"When is Final Fantasy not Final Fantasy? When it's a beautiful snail's-paced world-builder, that's when."

Introduction

Downloading My Life as a King expecting a traditional Final Fantasy would be a mistake. But if you're willing to give a little love and understanding, you may just uncover a gem that will soak up more Wii time than you anticipated.

Storyline/characters

The story (so far, I've not completed it) is as functional as it needs to be, and in the initial stages, barely does more than set a precedent for the game-mechanic of building stuff in your small kingdom. You're initially accompanied by two different courtiers, Chime and Yurg, who each provide a supporting role to your infant majesty. Chime takes care of the finances and kingdom reports, while Yurg looks after your adventurers. You have returned to your Kingdom to find it empty, and a large talking crystal (yeah, just stick with it) charges you with the rebuilding of the Kingdom and bringing the citizens back, as well as bestowing the power of Architek upon you. With this power, you can summon houses, taverns, bakeries and all manner of other buildings onto the glowing squares of the town and thus repopulate it. When you've built some abodes, the people will return to them and then you can assign jobs to the people and get them to do your bidding.

Gameplay

And that's where the core gameplay kicks in. Each building requires a certain amount of the crystal's elementite, but the supply is finite, so your loyal subjects must be employed to go out into the wilderness and raid the various locations for this material, so that you can keep on building. Defeating the bosses of each dungeon will either unlock new building types or increase the limit you can have of the buildings you've already learned.

The townspeople are quite willing to go out and battle monsters on your behalf, following the orders you pin on the notice board each morning, which is fortunate, as the king is forbidden from leaving the grounds of the town. Some players might find this a tad limiting, and you are certainly left with the impression that the king is a fragile leader that everyone indulges rather than a commander they all obey. It's hard not to feel a wistful twinge as you watch your adventurers gallop through the castle gates to earn more booty for your burgeoning town; the game map is huge, but the world is small.

So what do you do while the adventurers are out doing battle with nefarious beasties? Well, mostly nothing, actually. You can stomp around town, speak to the townspeople, build new buildings (if you've enough materials), but you can't get away from the fact that you're involvement is minimal for most of each game-day. You can quite easily spend sixty seconds sending your adventurers off, putting down a building and then leave the game running while you make a cup of tea, safe in the knowledge that you won't die and nothing bad will happen. Even if your adventurers are bested in battle, they'll trudge home again, demoralised, but safe and sound. Fair enough, they might not be willing to go out and fight the very next day, but after that, they will. But there's no denying that the game is limited in what you can do. For example, you can only talk to people who have a smiley-face icon above their heads. The appearance of this icon is timed, so it will only appear for a portion of the day. Manage to find that person and you'll raise their morale by speaking to them, but that means you inevitably just end up running to the highest vantage point of the town, looking for the smiley faces and then pelting back towards them as quickly as possible. You can use stored morale to encourage better relationships between your townspeople, or give adventurers a stat boost before going out on the next mission, but the in-game tutorial that explains this is crystal clear on some points and disarmingly vague on others. It's ironic that the further you get into the game, the less there is to do, after the initial flurry of activity in the morning of each day and the placing of earned buildings.

Graphics/sound.

As a downloadable-only game, you might not expect too much in terms of visuals, especially with the size limit imposed by good old Nintendo, but My Life as a King doesn't actually fare too badly in this respect. The colour palette uses mainly pastel hues, which rather than seeming washed-out, lends an old-world feel to the game. The character models are not the most varied, but the different costumes that pertain to each job give an immediate indicator of who does what, so you know which specialism that character possesses. The houses are pretty, but identical, meaning that if you want to find a specific person in the town, you'd best remember where you put their house, or be prepared to run all over the place looking for them. Larger and more specialised shops are colour-coded by their roofs, so you can spot them from afar, which is a nice touch, but up close, they don't appear any different.

However, the game can suffer from horrific slowdown at times, especially when you're putting the buildings down and people are milling around. It's not a game-breaker, and perhaps to be expected, but it's a bit annoying all the same.

As far as the sounds go, it's functional, but nothing spectacular. The music is calm and peaceful, the bells and whistles all gave their place, but there is no character speech, apart from Wind Waker-style noises to indicate shock/delight etc. This is no bad thing, but worth mentioning.

Downloadable content.

It seems strange to me to have downloadable content at a game's release, and there's no doubt it's a cynical move on Square's part. Sure, you can get a fully playable, perfectly acceptable version of the game for your 1500 points; but when you look at the descriptions of the additional content, you can't get away from the fact that a pretty big options-box is missing from the start. Personally, having watched video previews before release, I had pretty much decided that this was a game I would like, so I had no problem splashing out the additional points for some of the extras. Would you miss them if you didn't have them? Hard to say. I'm at day 85 and the additional stuff is just starting to make itself apparent, so at the very least, the first few hours will be identical whether you buy the extras or not. I don't regret the purchase though, as the game is proving pretty absorbing so far, and I'd rather not have the niggling feeling that I was missing out on something. Ultimately, this decision will be down to the individual – I will say that the extras are very much extras; no core gameplay element is missing without the additional content. For me, given the amount of dross available on the Virtual Console, I felt it was better to fully flesh out this larger, more complete game experience than download another SNES game that I'd end up playing for half and hour and then wishing I hadn't bothered.

Conclusion

So, you might think that this review hasn't been wholly positive, despite a reasonably high score. There are a number of issues with the game which I've tried to detail above, but there's one point I haven't mentioned – it's bloody addictive.

The game has that crucial ‘one more go' aspect, or rather ‘one more day' that fewer and fewer games seem to possess in the HD age. It has delicacy, grace, appeal, and unfettered gameplay that is a breath of fresh air in a console age dominated by FPSs with louder bangs and bigger guns. You'll learn to love the town and it's inhabitants, and want to build it well. With a little more work, it could have been a full-price disc-based game, but it does what it does extremely well, and with a charm that many other games could do well to emulate.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/04/08

Game Release: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (EU, 05/20/08)