There's a particular battle in the first chapter of Tactics Ogre: Reborn that I've been banging my head against all week. It's an uphill fort siege where you're facing off against an evil necromancer who's shooting down powerful, magical fireballs at you from above, alongside his never-ending army of undead skelly archers. The challenging terrain alone would be a test of anyone's mettle in this tough, turn-based strategy game, especially when trying to parse all the different heights of its grid-based map. But having every enemy unit resurrect themselves after three turns unless you exorcise them with a single-use item or the lone Priest you've just recruited (who you may or may not have neglected to bring into battle with you) on top of all that? That smacks of the kind of late-game tomfoolery that more modern games of this ilk would normally save until their final acts.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn, on the other hand, likes to make its players sweat early. It was, after all, forged in the fires of the mid-90s SNES era, and looking back at old GameFAQ guides from 2010 (when it was remade for the PSP), it's clear this fight was just as much of a roadblock back in the day as it is now. Think of it as what yer lad Genichiro was to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - a hard, and often gruelling endurance test of everything you'd learned so far, but one that would ultimately set you up for the rest of the game upon claiming victory. I'm still not quite there yet, but having spent six hours noodling around the rest of Reborn's opening chapter, this granddaddy of Japanese strategy RPGs sure does hold up in the cold light of 2022.