Before I started this whole Final Fantasy endeavour, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was my most-played Final Fantasy game by a long shot. I played it on my platinum Game Boy Advance SP, and I played the daylights out of this game. It’s one of the first times I remember going onto good old GameFAQs to figure out which abilities I needed to unlock the various classes, which, on dial up internet was quite the chore. But I don’t want to launch straight into my nostalgia. Let’s talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance itself, what I love about it, and what changed during this most recent playthrough.
The Story Begins
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens with a school-sanctioned snowball fight. You play as Marche, the new kid at school. On your team are the weakling Mewt and the strong, confident redheaded Ritz. The teacher gives everyone a little bit of instruction before setting the kids loose to pelt each other with snowballs.
I actually love this as a tutorial. It teaches the player movement, positioning, and attack range, all wrapped up in a scenario that feels surprisingly natural instead of throwing you into a random battle against goblins for no particular reason. Unfortunately, the other team is full of bullies, and they all decide to pick on Mewt. After a couple of rounds of combat, the cutscene takes over, and one of the bullies beans Mewt with a rock hidden inside a snowball. Little jerks. The teacher watching the scene puts an end to the snowball fight and the kids go their separate ways.
After school Mewt says he’s picking up an old book from the bookstore and asks if everyone wants to come over to Marche’s house to read it together. During this conversation you also see Cid across the street getting reprimanded by some adults while looking pathetic and defeated. It’s here you learn that Cid is actually Mewt’s father and that Mewt’s mother has passed away, leaving Cid trying to deal with his own grief while raising his son. It’s not exactly an easy situation, and it’s one of the first hints that beneath this bright, colourful fantasy game there’s something much sadder going on.
The group heads over to Marche’s house, where we meet Marche’s brother Doned, who uses a wheelchair and has been in poor health for quite some time. Then comes a conversation that probably every adolescent nerd who’s ever played video games or read fantasy books has had with their friends. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this fantasy world was real?” and “I’d love to live in a video game.” It’s that childhood dream of escaping into a world where you have power and agency instead of feeling helpless. After this escapist fantasy, Ritz and Mewt depart, and the kids go to bed.
That night, the world changes. The school transforms into a rocky plains crawling with monsters. Your school transforms into a bustling city crawling with various colourful races. Marche is lifted into the air, his pyjamas transform into battle leathers, and suddenly he’s standing in the middle of a fantasy world.
Marche immediately bumps into a Bangaa, a humanoid lizard race, and casually calls him a lizard—which, it turns out, is a terrible slur. Montblanc, the ever-cheerful Moogle, rushes in to save you before the offended Bangaa challenges you to an engagement.
Enagements & The Laws That Govern Them
In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, every battle is called an engagement, and every engagement is overseen by judges. These judges enforce a different set of laws that everyone in the engagement is expected to obey. One battle might forbid fire magic while rewarding ice attacks. Another battle might prohibit swords entirely. Sometimes the laws will barely affect your party, while others completely cripple a specific character, or essentially render a battle unwinnable. If swords are forbidden, suddenly your soldier class characters are having a very bad day. On the other hand, whenever the law prohibits Control actions, I always cackle because I’ve basically never used Beastmaster’s Control ability, so it’s practically a law-free battle for me.
Usually, breaking a law earns you a yellow card, earning you a fine of some gil or an item that you’ll lose after the engagement. Sometimes characters will get punished by having a certain stat reduced, which feels like a much worse punishment. Break enough laws, though, and you receive a red card, and that unit gets ejected from the engagement entirely, and you’ll need to bail them out of jail for a much larger sum.
From what I remember, this law system is at the centre of a lot of people’s complaints about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. There are situations where you’ll be fighting five monsters and one of the laws is “Don’t damage monsters.” So… what exactly are you supposed to do? The answer shows up partway through the story when Ezel opens a card shop, allowing you to add or remove laws before battles. At first you might wonder why you’d ever add another law, but it’s important to remember that every law that forbids something will also reward something else. If swords are forbidden, bows earn Judge Points instead. Judge Points, or JP, are awarded for following the rewarded law or for delivering the finishing blow to an enemy. Later in the story those Judge Points can be spent to summon powerful Totemas, dealing large MP or HP damage, depending on the race of the character who summoned it.
I feel that the law system is much more interesting than people often give it credit for. Yes, there are moments where the laws feel arbitrary or downright unfair, but more often than not they push me to think about battles differently or use classes and equipment I might otherwise ignore. It pushes me to diversify my party instead of railroading everyone into one specific path.
Clans, Your Found Family
Montblanc invites Marche to join his newly formed clan, and from there Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens up. You take on missions, recruit new members to your clan, and explore Ivalice, plonking down new locations on a barren map. Along the way you reunite with Ritz, meet Ezel, who as I said above has figured out how to manipulate the laws, and eventually encounter Prince Mewt. In this fantasy world, Mewt’s mother is alive again, and his disgraced father is now the respected Judge Master. Everything he’s ever wanted exists in this world. Marche, however, is determined to get home because he asserts that this world simply isn’t real. Ritz doesn’t necessarily disagree with him, but she enjoys the freedom and confidence she’s found here and has little interest in helping Marche return to the old world. Prince Mewt actively opposes Marche’s quest, strengthening the laws, sending judges after him, and even placing a bounty on his head. Honestly, it makes perfect sense. Here Mewt has power, privilege, and status. Back home he has almost nothing.
I was telling my wife recently that when I originally played this game, I didn’t agree with Marche. I was firmly on Team Mewt. Why would I ever want to leave this fantasy world and go back to reality? It wasn’t until I stood there and actually spoke those words out loud as an adult that I realized how sad that proposition really is. Only someone who’s deeply unhappy with their real life wants to abandon it entirely for a fantasy. As a kid, I understood Mewt completely. As an adult, I understand Marche and why escaping to a fantasy isn’t healthy. Throughout the story, Marche wavers. While he tracks down the crystals guarded by the Totemas and destroys them one by one, believing that breaking the fifth crystal will unravel this world and send everyone home, he’s riddled with doubt. Is it fair of him to rip Mewt away from his fantasy? Does he even want to go back to being the new kid at a new school, living with a single mother whose attention is spent mostly on his sickly little brother? It’s actually a surprisingly melancholy story when you stop and think about it. Three friends fundamentally disagree about what’s best, and eventually those disagreements are settled through violence because there simply isn’t another option.
Unfortunately for Marche, even after destroying the fifth crystal the world doesn’t simply disappear. It continues to exist because there are still people who genuinely want it to. His brother, Doned is one of them. In the real world he’s sickly and confined to a wheelchair. Here he can run, fight, explore, and live a full life. Of course he doesn’t want to leave. He spends the later half of the game actively sabotaging Marche’s plans because, from his perspective, Marche is trying to destroy the only world where he’s able and happy. It’s an interesting premise because Marche spends the entire game trying to save everyone by dragging them back to reality, while almost everyone he cares about is desperately trying to stop him because they’ve escaped the difficult circumstances back home. As a kid I understood the desire to escape. As an adult I understand why living permanently inside an escapist fantasy isn’t really living at all.
I will say that I find Ritz’s motivation for staying in this world relatively weak. In the real world, her hair is naturally white and she dyes it red every day. In this world, her hair stays red. And that’s about it! At least with Marche, Donad, and Mewt they have much stronger reasons for their conflict. Although I will say Donad coming around to agreeing with Marche to leave this world felt a little too easy. I can’t imagine someone agreeing to give up their ability to walk so easy, but hey, this game is intended for a younger audience. For the most part, the game does a really good job of giving each character their own motivations and showing how they are challenged and grow. Which is more than I can say for the sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, but that’s a tale for another day.
Jobs & Character Customization
What really made me fall in love with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, though, was the gameplay, and more specifically how the game lets you build your characters. Each character belong to one of five races, and every race has its own collection of jobs, with some overlap.
The Humes are your traditional human characters, beginning as Soldiers and Archers before branching into Defenders, Paladins, Ninjas, White Mages, Black Mages, and Thieves. Every job allows the character to equip different weapons, and most weapons will teach a different ability to the character holding it. Equip a sword with Mindbreak, and your Soldier can immediately use that skill. At the end of each battle, the entire party receives some Ability Points, or AP. Keep that weapon equipped for long enough and eventually you’ll master it, allowing you to continue using the skill even after swapping out the weapon that provides it.
New classes unlock by mastering abilities from previous jobs, so you’re constantly planning several steps ahead. If you want to get your Hume to the Ninja Job, you’ll need to master 2 thief action abilities. If you want access to the powerful Illusionist class that can damage all enemies at once, you’ll need 5 black mage abilities and 3 white mage abilities.
The Moogles lean toward magical and technical roles with the Gadgeteer, Gunner, and Mog Knight classes. The Bangaa focus on brute force with the Templar, Dragoon, and Gladiator classes. The Viera become elegant Archers, Snipers, Assassins, and Red Mages. Then there are the Nu Mou, who are probably my favourite race in the game. They’re these wonderfully melancholy, Eeyore-looking creatures who specialize almost entirely in magic. I’ve honestly never really explored their Beastmaster line because their spellcasting is just so absurdly good. Once you unlock Turbo MP, these little magical Eeyores transform into walking tactical nukes, dropping Firaga’s left and right, and I absolutely love them.
Most of the battles will let you bring 6 characters into battle, with Marche always being included. This means 6 sets of equipment and skills to balance and swap around between each battle. It takes 2 or 3 battles to master some of the cheaper abilities, but with 6 characters all earning AP, it’s pretty likely that at least one character will master an ability every battle. This means between every battle you’ll need to go into the party screen to swap gear to continue unlocking new abilities for your characters.
Doublecast + Summon knocked out all 5 of these enemies in one turn.
I know this level of party management probably sounds tedious to some people, but I absolutely love it. Between almost every battle I’m opening menus, swapping equipment, changing jobs, assigning abilities, and figuring out what everyone should learn next. Sometimes that means intentionally giving someone a weaker weapon because it teaches an ability they haven’t mastered yet. Because I’ve played this game so many times, I inevitably railroad Marche toward Ninja so he can learn Double Sword as soon as possible to wield two blades at once. Likewise, I almost always push a Viera into Sniper and then Assassin so they can combine Concentrate with Last Breath, Ko’ing enemies with an 80% hit rate. That, combined with their absurd speed means I start every battle immedately deleting one opponent from the battlefield before they even get a chance to move.
I do like this system and how it creates an arc for your characters, but there are certainly some downsides. First, it does take a long time to train up a unit to a point where they’re use able. It can be frustrating when you send your main units off on Dispatch missions, using a non-default unit just feels anemic. Also, sometimes grinding abilities just to satisfy prerequisites can feel like wasted time, like needing to learn thief skills to unlock the Ninja. As soon as I unlock the ninja, I never touch those thief skills again. This system sounds like it would reward exploring, but really, once you get every character dialed in on the two classes they’re going to utilize in the end game, then you’re pretty well done building those characters.
Even with my favourite classes dialed in, every time I replay Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I try to explore at least one or two jobs I usually ignore. This time I invested heavily into turning a Moogle into a Mog Knight, and after getting a decent amount of strength through their level ups, I swapped them over to a gunner, dealing really decent damage from clear across the map. Those were both classes I’d barely touched before.
Unfortunately this playthrough also brought along something I’d never experienced before. I lost Montblanc forever during a battle in the Jagd regions, where the judges don’t exist, the laws don’t apply, and death is permanent. Thinking back, I don’t think I’d ever actually lost a character before.
My Criticisms
Which brings me to one of my biggest criticisms of the game: saving. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance does a remarkably poor job of reminding you to save. In between battles on the map screen, you have to press Start, enter the System menu, and choose to manually save. It’s incredibly easy to forget for literally hours at a time, especially if the device you’re playing on has a decent sleep option, like the Steam Deck has. Back when I played this on my Game Boy Advance SP, I’d just snap the lid shut whenever I was done and rely on sleep mode to pick up where I left off. To really drive this pain point home, if you happen to lose a battle, or if Marche breaks the law and gets a red card, you get a Game Over screen, which kicks you back out to the title screen to load a saved game.
There were definitely times where I lost a battle and ended up losing eight or nine hours of progress because I simply had forgotten to save. Recently I made another equally stupid mistake. I sent almost my entire main party away on dispatch missions, figured I’d just walk around the map until they came back, and accidentally wandered into a new location, which threw me into a hidden engagement. Suddenly Marche was fighting 5 enemies alone. To make matters worse, the battle forbade damaging monsters, and I didn’t have an appropriate Anti-Law card. I had effectively walked straight into an unwinnable situation. Thankfully I’d saved a few missions earlier, so I only lost a little bit of progress instead of an entire evening.
One thing I noticed during this playthrough that I’d never really appreciated before is just how slow this game can be. The only reason I noticed it was because I played almost the entire game with a 2x speed hack enabled. Whenever I turned it off, everything suddenly felt glacial. Animations take much longer than I remember. There’s a noticeable slowness to the actions. Half of the battles are just watching the enemy units take their turns. This is a pretty common problem in every Tactics game though, and after sitting through the absurdly long summon animations of the PS1 era games, I really can’t complain about the “wasted time” here.
I don’t even feel guilty using an emulators speed-up feature anymore. Modern Final Fantasy remasters regularly include fast-forward buttons, encounter toggles, or experience multipliers. At this point it almost feels like an expected quality-of-life feature.
Living in the Shadow of a Giant
While I realize that nostalgia might be playing a role here, I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance more than War of the Lions. That statement might be sacrilegious to some people as War of the Lions is routinely touted as one of the best games ever made. Yes, War of the Lions tells a much stronger story. Its political intrigue and complex factions are objectively more sophisticated. But Tactics Advance is simply more approachable. It’s brighter, more colourful, and more fantastical, and the race and job system feels much deeper. And the isekai plot is exactly what thirteen-year-old Alex wanted. Back then I couldn’t appreciate the political maneuvering and power struggles of War of the Lions. While I appreciate that story now, Tactics Advance has a story that spoke to me on a personal level. I also had more gripes for War of the Lions, like not seeing the map while staging your units at the start of a battle, or not being able to take back your movement, or just how absurd the zodiac system was and how consequential your characters star sign would be to how much damage they’d deal to enemies. Now, I know some of those complaints have been fixed in the 2025 remaster, but I didn’t play that version.
I still love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It’s bright, colourful, cheerful, and endlessly fun to revisit. The job system on display here remains my favourite iteration of job systems in the entire Final Fantasy series. Unlocking new jobs, mastering abilities, experimenting with different combinations, and not spending 20 minutes throwing rocks at chocobos puts Tactics Advance above War of the Lion for me. Slowly building your perfect squad never stops being satisfying. Yes, the law system can occasionally be frustrating, and yes, forgetting to save can lead to some absolutely brutal losses, but every time I return to this Ivalice I find myself smiling. At the end of the day, I just feel joy while I play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is more than I can say about War of the Lions.
I bought Pies for a lot of reasons. First, I like trick-taking games. Second, I’ve really been appreciating small-box games that I can bring to people’s houses or out on our adventures without having to haul a whole separate bag. Third, the designer, Matthias Kramer, is also the designer of one of my favorite games, Glen More II, so I was quite intrigued to see what he could do with a small-box card game.
And probably the biggest reason I bought Pies is because Allplay sold it for $3.14 on March 14th. I do love me a good deal.
Now, I said above that I love trick-taking games, but I’d argue that Pies is not really a trick-taking game. It’s more of a tricky card game.
In Pies, there are three rounds, and each round has its own deck of cards. Each round, you’ll deal out all the cards to all the players and then, turn by turn, place a single card face up on the table. After everyone has placed one card, you’ll determine who played the highest number. They get the first-player token. The person who played the second-highest value gets the second-player token, and so on, all the way down to the player who played the lowest value card, who gets the last-player token.
Once player order has been decided, the person who played the highest-value card gets to take any one of the face-up cards and place it in front of them, creating a tableau. Then the next player does the same, and so on down the line. The last player takes the final card on the table plus one plum card as compensation for their poor showing.
Many of these cards will have a special action on the top, and when you take a card with a special action, you must perform it immediately. That can be anything from stealing a card from another player to gaining pie tokens, which you can use on future turns to increase the value of your card. Or it might be taking the dog token and placing it in front of you, protecting you from those dirty fruit thieves.
The other thing that can appear at the top of these fruit cards is a recipe, which is how you score points and ultimately win a game of Pies.
At any time when you take a card from the table, you can then fulfill a recipe, or make a fruit mix. To do so, you’ll take one of the cards in your tableau that has a recipe on top and discard cards from your tableau that match the requirements shown on that recipe.
These recipes might ask for two or three of one type of fruit, two matching pairs of fruits, or even five completely different fruits. The recipe card itself can be part of the fruit mix, but it doesn’t have to be. If you use a recipe card with fruit on it but don’t include that fruit as part of the mix, you still have to discard all the cards that make up the fruit mix plus the recipe card itself. So it’s slightly more efficient if the recipe card is actually contributing fruit to the recipe you’re completing.
And that’s largely the whole game. You’ll play cards, take cards, trigger special actions, and make fruit mixes. At the end of three rounds, you’ll reveal your fulfilled recipe cards, count up your points, and whoever has the most points is the winner.
I think the first point to make here is that the fruit artwork is really beautiful. It’s very reminiscent of the kind of art that adorns Wingspan cards, or the tree artwork in Arboretum, or the artwork that adorned my grandmother’s porcelain bowls. It’s just quality, real-life fruit artwork.
The gameplay is nicely interactive, but in the mean way where you’re actively undoing what other players did on their turns. Because you play a single card each round, having a card stolen from you feels pretty punishing. It’s not the kind of interaction that I particularity enjoy. I do enjoy the tension of the card play, though. Trying to reserve certain cards so you can play them at the moment you can use their abilities for full effect. Or, waiting until you’re last in player order so you can play the card you really want to take into your tableau when you can be certain you’ll pick first.
I don’t think Pies shines at 3 players, however. There were not many Dog cards, so one player just had immunity from being stolen from for the majority of the game. Unsurprisingly, that player won that game. But the player who steals the most is certainly not guaranteed a victory. The player who manages to actually fulfill their pie recipes is the winner, as ending the game with a tableau full of fruit will give you nothing but fruit flies at the end of the day.
There was a fair amount of luck in Pies, whether you’re gifted the cards that you want, or if you have the opportunity to snag any recipes when it’s time to pick cards. Of course what often feels like luck is other players conspiring against you to get the good cards for themselves. I think as players get more and more familiar with the cards, you’ll be able to make some clever plays, but most of the score will come from snapping up the right card at the right time.
At the end of the day, we enjoyed Pies, but not as much as some other trick taking games, such as The Crew or NYET!. Especially at 3 players where 3 Witches absolutely shines. The card play is a little too thoughtful to be a pub game, but if you’re really into trick taking games and want something to end a board game night with, Pies is the perfect gaming dessert.
I’ve loved Orléans for a decade now. Twice it’s made it into the top 20 of my top 100 games of all time, which is not a small feat when you consider how many games on that list get shuffled around. Whenever I think about Orléans, it’s mostly fond memories. Those plays where you manage to pull everything you need from the bag, where you’re one turn ahead of someone, blocking them from building guild halls, or just the fact that when you play Orléans, everything just feels satisfying. But something unexpected happened recently. I joined a two-player tournament for Orléans on Board Game Arena and played ten two player games in fairly quick succession, and by the end of it, I found myself a little less in love with the game than when I started.
But before I get into that, it’s worth touching on what Orléans actually feels like to play. At its heart, it’s a bag-building game where you’re slowly constructing a pool of workers. Everyone starts with the same handful of tokens, and each round you’re drawing a number of workers from your bag and slotting them into these little “recipes” on your board to make things happen. Those actions might get you more workers, push you up tracks, or unlock new abilities. Most of what you do feeds back into this loop of adding workers to your bag to expand your capabilities, improving your board, or letting you draw more workers each round. And that sense of constant forward motion is a big part of the appeal.
The tracks in Orléans are the focal point of the game. In general, you’ll take an action, you move up a track, and you usually get two things: a new worker corresponding to that track, and some kind of bonus. Farmers get you food, fishermen bring in coins, guards increase how many tokens you draw each round, and craftsmen let you place these little gear tiles that permanently discount your actions. Those gears are especially satisfying, locking in an efficiency boost that you can’t ever undo, but also means you’ll never have to pay for it again. There is also a track that will give you new actions, which can either tweak something you already have access to, or give you entirely new, often better, actions to work with. And then there’s the development track, which is a score multiplier for the end of the game. Ignore that track at your own peril.
Alongside all of those tracks, you’ve got movement on a map. Using carts on roads and boats on rivers, you’ll race to establish guild halls in cities. There’s only one spot per city (except in Orléans), so getting to each city first matters. A lot. At the end of the game, a large portion of your is the combination of how many citizens you’ve picked up and how many guild halls you’ve placed, multiplied by your development level. I find it endlessly satisfying at the end of the game when players are rushing about trying to drop as many guild halls as possible, to jump ahead on the road and put a house up right before they arrive. I know, I’m evil.
One of the more subtle pressures in Orléans is that nothing is infinite. Tracks have caps, worker pools can run dry, and if a type of worker is gone, the track becomes unavailable to everyone, even if you haven’t maxed out that track yet. So there’s this constant race happening. Often, being just one step ahead or other players on these tracks is often enough to completely derail what they were hoping to do.
What I’ve always loved about Orléans is that sense of progression. You start off painfully weak, and almost everything you do makes you better. You draw more tokens, your actions get cheaper, your options expand. By the end of the game, when you’re pulling eight workers out of your bag and some of your key actions only cost one or two workers, it feels great.
With more than two players, the game really sings. People are constantly sniping the thing you were just about to do, finishing a track to snag a citizen, grabbing a new action tile, completing a beneficial deed one turn before you, it all forces you to stay flexible. There’s a nice amount of tension around the shared spaces that makes the turn order feel really consequential, especially those citizens that reward whoever finishes something first.
But in that two-player tournament, something else emerged. Everyone seemed to fall into very well-worn strategies almost immediately. It didn’t take long for optimal openings to reveal themselves, and once they did, it felt like deviating from them was just… wrong. You’d have to prioritize those development tiles that make your actions cheaper, because if you don’t, the other player will take them all and run away with the game. I had one match where that happened, he ignored them and I hoovered them all up. By round 10 of 18 my opponent basically said, “I don’t think I can come back from this,” and he was right. I was drawing eight workers and paying one or two workers for most of my actions while he was paying three, the math just doesn’t work in his favour, especially because we were both hitting that draw cap.
The same thing happens with the tiles that grant new actions. In theory, having access to all of them when you gain one is exciting. It lets you tailor your strategy to the emerging situations. In practice, it often leads to players picking the same strongest or most comfortable options over and over again. Over multiple plays, especially back-to-back plays in a tournament, that starts to feel boringly repetitive. The variety is technically there, but you have to choose to engage with it, and optimal play doesn’t always reward that.
So between the potential for runaway leaders and the emergence of scripted openings, is Orléans still a game I’d recommend? Yeah, I think it is. But with a caveat. I think Orléans is at its best with more players, where the board state is more chaotic, the competition is tighter, and you’re forced to adapt more often. That’s where the game feels alive.
I also know there are variants that limit the available tiles to a small display instead of the full set, and I might prefer that approach when it comes to playing 2 player games. It nudges players toward trying different things and occasionally making suboptimal choices, which paradoxically often makes the game more interesting.
Even with some of the shine worn off, Orléans is still a great bag-building game. And the fact that it took me 20 or 30 plays to even start feeling that fade says a lot. Any game that hits the table that many times has earned its place in my top 100, even if it’s no longer quite as untouchable as it once felt.
I’ve talked about a bunch of polyomino tile-laying games on this blog, from Project L to the more recent Frosted Blooms, and in those posts I’ve often said that I really enjoy poluomino tile laying games. I still suspect a lot of this joy comes from my background in Tetris. My mom was very good at Tetris, and she would mercilessly crush me when we played multiplayer, until I got my first job and with my first-ever paycheck as a teenager, I bought myself a GameCube and a copy of Tetris and practiced and practiced in my room until I could finally bury her in junk lines.
Take that, Mom.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Bärenpark.
In Bärenpark, players are trying to build the best bear park. Every player starts with one 4×4 entrance tile and one of the green enclosure tiles, the size of which depends on your player order. These green enclosure tiles are small attractions, like a food stand or a porta-potty. They can be one, two, or three squares large and come either in a straight line or in a small L shape. On the central board in front of all players, there’s also a bunch of small bear enclosure tiles arranged in stacks. Each of these enclosures are 4 squares large and each of the 4 types are in the classic Tetris tetromino-style shapes, and the highest point value tile is on the top of each stack. Lastly, covering nearly half of the entire supply board are the coveted large enclosure tiles, which are five or six squares large and worth a healthy chunk of points.
Your 4×4 entrance tile is littered with icons. There are green wheelbarrows, white cement trucks, and construction crews. Covering those icons earns you pieces of the corrosponding type. Cover a wheelbarrow and you gain a small attraction tile. Cover a cement truck and you gain a medium bear enclosure tile. Cover a construction crew and you get to take another 4×4 park tile to expand your zoo.
Each turn, players simply place one tile from their supply onto their park, making sure it’s adjacent to an existing tile. Then, if they covered any icons in their zoo, the collect the corrosponding rewards and the next player takes their turn. The game ends when someone manages to completely fill all four of their 4×4 park sections, including the one they started with.
In addition to the points you earn directly from the various bear enclosures you’re placing into your park, there are a couple of other scoring opportunities. First, whenever you completely fill one of your 4×4 park sections, you get to erect a bear statue. The first player to do this scores the most points, and the statues steadily decrease in value as the stack gets depleted. There are also three randomly selected objectives available every game. Sometimes these are straightforward, like being the first player to collect three Panda bear enclosures, or just have three orange tiles touching each other. Other times they’re much trickier, requiring specific spatial arrangements, such as placing three L-shaped green tiles end-to-end. These objectives make the spatial planning aspect of Bärenpark significantly more challenging than it first appears.
Because you’re earning points from so many different places, from the bear statues, from the various enclosures, and from the objectives, and the fact that each of those point sources are slowly diminishing, you’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Do you place the piece that will finish a 4×4 section and secure a valuable statue? Or is it more important to stretch off into a new area and cover two icons with a single placement? Maybe you don’t have a need for that 2×2 yellow tile, it doesn’t fit perfectly anywhere in your park right now, but it’s the highest point value piece available, and you can see that your opponent does have a perfect spot for it. Is it worth taking now? Also, if you place a tile and don’t cover an icon, do you have an extra piece in your reserve to play next turn? If you don’t, you need to burn an entire turn taking a single green tile, which is a huge disadvantage.
It’s managing all those little decisions that makes Bärenpark really fun to play for me.
I find Bärenpark infinitely replayable. Every time I sit down with this puzzle, I’m delighted. Even if the core game always feels fundamentally the same, there’s just something about this system that just keeps me coming back and brings a smile to my face every time I play. When the odd shapes just fall in your favor and you manage to always be one step ahead of your opponents, netting an extra point here and a small bonus there, it’s great. And then when you eventually stumble across the finish line and count everything up to find that you won by a mere 5 points, it feels incredibly gratifying.
Of course, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you get to the end of the game and discover your park is dotted with tiny single-square holes. Holes that you now need to spend round after round filling those holes with porta-potties, because apparently you thought it was more important to lay your 3 large enclosures in a weird shape just so they touched, all so you could earn that one objective, and your two opponents managed to achieve it before you did! That part of the game is much less fun.
But hey. Skill issue, right? I don’t know how, but I rarely come in 2nd in Bärenpark. I’m either absolutely crushing my opponents, or being crushed. There is no middle ground.
What I appreciate most about Bärenpark is how focused it is. If you like polyomino tile-laying games, Bärenpark is about as good as it gets. There’s nothing here to distract from the spatial puzzle. There aren’t any markets to manipulate, side mechanisms to explore, or layers of complexity piled on top of the core experience. This game is simply about taking tiles, placing tiles, and trying to make them all fit together as efficiently as possible.
If spatial puzzles are your jam and you haven’t played Bärenpark yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.
I initially didn’t plan on playing Final Fantasy X-2. But one of my friends decided to join me on my Final Fantasy X playthrough. And by join me, we played our games separately and texted each other our exciting and frustrating moments. When we both finished, I mentioned I was going to play Final Fantasy XII next. He suggested I wait a bit so he could have a bit of a JRPG detox, then he’d join me on that one as well. So with all the wonderfully deep and melancholic feelings in my heart from the end of Final Fantasy X, I decided to spin up Final Fantasy X-2. I wasn’t really ready to leave Spira, I really liked the world and the characters and the story. I was interested in what the first direct sequel in the Final Fantasy franchise would hold.
Now, I had tried playing Final Fantasy X-2 back in 2014 when I bought the Final Fantasy X/X-2 remaster for the PS3. And the only thing I really remembered was launching Final Fantasy X-2, seeing Yuna singing and dancing in a Brittany Spears-esque JPOP dance sequence, then promptly turning the game off. Yeah, I really never game it a chance. Well, that changes now!
Story
Yes, the opening cutscene does have Yuna singing and dancing in a Pop concert. She’s the centre of attention and fans are cheering her on, but cut in-between shots of Yuna’s performance we see Rikku and Paine knocking out guards and sneaking backstage.
A little later on we discover that the Yuna who was dancing in the concert was actually LeBlanc, a sphere hunter and leader of Leblanc Syndicate. Leblanc stole Yuna’s dressphere and was trying to cash in on her fame. Yuna, has joined forces with Rikku and Paine to form the Gullwings, whose mission is to hunt spheres, because… they’re valueable?
It turns out there’s a 15 minute cutscene called Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm that set the stage for Final Fantasy X-2 that I completly missed until I was a couple hours into the story. It’s in Eternal Calm that you learn that Kimhari found a sphere recording on Mt. Gagazet, and in that recording there’s someone who looks suspiciously like Tidus being held captive. Yuna joins the Gullwings to find more spheres so she can find whoever this person is.
Final Fantasy X-2 is an asset-flip sequel. All the locations are the same from Final Fantasy X, and outside of the 3 main characters, all the old characters that you meet use their old character models. Which is fine, except for when Rikku tries to call Wakka “tubby”, but the character model from Final Fantasy X is jacked. Even worse than that, Lulu is pregnant and gives birth during the story of Final Fantasy X-2, but her character model doesn’t change at all. I appreciate trying to tell a story, but man, those moments made me scratch my head.
Pictured here: 9 month pregnant Lulu
The way Final Fantasy X-2 is structured, is that the airship Celcius is your base of operations. Piloted by Buddy and Brother, you are able to go to any of the locations from Final Fantasy X right from the get go. You want to start your new adventure in Zanarkand? Sure! Why not Djose temple? The game will highlight which locations are required for story progression, but almost every other location holds characters to meet and a side quest for you to explore. Not only does each location have a side quest, but Final Fantasy X-2 is broken into 5 chapters, and most locations have a side quest in each chapter.
On one hand, it’s kind of touching to revisit the old locations. Running across the calm lands, riding scoopufs, visiting the idyllic island of Besaid all evoke strong feelings of nostalgia. I couldn’t help but reflect on my time with the characters in X while playing Final Fantasy X-2. It was kind of fascinating returning to Zanarkand for the first time, and seeing it overrun with tourists. In X it was such a sombre, reverent place and now there’s gobs of people trampling over the places where Yuna laid her life on the line to grant these people their Eternal Calm. But after a couple chapters, I was fatigued. I didn’t want to go back to besaid island for the fourth time, I didn’t care about another trek through the lightning plains.
And I largely didn’t. The save file for Final Fantasy X-2 has a percent completion tracker on it, and I finished the game with about 60% completed. Now, some of those side quests can be kind of funny or sweet, or sometimes will shed a bit more light on certain characters, but at the end of the day it felt like a relentless grind. Running all the way up and down the Mi’ihen Highroad is fine once. Not over and over again.
The plot of Final Fantasy X-2 generally revolves around the actions of two competing factions. New Yevon and The Youth League. New Yevon seeks to maintain the power structure Yevon held in Final Fantasy X, despite the actions of Yuna revealing the corruption within the orginzation. The Youth League, on the other hand seek to uncover the secrets of Spira, including everything Yevon was hiding from the populace. As membership in The Youth League expanded rapidly, they became more hot-headded in their approaches, being openly hostile to anyone defending or even being tangentially related to Yevon, new or old. There was one moment where an NPC basically spat at Yuna and said “the time of the summoners is over. Aeons are gone, Summoners are useless now”, which is a wild thing to say after everything Yuna did for the populace in Final Fantasy X. But then again, I kind of get it. Yevon was a fraud, and the world has fundamentally changed. Still, I was shocked at the lack of reverence for Yuna after she delivered the eternal calm, considering the god-hero status Auron, Jecht, and Braska received after defeating Sin on their pilgrimage.
Because the structure of Final Fantasy X-2 lets you pick and choose which location you want to go to in the order you see fit, the story isn’t as cohesive or punchy as Final Fantasy X. And there’s a lot less of it, too. Each chapter has a handful of cutscenes to move the main plot forward, and you can count the CG cutscenes in the game on one hand. There isn’t an emotional build up throughout the game, instead any emotional moments are kind of built and resolved within their own side-quest encounters. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t hit the same was that Final Fantasy X did.
Basically under Besaid there was a giant machina weapon named Vagnagun, and 1000 years ago some plucky kid from Zanarkand wanted to use to to stop the war between Besaid and Zanarkand so he could save his summoner girlfriend. But they died, executed by firing squad. But their souls remained, and that plucky kid looks kind of like Tidus, which is who Yuna saw in that Sphere that Kimhari gave her to start the game. The leaders from New Yevon and The Youth League try to figure out what to do about Vegnagun, but while they’re standing in the Farplane, Shuyin (the Tidus look-alike) posesses one of the leaders, and takes him and Vegnagun deep into the Farplane, with the other faction leaders following to try and stop it. Without the leaders, the factions begin to fight each other more earnestly.
The Gullwings decide that the only thing that could possible stop the violence is song. So they put on another concert and Yuna unites the factions with a song and dance.
With the factions united, Yuna and group dive deep into the Farplane and meet with the leaders who are at a total loss as to what to do with Vegnagun. Their plan is to force Shuyin out of his current body into Nooj’s body, which they’ve rigged to sacrifice himself to stop Shuyin once and for all.
Yuna says “I don’t like your plan. It sucks.”
Which, to be fair, she would be sensitive to the idea of someone sacrificing themselves. But she suggests “if it’s a machine, we can just take it apart”, and so the Gullwings beat the shit out of this ancient weapon and save the day.
Right from the get-go, Final Fantasy X-2 has a dramatic shift in tone from Final Fantasy X, and that’s communicated immediately with the jpop concert opening. If you come into this game expecting another beautiful, meloncholic story, well, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Final Fantasy X-2 reminds me of all the mediocre fan-fictions I read as a teenager. Taking the characters we fell in love with, sliding in a self-insert, and then going on wacky adventures with little consequence or thought as to the wider world and narrative the original media set. I don’t necessarily hate Final Fantasy X-2’s story, but I certainly don’t respect it the way I respect Final Fantasy X.
Gameplay
Right off the bat Final Fantasy X-2 hits you with the changes to its battle system. The ATB is back, meaning the combat happens in real time. Also, it’s pretty fast paced and chaotic. More than once I’ve lost a character to just some bad timing and me spending just a bit too long drilling into menus trying to find the item that I was looking for.
The real big gameplay element that most of the story focuses on is the Dresspheres, which allow your three characters to change jobs mid-battle. By pressing L1 you pull up a menu and you can swap your job, triggering a magical girl style costume change. After the sparkles settle, the character can then use the skills associated with their new job.
Each character earns skills for each of their jobs individually. Just because Yuna learned all the White Mage Skills doesn’t mean that Rikku and Paine will be any help healing the party. On one hand, I get it, but on the other hand, it’s a tedious ass grind to acquire all the skills for each job for each character. This just naturally pushes each of your characters into archetypes, leaving little reason to have overlap.
The other element to the dress spheres, is the Garment Grids. These Grids are usually fairly circular and have various slots for you to place dress spheres in. The dresspheres you attach to the garment grid is what dictates which classes each character can access during each battle. Thankfully you can put the same dressphere on multiple grids.
Furthermore, most Garment Grids will offer a passive benefit as well, like letting the character cast certain spells no matter which dressphere they’re currently using. This enables a character to pull a little double duty, weilding a damage dealing class, but retaining access to some specific magics. Many Garment Grids have multi-coloured gates that will give a character a bonus if they manage to pass through all the gates. The bonus can be casting a spell for free, or bolstering a specific stat.
The Dressphere and Garment Grid system is pretty cool and unique, and surprisingly deep, but I didn’t actually end up utalitizing it all that much. In general I kept my characters locked to a specific class so I could unlock the high level skills, such as the -aga spells for Yuna as a black mage. But that left all her other classes feeling anemic by comparison, so I never switched her out. That is until I got a garment grid that let me use black manage skills, where I swapped her to a White Mage. Paine, I kept as the basic warrior class until I unlocked the Berserker class, which I switched to, so she could keep her impressive damage up.
Late in the game you can find Lore items, which, when equipped will let you access the skills from other classes. It’s something I wished was available right from the start, and would have encouraged me to shift my classes more frequently, if I could continue to access the skills I’d already earned rather than leaving them behind entirely.
Aesthetically, whenever you switch dresspheres, that character changes their costume too, but only in the battle. In the overworld, the three characters retain their default class costumes. I liked discovering each of the characters costumes, but oh my goodness the fan service was so gratuitous. It felt like every costume has the entire midriff section just clawed away, and the characters loved their booty-shorts and short skirts. Seriously, I felt shame and embarrassment while playing Final Fantasy X-2, to the point where I wouldn’t play it if my wife or daughter were home, lest they ask me why the characters in the game weren’t wearing any clothes
The Thief dressphere is probably the worst offender for skimpy-ness. Unfortunately that’s Rikku’s default costume for the entire game.
Overall, Final Fantasy X-2 is a fairly easy game. Once you lock in your classes and start unlocking their skills, you can cruise through most of the battles. That said, every now and then a ‘normal’ random encounter would KO my entire party. Sometimes, things happen, but overall the random battles were pretty easy.
I did run into some big troubles right at the end of the game when I messed up a final puzzle and didn’t realize you could reset it, so I spent a couple hours grinding levels and skills so I could beat this insanely difficult boss. The challenge with the boss was that he would hit for obscene damage, and healing himself for the same amount of damage, so I had two characters dedicated to healing or maintaining buffs, leaving the third character to be the damage dealer. The downside being that character was only doing 100 to 300 more damage than the boss was healing with every attack, so it was a very slow, attritional battle for me. Oh, and the boss had 144,000 HP. Yes, this battle took me FOREVER.
The upside to grinding up to a point where I could beat this super boss, was that it made the games final boss a cake-walk. It turns out you’re not supposed to beat that super boss, you’re supposed to solve the puzzle, which lets you skip that boss. And I’ll be honest, I ended up grinding my berserker to getting the Eject skill, and then just yeeted that boss right out of the arena. Cheesy, I know, but I hate grinding.
Final Thoughts
Final Fantasy X-2 is one of the rare games in the Final Fantasy franchise that has multiple endings. I got the normal ending with a 56% completion score. I think it would be fun to play through the game again, retaining all the skills and items I earned on my first playthrough, having multiples of each of the dresspheres, and discovering some of the sidequests that I left unfinished. I think that feature makes Final Fantasy X-2 one of the most replayable Final Fantasy games in the franchise.
Unfortunately for me, the plot is disappointing and utterly cheesy, with the power of song and love being the major problem solvers in this story. Further to that, the gratuitous costumes and the grindy nature of the game makes me not want to revisit it again, despite the New Game Plus feature showing up for the first time in franchise history. I was okay with the Normal ending, and I’m at peace looking up the other endings on YouTube.
One of the things I praised Final Fantasy X for, was that it was very easy to play without a guide. I cannot give that same praise to Final Fantasy X-2. So many side quests require perfect knowledge, to hit that 100% completion rating to see the perfect ending is such an exercise in tedium that I cannot be bothered. Not when there are so many other great games out there to explore.
Final Fantasy X-2 is the embodiment of a direct-to-video sequel. It reminds me so much of the Fan-Fictions I used to read and write back in the day. It’s a side-quest filled, asset-flip romp in Spira, with little regard for the themes and gravitas that made the source media so great. It’s the Mulan II of the Final Fantasy Franchise.
Next for me is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a game I’ve played half a dozen times and know that I love. I was going to proceed to Final Fantasy XII, but my friend who is willing to play it alongside me just got Final Fantasy VII:Rebirth, so I’ll hold off on my mainline adventures a little while longer.
The two-player-only category of games is a crowded genre. It’s crowded with a lot of extremely good games, and I’m not even talking about games that play more players but also happen to play really well at two, like Race for the Galaxy or Innovation. I’m talking about games that are specifically designed for two players and two players only. 7 Wonders Duel, Targi, Star Realms, Splendor Duel, Patchwork, you know the ones. Among all those two-player games, one of the first 2 player games I ever played, and to this day remains one of the best 2 player game in my mind, is Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon in 2009.
In Jaipur, both players are trying to become the best merchant around. Each player is dealt five cards to start, and those cards can be one of six different types of goods. There are the basic goods: leather, spices, and cloth, and the luxury goods: silver, gold, and rubies. The cards can also be camels. Camels never live in your hand, but they sit in front of you on the table. This is important because the hand limit is a huge thing to contend with in Jaipur.
Between the two players is a market of five cards. On your turn, you’ll do one action, and there are a couple of different actions available to you. Probably the easiest one is selling goods. Beside the card market is an arrangement of cardboard pogs, discs arranged in ascending value, with the highest-value token sitting on the top of each stack. Each type of good has its own value structure, and they decrease in value at different rates. The first leather sold is worth five points, but the last five are only worth a point each. Meanwhile, all five silver tokens are worth five points each. The coveted rubies are even better, with the first two sold worth seven points each and the remaining three worth five.
Whenever you sell a set of goods, you take that many tokens from the supply and add them to your area. Those become your points at the end of the round. You can also attract a bonus token if you sell three, four, or five of a good at once. Selling three goods gets you a bonus worth anywhere from one to three points. Selling four gets you four to six points, and selling five gets you a juicy eight to ten points. Because of that, it’s often worth holding out for those extra cards before cashing in.
Another action you can take is trading goods. You can take any number of cards from the market row, but you must place an equal number of cards back into it. This is helpful if, for example, you have two silver, a leather, and a cloth in hand and there are two more silvers sitting in the market. You can grab those silvers and replace them with the leather and cloth. This is where the camels come in. You can always use camels when trading, placing them into the market in exchange for other goods. But here’s where that hand limit matters. You can only hold seven cards in your hand at any time. If you’re already at that limit, you can’t take any more.
The last action is taking camels. If there are camels in the market row, you can simply take all of them and add them to your herd. The market then refills from the deck, potentially offering lucrative goods to your opponent.
Players take turns going back and forth, trading, selling, and accruing camels until three stacks of goods tokens have been depleted. At the end of the round, whoever has the most camels earns a five-point bonus, and then whoever has the most points wins the round. The winner of the game is the first player to win two rounds.
Jaipur is the kind of game that you teach someone who is kind of into games, in order to get them really into games. It’s a card game that feels unique and interesting, and when you walk away from it you can’t help but think about how you could have played better. It’s the kind of genius design that just sticks in your brain.
The push and pull of wanting to hoard goods until you have five of a kind for that really juicy bonus token is constantly juxtaposed against the diminishing returns of waiting too long. It’s not uncommon for one player to notice the other is hoarding all the spices, only to sell two spices from their own hand instead. They don’t get a set bonus, but they do snag the two highest-value spice tokens and leave only the low-value scraps behind. Suddenly that big stockpile your opponent has been carefully building doesn’t look nearly as impressive.
There aren’t enough good things to say about Jaipur. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s replayable, it’s competitive. It’s everything I want from a two-player game. If you have someone in your life who likes playing games with you, this is the perfect game to keep in your bag at all times.
Now, it is a little bit more than just a deck of cards, which makes it slightly awkward if you want to sit down at a coffee shop or in an airport and instantly start playing. But man, is it worth it.
There have been so many times where I’ve been absolutely convinced that I’ve won. I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. Look at all these goods I’ve collected.” Then final scoring happens and I realize I’m somehow almost twenty points behind. Part of that comes from the fact that the value of the scoring tokens are hidden from the other player. You know the value of the goods tokens that have been taken, but once they’re face down you can’t easily recount everything and determine exactly where your opponent stands. Then you add in the set bonus tokens, which are drawn face down, and now you have no idea whether they just scored one point or three points for that sale of three goods last turn.
That little bit of mystery keeps both players on edge. It keeps both players making difficult decisions. Do you take the lucrative points now, or do you chase the bigger payday later? Because that later may never come…
Jaipur is one of those games I could talk about all day. If I were to create a Meeple and the Moose Hall of Fame list, a collection of games that I think are brilliant, nearly perfect, and that everyone should play, Jaipur would be high on that list. In case you’re wondering, a Hall of Fame is different from a Top 100 list. I love Jaipur. It is in my Top 100, though perhaps not as high as you might expect given all the praise I’ve lavished on it here. That mostly comes down to personal proclivities and preferences. I can recognize that Jaipur is a triumph regardless if there are other games I’d usually rather play.
Jaipur has been around for as long as I’ve been involved in board gaming. It was a game that my wife and I played a ton when we first started in the hobby, and even today, when someone tells me, “Oh yeah, I like Catan,” or “I’ve played Ticket to Ride,” Jaipur is one of the first games I reach for. It’s a game that shows people what else games can be.
