New Tactics Ogre trademark signals a revival of Square Enix’s great tactical RPG

Square Enix has applied for a trademark, in Japan, for Tactics Ogre: Reborn, ramping up speculation that the 20-year-old Ogre Battle strategy RPG series is due for some kind of re-release.

The trademark application was filed March 31 and published on Thursday. Square Enix has made no official announcement of a new game in the Ogre Battle series, whose last original release was Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis for Game Boy Advance in June 2001. 1995’s Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was re-released on PlayStation Portable in 2010.

Something labeled “Tactics Ogre Remaster” showed up in a huge leak datamined out of Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming subscription service back in September. Fans at the time thought it might have related to a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster, which has been neither confirmed nor announced by Square Enix.

Square Enix has been on something of a remake/remaster kick lately; just Thursday, it launched Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, a remaster of the 2000 JRPG, for Nintendo Switch. Last year’s remasters of 1990s titles included SaGa Frontier for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC, and the upgraded, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC versions of 2020’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake. And remakes of Dragon Quest 3 and cult-hit RPG Live A Live are also on the way, both in the “HD-2D” style.

The Ogre Battle series of real-time strategy and tactical RPG games began in 1993 with Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen for Super Nintendo. Ogre Battle got sequels in 1999 and 2000 (the latter launching only in Japan) plus the Tactics Ogre spinoffs of 1995 and 2001.

Yasumi Matsuno, who directed both Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, reunited with Square Enix to develop scenarios for the Final Fantasy 14 MMO in 2017 and 2020, and in 2020 launched Unsung Story, a tactical RPG first announced in 2013.