I almost didn’t play Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. I was mostly just excited to move on to Final Fantasy XIII, and the week that I started playing Revenant Wings, Final Fantasy Resonance had just released. I really enjoyed the demo for Resonance and was very tempted to jump the queue and play it first so I could be a part of the cultural zeitgeist, but I find myself unwilling to pay full price for a game these days. Especially when I have so many other games on my list to play already.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is one of the few games in the Final Fantasy Catalogue that I actually played back when it was first released, in late 2007. I didn’t remember much about it, other than that it’s a real-time strategy game on the Nintendo DS and that I had managed to get to the final boss, but never managed to make it over the finish line (much like my Final Fantasy X experience, actually). But being fresh off The Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age means that there will never be a better time than now to play through Revenant Wings, so I buckled down and dug out my old 3DSXL. And besides, I was hopeful that the characters introduced in Zodiac Age would be expanded upon and developed further. I realize now that was a bit of a naive hope.
Story
Revenant Wings begins with Vaan and Penelo in their own airship, following Balthier and Fran as they approach and pillage a ruin for treasure. In the treasure room there are two crystals, Vaan and Balthier each grab one, and then escape as the ruins crumble around them. Vaan and Penelo hitch a ride on the Sthral as Vaan’s airship is caught in a landslide and lost. Soon after, an airship of unknown make and origin falls from the sky and crashes outside Rabanastre. Vaan and Penelo, along with their orphan friends from the Lowtown, Filo, Tomaj, and Kytes, sneak aboard and commandeer the derelict airship.
The airship takes the party up to the mythical sky islands, where they meet Llyud, an Aegyl, a winged person who’s entirely devoid of emotion. Vaan learns that he can use the crystal from the ruins to summon Espers to aid them in battle. What follows is supposedly a story of friendship. The crew meets someone called the Judge of Wings, who is trying to destroy the Auralith, large crystals that supposedly keep the sky islands safe and afloat. The Judge quickly succeeds in destroying one, leaving two. At the same time, lots of sky pirates are ascending to the islands looking for treasure and bounty, bringing conflict to the Aegyl.
Being the happy-go-lucky personalities that they are, Vaan and Penelo try their best to prove that not all sky pirates are bad and that they’ll do right by their new friend Llyud. They follow the Judge of Wings toward the second Auralith, where they meet Balthier and Fran, and Balthier is in the process of destroying the second Auralith. Vaan tries to stop him. Balthier rebukes him, telling him to stay out of matters he doesn’t understand, and refuses to explain the situation to his supposed friend. Balthier succeeds in destroying the crystal, and shortly after it’s revealed that the Auralith are instrumental in stripping the Aegyl of their anima, the essence that gives people emotion and humanity. It turns out that destroying the Auralith is a good thing, because the villain, Feolthanos, has been absorbing everyone’s anima for who knows how long.
Balthier and Fran join the party while their airship is under repairs, and shortly afterward Ashe and Basch show up too, because trouble has befallen Ivalice: people are summoning espers down below and they are looking for help. The party flies around, engaging in combat after combat, until they eventually ascend into space, face down Feolthanos directly, and destroy him and the third Auralith. Everyone lives happily ever after, or something.
I apologize if my story synopsis went off the rails for a bit, but that’s honestly how the story felt. It tries to set up dramatic revelations, betrayals, and people who’ve ascended to godhood trying to bring back a fallen loved one, and none of it really hits properly. Part of the problem is that all the characters and dialogue are really childish. The writing portrays them as excited little children, and there’s no depth. They’re ignorant of anything that’s not happening right in front of their little noses.
There’s one point where Penelo attaches herself to someone they meet along their journey for a single night, and then that person is taken away by the Judge of Wings. Penelo falls into the depths of despair, saying she’s tired of everyone being torn away from her. It was a moment of dissonance for me, because we as players haven’t been shown Penelo’s losses at all. So many other characters in the Final Fantasy series earn that kind of statement far more. I’m thinking of Cyan in Final Fantasy VI, who watched his entire kingdom fall to Kefka’s evil plots, and saw his wife and child perish right in front of him. Or Cloud in Final Fantasy VII, who lost Zack and Aerith during the game. I know Penelo lost her parents during the war before the events of Final Fantasy XII, because the exposition told us, but so many other games in this series have done such a good job of showing us loss, that this was a moment where I didn’t feel Penelo had earned that statement.
There’s also some narrative dissonance in how the game treats its central risk. Early on you’re warned that using the crystal to summon Espers costs you part of your anima, and that if you use it too much you’ll be robbed of your humanity. But there’s never any consequence for summoning, or for just playing the game. The story tells you this is a risky endeavor, but the gameplay never feeds into it. Much like in Final Fantasy XII, the characters at the end of the game are largely the same as they were at the beginning. No one experiences great loss or growth. At the very least, there were a lot more little vignettes of the characters interacting with each other. The dialogue was never deep or impactful, but those interactions made them feel more like friends.
The Gameplay
Revenant Wings is an Real Time Strategy game. You control five leaders in real time, and each leader has a number of minions in their squad. The Minions come in three types: melee, ranged, and flying. There’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic at play between these types, where melee units are strong against ranged units, ranged units take down flyers, and flyers are really good at defeating melee. There’s also a secondary cycle of elements (fire, water, thunder, earth), with units resistant and weak against each other.
Before every battle you get a preview of the leaders and minions your opponents have, and you set which five Espers types you want to bring. I kind of like this in theory, but in practice it’s more fiddly than it should be. It’s annoying that the game doesn’t show you the incoming enemies while you’re choosing which minions to take. You need to remember what types and weaknesses the enemies are bringing and build your loadout accordingly. I ended up needing to flip back and forth a lot just to remember who I needed to counter, It’s mildly tedious.
Every battle starts out roughly the same. Your five leaders, each bringing two minions, are set off on a sprawling map to overcome overwhelming odds. The enemies are spread all over the map, and the goal is to pick them off one by one, or in small groups, so you aren’t overwhelmed yourself. Most maps have a summoning gate that you can capture with your leaders to summon reinforcements, though there’s a limit to how many Espers you can summon, meaning you can’t just Zerg rush the enemy. Some maps also have soul crystals, which respawn leaders if they fall in battle.
Each of your leaders have unique abilities, and will acquire more as the game progresses. You can set one ability on each character to auto-fire through a “Gambit”, but calling it a Gambit feels disengenous. The Gambits in Final Fantasy XII was a clever series of If/Then statements that you could curate and manage to control how your companions behave in battle. Here, a ‘gambit’ is just ‘trigger this ability as soon as it’s ready’. There’s no logic or context for the gambit, just, spam this one ability.
Every other ability has to be triggered manually: tap the hero, tap ‘abilities’, choose the ability, tap the target. That ends up being a lot of taps per ability, especially when each character has 8 abilities and you have 5 characters to manage all at the same time. And choosing your target can be impossible when you have 15 of your little guys running all over the map and engaged in massive cluster of a battle with 10 enemies. It becomes frantic and unwieldy. I spent the vast majority of my playthrough just using Kytes and his AoE spells to blast enemies with their weaknesses. It was pretty rare that I needed to dig into the other characters’ abilities, with the exception of Penelo and her Raise.
Some characters have an ability that’s just so good it always has to be the Gambit. Penelo, the White Mage, was always casting Curaga, which heals a group of allies over a wide area. I always want that on, but she also has other good abilities, like buffing strength or magic, and using those means remembering to trigger them manually. That often meant taking my focus away from the battle and then trying to control Penelo manually. Because she can cast her healing at a range, if I wanted her buff to hit my melee and flying characters, I’d have to manually move her closer, then hit the buff button before turning my attention back to the characters doing the battling. And often, by the time I did all that, the battle would be over already.
Trying to utilize the abilities of all five characters and trigger them all at the right time turns the game into a furious screen-tapping mess. I understand that in RTS games the victor is often the player with the most actions per minute, but it just doesn’t work well here, especially thanks to the DS format. Triggering every ability takes four taps at the least, and by the time you’ve finished tapping through two abilities, the first one has cooled down and reset. If you forget what an ability does, by the time the tooltip scrolls up and tells you what it does, someone is dead, or the situation where that ability would have been useful has passed.
Pacing and Difficulty
Every battle in Revenant Wings is slow. It takes time for your troops to stomp across the map, time to summon reinforcements, time to capture a gate, and time to command your army to engage an enemy and watch that little red health bar tick down bit by bit. Because every battle takes so long, I was never inclined to grind. On every map I collected all the materials scattered about and every treasure, and I even did all of Tomaj’s side missions outside of the story missions, all the way up through chapter 9.
Chapter 9 is my biggest qualm. The difficulty spikes dramatically. Maybe I missed something, but all the enemies and my characters had been around level 38 to 40, and then all of a sudden the enemy level jumped to 50 and I was getting smoked. There were no more side missions to do and no more main missions to attempt other than the one I’d hit a stone wall against. My only option was to bash my head against that mission, accrue experience from losing, slowly level up, and eventually win.
Sometimes you can go into a battle with the exact same characters and the exact same build and have a wildly different outcome depending on which enemies attack whom, and when. More than once I had to scrap a mission because Penelo got blindsided and knocked out, and she was my only character with a revive unless I also brought Llyud. It feels insane to me to have only two characters with that ability. There’s no option for items such as Phoenix Downs, and really nobody else to pick up the slack if your healer (Penelo) gets ganked. Llyud is also a front-line character, so it’s not uncommon for him to die when a couple of ranged characters get behind a melee unit he’s fighting. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s frustrating that I have to always bring Llyud and Penelo, or else as soon as I Penelo gets hit, I have to scrap the whole battle and start again.
Graphics & Music
The graphics are honestly fine. Most of the character sprites were taken directly from Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced or Tactics Advanced A2, and a the sprites of the characters that came from Final Fantasy XII looked like their PS2 counterparts. The character portraits are pretty flat and featureless, which might be a style choice, but I found them much less interesting than they could have been.
Every now and then throughout the story there’s a FMV cutscene, much like in XII, and I was surprised to see the full-motion video on the DS. It does run at like, 15 frames per second, and some of the character models look like wax figures compared to how they looked in Final Fantasy XII. One thing I really didn’t like was Penelo’s new outfit, where she’s basically wearing nothing from her ribs down to her pelvis. Especially because she looks and acts like a child, it’s just uncomfortable.
The music is all straight from Final Fantasy XII, but using the DS’s dramatically reduced sound capabilities. They’re cheap, tinny facsimiles of the gorgeous music that the original game had.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think Revenant Wings is a game that’s okay being lost to time. RTS is a challenging genre to implement well, and the DS isn’t the best form factor for it. It’s probably better than any other console would be, since you can tap the screen, but it’s still not ideal. The game doesn’t add anything substantial to Final Fantasy XII and doesn’t really build on the foundation of the main game. It feels like a cheap side-story spin-off, more fanfiction than cannon.
I don’t think Revenant Wings is worth anyone’s time today. If you like RTS games, this one is a hollow shell of what the genre offers. The story is childish, but the difficulty is such that I don’t think any kids are going to beat it. I know back in 2008, I sure didn’t. There are so many better games in the Final Fantasy franchise, and in the end this one just isn’t interesting or intriguing enough to justify suffering through all the frustration points.
But I am glad to have finally ticked an unfinished game from my childhood off the list, and it’s another step completed on my Final Fantasy pilgrimage.
Sky Team took the world by storm a couple of years ago, winning accolades and awards galore, and I kind of have a complicated relationship with it.
Sky Team, designed by Luc Rémond and published by Scorpion Masqué in 2023 is a two-player cooperative game of limited communication. You and your partner are pilots trying to land a plane. Each of you rolls four dice and keeps them hidden behind your screen. Then, one at a time, you take turns placing the dice in certain areas of your console. Often the the sum of the two dice, one placed by you and one by your partner, will affect different aspects of how the plane flies. The goal of Sky Team is to land safely in the end. That means having no other planes in your way, ensuring your plane isn’t tilted, and touching the ground at a speed that isn’t going to send you hurtling off the end of the runway.
The dice are your only way of communicating with each other. What you place first, and where, is supposed to tell your partner something about what you’re holding. Usually that works. You should more or less trust your partner to do the right thing. But every now and then you get a catastrophically bad roll. Say you need to slow the plane down and then you roll four sixes. There aren’t really any options to make up for a bad roll.
I think the crux of my frustrations with Sky Team is that it’s a game of mitigating randomness, and sometimes you simply can’t. You might roll badly. You might roll yourself into a situation that you and your partner simply cannot overcome, and you might not discover that you’re in an unwinnable situation until that final round. Of course you can always be trying to put yourself in a better position. You can keep a full complement of coffee, and you can hold on to the tokens that let you reroll your dice to hopefully give yourself as many chances as possible to overcome this logistical challenge. But at the end of the day, you really are just at the mercy of the dice.
I don’t particularly enjoy games you can lose just because you didn’t roll right. I’m not against randomness in my games, but in Sky Team you can’t really prepare for what you roll. Maybe you hit a bad streak and roll all ones all game. What are you supposed to do about that? I know statistically it’s not probable, but it’s also not impossible. I prefer having agency. I prefer my victories to be earned, not just delivered as a gift from the dice rolling gods. I prefer my losses to have meaning, lessons I can learn, instead of “darn, that was a tough one, I just didn’t roll the right dice.”
I think back to Gloomhaven and how those scenarios were tense and difficult, and sometimes whiffing your big attack really does just send you and your team careening down a losing battle. The difference is that I chose to take that risk. Sky Team front loads the randomness and then tells you to figure it out.
Despite all this griping, I actually did enjoy playing Sky Team. It did a great job of creating tension, and the moment you successfully land the plane is pretty euphoric. You and your partner overcame the challenge together. You communicated without talking, and you both did your jobs. That feels really good. The randomness does make me lean towards the side of saying that I don’t like Sky Team, but I’d still play I’d play it if asked. I’m not saying it’s a bad game. It’s just a game that I don’t like, and that distinction is important.
But hey, Sky Team won a ton of awards and honours over the past 3 years, its ranked number 32 on the BGG top games of all time (at the time of this writing), so it’s obvious that I’m in the minority here. You could even go as far as saying I’m just plain wrong in my terrible opinions. But that’s the joy of owning a blog. I get to say what I want, even if I’m being unreasonable.
It’s been just over a month since I started Final Fantasy XII. This time the gap between starting and finishing wasn’t because I lost interest, like it was with Final Fantasy VIII. It’s because I got a new job, and now I only have about an hour a day to play games. Final Fantasy XII took me roughly 36 hours, and that doesn’t count the time the in-game clock lost when I got a game over and had to reload an old save, nor the fact that I had it on X2 speed almost the entire time.
My history with this game is a little textured. I played it when it first came out, and I tried it again five years ago, but both times I never got much farther than the Tomb of Raithwall. It wasn’t that anything was wrong with the game. I was just bored, and a big part of that is that I’m such a character-driven person. The lack of a character driven story in XII always drove me to apathy. I’m quite happy that I finally played it all the way through, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s set the scene.
Story
Final Fantasy XII begins with a royal wedding. Princess Ashe is marrying, promising an age of peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Dalmasca. Unfortunately, the Archadians attack, invading with their terrifying airships and bringing the war to the doorstep of Rabanastre, Dalmasca’s capital. The prince fights valiantly, but Dalmasca’s forces are pushed back to the throne room. Basch and Reks rush through the castle to guard their king, but they’re separated. By the time Reks arrives at the throne room, Basch has slain the king of Dalmasca, ending the war and pushing Dalmasca into servitude to Archadia.
The game flashes forward a couple of years and focuses on Vaan, Reks’s little brother. Reks died after that encounter, but he lived long enough to tell the world what he saw: Basch murdering their king. Vaan is a street rat, an orphan who dreams of becoming a sky pirate. He spends his time screwing around in the city’s underbelly, hunting rats and doing favours for an old man. His childhood friend Penelo is generally by his side, trying to keep him out of trouble.
Archadia’s crown prince, Vayne Solidor, arrives in Rabanastre and assumes government, promising to be a good steward of a country that is now under Archadian rule. There’s a celebration, a gala, and Vaan thinks this is the perfect time to sneak into the castle to steal some treasure. He manages to snag a small gem called the Dawn Shard, and while he’s at it he runs into Balthier and Fran, two sky pirates also seeking treasure. During this heist, a resistance force launches an attack on the castle and throws everything into chaos. Vaan, Balthier, and Fran escape together, fighting over the Dawn Shard and agreeing, reluctantly, to work together to get out of this particular pickle.
The group ends up in chains in the dungeon, and there they meet Basch, the knight who slew the king. He swears he didn’t do it. He swears he was framed, and that his twin brother was the true kingkiller. The group frees him from his chains, they all escape together, and Basch leads them to the resistance, where they meet Princess Ashe, who was presumed dead. Around this time Penelo is kidnapped and held for ransom. The group rescues her and starts to learn about the secrets of the Dawn Shard, the manufacturing site, the terrible power it has, and how Archadia is using it to turn the tides of war.
The rest of the game follows Ashe seeking power to bring freedom to her country. They hunt for more nethicite, find the Tomb of the Dynast-King and the great swords that can destroy nethicite, and eventually find the Sun-Cryst, the source of all the nethicite itself. Working together, they break the Sun-Cryst, hoping to bring an end to the age of war.
While Ashe’s party runs around the desert gathering relics and nethicite, Vayne Solidor kills his own father to take control of the empire. So much of this game is the machinations of imperialism, people who want power for the sake of power. The story comes to a head when Vayne, in the sky fortress Bahamut, declares war on a neighboring kingdom, with Rabanastre caught right in the middle. In fact, the battleground is Rabbinate itself. The party manages to board Bahamut, ascend the sky fortress, and slay Vayne, leaving his little brother Larsa, a friend of peace, to rule and bring an end to the war.
My biggest critique
Much of the story has far less to do with the characters and their individual growth than with the tides of fate and global geopolitics. There are plenty of scenes of people gnashing their teeth and saying the council will never agree to whatever plan they have, and then someone barking back that they are the council, and if the king won’t agree, they’ll just have to kill the king and take his place. Unlike the previous Final Fantasy games, which focused on the characters and the relationships between them, this one is about larger events, and the individual players don’t necessarily matter so much.
That is my biggest critique of Final Fantasy XII: it is not a character-driven game. No one grows or develops. All the characters are largely the same at the end of the game as they were at the beginning. No one faces great trials of conscience, and no one has to give up their old ways to become something different or better. Compare that to Cecil in Final Fantasy IV, who grows from a dark knight into a paladin through a story of atonement and redemption. Or look at Final Fantasy X, with Yuna and her pilgrimage to save Spira, bound by her duty while struggling with her feelings for Tidus. For a series that has done such a great job creating memorable characters over decades, Final Fantasy XII left me a bit puzzled by its focus on grand history instead of the character-driven plots the series is known for.
If we’re being honest, the party has no real motivation to stay together, nor do they spend any time deeping their bonds to one another. Penelo is only there because Vaan is there. Vaan is there because he wants to be a sky pirate and sticking close to Balthier is a foot in the door. Fran only sticks around because Balthier is here and Balthier is sticking around because he smells treasure. The only character who has real stakes in the adventure is Ashe, and the adventure is just her seeking our relics to build power so she can take back her kingdom. At the end of the game, Vaan mentions that they’re such good friends, but I really didn’t feel it. There’s no side stories or dialogue outside of the main plot that makes you think the characters have developed a bond of friendship. Having snippits of their personalities along the adventure would have gone a long way to helping this, like the Skits in the Tales of series, or the way the characters quip in Dragon Age or Mass Effect.
The villains are all similarly underdeveloped. Vayne has ambitions to bring Dalmasca under his control and commits regicide/patricide to assume power, but he’s never more than a distant threat that shows up in cutscenes. In Final Fantasy IX or VI, Kuja and Kefka were constantly in your face, showing you their power and making you hate them, giving you a reason to want to fight them. Vayne is just, a figurehead to fight in the very end. The judge, Galbranth is a bit more interesting, a former Dalmasican, now a dog of the empire and brother of Basch, there’s more to explore but it doesn’t really get brought up. likewise, the mad scientist Cid is Balthier’s father, they have a couple quips of Balthier running away to be a sky pirate, but no one sheds tears over each other when we slay their kin. The story just moves on because it’s so much less interested in the characters than the grand politics at play.
The World
Every game in the series seems to have, in my opinion, some direct response to the criticisms of the previous game. I felt that Final Fantasy X was too linear, that every dungeon and every map was little more than a straight line from beginning to end. Final Fantasy XII took that criticism to heart. Every town, dungeon, and environment is huge and sprawling. Thank goodness the Zodiac Age has a map overlay that lets you see the entire dungeon in one view, because otherwise you’d spend so much time running around trying to get your bearings.
This isn’t a criticism, by the way. I actually quite enjoyed how it made every area feel like a real place. The world of XII feels real, full, and lived in. Cities are littered with people to talk to and alleyways to explore. Sure, there often isn’t much reason to explore them, but they’re there, and it makes the world feel more textured and fleshed out. That goes for the various races of Ivalice too: the lizardesque Bangaa (never call a Bangaa a lizard, kupo!), the Viera, the Nu Mou, and the large, piglike Seeq. It feels like a fantasy world, and a very well-developed one.
The Gambit System
The gameplay is also quite different from its predecessors. Unlike Final Fantasy X, or anything before it with an active-time battle system, Final Fantasy XII happens entirely in real time. Battles happen right on the main map, with no transition into a separate battle screen. Each character selects an action, and then a ATB meter starts to fill. You can directly control each character, but there’s a robust gambit system that allows you to program each character with a bunch of commands that will automate their decisions in battle, removing the need for constant commands.
The Gambits start off pretty simple. You set a character to target the nearest enemy with an attack, and they’ll keep doing that. When you get some spells, you can set the character you want as your healer to cast Cure when someone’s health falls below 50%. Put that Gambit above the attack Gambit, and now they’ll continue to attack until someone’s health is below 50%, then switch over to curing. It’s all automated and smooth, and it makes running around the map and grinding through battles really easy, especially in The Zodiac Age version, which has a speed-up option.
The problem with this system is that you can set up your gambits to handle a combat, but every combat is different. Even with a good set of all-purpose Gambits, there is a lot of going into your menu and tweaking your actions and triggers to suit each scenario. I didn’t mind it, but I’ve read that some people get exhausted of micro-managing these supposedly automated party members. Personally, I appreciate having so much control over these AIs, as I cannot tell you how many times I’ve cursed a game because my supposedly intelligent automated party members did something completely idiotic.
The License Board
Slain enemies drop two kinds of points: experience points to level up your characters, and License Points to unlock new abilities. Each character has a License Board, and in this version of the game there are 12 job-specific boards to choose from. Every character can use up to two. You can give someone a Monk and Red Mage combination so they can beat down enemies with their fists but pivot to magic when necessary. Or a Time Mage/Archer, someone casting Haste on everyone before flipping over to the bow to slay flying enemies. All of the gear each job can equip must be unlocked by a License, the same goes with all the jobs corresponding abilities.
I remember playing the original North American edition, where there was only every character had their own massive license board that contained everything. Every character had access to every single ability and every piece of gear, should you have the LP to purchase it. You could push each character in different directions to diversify them, but kind of like in Final Fantasy X and it’s Sphere grid, by the end game everyone was starting to overlap. Truly dedicated players could unlock every License for every character. I’m guessing the Zodiac Age’s restrictions are meant to counter that Jack-of-all-trades mentality.
I made the conscious decision to diversify my cast, so I had all 12 jobs covered, even if I felt some jobs were really unnecessary. My Red Mage was basically just a worse White Mage who rarely used any Black Magic. My Machinist ended up as a White Mage by the end of the game, using entirely White Mage focused gear and abilities. But I still enjoyed having each character fill their own role, especially because you do need to swap them in and out of your party. Characters not in your party don’t gain experience or License Points, so it’s pretty easy for the one character who’s always in your party to get really far ahead of the rest. These jobs are the only real thing differentiating each character from one another, so it was worth it for me.
It can be frustrating that when you unlock the license for a technique, ability, or gear, you then need to find the associated skill or equipment out in the world. The reverse is true, when you find a new weapon, you’ll need to go into your inventory, go to the bottom of your weapons list to see what license it needs, then go into the specific characters license board and buy the license before you can equip it. It’s fairly tedious, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the feeling of unlocking nodes on the license board. Sometime in the latter half of the game however, I managed to hit everyones stat bonuses on their license boards, and then I really stopped caring about preemptively buying licenses until after I found the equipment or skill. I’d be sitting on hundreds of LP for each character, just waiting for the next piece of gear that needed unlocking.
Loot, Chests, and the Bazaar
You find some gear lying around the world, but you have to be aware that a lot of the treasures comes down to some pretty nasty randomness. When you enter an area, most chests have only a certain percent chance of spawning, and many of those chests only have a certain percent chance of containing good gear. This is particularly atrocious in one part of the game near the end, which has nearly one hundred chest scattered around about five sections of the map. Each chest only has a 15 to 20% chance of spawning, and each one only has a 5% chance of holding the item you’re looking for, while the other 95% change will have a range of Gil. That mentality is prevalent throughout the entire game. Sometimes you’ll be running through a forest, spot a treasure chest, open it, and find a mere 5 Gil. Really not worth the time.
So if the chests are random, where does the good gear come from? As per Final Fantasy tradition, a number of great gear can only be acquired by stealing it, which is never my favourite thing to do. But Final Fantasy XII introduces the Bazaar. At every shop in the game, you can sell the various loot the monsters drop, and if you sell the right combination of loot, the bazaar will have an item up for sale. Some of the best weapons in the game are acquired only through the bazaar, but they require some serious hunting for specific loot. I never found any in-game resource for the bazaar recipes, it’s almost like Square Enix expected you to have a guide or go online to find exactly what types of goods to sell to get the items you’re looking for.
Hunts and Difficulty
The main storyline of Final Fantasy XII was fairly easy. None of the bosses on the main quest gave me any trouble. But there’s a Hunt system, where the game gives you specific marks to seek out. These Marks often representing some pretty serious challenges, especially if you take them on as soon as they become available. While the Gambit system automates so much of the combat, what I really liked was thinking, before going into a battle, about what kind of Gambits I’d need. You can use the context clues the hunt-giver provides to guide your strategy.
The annoying part of the hunts is that every hunt requires 4 steps. First, you need to accept the hunt from the board in the various pubs in the towns you’ll visit across Ivalice (or accept them from Montblanc). Then, you’ll need to find the hunt requester, somewhere in the world. Once you trek over to the requester, you then need to go find the monster somewhere else in the world. And finally, once you’ve slain the beast, you need to return to the hunt requester to claim your reward.
All I can say is there’s a ton of back tracking in the Hunt System. You’ll think yourself done with an area, but these hunts will have you running right back of the path you just completed to find the requester or mark. There is a teleportation system, but it uses a consumable resource, so I never really liked using it. Likewise, each of the cities in the game contains an aerodrome, allowing you to pay a small sum to fly between towns, but there’s a ton of world inbetween locations. Once again, thank goodness for the X2 speed up.
Final Thoughts
I’m happy I finally played and finished Final Fantasy XII. It’s ultimately a great game. The visuals are stunning when compared to even Final Fantasy X and X-2, the music is brilliant, the world feels real and fully realized, and the gameplay is interesting. I never really felt frustrated. The dungeons were large, sprawling, and interesting to explore, and I like exploring the world of Final Fantasy XII, especially when my pacing isn’t thrown off every three seconds by a random battle transition and me mashing the A button to get through the random mobs.
That said, I have a hard time believing this will be anyone’s favourite Final Fantasy, especially if they’ve explored the games that came before it. I could see it being the favourite of someone if it’s the only Final Fantasy game they’ve ever played, because it is a very solid game. The systems are deep and invite you to explore and plumb their depths, and there are plenty of side dungeons and bonus content to engage with.
But for me, the lack of character development and character-driven story means Final Fantasy XII doesn’t rank very highly on my list. It’s below X for sure, below all the SNES games, probably below at least VII, and maybe below VIII and IX, too. Like I said, I never felt frustrated with it, and I don’t have any real reason to pan it critically. But I also don’t see myself coming back to this one. I’m happy I played it, I’m happy I’m done, and I’m ready to move on to Final Fantasy XIII.
Or Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. That’s another game that I had when I was a teenager, and the only thing I remember is that I managed to get myself right up to the final boss, but never managed to summit that challenge. Perhaps this is the time to give it another shot, while the story is still fresh in my head.
Disclaimer: A copy of Pond was provided by the publisher for review purposes
I used to say that how a game looks didn’t matter to me. I said it most often about video games. I never cared for the realistic graphics the AAA industry pushed to sell a game, because what I ultimately cared about was gameplay. Give me pixel art, give me the NES, the Super Nintendo, the Atari quality graphics, whatever. It didn’t matter to me how a game looked as long as the gameplay was fun.
I’m starting to realize I may feel differently about board games. Case-in-point, POND.
POND is an area majority conflict game from Brother Ming Games, designed by MingYang Lu, and published in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Area majority and direct conflict games are two genres I don’t traditionally enjoy, yet I can’t help being utterly charmed by Pond’s visual presentation.
POND is a simple game to play. Each player takes control of one of four frog factions with their own asymmetric abilities. Every faction has two kinds of units. The little frogs are your troops on the ground, the creatures that do battle with one another. Then you have your Long Fwooogs (Yes, that’s literally what they’re called, and you’re contractually obligated to say fwooogs every time you reference them), which function more like spawn points and point pinatas. At the start of every turn, each Long Fwooog spawns one little frog. The Long Fwooogs count toward claiming the majority in a pond, but they themselves can’t attack and can’t be removed from the map by battle. They exist to put new frogs on the table and to be juicy point piñatas for your opponents to come and beat the stuffing out of for major points.
After spawning, you move into your main phase. You hold five cards and play them to do the actions printed on them. It’s more Dominion-style than anything else, where you just follow the rules on every card to deploy, march, battle, build, and more. Some cards will let you gain berries, which are an ethereal resource that doesn’t persist between rounds, so you use them or lose them. Berries are spent on new frog cards, which go into your discard pile. At the end of your turn you score one point for every pond where you hold the majority of frogs, and ties don’t count. You also score one point for every lily pad one of your frogs is sitting on. If you ever find yourself in a pond with an empty lily pad during your turn, you may move one of your frogs onto it for free. Then every card you played goes to your discard pile, you draw five new cards, and play passes to the next player.
When you need to reshuffle your deck, you must first exhaust one of your frogs, which removes it from your deck entirely, but not from the entire game. The exhausted frogs become a second resource, as there are Hero Frog cards you can pick from, and the only way to pay for them is to consume your exhausted frogs. Those Hero frogs offer players persistant, permanant powers for the rest of the game. I really appreciate that deck culling is baked in as a mechanic here, available to everyone. This mechanic also makes each player’s abilities scale up the longer the game goes on, depending on how many heroes they’ve gathered, creating a nice arc to each game of POND.
Players take turns one after another until the pool of victory points runs dry, and the moment the last point is claimed, the game ends. It ends suddenly, too. If a player was supposed to earn nine points from their controlling interests but only four points are left in the pot, they take four. The winner is whoever has the most points at the end, counting both the points they accrued during their turns and the points printed on the frog cards they acquired.
The first and most salient thing that attracted me to POND is the art and aesthetics. There’s so much style on display. The art on each frog card is delightful, with jokes and references all over the place, and the little frog meeples have tiny bums peeking back at you. I adore everything about this production. The brightly coloured board is littered with details too, and its little vignettes of frogs having misadventures are simply delightful.
The gameplay plays on my loss aversion. At first I fervently wanted to defend my ponds. “These are my ponds! You’ll take them from my cold, dead hands!”, But as the games wore on, I realized a good POND player might not care if someone comes stomping through a pond that was once theirs. What really matters is whether you can hit the other players’ Long Fwooogs harder than they’re hitting yours.
Games of POND have generally wrapped up rather quickly. In one game, a player picked up an extra exhausting card in the first round, and by the end of the game he had exhausted a total of nine cards, and held 4 hero frogs while the other two players had exhausted only three frogs each. That threw the hero frog balance completely out of whack, and he won by about 20 points.
I usually like games that let players control when the game ends. I’m not a big fan of set rounds, because if someone happens to have a fast, hot strategy, and it burns out when there’s still half a game still to go, that’s just a frustrating feeling. POND sounds like it should be in the player-controlled camp, but I think the first-player advantage is a little too steep. In most of our games the first player usually had more turns than everyone else, and more turns means more chances to score. To compensate for this first player advantage, the starting player begins with 0 victory points and everyone after gets one point increasing down the player order. But that tiny benefit doesn’t feel like the having a whole extra turn at the end of the game, especially because it’s pretty reasonable to earn eight, nine, or ten points in a single turn. It simply feels unfair.
The back of the box promotes POND as “Root if Root only took five minutes to learn”, and that’s a fair comparison. Root is MUCH harder to teach, but its asymmetries are wildly more dramatic. I wouldn’t dare call POND shallow, but it certainly doesn’t have as much depth as Root. Still, there is quite a lot to enjoy in a game that takes only five minutes to learn and plays in around 60 to 90 minutes and that looks as good as Pond does.
POND never gave the bad feelings I usually get from high-conflict games. Sure, someone stomped through one of my ponds and blasted three of my little dudes off the board, but the next turn I spawned them all right back onto into the game. There is a hard limit on how many little frogs each player can have on the board at one time, so once all your spawning frogs are out, it’s fairly easy to respawn back up to your max strength. Losing units in a combat isn’t that consequential in the end. A game of POND has a pretty decent arc, with a slow start, a tense middle, and a fast and furious race for the final points at the end. It’s satisfying in a way I don’t find in many other majority games.
There might be a runaway leader problem. If someone gets a wild head start on hero frogs, or stumbles into an incredible combo, I think it’ll be pretty difficult to catch up. But you won’t see every hero frog in every game, since the deck is thick with frogs and the combinations won’t all be available each time, making every game of POND feel varied and interesting.
I really enjoyed POND. I enjoyed the art, and I enjoyed how fast it is to learn and play. I’m also impressed by how friendly a combat-heavy game can feel. I’d recommend it especially if you have players who haven’t tried many area majority games, because it’s a great introduction to the whole genre. And really, I dare anyone to take a gander at these amphibian posteriors and not be utterly charmed.
I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Keyflower before. This happens now and then, I think to myself “I’ve definitely already reviewed this game”, only for my search to turn up absolutely nothing. Well that’s certainly a treat, because I love Keyflower and am so excited to talk about it.
Keyflower is a worker placement auction game designed by Sebastian Bleasdale and Richard Breese, and originally published in 2012. In Keyflower, you are taking meeples and using them to bid on parcels of land, but those same meeples that you used to bid on tiles to expand your village are the very workers that you will use to activate the tiles ability. Keyflower is a fascinating experience the first time you play it because you will find yourself caught between these core two desires: one, to acquire as much land as possible, and two, to exploit the land that you have acquired.
The meeples come, by default, in one of three colours: blue, yellow, and red. But some of the tiles will let you exchange them for a special green one, which only shows up when someone has used that tile. And the reason why the specific colours are important is that when you bid on a tile or use it for an action, suddenly you’ve locked that tile to only be able to be used by meeples of that colour for that round. This can get very important when you are running really low on blue, for instance, and then someone plops a blue meeple as a one-meeple bid on a tile. It’s only one meeple, but if you’re void in blue, you’re up the creek without a paddle.
This mechanic creates interesting and tense dynamic moments. Another aspect that helps facilitate those feelings is the fact that you can always pass instead of taking an action. There’s no punishment for passing or set round timers. Sometimes you’ll want to go first to stake your claim on a tile, while other times you might want to hold back so you can react to the moves and machinations of your opponents. When the other players take their turns and it comes back around to you, you can choose to jump back into the action, or you can choose to pass again. The round only ends when all players pass in succession. There’s a little bit of push-your-luck, playing-chicken-with-the-other-players feeling when you maybe want to do something, but you’re waiting for someone else to tip their hand. Maybe you want someone to spend their yellow people somewhere else before you commit to bidding yellow on a different tile.
Keyflower is played over four seasons. In each season, there will be a market of tiles to bid on, and at the end of each season, each player gets to choose a boat to inject their house with more meeples. At the end of the fourth season, everyone score their points and whoever has the most points is the winner.
Keyflower is such a unique Euro game with its worker placement and auction mechanics. It’s one of those few games that plays well all the way up to six players. It’s especially exciting when you manage to read a situation correctly; when you play a single meeple to a tile completely throw a spanner in the works of your opponents, just because you used the one colour they didn’t have. it makes you feel really smart and clever.
One of the major strengths of Keyflower is that it feels incredibly replaybale and scaleable. It plays well at 2 players, it plays great at 6 players. Not many euro games can boast that. Another aspect of Keyflower that I really love is the element of positive player interaction. At any time on your turn, you can choose to play one of your workers on any tile in the game, whether that is on the auction market or in one of the other players’ villages. You place your people on the tile and you activate it. The rub being whoever owns that tile will take the workers that were used to activate the tile into their supply to use next round.
But sometimes that’s pivotal. Near the end of the game, especially in the final round, players will be using each other’s markets quite freely because you want to be using the best actions available. It’s worth giving your opponent one or two meeples to use their cart to move five goods with one action rather than try to struggle along with your own cart that might only let you move one or two goods per action. Efficiency is the name of the game. And, each tile can only be activated 3 times per season, with an ascending cost. The first time it’s used, it costs 1 meeple. The second time costs 2, and the third time costs a whopping 3 meeples. So not only are you getting the benefit of using that tile, but you’re depriving your opponents of the opportunity to benefit from that action.
Another dynamic part of Keyflower is that every player is dealt three end-game goals at the very beginning of the game, and no one reveals any of their goals that they have until the final round. Hell, in the final round you don’t have to put all your goals out onto the table. If you are holding a goal for the most green workers and you have no green workers at all. It behooves you to hold that goal back, deny it’s existance in the game. Of course, the more goals you put out, the less competition there will be for the goals you really want. After all, the end game scoring tiles are what fill the auction market in that final round. All players get to bid on those goals, meaning that one that you’ve been building towrds all game can get stolen. And the alternative is that you can steal a goal away from someone, denying them points even if it barely benefits you.
Sure, maybe they have a huge stockpile of resources and they were going to clean up, but if they can’t win that auction, those resources aren’t going to help them. It’s that dynamism that makes Keyflower so attractive.
The interaction makes Keyflower a top-tier game. It’s one that gets your elbows up as you try to outmenauver your oppoents. It’s a delicate dance of timing and being flexible with your plans, as you never really know how the meeples are going to shake out in the end. It actualyl evokes a lot of the same feelings as Hansa Teutonica, but with an auction mechanic instead of route building and overt bullying. If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Keyflower yet, you really owe it to yourself to get it to your table.
