May 4th is here, which means it is officially Star Wars Day! To celebrate, all kinds of Star Wars games, toys, and products are available on sale today! The best deals for Saturday, May 4, include Star Wars Outlaws, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Nintendo Switch OLED, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and more.
Get a $15 Gift Card with a Star Wars Outlaws Pre-Order
To celebrate Star Wars Day, Best Buy is offering a $15 gift card with the pre-order of Star Wars Outlaws. This applies to all versions of the game across platforms. The game is set to release on August 30, so be sure to get your pre-order in now for a free gift card!
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for $25
What better way to celebrate Star Wars Day than to pick up Star Wars Jedi: Survivor at a discount? Right now, Amazon has the title available for just $25, which is the lowest we’ve seen it so far. Set after the events of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Cal Kestis has become a powerful Jedi, traveling through the galaxy to maintain peace. With new force abilities, lightsabers, and melee combat options, Survivor is an excellent sequel and a title any Star Wars fan should try out.
Nintendo Switch OLED for $314.99
Woot currently has the White Joy-Con Nintendo Switch OLED Model for $314.99. If you’ve yet to pick up a Switch console, the OLED Model is the one you should aim to buy. With a gorgeous OLED screen, games on Switch pop and look vibrant. Additionally, the new reworked kickstand makes this device much easier to play in tabletop mode.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga for $19.99
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga recreates all nine films into one incredible LEGO experience! Hundreds of characters are playable, with massive planets to explore and complete quests across. If you were a fan of the Complete Saga game, the Skywalker Saga makes everything grander.
Star Wars The Black Series Axe Woves Premium Electronic Helmet for $86.99
If you enjoy cosplaying or even buying replicas for your home, Amazon has an amazing deal on the Star Wars The Black Series Axe Woves helmet. Modeled after its appearance on The Mandalorian, this helmet features an illuminated heads-up display, an adjustable headband, and plenty more.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition for $20
Walmart has The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition for $20 right now. This title is the expanded and ultimate version of the massive RPG, with improved visuals, load times, and textures for Xbox Series X. The game even includes items inspired by the hit Netflix series, so you can experience the ultimate version of this beloved title.
Save 31% Off LEGO Star Wars The Child
For Star Wars Day, this LEGO Star Wars The Child set is on sale! The Child, known as Grogu, is a prominent character in The Mandalorian series. Joined by Din Djarin, the two set out across many missions throughout the galaxy. This LEGO set even includes a tiny minifigure of Grogu!
Square Enix has a plethora of RPG series under its belt, but of all of them, SaGa is certainly its most experimental, unique, and the hardest to crack into.
Starting life on the Game Boy, and initially marketed as a Final Fantasy spin-off in the West, the SaGa series is known for ditching traditional levelling mechanics and storytelling for something a bit more open. While earlier games have you selecting characters and classes as blank-slates, later entries had a set cast with their own individual storylines.
It’s Star Wars Day, everyone! In honor of May the 4th, this most auspicious day, let’s take some time to celebrate and honor one of the galaxy’s greatest heroes: no, not Luke, not Leia, not Rey or any of them. I’m talking about Lugubrious Mote.
You know, the flea that saved Luke’s butt from Jabba the Hut? That flea??? Come on.
This comes from 2020’s The Legends of Luke Skywalker: The Manga, and more specifically, the chapter titled The Tale of Lugubrious Mote. The story follows Luke and Leia’s rescue of a carbonite-frozen Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine, but presents a strange twist on what we know from Return of the Jedi. It introduces Lugubrious Mote, a mole-flea living on the back of Salacious B. Crumb, Jabba’s palace clown. Mote is intrigued initially by Luke’s recorded message to Jabba played by R2, and later by the appearance of Leia when she’s captured by Jabba.
(You can see the lil guy in the photo below – excuse the Android photo.)
Late at night, Mote makes herself known to Leia, and the two form a fast friendship. They stay up all night chatting, during which time Leia encourages Mote to put her faith in Luke. The next day, when Luke shows up to negotiate with Jabba in person, Mote is impressed with his heart, if not his overconfidence. She follows him down into the rancor pit, where Pateesa emerges.
In the film, this is the bit where Luke grabs a bone, shoves it in Pateesa’s mouth, and runs around a bit before shutting a closing gate on Pateesa’s neck, killing it. That’s still how the story plays out, but in The Tale of Lugubrious Mote, we learn this wasn’t Luke’s genius idea. Mote whispers to Luke as he runs around in a panic, and Luke hilariously mistakes the mole-flea for a Jedi Spirit guiding him. Mote steers him, Ratatouille-style, by nibbling on his head, letting Luke think the itchy scalp he has from a literal flea is Force tingles, and Mote’s instructions are just a Jedi Ghost. Every brilliant idea Luke has in that scene – every dodge, every clever use of a bone – is fed to him by Lugubrious Mote.
Ultimately, Mote feels fulfilled by the encounter, as she’s inspired by Luke’s hope, optimism, and confidence. But at the end, she asks Leia not to tell Luke about her, preferring to allow Luke to think he tapped into the Force during his encounter with Jabba and Pateesa. It’s not like Luke hasn’t used the Force before this point or anything, so it’s a little weird he doesn’t recognize the difference – but sure, whatever. In the end, Mote joins the circus, despite Leia’s seeming promise of an advisory position in her government nestled safely in Chewbacca’s fur.
Side stories like that of Lugubrious Mote are meant to be more fun than serious. The Star Wars universe is full of fun little tales about goofy characters doing silly things that often intersect in unusual ways with the main heroes of the films. It’s a big galaxy, after all – big enough for Jizz music, IG-88, the Max Rebo Band, and whatever Glup Shitto is.
Happy May the 4th, everyone! Justice for Lugubrious Mote!
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I’ve covered so far, be sure to check out the 11 previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section.
I can’t look at the box art for Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen without “hearing” Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. From its iconic main theme to the cheers and jeers sounds when liberating towns, and the muffled “fight it out” and “thank you!” voice samples – it all comes right back. I haven’t played this – now sadly obscure – SNES strategy RPG in three decades, but booting up the dusty Japanese cartridge on my Super Nt instantly reminds me why I skipped pesky, non-essential things like sleep when I first brought it home.
Like so many things, my love affair with the Ogre Battle series started in 1993 during my college years in Japan. I had devoured Final Fantasy IV and V, and with the next installment in my favorite RPG series still a year off, I was looking for anything to fill the void. Ogre Battle’s cover art immediately called to me. No surprise, really – it’s the early work of a future master of character design: Akihiko Yoshida. You may not know his name, but you probably know Vaan and Ashe from Final Fantasy XII and have no doubt seen Yoshida’s art style in everything from Vagrant Story and Bravely Default, to Nier Automata.
Developed and published by Tokyo-based Quest, with support from Nintendo, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen faced some tough odds: namely, a vibrant and crowded RPG scene dominated by Square and Enix (still two separate companies at the time). Yet somehow, this virtually unknown studio landed a critical and financial hit that instantly turned heads – and eventually led to Enix itself bringing the game to the US.
Is This the World We Created…?
If I had written this column a few months ago, as planned, I would’ve told you that Ogre Battle was both the start and the end of a sub-genre branch on the evolutionary tree of roleplaying games. Players don’t control a character or a party on an overworld map, they control multiple teams in real time. There aren’t any random battles. Instead, enemies move across the world in plain view, just like the player’s units. And when two groups bump into each other, the screen switches to an isometric display with the individual units duking it out in turn-based combat. But you’re not actually in direct control – battles are largely automatic, with the placement and classes of the characters determining their attacks and defensive moves. Instead, you assume the role of an omnipotent strategist, intervening with tactics changes and by playing magical tarot cards that you collect during the exploration phase.
It’s a bold departure from Nintendo’s slower-paced, turn-based gameplay in Fire Emblem and Square’s influential active-time battle system that was affecting the design of every other RPG in development. Although you can pause the action during both overworld exploration and battle screens, Ogre Battle feels fast and relentless by comparison, driving you to make choices and adjust your strategy on the fly like in a modern real-time strategy game.
On top of the combat and exploration elements, there is an economic element – freed towns earn you money that you need to finance additional unit deployments – as well as the clever, but sometimes hard-to-understand interconnected reputation and alignment systems. You can be more lawful and raise a character’s alignment by attacking enemies of higher level or of lower alignment, or descend towards chaos by picking on those of lower level or more lawful than you. Take too much time during your conquests and your reputation – known in the Japanese version of Ogre Battle by the awesomely flowery name “Chaos Frame” (later adopted by the localized sequels, too) – will drop by the day. Meanwhile, liberating or capturing towns with characters of high or low alignment will similarly influence your reputation in the world of Ogre Battle, which ultimately impacts what characters you can recruit and what ending you’ll get.
Despite the fact that you never directly control a singular character, each warrior has a detailed set of stats, including RPG staples like Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Charisma, Luck, and hitpoints, in addition to the aforementioned alignment. Plus, there are many different character classes – including powerful monsters that cause a lot of damage but cannot lead a party. It’s a surprisingly deep system, given that its main gameplay loop unfolds in real time. Well, accelerated real-time with different speed settings – and there’s even a day/night cycle that affects certain units. Have a vampire on your team? During the daytime, you don’t! You just have someone snoozing in a coffin who can’t attack. If that sounds daunting, know that it does take a bit of time to get into and understand it all, with even expert players trying to puzzle out all the nuances over multiple playthroughs on how to master the reputation system and get the best ending.
Sounds like the beginning of a new, lasting series that would surely be around forever, right? This is Forgotten Gems, remember?
Breakthru
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen sold more than half a million copies – a fifth of that via a PlayStation limited edition re-release some three years after its Super NES debut in 1993. But creator Yasumi Matsuno had big plans for his new roleplaying saga, even before it emerged as a surprise hit. March of the Black Queen is subtitled Episode V and was meant to be the first story in a seven story saga, with chapters I-IV acting as prequels.
As a newly-minted fan, I didn’t know all that and searched in vain for the previous games – there was no internet in the early ‘90s to tell me “five really means first”. But I also didn’t have to wait long for a sequel to Ogre Battle to be announced. But instead of a direct sequel and a sixth or a prequel episode, the next Ogre Battle game would be Tactics Ogre: Episode VII.
If you’ve played Tactics Ogre, you know it’s a huge departure from the original Ogre Battle in everything from the story focus on politics over high fantasy to its slower-paced, chess-like gameplay. Which may relate to a character trait of Matsuno’s that he himself has highlighted in interviews with the Japanese press over the years: he tends to get bored with his creations, even if players don’t.
Someone will make something better, so I’ll make something different.” — Yasumi Matsuno
Inspired by games like Solstice and Landstalker while finishing up development of Ogre Battle, Matsuno fell in love with the idea of making an isometric action game. That game idea morphed into a full-fledged pitch for an Ogre Battle Saga game called Lancelot: Somebody to Love, which would eventually turn into Tactics Ogre: The Bequest of King Dorghalla, before settling on the final, once again Queen-inspired, subtitle: Let us Cling Together.
Under Pressure
“Someone will make something better, so I’ll make something different”, Matsuno said in a 2018 interview with DenFamiNicoGamer when asked about the change from Battle to Tactics. “It may be a strange analogy, but the first Alien, which was made by Ridley Scott, and the second film, which was made by James Cameron, have completely different ‘tastes’, right? It changed from being a sci-fi horror movie set in space to an action and war movie. I really like that transition.”
“When making a sequel to Ogre Battle, I intentionally aimed to create a completely different style of game rather than a ‘2’. I didn’t have any particular proof, but I was convinced that hardcore fans would probably be more happy with that.”
Unfortunately, nobody really stepped up to make a “better Ogre Battle”. I was initially disappointed in the new direction the Ogre Battle series took by abandoning its real-time roots, but grew to appreciate it and the many games like it that have followed over the years (Final Fantasy Tactics, Octopath Traveler, and Triangle Strategy, to name just a few). Matsuno left Quest after Tactics Ogre shipped and joined the company he was initially competing with: Square. At Square, he would go on to make Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, before moving on again to, erm, redder pastures, such as working on slash-fest MadWorld from PlatinumGames.
Don’t Stop Me Now
But despite its creator’s departure, the core Ogre series wasn’t over yet. Quest programmer Tatsuya Azeyagi replaced Matsuno in the director’s chair and led a team with Megami Tensei Gaiden designer Koji Takino to fill the gap between Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. The game: Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, the sixth chapter in the saga. Published by Atlus and Nintendo, the excellent and ambitious sequel featured polygonal maps and 3D-modeled, pre-rendered character sprites a la Donkey Kong Country and clocked in on the second-biggest N64 cartridge with 40MB/320 megabits, second only to Resident Evil 2’s 64MB cart.
If you’re up-to-date on Nintendo 64 history, the bigger the cartridge size, the bigger the risk for the publisher because cartridges had to be manufactured – and paid for – way in advance. That requires advance cash and can mean betting the studio’s future on a single game’s success. The result was that Ogre Battle 64 was impossible to find upon launch. It sold a more modest 200,000 units, but given the positive reviews and word of mouth, its fate was no doubt caused less by gamers not being interested and more by it not being available to purchase. I vividly remember the many frustrated letters we received at IGN64 during those days.
Quest needed money. It sublicensed Ogre Battle to SNK, who were looking for hot properties to adapt for the new NeoGeo Pocket Color handheld system, a capable and underappreciated competitor to the Game Boy Advance. The result was that Ogre Battle suddenly saw a bit of a renaissance. Two “side story” (Gaiden) games from two different developers followed Ogre 64 in quick succession: SNK’s Ogre Battle Gaiden: Prince of Zenobia for NGPC and Quest’s own Tactics: Ogre: The Knight of Lodis for Game Boy Advance. Both games’ stories run parallel to the events in the very first game, Episode V, with the GBA title bridging the events between Episode V and VI.
All Dead, All Dead
The NGPC title – more of an imitation of the original than a game that could rekindle the flame – was a mere blip on the radar, while the GBA Tactics Ogre saw respectable sales, certainly for a strategy title, with more than 380k units sold through. Yes, it outperformed its 64-bit brother despite the GBA’s rich RPG and strategy library and a total lack of them on Nintendo 64. Was I the only one who preferred the classic Ogre Battles to the isometric tactics variety?
But what seemed like a rebirth actually proved to be the end of the line. In 2002, Square acquired Quest – and despite our wildest dreams of a reunited team working together to finally give us the first four chapters of the story, we only got a Tactics Ogre remake for PSP – and later, with very little fanfare, a new take on the same game again via a 2022 remaster called Tactics Ogre Reborn.
The Miracle
But before I leave you on another downer of an ending because nobody is working on another true Ogre Battle game (at least, that we know of) and somehow, neither the SNES original nor its N64 sequel are easily accessible, have you heard of Vanillaware? Well, the saints behind Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown seem to have a soft spot for Ogre Battle as well. Unicorn Overlord arrived as an absolute highlight for SRPG fans in early 2024. If you missed it, give it a shot! When it was first revealed in Nintendo’s September 2023 Direct, I had to do a double take because I genuinely thought it was a new Ogre Battle game.
So perhaps Matsuno was right all along – it just took a few years to get there. Somebody did make “something better” and a promising new RPG sub-genre continues under the banner of a new queen.
Where can you play it now?
But back to the classic Ogre Battle RTSRPG titles. In case you lost count, the 16-bit Tactics Ogre – which was never localized on Super NES – got a Saturn edition in Japan, then a translated wide release on PlayStation, then it was remade for PSP, and finally remade again in 2022 on everything but Xbox. Sadly, the original Ogre Battle was last seen in the west on the Wii Virtual Console in 2009, though Wii U and 3DS saw Virtual Console editions in Japan in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Ogre Battle 64 hit the Virtual Console on Wii in 2010 and saw a late release on Wii U in the US in 2017, as well. Neither title has seen multi-platform or compilation releases nor an announcement for Nintendo Switch Online. Given that Square titles have been entirely absent from Nintendo’s subscription service, it’s unlikely we’ll see them added anytime soon.
Which leaves the possibility of a future compilation – or, the old-fashioned way to legally play them on the platforms they were released on. Bad news, folks. The original Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen cartridge commands a price of almost $200 (loose) on eBay. Ogre Battle: Person of Lordly Caliber is a steal, by comparison, costing $100 for just the cartridge (no box or manual). A copy of Ogre Battle Gaiden for NeoGeo Pocket Color could be yours for just $30, on the other hand – and thanks to the new NGPC core and converter you can play it on the Analog Pocket’s gorgeous screen, too, if you own this fantastic retro handheld. In general, Japanese versions of all three Ogre games are way cheaper since more carts were manufactured, but know that you can’t switch the in-game text to English.
What about you? Are you interested in replaying either one of the three Ogre Battle games on a modern device? Or are you content with the torch passing to Unicorn Overlord as Square’s prime medieval-based strategy RPG series?
Peer Schneider heads up IGN’s Guides, Tools, and Map Genie teams and hopes to one day see Square bring back Matsuno to give us Ogre Battle: Episode I – The Show Must Go On.
In honour of ‘Star Wars Day’, as May 4th has come to be known, we’re republishing this reader-ranked list of all the Star Wars games on Switch and other Nintendo consoles. As they say in Britain, Fourth of May be wi—hang on…
The release of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019 may have ‘ended’ Star Wars as we’d known it for the previous four-and-a-bit decades, but all it really did was tie a bow on the cinematic tales of the Skywalker clan and the nine-film saga which began in 1977. After all, Star Wars is never really gone.
It’s a franchise close to his heart, like Star Wars.
Movie director Wes Ball has recently been doing press rounds to promote his new Planet of the Apes movie and he’s once again been asked about his upcoming live-action Zelda movie.
Although he can’t say much, during a chat with The Direct, The Legend of Zelda movie director reassured fans about his love of the series and how it has been “one of the most important things ever” in his life. He went as far as comparing it to his love of Star Wars from childhood through to adulthood and is seemingly confident “fans are gonna be happy” with the end product.
It’s already been quite an interesting week on the Nintendo front, and now to add to this, it’s been discovered some new trademarks were recently registered by the video game giant in Australia.
As highlighted by Vooks, trademarks have been registered for the 2015 Wii U title Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush (Kirby and the Rainbow Curse) and 2015 3DS release Fullblox (also known as Stretchmo).
Wizards of the Coast has released a new FAQ addressing the use of generative AI (GenAI)in Dungeons & Dragons and admitting it “made mistakes” in its lack of transparency regarding this use in its art.
The official D&D Beyond X/Twitter account made a post with a link to a new FAQ that aimed to “address how [Wizards of the Coast] assess and respond to generative AI concerns” regarding art commissions for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.
The Wizards team recognizes that transparency is critical in the face of evolving issues that affect the games we make, the people who create them and the community that plays them.
“Recently, we’ve had a few occasions where art used in marketing and game pieces has been publicly scrutinized, including for the possible inclusion of generative AI,” the opening paragraph of the FAQ reads. ” During this time, we’ve made mistakes while at the same time have also seen artists and their work misidentified as problematic in a variety of ways.”
The FAQ notes that Wizards of the Coast requires artists, writers, and other creative professionals who contribute to either or both games to “refrain” from using GenAI tools when crafting products. To combat those that may be using GenAI, Wizards of the Coast disclosed that it was “regularly evaluating resources” that could be used to detect when someone used generative AI.
The company also elaborated on why it may not respond to fans’ claims that GenAI may have been used in its artwork. One reason is that its internal investigation found the results inconclusive or that it made an internal decision not to work with an artist who used GenAI going forward but not publicly commenting to protect “the privacy of one or more individuals.”
This is not the first time Wizards of the Coast has been at the center of controversy for its use of Generative AI for artistic purposes. Last December, the company issued a statement reaffirming its anti-AI art stance after fans speculated that some of the art in the upcoming 2024 Player’s Handbook for Magic: The Gathering was because a dwarf was missing one of the arms, which is why the company used the technology in some capacity. A few weeks after the statement, the company disclosed that it used “AI components” in Magic The Gathering’s marketing artwork.
GenAI has become a hot topic in various industries in the last year. While some see the benefits of GenAI and artificial intelligence, others oppose the use of AI, especially in creative professions, as some may use it to displace people from jobs or potential work.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
Yesterday, Viz Media announced the English release of a Magic the Gathering manga series called “Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated.” The manga’s physical release, due later this fall, will also come with an exclusive Magic card.
Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, written by Katsura Ise and drawn by Takuma Yakota, is an ongoing manga series that was first published in 2018, according to MyAnimeList. The series, which takes place in 1998, follows a junior high school student named Hajime Kanou who goofs off with his friends by playing Magic: The Gathering. This garners negative attention from the school’s top student and Hajime’s academic rival, Emi Sawatari, who scolds him for bringing Magic to school.
Announcement: Attention Magic: The Gathering fans! The original Japanese manga, “Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated. A Magic: The Gathering Manga,” with story by Katsura Ise, and art by Takuma Yakota, releases Fall 2024. Includes an exclusive card! pic.twitter.com/IVpEbr12ID
Their relationship takes a turn when Hajime discovers Emi is the best Magic player at their local card shop, thus propelling their budding relationship and potential romance over their shared love of the game. If you’re a fan of YuGiOh! — which coincidentally also takes place around the same year — Emi and Hajime’s relationship reads as the polar opposite of Yugi Muto and Seto Kaiba. That is unless you read their relationship as a slow-burn romance, too.
Now, Magic fans can look forward to upcoming video game collaborations with Final Fantasy and Marvel, as well as Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated and its yet-to-be-revealed Magic card to sweeten the deal.
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
“Ouch, right in the review score. Well, I guess it’s warranted,” Pilestedt wrote. “Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience. I just want to make great games!”
Ouch, right in the review score 😢🤕
Well, I guess it’s warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience.
Pilestedt’s apology follows a previous tweet in which the Helldivers 2 boss directed disgruntled players to PlayStation Support if they had any questions about account linking rather than reaching out to Arrowhead.
In its statement, Sony rationalized its new Helldivers 2 account linking requirement as a safety and security concern, saying, “Account linking plays a critical role in protecting our players and upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games.”
According to Sony, “technical issues” were to blame for Helldivers 2’s account linking being temporarily optional on launch. Come June 4, all current Helldivers 2 players must link their accounts in order to continue playing the game.
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
