When the story inevitably veers away from actual events for the sake of the action and the page count it still makes an admirable attempt to draw as much as it can from the game’s lore and mechanics, leading to segments where wizards call forth devastating ice magic before the physically vulnerable caster ends up killed by a well-placed arrow (as wizards should) to mention of healing leaves, levels (written with more subtlety than I have the space to explain it here), and Nightmare spells forcing people to sleep.Ĭharacters are represented faithfully in a broad-brush kind of way: Denam is the conflicted hero forced to live with a terrible decision he wish he didn’t have to make, Canopus is exactly as cool as a bare-chested battle-hardened birdma-sorry, Vartan should be, and as the manga goes on Leonar becomes frustrated with Duke Ronwey’s decisions to the point of turning his sword on his leader. There’s a lot of Tactics Ogre in here beyond the oaths warring factions shout at each other on the battlefield or the schemes that quietly unfold behind closed doors, and you do feel that Matsuba either bothered to do some genuine research before sitting down to plan this out or had fond memories of playing the game themselves. This impressive attention to detail also extends to more minor details too: Stones are thrown at distant targets, gems are used to make hasty magical retreats, and characters classes are immediately recognisable purely by the look of their armour and equipment. The manga’s astonishingly accurate at times, with some scenes mirroring not only the general content but even the staging of their game equivalents perfectly, showing the right people sitting in the right chairs in the right room of a specific castle as if the author, Hiro Matsuba, had taken a prodigious quantity of screenshots beforehand and then treated them as storyboards.
Looking at the alternatives listed above it’s the only game-to-manga treatment that makes sense, as continuing the plot threads laid out in the game runs the very real risk of accidentally treading on another Ogre Battle‘s toes, and inventing a whole new story in a setting like this isn’t the sort of thing that’s easily done no matter how big of a fan someone may be of Denam and his friends (or “friends”, depending on your choices).
This Tactics Ogre manga, released in four parts between March 2000 and November 2001, is the straightforward adaptation sort, based on (the pre-PSP version of) the game’s Law route.
#Death by degrees xplay full
We’ve had manga based on video games for about as long as we’ve had video games full stop (and now I’m wondering if Space Invaders ever had its own adaptation…), but for all the differences in their source material and artistic handling they tend to fall into one of four categories: They can be a safely straightforward adaptation of the game’s plot, some a sort of “The further adventures of…” semi-canonical tale, completely made up (for better or worse), or they might follow in the footsteps of the Final Fantasy XII manga, and by that I mean they might be awful and unfinished (yes I am still bitter).
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