Build Your Ultimate Kingdom!
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as King, or simply FFCCMLAK for a not so short abbreviation, developed by Square Enix was released in 2008 for Nintendo's WiiWare platform. At the time of release it was one of the first WiiWare games. Overall FFCCMLAK can be a fun and addicting game if you can get through some of the boredom associated with a kingdom building simulation game.
The main premiss in FFCCMLAK is too rebuild your father's kingdom that was destroyed previously by the Dark Lord. The kingdom is completely empty when you start out, and you must build it up slowly building by building. Buildings can be built anywhere where the ground is a shiny green color, and how the town is constructed is completely up to the player. There are many different types of buildings to construct. The core buildings are houses. The houses allow citizens to move into the town, and you collect tithes or taxes from them to help fund the kingdoms development. Besides houses there are also multiple different buildings to construct including weapon shops, armor shops, bakeries, emporium shops, and temples. All of the shops have to be upgraded using money to provide better equipment and skills to the adventurers. By the time the game has progressed to the end your kingdom should be nearly full and it is very rewarding to follow your progression and see a barren land turn into a vast kingdom.
Also, with every house that is built a new adventurer will be available to summon into dungeons for battle. Adventurers will ask to be employed by the kingdom, and after you pay some money you can send them off into many different level dungeons to fight monsters and gain a resource called elementite. Adventures similar to some Final Fantasy games take on the roles of different classes including Theifs, Warriors, Black Mages, and White Mages. To obtain a class you must construct the building corresponding to it. For example, to get Black Mages in your parties you must construct a Black Mage School so the adventures can learn the trades. Going back to elementite, it is used to build the buildings in the town. Each and every building needs the elementite, for example, to build a house you would need 100 elementite. i never had any trouble with running out of elementite and you will more than likely have plenty of it.
Each day in the kingdom you are given a certain time to do all the daily duties such as assigning adventurers to dungeons and constructing buildings. During the downtime of the day you can talk to the citizens to boost the kingdom's morale. I found talking to the citizens to be such a waste of time that i ended up spending a lot of days just sitting there or simply skipping ahead to the next day. When the morale of the kingdom goes up you obtain spheres which are used to enhance the kingdom. Despite being kind of addicting there is no doubt that getting through FFCCMLAK is a pretty hefty grind, especially during the late game. I found myself being bored at times with the game, but I also had the feeling of "well ill do just one more day". Soon after that i found myself playing for a few hours at a time. In total it took me about 17 hours to get through the game, which in my opinion is a good value for a $15 game. FFCCMLAK is definitely a game that you will either love or hate. All in all I wish there was more gameplay stuff to do during the downtime instead of just talking to the citizens. I would have easily enjoyed the game a lot more if this was the case.
The art style of the game is pretty good. The kingdom is bright and colorful and has this sort of cartoony aesthetic to it that I really liked. You can tell however that they wanted to do more with the visuals, but were held back by file size constraints. Where this is most apparent is with the games audio. You only get a handful of tracks in the game, and you will mostly hear the same one play over during the normal day time of the game. Don't get me wrong the music is good, but you will go nuts hearing the same tunes over and over.
As a note, FFCCMLAK has a ton of DLC which are essentially micro transactions. I found none of it really worth my time. You can buy extra buildings, dungeons, and even costumes for yourself or your advisers. There is even DLC to add two new races of people to your kingdom.
Overall I had mixed feelings on the game, but I do think it is just about average and was 15$ well spent. I got a good amount of play out of the game and i enjoyed most of it.
3.5 stars (7.0)
Gameplay: 7
Replayability/Value: 7
Graphics: 7
Audio: 6
Presentation/Design/Story: 7
