Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together - Setting and Plot

Setting and Plot

The Game Boy Advance game, Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is set before the events of Chapter 5 - Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen and Chapter 6 - Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. The Neo Geo Pocket Color game, Ogre Battle: Legend of the Zenobia Prince is a sidequel to March of the Black Queen. Chapter 7 - Let Us Cling Together is set after all of the above games. In the PlayStation/Super Famicom version the player must lead the "Liberation Army" to bring freedom to the oppressed nation of Valeria.

The game was innovative in its non-linear branching plotline. Crucial decisions made in the game determine the path of the story, the members of your army and the ending sequence. There are multiple endings with radically different outcomes. The game expanded the non-linear alignment system of its predecessor, with three types of alignments for each unit: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaos, neither of which are portrayed as necessarily good or bad. The game gives players the freedom to choose their own destiny, with difficult moral decisions, such as whether to follow a Lawful path by upholding the oath of loyalty (even if it means slaughtering civilian non-player characters on the leader's command), or follow the chaotic path by following a personal sense of justice (even if it means rebelling), or instead follow a more neutral path. Such factors affect the game's ending, which is also affected by decisions such as whether to obtain the most powerful class, which can only be acquired by making a tragic sacrifice. In the PSP version, "The World" system allows players to revisit key plot points and make different choices to see how the story unfolds differently,.

While the concept of branching storylines affected by Law/Neutral/Chaos alignments had already been explored before in the Megami Tensei series developed by Atlus, Tactics Ogre presented choices more grounded in reality, revolving around war crimes and political alliances, rather than supernatural elements. The dark, complex, political narrative of Tactics Ogre revolving around the reality of war was inspired by writer Yasumi Matsuno's outside perspective on events that unfolded during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, including the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.