My focus in video games hews towards their stories and overall worldview, while for their history my interest flows towards the people who make them. A case where those two sides came together to drastically shape the future of mostly RPGs was 1995's Tactics Ogre.That game stands apart from most of its SNES brethren by sheer volume. Unlike its predecessor Ogre Battle—whose story was tailored to fit into whatever ROM space remained after all other assets were in place—the "thinking game" team at Quest allocated a large amount of memory to text, which gave writer-director-designer Yasumi Matsuno a lot of opportunity to spread his wings. And he did so with gusto, laying out an entire political war drama from multiple angles and various outcomes, portrayed by a cast with personalities so multilayered that everybody can be hard to empathize with. There's a specific kind of cynicism & nuance to his writing, and the particular way he goes about portraying the horrors of war, which are hard to...
