Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as King
Genre: City-building Simulation
Review by: Kenzo287
My question to you is did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a young King? To be able to build your kingdom as you see fit? If you said yes then you have a winner with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. The game is actually heavily story oriented. You are the son of King Epitav, the founder of a Kingdom that you and your half Clavat half Selkie Chancellor Chime and your Lility guard Hugh Yurg come across. After the events of the first game the deadly Miasma has cleared and the creatures that were born from it have become organized as if they were an army. After discovering your father's lost kingdom you gain a mysterious power called Architek. With it you can build houses and other building out of thin air. The gameplay takes place during the day where you wake up and issue behests, or quests, to your adventures, or soldiers, and then you walk around and tend to the needs of every person in your kingdom. Around sunset though you are forcibly required by Chime to retire for the night.
Here's where the gripes begin. When first starting off with your settlement the day is excessively long and you can get done pretty much everything you need to. But soon you'll find yourself running around as fast as possible to get everything done. Although you can extend this time limit by making your villagers happier you would have to spend most of the day making them happy in the first place to get to stay up at night and while the alternate nighttime music and calming look of the kingdom at night are nice rewards for your effort you are not going to get much done this way.
Then the music. Oh the music. There are less tracks in this game than the fingers on your hand. There is about 5 different songs in the whole game. Which as far as they go they're alright. The theme that plays during the actual gameplay is repetitive and annoying after the first couple of in game days. It is memorable though and most like will be engraved into your head.
Now when Crystal Chronicles first appeared on the GameCube the graphics were pretty good. Definitely far from the greatest but we couldn't complain...then. Now however we can complain and I WILL complain. The graphics are good in the extent that it is a launch title for WiiWare and I can't expect mind blowing graphics right off the gate but maybe we could have some facial expression. Like Crystal Chronicles before it, My Life As A King features characters who are smiles all the time. Even when the Dark Lord is about to destroy you both you and your subjects are smiling like the price of oil dropped to 12 cents a barrel. This is really annoying especially in some of the more serious moments of the story. The only exceptions to this rule is Hugh Yurg and all of the Yukes in the game who all have helmets with face plating so you never really know what they look like. But overall the graphics are good enough that you can tell what everything is but they are a small improvement if any at all to the original Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube.
Similar to Super Smash Bros. Brawl you can use one of four types of controllers. First up is the Wiimote by itself. Holding it like a TV remote you move with the D Pad, summon Chime with either the - button or by shaking the Wiimote. The sensor can sometimes get in the way if you forget about it. The A button let's you communicate with people but only if they have a bubble over their head which usually expresses their mood. Holding the B trigger will set the camera directly behind the King and then moving the D Pad while holding it will allow you to rotate the camera. The benefit to using the nunchuck is that all the controls remain the same except you use the analog stick to move and rotate the camera with the D Pad on the Wiimote. The Classic Controller and the GameCube controller are also supported with the L button replacing the B trigger of the Wiimote and the Y button taking the place of the shaking motion. I personally found the nunchuck to give the best experience with the GameCube and Classic Controllers to be next in line followed closely by the Wiimote which is actually pretty good in this game.
Later on in the game you will gain larger houses and shops and training facilities for you adventures who can be one of four jobs. The jobs are warrior, the default class, thief, whose skills can be used to find shortcuts to explore dungeons easier, white mage, who uses holy spells to heal and protect, and the black mage, who uses arcane magics to harm and destroy. Every morning you issue a behest to your adventures and have them explore a dungeon in order to find the location of the dungeon's boss. The next day after fully exploring a dungeon your adventurers can fight the boss. Whoever dealt the final blow will be awarded a medal of your choice the next day. This is a system that I found enjoyable and easy to use as I focused on the building of my kingdom.
Unfortunately all of the fun in building you kingdom is lost when you start to get it to grow only to have the frame rate go down and the lag go up. It becomes ridiculous at some points. With dozens of people running aroud if you want to build a house you have to summon Chime whose animation take roughly five seconds to complete with the lag, you the have to wait for the three second lag on the speech bubble. Moving your selection in the menus take a little longer than necessary and then the whole game slows down during the dramatic building animation. That is why I will not give this game higher than an 8. It is because at some points it is barely playable and is far more trouble than it's worth. These experiences are frequent but they aren't as bad as the lag one would get trying to play a FPS online through a dial up connection. While the lag take some away from the experience it does not kill it completely. The lag is over in a couple of seconds and you will then rush to the next thing on your agenda.
One revolutionary thing about this game is the inclusion of the Pay to Play function. This is downloadable content that is optional. Among these are an alternate costume for your King and one for Chime, dungeon packs which if you install will allow you to level up more to take down his royal pain in the butt the Dark Lord that much sooner, and housing for the other races of the Crystal Chronicles series although they are limited to only five houses of each. While Pay to Play is a little late to the game, games like My Life As A King and the upcoming Samba De Amigo for Wii will show off what Wii can do with DLC. Now if only we had more storage. Speaking of which there is a serious problem with not only this but all WiiWare games being so large that you will have to delete channels in order to make room for them.
Overall you can't go wrong with My Life As A King. It is deserving of the Crystal Chronicles name and will hopefully give us some insight into the upcoming Crystal Bearers. Don't let the 7.0 confuse you. this is worth every penny DLC and all. Download it you won't be disappointed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Story: [8.5/10]
Graphics: [7/10]
Sound: [7/10]
Gameplay: [8/10]
Controls: [8/10]
Overall: 7.7
By Kenzo287
Genre: City-building Simulation
Review by: Kenzo287
My question to you is did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a young King? To be able to build your kingdom as you see fit? If you said yes then you have a winner with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. The game is actually heavily story oriented. You are the son of King Epitav, the founder of a Kingdom that you and your half Clavat half Selkie Chancellor Chime and your Lility guard Hugh Yurg come across. After the events of the first game the deadly Miasma has cleared and the creatures that were born from it have become organized as if they were an army. After discovering your father's lost kingdom you gain a mysterious power called Architek. With it you can build houses and other building out of thin air. The gameplay takes place during the day where you wake up and issue behests, or quests, to your adventures, or soldiers, and then you walk around and tend to the needs of every person in your kingdom. Around sunset though you are forcibly required by Chime to retire for the night.
Here's where the gripes begin. When first starting off with your settlement the day is excessively long and you can get done pretty much everything you need to. But soon you'll find yourself running around as fast as possible to get everything done. Although you can extend this time limit by making your villagers happier you would have to spend most of the day making them happy in the first place to get to stay up at night and while the alternate nighttime music and calming look of the kingdom at night are nice rewards for your effort you are not going to get much done this way.
Then the music. Oh the music. There are less tracks in this game than the fingers on your hand. There is about 5 different songs in the whole game. Which as far as they go they're alright. The theme that plays during the actual gameplay is repetitive and annoying after the first couple of in game days. It is memorable though and most like will be engraved into your head.
Now when Crystal Chronicles first appeared on the GameCube the graphics were pretty good. Definitely far from the greatest but we couldn't complain...then. Now however we can complain and I WILL complain. The graphics are good in the extent that it is a launch title for WiiWare and I can't expect mind blowing graphics right off the gate but maybe we could have some facial expression. Like Crystal Chronicles before it, My Life As A King features characters who are smiles all the time. Even when the Dark Lord is about to destroy you both you and your subjects are smiling like the price of oil dropped to 12 cents a barrel. This is really annoying especially in some of the more serious moments of the story. The only exceptions to this rule is Hugh Yurg and all of the Yukes in the game who all have helmets with face plating so you never really know what they look like. But overall the graphics are good enough that you can tell what everything is but they are a small improvement if any at all to the original Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube.
Similar to Super Smash Bros. Brawl you can use one of four types of controllers. First up is the Wiimote by itself. Holding it like a TV remote you move with the D Pad, summon Chime with either the - button or by shaking the Wiimote. The sensor can sometimes get in the way if you forget about it. The A button let's you communicate with people but only if they have a bubble over their head which usually expresses their mood. Holding the B trigger will set the camera directly behind the King and then moving the D Pad while holding it will allow you to rotate the camera. The benefit to using the nunchuck is that all the controls remain the same except you use the analog stick to move and rotate the camera with the D Pad on the Wiimote. The Classic Controller and the GameCube controller are also supported with the L button replacing the B trigger of the Wiimote and the Y button taking the place of the shaking motion. I personally found the nunchuck to give the best experience with the GameCube and Classic Controllers to be next in line followed closely by the Wiimote which is actually pretty good in this game.
Later on in the game you will gain larger houses and shops and training facilities for you adventures who can be one of four jobs. The jobs are warrior, the default class, thief, whose skills can be used to find shortcuts to explore dungeons easier, white mage, who uses holy spells to heal and protect, and the black mage, who uses arcane magics to harm and destroy. Every morning you issue a behest to your adventures and have them explore a dungeon in order to find the location of the dungeon's boss. The next day after fully exploring a dungeon your adventurers can fight the boss. Whoever dealt the final blow will be awarded a medal of your choice the next day. This is a system that I found enjoyable and easy to use as I focused on the building of my kingdom.
Unfortunately all of the fun in building you kingdom is lost when you start to get it to grow only to have the frame rate go down and the lag go up. It becomes ridiculous at some points. With dozens of people running aroud if you want to build a house you have to summon Chime whose animation take roughly five seconds to complete with the lag, you the have to wait for the three second lag on the speech bubble. Moving your selection in the menus take a little longer than necessary and then the whole game slows down during the dramatic building animation. That is why I will not give this game higher than an 8. It is because at some points it is barely playable and is far more trouble than it's worth. These experiences are frequent but they aren't as bad as the lag one would get trying to play a FPS online through a dial up connection. While the lag take some away from the experience it does not kill it completely. The lag is over in a couple of seconds and you will then rush to the next thing on your agenda.
One revolutionary thing about this game is the inclusion of the Pay to Play function. This is downloadable content that is optional. Among these are an alternate costume for your King and one for Chime, dungeon packs which if you install will allow you to level up more to take down his royal pain in the butt the Dark Lord that much sooner, and housing for the other races of the Crystal Chronicles series although they are limited to only five houses of each. While Pay to Play is a little late to the game, games like My Life As A King and the upcoming Samba De Amigo for Wii will show off what Wii can do with DLC. Now if only we had more storage. Speaking of which there is a serious problem with not only this but all WiiWare games being so large that you will have to delete channels in order to make room for them.
Overall you can't go wrong with My Life As A King. It is deserving of the Crystal Chronicles name and will hopefully give us some insight into the upcoming Crystal Bearers. Don't let the 7.0 confuse you. this is worth every penny DLC and all. Download it you won't be disappointed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Story: [8.5/10]
Graphics: [7/10]
Sound: [7/10]
Gameplay: [8/10]
Controls: [8/10]
Overall: 7.7
By Kenzo287
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