Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

Rating:

System: Wii
Publisher: Square Enix
Players: 1
Cost: $15-$30+

Premise-

Set in the Crystal Chronicles universe a young king is tasked to rebuild a ruined city with the help of his friends and hired adventurers.

Gameplay-

The player takes control of the young king and starts off on his task to once again bring glory to the city. This is done by hiring adventurers to go out and gather resources for you, using those resources to build houses and shops, and collecting a tax from your subjects to get better equipment and hire new adventurers. Adventurers are controlled by the AI once they go out on a mission (referred to as a behest) so you are never actually battling monsters. However, you do get updated with their progress with a type of RSS feed on the top right corner. Once the day ends you also get a detailed report on the entire dungeon crawling mission. A day in this game is roughly 5 minutes which you can skip ahead if you’ve done everything for that day which is a nice feature.

Controls-

You have many controller options available to you but I just stuck with the nunchuck and wiimote which worked well enough. There was never a point of the game where I thought that they could have tightened up the response or had a button layout. The only motion functionality that the game used was to give the wiimote a quick shake to call your helper which seemed more like a gimmick but it was still better than using the minus button.

Graphics-

For a Wii-Ware game I don’t think the graphical direction they went was a good choice. The colors are very bland and don’t match the character design whatsoever. I’m not entirely sure what art direction they were going for but it doesn’t work. For the cutesy character models I think cell shading would have worked wonders as the colors would have complimented the character design much better.

Closing Thoughts-

The core game got pretty repetitive after 2 hours into it. There was not much building or character variety unless you chose to download all the extra content which made this game around $30 instead of $15. Square Enix should have bundled everything together for $15 instead of trying to nickel and dime their customers which would have made this game much more enjoyable. As a $15 game it feels incomplete but a $30 game makes it too expensive for what it is.