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Why Everyone Hates It: By the time of Ogre Battle 64's release, public perception had generally dismissed the N64 as a viable platform for RPGs and strategy games. Additionally, at first glance, Ogre Battle 64 seemed like just a graphical update to a game which itself appealed only to a small niche.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: While Ogre Battle 64 is in fact a full blown sequel to Ogre Battle, the series as a whole trends towards the high end of the difficulty spectrum.
Why I Like It Anyway: Ogre Battle 64, simply put, delivers everything that worked about the original Ogre Battle while addressing the more frustrating aspects of the game, and adding some interesting new features. The most important change is that the player's reputation now demands that while towns of high alignment still need to be liberated by high units, towns of low alignment prefer to be liberated by low alignment units. This encourages using a healthy mix of the two, which is far easier to cope with given the game's mechanics.
What makes this change so important is that alignment system used by the Ogre Battle is a difficult mechanic to manage. Each individual unit in the game has an alignment value between 0 and 100, which shifts up and down based on the results of combat. As is fairly standard, units fighting units of extremely low alignment, say, undead units, and various spellcasters, which also tend to be the best damage dealers. Fighting high alignment units, which tend to be more healing and defense oriented, tend to shift alignments down. Rather than simply treat alignments like opposing teams though, the Ogre Battle games judge units by their actions as well.
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More important than the alignments of the various units in a conflict is how fair the fight is. If you send a group of level 20 units at a group of level 10s, your alignment will drop. If you chase down a group of units retreating towards its home base, your alignment will drop. If you actively avoid actually killing any opposing units, your alignment will rise. While all of this makes sound moral sense, using what in any other game would be the best possible tactics on the battlefield will cause your alignment to plummet. Maintaining high alignment units requires you to actively handicap them any way you can, and you will also have to swap numerous units in and out of circulation to keep their levels from growing to the point where they have an actual statistical advantage as well. 64's reputation meter not only throws the player a bone by encouraging the building of a monstrous clean-up squad or three, it also improves on the sophistication of the morality. After all, while the noble heros freeing the city full of happy smiling citizens from their evil oppressors will be celebrated as champions, odds are they'd be considered a bunch of killjoys in those towns which consider vampires and liches to be pillars of the community.
While changes like this make it more palatable, the actual meat of Ogre Battle 64 is largely in line with the original, being what really can only be called a Strategy RPG. While most people use the term Strategy RPG interchangeably with Tactical RPG, there is an important difference. A Tactical game, like the X-Com series, the Ogre Battle series' second entry Tactics Ogre, or the more recognizable Final Fantasy Tactics by the same developers, is a game based on direct, absolute control of every unit, carefully planning out moves and positioning to maintain the upper hand in each small skirmish. With Strategy games, like StarCraft or other RTS games, individual units will generally act on their own when it comes to the actual fighting. The player's role is primarily about large scale planning. Taking into account the entire map, and making sure to send the right units into the right situations.
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In keeping with this, the actual battles in Ogre Battle (64 and otherwise) aren't in direct player control. Units are assigned to groups of up to five members (although some units count as two), in formations that can go up to three characters wide, or three rows back. What abilities a given unit will use in combat varies by where they're placed, and a single choice is made at the start of actual combat to determine their AI for choosing targets. Beyond that, things play out somewhat like an RTS. A large map with several towns and varied terrain is displayed, groups are deployed from your home base, and move to assigned waypoints. If two groups meet, they fight for two rounds in standard console RPG style, with the side which came does the least net damage being pushed back and disoriented on the world map.
The other twists added in for the N64 sequel include the late-game ability to combine several groups into large troop formations, and an odd mechanic where new units are promoted up from a large supply of volunteers who join up between battles based on how well the player is doing. These anonymous level 0 units are a homogenous herd, with no individual stats, added to groups in clumps of three. The more of this cannon fodder is in a group, the less skirmishes they need to survive for one to grow up into a real unit. Not only does this system give new units a jump start towards the desired alignment, the severe disadvantage posed by bringing them into combat is an excellent way to keep high level high alignment groups sufficiently humble.
As mentioned earlier, the only game to take this particular Real Time/Turn based SRPG approach is the original, much less forgiving Ogre Battle. Tactics Ogre, the second game in the series is, as the name would imply, a traditional Tactical RPG. It does however share the same unit list, promotion system, permanent death, and odd penchant for name dropping Queen songs. The only thing which really approaches similarity to the first and third games in terms of actual gameplay is the Saturn game Dragon Force, as discussed here previously.
