(Yes. I waited that long just for that pun.)
One more release before the year’s end – one I was kinda holding back on for a bit while I thought of how to present it.
Back in February, hendersa found an 8M pack of the 8M Pack demo of Tactics Ogre and put some footage up on this channel.
It was ROM dumped fairly shortly afterwards – I believe hendersa learned how to make a dump himself, which is impressive – and I spent a bit of time analyzing it.
There’s no issues with the dump, and it emulates well enough on just about anything, so we can get right down to the contents.
The game boots right into a pre-set map with a red team and blue team, each with matching sets of characters from Tactics Ogre’s minor character/class pool.
The most interesting thing about this demo is when it clicks in that the player has control over all the characters in the battlefield; regardless of red team or blue team, the 1P controller can check their menus and issue them commands as their turn comes up. If you have a buddy (or group of buddies) around, you can pass the controller to make a sort of multiplayer experience.
Here’s where I give a reminder that Tactics Ogre is normally a completely single-player game. 😀
The header date of the ROM is 10/2. Since it’s not likely for the demo to have been put out long after the retail game’s availability, this makes the download date almost certainly 10/2/1995. That was a Monday, so it’s possible this may have been the demo’s earliest availability, but I can neither confirm or deny that (It does not seem to appear in those scanned Famitsu schedules? Then again, neither did the Cho Aniki demo…)
Tactics Ogre would be released 4 days later.
If you’ve been checking the Satellaview archival videos on NicoNico and from Kukun kun’s YouTube Channel, you can tell that Tactics Ogre was frequently promoted – there’s potentially more to ROM dump for Tactics Ogre regarding magazines with promo screenshots and potentially more radio programming to recover. However, It doesn’t seem like any of the archival recording we have directly references the demo. That said, I might be wrong there. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.
タクティクスオウガ BS版 | Tactics Ogre BS-Ban
ROM Download
