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Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – My Life as a King

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Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles : My Life as a King was one of the first WiiWare games released on the Nintendo Wii as well as one of the most expensive WiiWare games to date. It is a sequal to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the Nintendo Gamecube and takes a very different route to the other game. Whilst in the other game, you could take your adventurers out and fight monsters, you take the role of King Leo (You can change names however) who has just been granted the power of Architek to help rebuild the town that he inherited from his now missing father. This means, you do not fight, but instead build and manage a town. How does this fare and does it live up to its previous game? Find out after the jump.

Characters/Storyline

The main character of the game is King Leo, you do not hear or read what he says throughout the game however he is your controllable character so you do learn to live with his quiet speech. Generally he is a king who is there with every intent on having his new kingdom prosper, even willing to plunge into a fight with a monster (or penguin), only to get held back by his advisors. His story is that his father King Epitav disappears in battle and he eventually is assigned the task of rebuilding the same kingdom, using Architek, which somehow brings the old residents of the homes back into the kingdom (Got no idea how that works…). He has a number of different costumes, two being DLC and two being shown in-game, these being his normal royalty outfit (See left) and his holiday outfit (See Right) which he isn’t originally happy about. Overall, generic character with a bit of a history, nothing that special.

Chime is the main advisor and sister like person towards Leo. She was wondering the world with him and Hugh Yurg in search of this kingdom now owned. Now, she spends her time being at Leo’s call through the use of a bell, which allows you to go to bed early or raise morale in the town. She is also the annoying one who sends you to bed before you do something important which always seems to happen. Her personality is widely unknown but she is supportive towards Leo and runs the tavern in the town. Her most important functions however are the Daily Reports which summarises what occurs in the previous day, setting daily missions and with DLC support, Chimes room which allows you to rename characters and do a lot more of handy stuff.

The Adventurers do not play much of a role in the story except for a few vocal bits for a few select characters, mostly from the first two you recruit. You originally only start with Clavat Warriors and you soon can recruit White Mages, Black Mages and Thiefs. Selkies, Yukes and Lilities are also available within the game with DLC expansion and the occasional traveller visit.

Overall, the characters are pretty plain however for a Wii-Ware game that only has a certain storage capability, it isn’t that bad and there are some decent personalities within the group of characters such as the talking penguin Pavlov who is the games comical character, causing chase wars with Leo and screaming random complaints. Storyline is decent for a Wii-Ware game, and it is pretty good for the price and what the gameplay is like. Not even close to most games on the market through, but at least you work towards the goal on a continuous storyline instead of letting you aimlessly play the game.

Music

There is a good variety of songs within the game with approximately 15-20 different tracks, which I think is decent for a Wii-Ware game. However, after a few hours, you will find that some of the songs will be digging at your ears a little bit, leaving you hoping for a bit of variety, as only about a 1/4 of the tracks are town tunes, which you spend a lot of time in. For the first few hours through, the music is plesant and bright.

Graphics

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The graphics within the game are similar, if not the same quality of the ones found in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. They are pretty good but still a few years out of date for when this game was released last year. Several adventurer designs had been ripped from the original, mostly for the Clavat warriors, whilst all other classes only recieved one character style, meaning that all your Clavat Mages looked the same and all the Selkie Thiefs looked identical. Got annoying having identical characters so I purposefully tried to vary mine as much as possible. With that, other Villagers looked pretty plain, with two designs for mother and father each and one design per gender for all the other groups including brothers, sisters, maids etc. Was hoping for at the very least all the villager styles from Crystal Chronicles on GameCube to be recycled, however no luck there…

Graphics within the town were appropriate with, whilst all buildings of the same class looking familiar, when assorted they didnt look that bad. If you were to go up into the tower and view the outskirts of the town, you will find several locations from the main map surrounding the town, which is some good use of detail. Overall, not as good as I would have expected but good within reason.

Gameplay

The gameplay is simply this, you hire adventurers from the towns youth and then send them off to far away dungeons in order to gather Elementite to be able to build new buildings as well as other items to upgrade your weapons and armor past a threshold. You also have the role of building new homes, buildings and training facilities in order to have the kingdom running effectively. This may sound bland but it is actually very addictive, and I have invested many hours working on my towns to have them set out structurally perfect and simply reading the daily reports are interesting. If you don’t want to send your adventurers out, you can declare a national holiday when even your king changes personality and you can socalise with your adventurers and their families in order to raise town morale, which you can use to upgrade your whole kingdom and gain special abilities. It is basically, a building simulator taken a different route and made fun through the use of recruiting adventurers, managing them and talking with villagers and interesting personalities.

Replayability

I have had this game since my birthday last year, originally I played through the normal mode and then completed the hard mode. I am now playing the Very Hard mode and really enjoying it still. With the DLC benefits as well, if you enjoyed it through normal, it is safe to say you will enjoy it through the other modes, as they both unlock new dungeons, extra buildings, addition to levels and generally a more challenging experience. Playing with the same file however, once you clear all the dungeons, really no need to continue playing the file except to keep filling villagers requests and reaching max levels (Which I think is 99). The DLC does add the extra gameplay, especially the Infinite Tower (I think it is called), which gives more gameplay value than all the dungeons and only costs 300 wii-points. I personally think the extra DLC costumes are pretty good as well, althrough I ran out of points to buy any! Buildings look quite good as well althrough not sure if I would have bought them…. but definately Dungeon Packs are a must.

Personal Opinion

I still feel this is one of the best Wii-Ware games they have released as for the money I spent on it, it has definately given me the value for money. I do feel that it was lacking in some things that could have been added in there at the extra expense of a storage block or two, but overall, pretty satisfied. There were a few problems that annoyed me however, small trivial things but problems none the less:

  • 16 Adventurer limit while the house cap is 40.
  • You couldnt choose where adventurers should go… so you could have an important mission that is really hard but your top two teams prefer to go levelling up in a newbie area.
  • Lack of character and villager designs.

Still, pretty good game if you have Wii-Points, infact… if you do have Wii-Points, this is a game you should seriously consider at only 1,500 points.

Overall Score

Characters: 6/10

Storyline: 7/15

Music: 10/15

Graphics: 9/15

Gameplay: 18/20

Replayability: 10/10

Personal Opinion: 12/15

Total: 72/100 (72% – B)
Special Thanks

The Normal American and Japanese 「Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as a King」 Official Websites for Graphics and DLC Chart which I was not able to gather from my own console.

Sam
Sam
Founder of The Otaku's Study. I have been exploring this labyrinth of fandom these last fifteen years, and still nowhere close to the exit yet. Probably searching for a long time to come.

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