Which means I'm making up for lost time with Ogre Battle: Episode VII. I mean for Sony's PlayStation Portable. Ogre Battle's the series name, and Tactics Ogre comprises its seventh chapter. I know, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, the first game in the series, starts at chapter five. The prior four episodes don't exist yet.

What to make of Square Enix's rethink of a putative classic? So far, so enjoying it, while working to make sure I fully understand it. It's complex enough to convince me I missed something, well, complex for a console 16 years ago.

I'm only a few battles in, hovering over Krysaro, about to march on Qadriga Fortress and The Necromancer Nybeth. I have a party of 12 and the game's letting me juggling up to eight in battles. After 14 days on the road (comprising just five battles, but "14 days" sounds livelier) I've slain 19 bad guys. That's without using the Chariot Tarot, one of the new PSP version features that lets you rollback the clock, one turn at a time.

The learning curve's notably lower than Final Fantasy Tactics (technically Tactics Ogre's descendent) and that's not a bad thing. Battles feel less like collating swarms of feuding digits and symbols before clicking "next turn," and more like .

Battles move, in other words. When you maneuver your little sprite knights, warriors, wizards, and rune fencers around the game's Q-bert-like battlegrounds, you can sight things tactically. Head-on assaults are bad, sidewise better, and from behind, best. Concentrated fire gets faster results than dispersed. Fighting from above is better than below. Battlefield conditions and terrain types dictate movement rates. Element-based magic hews to classic this-beat-that tropes. The only stat that'll draw your attention away from the battlefield is recovery time (RT), which determines who goes next.