The late 00’s and early 2010’s were a beige time in board games. Lots of board games with shades of brown and themes about trading spices and goods for prestige in the Mediterranean. Let’s not forget all the covers with grumpy men staring either at you, or off into the distance. Rococo, designed by Matthias Cramer, Stefan Malz, and Louis Malz and published by eggertspiele in 2013 decided to buck this trend by having a beige cover with a woman staring at you instead. Oh, also instead of trading spices, you’re trading silks, threads, and laces as you craft ballroom gowns to sell for cash or rent for prestige.
Rococo is a euro game through and through, but a bit of an interesting take on deck building. Each round, you pick up your whole deck of employee cards and choose 3 to put into your hand. These employee tasks allow you to preform one of the six main actions, but not all employees can preform every action. Masters can do everything, apprentices can do most of the actions, excluding only crafting master dresses and hiring new employees. Journeymen are cut off from seeking the Queens Favour, and from making dresses entirely.
To take an action, you must play one card from your hand and then choose one of the six main actions. Taking the queen’s favour earns you 5 Lirve (the currency for Rococo) and you get to go first next round. Visiting the silk market allows you to take silks, or, discard the silk tile for thread and laces. All of which are important for building the dresses. Building dresses is another main action, where you pick one blueprint from the row along the bottom of the board, turn in the required resources, then either sell the dress for cash, or rent it out and place it in the hall in an area majority contest that will net you a small amount of prestige. Each round, there are 4 employee cards available for purchase, and this action can only be taken by a master. When you buy an employee card, they do go right into your hand, so you can use their ability on the round you purchase them. The next action is to depute a worker, which has you send them off to get a small amount of cash equal to their skill level (and removes them from your deck), and the final action is to sponsor a decoration, which just has you trading in a sum of money and placing a disc onto the board.
Most of the employee cards also have a special ability that gets activated after you preform the main action. These can be as pedestrian as earning you a single coin for their labour, while others will net you resources, or allow you to preform a specific main action with a discount. Each player takes a turn playing an employee card, doing one action, then activating the employee bonus, and their turn is over. Once all players run out of cards, the round ends. After 7 rounds, the game ends, and the player with the most prestige points, is the winner.
Rococo does have some really interesting concepts. First, its approach to deck building is novel and full of control. Instead of shuffling your discard and drawing 3 cards, you get to just pick up your whole deck and choose any 3 cards you want. Once used, those employees will sit in the discard until you go through your entire deck, but still, it’s deck building without the luck of the draw.
The other aspect of Rococo that I really enjoyed was the dynamic markets. Both the resource market and the employee market cost money, but the amount of money you need to spend goes down as players buy from those markets. It creates a fascinating tempo consideration. If there’s a juicy employee that you want, is it worth 5 Livre to buy immediately? Or can you wait until someone else buys a different card so you get the employee you want for 3 Livre, or even for free if they’re the last employee available for the round.
All of the markets refresh at the start of each round instead of during gameplay, so it’s not uncommon for a market to run out of options. This creates another timing consideration. Do you take a resource from the market now? If you wait, will there even be anything left the next time your turn comes around?
Everything I’ve talked about so far is in service of the main board, where you’re making and renting dresses to people lining the halls. Each of the 5 halls will give prestige to the player who has the most dresses in that hall, as well as prestige for the dresses themselves. This is where the bulk of your points will come from.
But at the end of the day, Rococo is still a euro game. There’s not a ton of player interaction other than taking a resource from a market first, or sneaking in one last disc into a hall to secure the majority.
I think Rococo shines best at odd player counts, as having an even number of players makes the area majority aspect of the game a bit of a tit-for-tat tug of war instead of something a bit more competitive. At the same time, I don’t think having a lot of players will do the game any favours, as the entire stack of employee cards will be used no matter the player count. With more players, you’ll be stuck reusing your same basic employees again and again, leading me to think the ideal player count is 3.
Rococo is a great mid-weight euro game. It has all the familiar trademarks of other games (resource markets, deck building, recipe fulfillment), but utilizes the mechanics in novel and dynamic ways. The theme of creating dresses in 18th century France is whimsical and unique. It’s not a hard game to play, making it a good choice to play with those who have graduated past gateway games and are on their way to a more meaty affair. It doesn’t break traditions, or reinvent the wheel, making it an easy game to enjoy.
For those of you keeping track, it’s been nearly 3 months since I reviewed Final Fantasy VII. I promise, I started Final Fantasy VIII immediately after, but I’ll be really honest. I found it to be so unfun that I struggle to play it. Every time I turn the game on to keep progressing, I get into a single battle, roll my eyes and shut it down again. So instead of progressing on the main story, today’s post is another adventure into one of the spin-off games, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy. Specifically Final Bar Line, the most entry in the series.
Theatrhythm is a rhythm game set to the music of the Final Fantasy universe. When you first launch the game, you’re given a key, and a carousel of the main line titles, along with a choice selection of some of the more popular spin-off games. Your key will unlock one game, along with a few chibi representations of party members from that specific title.
You’re tasked with building a party to take into each one of these rhythm game missions, and the characters are largely separated into different types. Attack type, defense type, support, summoner, and so on. As they go on missions, they level up and unlock new skills.
But wait, you might be asking. Why are you getting levels and skills in a rhythm game? That’s a great question, and one that is never really answered. Each game presents you with a linier path of songs, starting from the beginning of the game, and progressing through the major plot beats. Each level has various dots scrolling from left to right, and all you need to do when the dot hits the right side of the screen is press a button. Literally, any button will suffice. You can choose to use the shoulder buttons, the face buttons, d-pad, anything. If two buttons hit the right side bar at one time, you’ll need to hit two buttons. There’s also green lines, when make you hold a button for a while, and if that green line slants up or down, you’ll need to hold the joystick in that direction to satisfy the note. There’s also arrows mixed in with the buttons, asking you to press one of the joysticks in that direction.
And that’s the entirety of the gameplay. But literally behind the rhythm game aspect, your party of characters is walking in the background from right to left, letting the scenery scroll by, and occasionally encountering monsters. Your party will automatically battle the baddies they encounter, and should they defeat them, they’ll just keep on walking to the left until the song ends. After a couple songs, you’re rewarded with another key, so you can unlock another game’s music, and if you manage to complete all the songs for a game, you’ll be able to add that games antagonist to your party, just for kicks.
To encourage you to build your party out a little bit, each song has a mission for you to accomplish, and most of them have to do with the party defeating a certain number of baddies, or using certain types of skills. It can be quite difficult to nearly impossible to defeat enough enemies when you first start the game, meaning you’ll likely need to return once your party has levelled up enough to lay the smack down on the enemies. That said, some characters synergize with each other incredibly well to really ratchet up the damage they’re able to output, making previously impossible challenges an utter breeze.
I find the RPG elements of Theatrhythm to be banal and superfluous. It literally does not matter how you build out your party, or if they fail to accomplish whatever the goal of the song is. The only thing that matters is that you hit enough notes to complete the song. I will concede that some of the characters trade defense for attack, and if you stack too many of those characters together, then missing just a handful of notes is enough to make you fail the song.
The rhythm game itself is simple and generally relaxing. The music of the Final Fantasy franchise is beautiful, and it’s actually been really lovely to revisit the past 7 games I’ve played in this way. The musical themes stirring up the memories of my adventures was more nostalgic that I originally expected. Some of the songs really ratchet up the difficulty, putting this game into the “easy to play, difficult to master” territory. Thankfully, each song has several difficulty levels, letting you push yourself on the easier songs, and pull back on the more devilish ones.
I use the term ‘master’, loosely. Theatrhythm is very forgiving, with generally wide range for accepting a button input, to the directional arrows just needing to be within the correct 90 degree arc. Add this to the dual stick and any button approach, and sometimes just spamming things at the right general direction is enough to get you through a difficult spot.
I was surprised at just how many songs were packed into this game. Every main title has at least 10 songs to deliver, and Final Fantasy XI shows up with a whopping 44 songs. With the DLC added, there’s over 400 songs to play through, although some of the most popular songs end up repeated and remixed several times (looking at you, Battle on the Big Bridge).
Theatrhythm ends up being a wonderful and charming celebration of Final Fantasy music, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Although the RPG elements are pointless, they do provide a fun little background for my daughter to watch while I focus on the dots flying across the screen.
If you’re being picky, you’ll start to notice that not all note tracks are particularly well-matched to each song. Some dots will fly by and ask for button presses off-beat, but it’s hard to really complain too much when all of the music is just so good. As a celebration of Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary, Theatrhythm absolutely succeeds in being a big package of fan service to long-time fans. I don’t think the gameplay is engaging enough to make you want to sink hundreds of hours into it, nor will you be organizing multiplayer Theatrhythm parties any time soon, like you used to do with your favourite rhythm games. But if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, I think you’ll find yourself surprisingly touched when the themes of your favourite games come on, and the caricatures of the heroes you’ve spent dozens of hours with bob across the screen. Just don’t show up expecting deep, satisfying RPG gameplay, you won’t find it here.
I’m not really an expansion kind of guy. In general, when given the choice between buying an expansion to a game I already know, or buying a whole new game, I’m going to pick buying a new game almost every time. Yes, I realize expansions are usually cheaper, and there is something lovely about injecting a bit of new into something you and your group are already familiar with, but still. I own very few expansions.
In 2023 I reviewed Akropolis, the tile laying game designed by Jules Messaud and published by Gigamic. I was absolutely smitten with it then, to the point that it landed as number 36 on my top 100 games list, the last time I made that list. Akropolis: Athena is the small box expansion that adds just a few tiles, but can absolutely bend the game if you let it. Let me explain.
Akropolis: Athena basically consists of a deck of goal cards, and a bunch of single hex tiles. That’s right, single hexes. At the start of the game you lay out 4 goal cards, and below each goal card, lay out 4 hexes for a total of 16 single hexes. During the game if you manage to achieve one of the goal cards, you get to take one of the single hexes from that goal card, and place it into your city. You can only achieve each goal once, so you also take a piece of an Athena statue to remind yourself you’ve already completed that objective. If you manage to complete the whole statue, the leftover stone at the end of the game is now worth 5 instead of the usual 1.
What makes Akropolis: Athena special, is that the goal cards are often pulling you in different directions. They offer objectives that by themselves offer no strategic benefit, but those single hex tiles can be game changing. I can’t tell you how often I play a tile laying game, and want to snap a piece in half (looking at you, My Island), or cursing the orientation of a polyomino tile (The Z tile is always facing the wrong direction in My City). Akropolis: Athena gives you the satisfaction of a single hex, allowing it to just drop into the perfect place in your city to make everything feel whole again.
And these single tiles can be really powerful. They may give you stars to improve the score of a certain colour in your city, and many of them are actually split in half, giving you the power of two districts on a single tile. This can allow you to bridge the gap between blue districts while strategically keeping the yellow half away from another yellow tile, or, it can be useless as the spot where you need the tile to go just doesn’t work for the colours that are surrounding it.
Depending on what set of goals you have, it’s entirely possible that no one manages to complete all 4 in a single game. They do ask you to do some odd things, which you often won’t accidentally stumble into doing on your own. Like having a straight line of red tiles, or putting a green tile next to a green star. You might luck into it, but you’ll more than likely need to make a concerted effort to achieve the goals.
The payoff for managing to complete all 4 goals can be almost game breaking. In one of my plays, I managed to complete all 4 objectives, and then hoard 15 pieces of stone for a bonus 75 points. Considering that in the base game, an average score is 114, it’s a pretty lucrative path to take. But if chasing that stone dragon takes up entirely too much of your time, and your opponents’ manage to collect everything they’ve ever wanted, then Athena on her own is unlikely to save your game.
What I’m trying to say is that it is possible to ignore this expansion completely and still come out the victor. Especially if the players overcommit to completing the objectives and don’t properly capitalize on the benefits Athena brings. For some people, if an expansion can be ignored, they ask why have it at all? I have to say that I really appreciate this expansion. Having the goals shift every game keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Now you can’t just rely on hording the green tiles to carry you to victory every single game. Because the Athena tiles do shift the balance of the stars, perhaps in one game the purples just have that little bit higher chance to be even more powerful than the other colours. I also really appreciate having something extra to shoot for, especially when the market is bare and none of the tiles available to be are useful.
Akropolis: Athena hits a pretty great balance between being powerful and exciting, but not overwhelmingly so, in that if you ignore the expansion bits, you have no hope to compete. At the very least it adds variety to the strategy of Akropolis. Athena definitely improves Akropolis, and I feel comfortable in teaching the expansion to new players right from the start. I think my only main complaint is that I can’t fit the expansion into the base box without tossing the entire insert away and just letting everything be loose in there. But even with that gripe, If you enjoy Akropolis and want a small expansion that meaningfully refreshes the puzzle without complicating it, Athena is a must-have.
It’s finally here! My top 10 video games of all time! Expect me to get a little rambly, as (obviously) I adore each and every one of these games.
10 – Train Valley 2
Year Released: 2019 | Platform: PC
This was my Covid game. When we were all told to stay home for 2 weeks, which turned into the better part of 2 years, I got really, really into Train Valley 2.
It’s a simple concept. You have stations dotted around the map, one of those stations produces workers, and wants a certian type of good, lets say, chairs. You build train tracks to the wood station, and send workers. Then when the workers are turned into wood (don’t ask), you build more track and send that wood to the chair shop. But the chair shop also needs workers, so you build rail and send people as well. Then, when the chairs are done, you send the chairs back to the person station, and you’ve succeeded.
Now that that concept, and multiply it by 50. You now have 3 person stations, all of whom want different things. There’s 10 different goods, and each good needs 3 other goods before they can produce. Also, your rails are built on the edge of a cliff, so you need careful management to prevent head on collisions. And to get 5 stars, you can’t turn any trains around.
It’s a cerebral puzzle, kind of like digging into a box of wires, and slowly teasing the edges until you find one that can be pulled loose. As you tug and tease, the knot gives way, and you end up in a flow state. You’re a symphony conductor of trains, deftly balancing 7 locomotives, all with different destinations and switching junctions at the precise moment to get everything where it needs to be.
By the time you hit the end game levels, some maps take upwards of 45 minutes per attempt. I recognize this puzzle game is not for everyone, but goodness me I fell in love with Train Valley 2 HARD. At 362 hours recorded on Steam, it’s my most played game on the platform. I adore this little train game, and am always eager to get back into it and work my brain through a new map.
9 – Mario Kart 8
Year Released: 2014 | Platform: Wii U
I was one of the apparently few people that bought a Wii U, and my reward for doing so, was Mario Kart 8.
I find it kind of remarkable how Nintendo manages to release a new version of Mario Kart, which feels perfect and amazing, and renders the versions that came before it as clunky and terrible. I loved Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart 7, and then Mario Kart 8, but once the later one came out, I found it very difficult to go back to the older itierations.
Mario Kart 8 (with the DLCs) was the sole reason my Wii U stayed plugged into my TV for years after the Nintendo Switch launched. The main gimmick of Mario Kart 8 is the anti-gravity wheels and the tracks going up walls, upside down, and curving all around, but that aspect can largely be ignored, as the camera sticks behind you the entire time. It is kind of cool when you’re not the one playing, seeing the course in the background curl up into the sky, or enjoy the details in the distance. Beyond that, Mario Kart 8 doesn’t dramatically reinvent the formula, but it does deliver on fantastic arcade racing, with power-ups and chaos that keeps my wife and I coming back over and over again.
And really, one of the biggest compliments I can give a game, is that I bought it at full price, plus paid for the DLC on the Wii U, and then paid for it again on the Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
I am mildly salty that the Nintendo Switch didn’t get a proper Mario Kart game of its own. I know Mario Kart World is waiting for me on the Switch 2, but I’m waiting for a while before I pick up any new hardware.
8 – Fallout: New Vegas
Year Released: 2010 | Platform: PS3
Fallout 3 was mind-blowing for me, but Fallout: New Vegas improved on the experience in every way. While I didn’t get the ‘mind-blown’ experience of exiting the vault for the very first time and exploring the wasteland, I was instead treated to the Mojave Desert, and the excellent factions and characters that inhabit it
Now, I first played New Vegas on my PS3, and it was fine. It was buggy, slow, and prone to crashing, yet I persisted. I loved chosing between the factions, each one having their own ending as they fight for control of New Vegas. Mr. House loading you up with cash, Yes Man pushing for an independent New Vegas, siding with the NCR to bring governmental legitimacy back to civilization. There’s also a Caesar’s Legion questline that I never followed, because I’m not a rephrensible human being.
Also, because Boone is my main man.
What really cemented New Vegas as one of my favourite games of all time, was when I built my first gaming PC and I picked up New Vegas: GOTY for $5 on Steam. The DLC was a breath of fresh air, as by that time I has already plundered the depths of the game, but the DLCs were new and exciting. And even after several full playthroughs, every time I set out from Goodsprings, I found something new. I was always uncovering more layers of the onion, and discovery is something that I really appreciate.
For me, New Vegas is peak Fallout. It’s the one I keep going back to, and the one I hope will inspire future games in the series.
7 – Super Mario Odyssey
Year Released: 2017 | Platform: Nintendo Switch
Super Mario Odyssey is the definition of whimsy. A wonderful 3D platforming adventure with tight, exciting controls, and dozens of gimmicks around every corner, Odyssey is just a damn joy.
It’s something I’ve come back to again and again, Nintendo games are fun. Mario Odyssey doesn’t lose itself in trying to be a dozen different genres, it’s just a colourful, fun, romp through a myriad of biomes, with excellent music, and original thrills. Yes, Mario is the same running and jumping dude we’ve been playing as for 30 years, but every game feels fresh and joyful.
What I have really come to appreciate, is how if you just want to breeze through the worlds, you can do that. But if you want a challenge, some of those moons can be a real pickle to pick up. Much like Breath of the Wild and those damn Korok seeds, there’s powermoons EVERYWHERE. The more you stop to look around, the more you’ll find. The firehydrant you’ve run by a dozen times, turns out you can move that to reveal a power moon. Sit down next to a dude, power moon. Scale your way to the tip-top of any level, and you can be sure you’ll be rewarded with a power moon. Those little achievements are a joy to reveal, and after playing through all the 3D Mario games with my daughter this year, I can definitively say, they are always getting better. If you can shake your nostalgia glasses off, I’m sure you’ll agree.
6 – Super Mario World
Year Released: 1990 | Platform: SNES
But this is the Mario game of my childhood. 3D Mario games are great, but nothing replaces the joy I get from Super Mario World. Unlike the collectathons that are the 3D Mario games, Super Mario World is all about running to the right and getting to goal. Sure, most levels have some kind of secret for you to find, which may open a branching path on the world map, but the goal is still the same. Get to the exit. Coins exist to give extra lives, and that’s all. Just, run and jump platform to platform, stomping Koopas, and making your way to Bowsers Castle.
I know I just talked about taking your nostalgia glasses off, but I’ve literally been playing Super Mario World since before I could read. This is the Mario game for me.
5 – Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
Year Released: 2003 | Platform: GBA
While Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones was the Fire Emblem game I played the most, The Blazing Blade was the one I fell in love with.
Beginning with Lyn’s story, serving as a 10 chapter introduction to the game, culminating with her reuniting with her grandfather, not only does this part of the game introduce you to the gameplay mechanics, but it introduces you to many of the characters that will come back in the second act.
I have always been a character first type of person, and Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade really knocked it out of the park with a genuinely good cast. The character interactions were brilliant, and by the end, I felt like each unit did have their own motivations and characterizations, which is tough to pull off with such a large cast of characters. As always, I really enjoyed the support system, seeing characters that would never interact within the main narrative spin have their moments in the sun.
The plot, I actually have a hard time recalling properly. A year after Lyn saves her grandfather, you follow Eliwood as he searches for his father. Accompanied by his best friend Hector, they find themselves entangled in a plot to bring Dragons back to the world.
But for all the plot’s weaknesses, the maps and gameplay more than make up for it. I loved playing The Blazing Blade, and it continues to be one of the games that I go back to over and over again. Sometimes the pacing of the narrative can mean that if a character is unlucky in their stat growths, then they simply fall behind and get benched. This is something that was “fixed” in The Sacred Stones, but I will concede that allowing players to grind made the game trivially easy.
And as a special bonus, when you finish Eliwood’s adventure, you get to play through it again with Hector as the main character! It’s a bit like Ender’s Shadow, where it’s really the same story, but there is a little bit more characterization for some units from Hector’s perspective. Either way, I’m a big fan of having a bonus mode getting unlocked after you complete the main narrative.
Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is the quintessential Fire Emblem experience. It’s a tactical strategy game with great characters. While every entry in the series that has come after it has tried to add their own unique takes on the system, The Blazing Blade is the bar against which every other Fire Emblem is measured against.
4 – Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Year Released: 2003 | Platform: Gameboy Advance
This might be one of the more controversial takes amongst the Final Fantasy Tactics community, if not the FInal Fantasy community at large. I ADORE Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
I’ve always appreciated the depth of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. As a kid, I struggled to understand Marche and his desire to return to the boring ‘real’ world after being isikaied into a Final Fantasy adventure. why would anyone want to leave a magical world where they’re strong and admired to return to a harsh and boring reality? Especially as he meets his friends who have all of their main troubles solved. Doned has his health, Mewt has his father, who is a respected judge. Ritz has her… red hair. But, I appreciate the story that focuses on doing whats right, not what’s easy or comfortable, even when your loved ones are the ones pushing against you from the otherside of the battlefield.
Most people will say that Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the best games ever, but I personally think FFTA improves upon the original, mostly in respect to a more approachable story and style, but especially on the gameplay mechanics. Some people despise the Law system, but I never found it to be that difficult to work around. It is fusturating when a law forbids blades and your whole party is kitted out with swords, but I appreciate the game trying to push you in different directions, to keep you from being comfortable.
My biggest gripe with FFTA is once you have your 6 characters, you keep recruiting party members that you’ll never use. The characters that you do use, however, grow and change jobs in a way that is very reminicient to Final Fantasy V. The job system and customization options makes Final Fantasy Tactics an absolute joy to play.
3 – Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver
Year Released: 2009 | Platform: Nintendo DS
A reoccuring theme you’ll see in these top 3 games is the surprise reveal of more or a new map/world to explore. When I first played Pokemon Gold on my Gameboy, I had no idea that after I got all 8 badges, and on the cusp of challenging the Elite Four, I’d be back in Kanto. And further to that, after challenging the Elite Four, I’d get to explore Kanto all over again, rebattling the gym leaders that I spent so much time banging my head against just a few years earlier. That hidden feature just blew my 11 year old brain when I discovered it.
I’ve chosen for HeartGold to represent this game, because it’s probably the best remake that Pokemon has ever recieved, followed closely by Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. The real shame with that remake was the exclusion of the battle tower, but I’m getting off track.
Pokemon Gold improved on Pokemon Red in every way. A day/night cycle that affects which pokemone are available, new pokemon types in the Dark and Steel types, shiny pokemon, held items, eggs and breeding mechanics, all of which do wonders to deepen the gameplay experience.
HeartGold and SoulSilver were the best remakes, bringing the excellent Johto region into the DS era. The bright spritework is brilliant, now your lead pokemon walks behind you, giving so much more personality to the mons you keep at the top of your party, redesigns to the bug catching contest and the safari zone, I could go on and on, but the more I write here, the more I want to go and play a Pokemon game, and doing that would derail my Final Fantasy project…
2 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Year Released: 1991 | Platform: SNES
This is the first video game I have memories of. My mom had a SNES attached to our living room TV, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the game that was most often slotted in. I remember playing this before I could read, which means I spent a lot of time just wandering the plains and forests of Hyrule. To this day, I clear the first three dungeons with complete and total muscle memory.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past tasks Link with gathering the three pendants spread out all over Hyrule, so Link can obtain the Master Sword and defeat the evil wizard Agahnim. When you do that, however, you’re transported to the Dark World, which doubles the world map size, and tasks you with collecting 7 crystals. Just when you thought your adventure was coming to a close, BAM, a new world and new objective.
I’m going to firmly blame nostalgia for the fact that no other Zelda game has ever surpassed A Link to the Past for me. A Link to the Past is a warm hug, a familiar friend that I can always go back to. I adore this game, but not as much as the top game on my list.
1 – Tales of Symphonia
Year Released: 2003 | Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Tales of Symphonia was my introduction to the Tales of… series. You follow the story of Lloyd, who is best friends with Collette, the chosen. The game begins with the Chosen embarking on her journey of regeneration, which involves her unlocking the seals at the elemental towers scattered throughout the world. When she completes this journey, the world, which has been in decline, will be restored.
The Tales of series is known for its Linear Motion Battle System, which puts you in control of only one of your party members, with the others being controlled by AI, and sets you on a 2D battle plane in a 3D arena. It’s a little confusing to describe with words, but basically, all your enemies and party members are running around the 3D arena, while you target an enemy, and can run towards or away from your target. The battles all happen in real time, creating a more engaging combat experience when compared to many other JRPGs of the same era.
As your party goes on the pilgrimage of salvation, unlocking the seals on the towers, and eventually scaling the tower of Salvation, in a big twist reveal, the party is transported to a second planet, the flourishing world of Tethe’alla. You eventually learn about the system of flourishing and declining worlds is due to the two worlds vying for access to the limited supply of mana, and the worlds were rent in two by an ancient hero named Mithos. Because Lloyd is dumb and an idealist, he simply proposes to put the worlds back together again. How lovely it must be to be unburdened by logic and reality.
I love the characters in Tales of Symphonia. There’s an affinity system that affect which characters join you for certain events in the game, and as a kid, I replayed the game enough to experience those events with every single character. This is another game that I was obsessed with as a teenager, eventually hitting that 100% completion goal, and then continuing to replay the game again and again, just because I loved the world so much. If I recall correctly, my GameCube save file had 36 game clears on it.
I should also mention that after completing a game and starting new, you are given access to a GRADE shop, which modifies certain things for your next play through. From increasing the amount of money and GRADE you can earn, to keeping your techs and titles, after enough play throughs it is possible to have everything there is to experience on a single save file.
I could go on and on, but Tales of Symphonia is a special game for me. The story of racism and perseverance resonated with me at a young age, and I love returning to this game over and over again. It’s just a shame that all the ports and remasters use the PS2 version as their base, which is locked at 30fps while the original GameCube version was a buttery smooth 60fps.
And that’s it, my top 100 video games of all time. Thank you so much for checking out my lists! As always, please let me know which games you also love, and what game would you call your #1 game of all time, if pressed for an answer!
I like mushrooms, but only in the context of the kitchen. Some tasty morels, lobsters, and oyster mushrooms will always get me excited. I do find mushrooms kind of fascinating, how fast they can grow, how different they can all be, but their poisonous nature has always made me rather just get my mushrooms from a store instead of trying to venture out and pick my own. The last thing I need is to get a hospital visit because I mis-identified the gills of a chanterelle or something.
Undergrove is designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, and published by AEG in 2024. In Undergrove, players are Douglas-fir trees, and are tasked with trading resources with the mushrooms that dot the forest floor. Your actions involve trading Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium with the mushrooms, to get special benefits or to just get more resources than you’re generally putting out. The core of the game is to use the Carbon to activate the mushrooms, then absorb that carbon through your roots to grow a mighty evergreen.
The care and interest of the mycology science shouldn’t be a surprise. Elizabeth Hargrave is the president of her local hobbyist mushroom club, the Mycological Society of Washington, DC, and she and Mark Wootton had many conversations with entomologists and PhD students to discuss how the science works. Sure, Undergrove abstracts some concepts, and the giant mushroom tiles may indicate the outsized abundance of the mushrooms in a real forest, but hey. It’s a board game, it’s often more important to be fun than correct.
The mycology theme is wonderful, and the production is utterly gorgeous. I have the Kickstarter edition with all the wooden pieces, including the amazing painted wooden tiles. The screen printed wooden pieces are all beautiful, and there are snug little circles cut out of the corners for your player pieces to sit. The art on the tiles by Beth Sobel is fantastic, colourful, and beautiful. Building out a large tableau of mushrooms is a sight to behold! There are sturdy tuck boxes for every resource and for every player’s pieces, making the inside of the main box a tidy affair. AEG absolutely knocked this production out of the park.
So the science is good. The art is great, and the production is fantastic. How’s the gameplay? Well, here’s where my notes turn a bit sour. Undergrove is a tight resource management game. Activating most of the mushrooms on the board require you to at least spend 1 carbon, and often will have you flip a mushroom activation disc (so you can’t just juice the same tile over and over again). The only way to get carbon is to take the photosynthesis action, which provides you with 2 carbon as a base. Then, you may choose to throw away any nitrogen you’ve accumulated for more carbon. The economy is already tight, it feels punishing to be jettisoning your nitrogen in exchange for carbon that you’ll spend to get a surplus of nitrogen so you can do other actions.
Spending the carbon onto the mushrooms feeds really nicely into how you score points and win the game. The absorb action lets you take a carbon from a tile and move it onto your seedling. Once a seedling has absorbed 3 carbon, it blossoms into a full tree, unlocking the ability for that tree to score all four of its roots. But fret not, if the game comes to an end and some of your seedlings have one or two carbon on them, they can score one or two of their roots. Speaking of game end, there is a carbon track. Anytime a player absorbs any amount of carbon, they move one step up that track, collecting bonuses as they do so. Once someone has reached the end of that track, everyone gets one final action and the player with the most points, wins.
One of the challenges with that carbon track is that the pace of the game is solely controlled by the players. If no one is absorbing carbon, you’ll all just be having a merry time spreading your seeds and roots, building an impressive forest floor, and maximizing each one of their seedling investments, only to realize that the end of the game is still an hour away. Conversely, a player with a singular focus can rush the game to an end, rendering your efforts in building any semblance of an engine moot. I suppose it depends on what you want out of your mushroom game. Is the player who plays lean and fast the one to win, or can a player build strong enough to put up a fight?
A small anecdote. Bear, Otter, and I played this one together. Bear was having an absolute blast chaining actions together to squeeze out one more resource, hitting the public objectives where possible, and getting out nearly all of their seedlings and roots. But completely failed to absorb carbon, so when Otter and I completed the carbon track on the same turn, his score was half of ours, despite his far superior forest structure.
The other things you can do on your turn include spending carbon and phosphorus to throw your seeds to the wind and settle your seedlings elsewhere on the tableau. Similarly, you can spend a carbon and two potassium to sprout two roots on any of your seedlings. The roots play an important role for your trees (no duh), as the roots are what give you access to any of the abilities or actions the mushrooms provide.
I feel like Undergrove is supposed to be an engine building game. It has all the hallmarks for it. But in play, it’s really not. Many players will get excited at the chance to put down new mushrooms, to add to the board, but putting mushrooms down doesn’t get you anything. Sure, you can control the location of it, which may slightly benefit you more than others, but it’s not like putting down a mushroom gives you ownership or a strong benefit. You’re not really building and engine in Undergrove, you’re claiming slightly more efficient action spots, then choosing which one you want to use on your turn. Because of that, Undergrove’s gameplay arc feels flat. From about the 5th turn until the end of the game, not a whole lot really changes, robbing players a real sense of progression that other, perhaps bird themed games, have.
Undergrove left me in a curious state. I love its celebration of fungi and nature, the obvious reverence for real science, and the sheer beauty of its production. Sitting around a table filled with colourful mushrooms and tidy wooden trees is genuinely delightful. But once the novelty and aesthetic glow fade, the gameplay settles into a low, pleasant rhythm. Pleasant, but rarely stirring. Its tight economy and player-driven pacing create interesting decisions, yet the lack of meaningful progression makes those choices feel more iterative than transformative. If you’re looking for a contemplative, tactical puzzle wrapped in a stunning package, Undergrove is right up your alley, but if you’re hoping to build a powerful engine, then this isn’t the mushroom you’re looking for.
