Ogre Battle 64 is truly the best RPG to ever grace the N64 platform, in my opinion at least. It's a strategy-RPG, with gameplay that closely resembles Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings on DS.

The isometric cutscene graphics alongside the 3D gameplay graphics work great. The characters have great development. This game has huge lore and even has a huge history to look at.

All the battles in the game feel like wars, with you capturing strongholds and liberating an area. You can customize your squadrons in a lot of ways, naming all the characters (except the main ones), equipping them, changing formation, etc.

As it is with every game in the series, your endings depend on crucial moral decisions. There's a lot of secrets with hidden areas, unlockables, side quests and recruitable characters which end up giving this game a huge replay value.

The music is beautifully composed, as it is with all the games in the series.

On the negative side, the gameplay may seem very slow at times and doesn't put you directly in action since the units attack on their own. You can give them orders on where to go, but they will fight using their preset formations. Another downside is the overarching difficulty, but any die-hard RPG fan would look aside to the absolutely marvelous story.

Sidequests surprisingly work in such a mix of genres, although it does get tedious traversing the same maps without any obstacles or few enemies.

On the N64, this is a must play and a marks a difference from all the platformers and action games.

[u]Ogre Battle 64 - Lycanthropy Patch[/u]

Lycanthropes were not available as a playable class in the release version of the game. If you change one of your characters into either a lycanthrope (03) or werewolf (2A), they will not transform with the moon. This patch corrects that behaviour, assuming of course you manually change a party member into one of these ;*)

There are two flavours to this patch. You can use GameShark codes on console or in most emulators, or you can patch the ROM with the .ups file provided. Note that the patch is slightly different: werewolves transform when vampires do, from 6pm to 6am, instead of 9pm to 3am. Codes are listed below.

Sorry, but the patch and codes are only designed for the North American release; I don't have copies of the japanese or PAL cartridges, but source is provided if you'd like to try to port the code.

Again, this only fixes lycanthrope transformations. You will need to make a lycanthrope, but there's plenty of documents on class changing.

+_+

[u]Patch Version:[/u]

The patch is a ups file, so to apply it use byuu's ups patcher. You can find Windows and Linux patch tools at:
http://byuu.org/

Only apply it to an unbyteswapped, North American release (NOBE) game -- and do respect copyright law. If you can't obtain a legal backup copy of the cartridge, use the codes instead.

+_+

-Zoinkity

Ogre Battle 64 - Person of Lordly Caliber.z64
CRC32: A05AEA85
MD5: F666E020218392E52662FDDFA1EA4F21
SHA-1: 9CD0CFB50B883EDB068E0C30D213193B9CF89895
SHA-256: 571E83396BC81E70DA4C0A20313D82DBD7DFE685F2C37418C8E27F927E2CC67A

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