Certain games have an uncanny ability to entrance unwary gamers into obsession. Games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and pretty much any game with the word “Tycoon” in the title challenge gamers to use their heads and develop the world around them. Whether it is farming or building roller coasters, something about being able to manage what might seem to be job-like tasks seems to fixate players. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is one such title. < /p>
This title, available on Nintendo’s new WiiWare downloadable game service, allows you to step into the shoes of the young son of an exiled king. You return to your homeland to find there is nothing left, save for your old castle and a giant crystal in the center of town. Fortunately for you the crystal has magical powers that it bestows on you. The crystal speaks to you and tells you that you have a power that allows you to build structures out of your memory by combining the crystal element with your own will. Your chief duty as the ruler (and creator) of this kingdom, is to create structures for this town.
You use this power initially to build a few houses, and as you build resident return to the once-empty kingdom to live in their newly recreated homes. But you soon run out of the crystal element you need for the construction. You learn that you can find more of this element by exploring nearby caves and fighting dungeon bosses. But there’s one problem: you’re the king! You can’t simply leave you’re duties to go out questing! Luckily for you, the citizens enjoying their newly created homes provide you with their youth to train as adventurers. It will be up to you to assign daily quests and tasks to these adventuring classes.
The two main focuses of the game really rely on your ability to do two basic things: civic planning and team management. You have a fairly large area initially to work with, but as you unlock more types of structures, like large houses, emporiums, parks, and guilds, you will see that you will have to plan very carefully to get the most efficient use out of the land that you have. You will also have to manage an ever-growing team of adventurers. You will be able to gain more adventurers as you build more homes and entice more people move back to your village. This means you will have a major discrepancy in the levels of your adventurers, and you will have to plan different missions for lower level adventurers as well as higher level ones. Adventurers will also not be able to go out every day, as they will lose motivation based on their success with previous missions. They will also become tired after a while, so you will have to keep an eye on each one individually.
In addition to these two main focuses of the game (you will be building and going out on adventures every day), you also have the broader task of increasing the morale of your kingdom. You can make people happy by talking to them, building places for them to shop and eat, and creating parks. It is important to keep your citizens happy because they will provide you with morale orbs after they reach a certain happiness point. And these orbs can be traded in at your castle to increase the value and productivity of your land.
As you can probably tell, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is a very involved title. There is so much to do. It is very easy to lose yourself for hours at a time just working on earning one certain structure, upgrading your adventurers or even sending out teams to recover one certain raw material or artifact. It really is a sweeping title, and its depth is quite amazing considering the fact that this is a downloadable title.
Graphics in this title are not that great, considering some of the other Wii titles that are out. It looks like a super-sized version of the Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates title for the DS, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as this title is actually one of the best-looking DS games I’ve ever encountered. But when you compare it to games like Super Mario Galaxy or Super Smash Bros. Brawl, this game doesn’t look too hot. But when you consider the fact that this is a downloadable title for a console that has no hard drive, you can’t knock them too much for trimming the fat where the visuals are considered.
Sound in this title is also very truncated, but works well enough. The background music is very nicely orchestrated and sounds great. However, this title is lacking greatly in the voice acting department, and only features short character utterances like “uh-huh” or “oh.” All the dialogue is delivered via scrolling text, and the occasional utterances actually get a little annoying. Having just scrolling text without the occasional vocal noises would have been preferable in this case.
Control in this game is fairly easy, and you have your option of using the GameCube controller, the Classic controller, the Wii-mote and Nunchuck, or the Wii-mote alone. But no matter how you control it, you’ll only really be using the joystick (or control pad if it is just the Wii-Mote) to wander around and then a quick button tap or shake of the Wii-mote to pull up various menus throughout the game. The Wii-mote and Nunchuck is perhaps the best control scheme in my opinion, but it doesn’t really make too much difference as the gameplay basically consists of running around and making menu-based decisions.
Overall, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is a very nice title for the budding WiiWare service. It features very deep managerial gameplay, which it is easy to become entranced with. This title gives you so many options for gameplay that it is hard to resist the urge to level up your adventurers just one more time, or unlock a certain building before shutting it off. This title will definitely entertain fans of this type of managerial gameplay, and will keep you coming back for more!
RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.1 Graphics
On par with the Nintendo DS Crystal Chronicles game. It doesn’t look particularly good, but it doesn’t look awful either. 4.0 Control
There are multiple control schemes, and you really can’t go wrong controlling this title. 3.5 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Background music is nicely orchestrated, but voice acting is sadly limited to the occasional “uh-huh” or “oh.” 4.5
Play Value
This title is amazingly deep, and you’ll be surprised at how addicted you’ll become! There’s so many structures to build, dungeons to explore, and things to unlock that you’ll get lost in the Crystal Chronicles world!
4.1 Overall Rating – Great
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.
Game Features: