling together» suggests that the best way to live is with solidarity and to include ever more people into your group as you fight for your freedom against any oppressors, and yet, as you will come to see, in all your attempts to unite, you inevitably divide.
One of the first characters you meet is Nybeth Obdilord, a man who chose to become a necromancer in an attempt to ressurect his wife and daughter. He sees little success in this endeavor, as the experiments on the soldiers that died on the battlefield only results in the rising of undead.
When the writer Matsuno adds Nybeth to the cast, it feels pertinent. Not only because death and grief are central themes of the game, but because it adds thematic shading to the ideas of unity, and whether trying to change the world can actually change anything at all.
What is death, and what does it drive those left behind to do? You have experienced the death of your loved ones, and you have caused the death of others' loved ones. What light does Nybeth's cold-hearted desperation put your own actions in?
Nybeth establishes the stakes. These are the consequences of war. His undead's hollow eyes remind you that however just your cause, this is what is left in your wake. You can not take your actions back.
Further reminding you, you can read the newspaper and the biography of every character you meet. You ponder what they lost in the war, what sacrifices they made to try and change the course of history, and you feel for them, for they are the same as you.
This does not stop you from cutting them down however. Oppression can not be justified, and whoever stands in the way of the liberation of your people is your enemy. This is the reason you took up the sword after all. You chose this path, and it became clear that it could
not be walked without sacrifice.
Your optimism has started to show some wear however...
The spectacular nature and old ruins seem to silently suggest that your choices are nothing in the schemes of geological forces and time. These powers are even stronger than the political forces that tug at your war from the outside.
Not only does it minimize you, it also asks you to ponder how your idea of choice fits into the cause and effect of nature. Are your choices really yours, or are the actors in this play just rowboats without rowers, destined to drift along with the currents of the sea?
These questions are also asked by the Wheel and World tarots, systems that lets you rewind time and explore the different outcomes of your choices.
At the same time, nature also seems beautiful and tranquil. It puts the war of humans into relief. For a leaf, life is simple. Wouldn't it be easier if all you did was sway back and forth with the wind?
Nature is not so simple. It's also filled with monsters, and you may wonder how different this war really is from the eat and be eaten, the spreading of seeds and struggle for survival that these creatures live with every day of their short lives. A war for ideals seems luxurious by comparison.
Set against this backdrop of nature, history and greater cosmic forces, the director Yasumi Matsuno fills his character with a strange sense of life. These characters feel conscious and determined. They, like you, walk upon the stage of life and make the choices that seem just to them.
As you made your choices, were you really free, or were you just a drop in the greater historical currents that were bound for the results you saw? Yet you felt free when you made those choices, and the events that transpired were directly caused by them.
This contradiction between optimism and fatalism lies at the heart of Matsuno's work. As true motives are revealed, allegiances shift, and you mature, you also come to realize the true nature of the war in a way you never could have if you had not chosen to participate in the first place.
The people who oppressed you seem strangely savvy to this and don't give you the full satisfaction of removing them from the stage by being as evil as you thought them to be either. Who is the enemy? Was there really ever an enemy? There had to be, otherwise you could not have achieved your goals.
Your choices got you far - you united a kingdom - and yet, the sacrifices you made along the
way made you eerily similar to the sacrifices of the people you fought to get there. Despite your monumental achievements, history seems to repeat itself and it's all outside your control.
The final boss was the same as you – war-hardened leader who united the island. What does it mean to defeat his ghost? Will you take up his mantle, or will you deafen his voice and do better than him?
The ending suggests that your actions were inconsequential, as two empires vye for control of your island to gain strategic advantage against each other. The peoples you fought to establish the peace are already planning your assassination. The roles are reversed as small factions now plot their revenge against your hegemony, but you also find yourself exactly where you started: a small fish in a sea of powerful players that do with you as they see fit. Is the peace you brought so brittle that it will shatter upon your death?
The game opened by empowering you, by letting your imagination run wild and allowing you to dream, to ponder the beauty of your freedom. It then undercut and complicated this feeling. You made your choices, but so did everyone else, and the result was cacophony.
Somehow, the tarot cards from the opening seem to contain this contradiction as well: they reflect both the gravity of each individual's fate as well as the dizzying number of permutations that make up the world.
My actions may have been steered by free will or by cosmic forces outside of my control. Maybe both at the same time. Maybe it doesn't even make sense to distinguish between them. Perhaps they are simply one and the same.
Even if even the story paints a bleak picture of what you can achieve, the feeling you're left with is strangely still one of empowerment. You can't help but feel that even if your actions didn't lead to the results you wanted, the chaos that ensued was somehow beautiful and true.
For each lesson you can derive from Tactics Ogre, there will be another one to contradict it. There are no easy lessons to be had here. Like a poem, it's rich in suggestion and there are many possibilities for interpretation. Even after the game has ended, the story's thematic arguments continue to frictate against each other like earth and sky.
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