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Review - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

posted by nikki at 11:00 am.

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Damn you Square-Enix. You do this to me every time… I’m busy playing one game, and then you go and release something new, and said game instantly begins collecting dust on my game shelf (in this case, Dead Rising is the poor unfortunate). It happened with Final Fantasy XII, it happened with Crisis Core, and now, of course, it’s happened with My Life as a King.

My Life as a King is available as WiiWare from the Wii Shop Channel for a somewhat pricey 1500 Wii Points (it’s actually the most expensive off all the U.S. WiiWare launch titles), and I’ll be honest… I’m cheap. If it hadn’t had the Final Fantasy moniker, I probably would have passed.

The first thing you might notice when and if you download Square-Enix’s first foray into WiiWare is that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is *gasp* not an RPG. Apparently they can make other kinds of games over there in Sephiroth-ville. No, My Life as a King is, in fact, a civilization simulator in which you are a king and you must rebuild your kingdom.

That’s not to say the standard Final Fantasy gloss hasn’t been put on this game. Even though it is a sim, it still sort of has the feel of an RPG. There is a battle system, even though you yourself don’t do any battling, and there is an engrossing (if somewhat simple for the franchise) plot that is revealed gradually through cutscenes that seem to come up about once a month (game time, obviously) or so.

To be honest, the first few days in your kingdom are a little boring. You spend a fair amount of time talking to Chime, your chancellor, whom you summon to your side by ringing a bell. Chime is in charge of the command menu, and will help you build, boost morale of your citizens, and tell you when it’s time to go to bed. Things are linear, you have almost nothing to work with, no one to talk to, and you’re stuck in tutorial city learning how to do the fun stuff but not really doing much of it.

And then the fun begins. Once you pick up the necessary fundamentals, you have a lot more freedom, and things get a lot more interesting. Instead of just doing what the game dictates, you can begin to commission adventurers, send them out to fight monsters, and build new structures to bring in more people to get more money to hire more adventurers to fight more monsters, and so on and so forth.

Initially, the days are short, cash is low, and buildings are limited (all you can build at first is one kind of very simple house). What really makes this game work for me is the desire to find more stuff. You know there’s stuff out there to unlock and you want it, damn it, so you start sending people out to unlock it.

Half the fun of the game, like many sims, is trying to keep up with the needs of the people. The adventuring system adds a nice touch, because in addition to keeping your adventurers in good spirits, you must also make sure they’re trained well enough to complete the the dungeons you send them to, make weapons and other equipment available to them, and ensure that they have time to rest. Things may start out slow, but they pick up quickly, and soon you have a lot of people who need bakeries, and parks, and sharp, pointy swords.

My Life as a King is also the first (and currently the only) WiiWare title to utilize the Pay to Play feature, which allows you to download additional (but optional) content for the game. There are already a number of options currently available:

1. Dungeon Pack (300 Wii Points) - adds 11 new dungeons to the game

2. Lilty Hut (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Lilties

3. Selkie Den (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Selkies

4. Yuke Shack (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Yukes

5. Triple Race Pack (800 Wii Points) - combines the Lilty Hut, Selkie Den, and Yuke Shack content into one, slightly discounted download.

6. New Royal Outfit (100 Wii Points) - a new costume for the king

7. New Chancelor Outfit (100 Wii Points) - a new costume for Chime

8. Luxurious House (100 Wii Points) - unlocks a new house style that greatly increases income.

9. Sacred Shrines (200 Wii Points) - unlocks Shrines, which temporarily boost your adventures’ stats.

The nice thing about My Life as a King is that you can pick it up and play it for ten or fifteen minutes, or you can sit and play for 3 hours at a time, depending on what kind of mood you happen to be in.

The downsides? Well, for one thing, there’s a lot of repetition. For the most part you’re really just doing the same series of actions over and over to unlock more content and advance further into the game… but then that’s true of just about every sim I’ve ever played (which is probably why I don’t often get into them). For me, though, the story and the adventuring system somewhat make up for the repetitive nature of the game.

On the whole, it’s by no means my favorite Final Fantasy title, but it’s still fun and strangely addictive. I give it an overall 7 out of 10.

Nikki Blight: is still trying to find that damn princess... when she's not writing fresh code for the217.com.