Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King can be thought of as SimCity set in the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle’s universe.  The game starts with you arriving with your two advisor's at a town with no buildings, save for your castle.  Like most towns in the original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle game, this one has a giant crystal sitting in the middle of it, which ends up talking to you and giving your character the ability to magically create buildings. 

After completing a few tutorial missions that teach you how to create said buildings, complete with occupants, the game leaves you to build the town as you see fit.  This is done by the commissioning of adventurers, which you send off to dungeons for the good of the kingdom.  You can either have an adventurer run off to gain experience as they see fit, or you can give them a specific mission to accomplish.  There are three main reasons to give a mission to your adventures; to advance the story, to obtain the ability to create new types of buildings, or to collect the resource, called Elementite, that’s required for creating buildings.  After you have enough Elementite, you can build houses, to obtain more adventurers, shops, to provide equipment for your adventurers, and guild halls, to provide your adventurers with additional skills.

Much like other city building games My Life as a King can be quite addictive, frequently leading to a case of the “just one more turns”.  About half way through the game you’ll start unlocking other character classes and not far after that you’ll open up the ability to create adventurer parties.  As I said, the game is really addictive, but that’s also a problem because it’s really short.  I left game feeling that the game was only half finished.  You can build equipment shops, but most items that are available are upgrades to existing items.  The same goes for character classes.  For instance, My Life as a King has your typical Final Fantasy Black Mage class, but you’re limited to only a handful of spells with the Fire tree being the only elemental spell I was able to open up.

The game full announces when it’s about to end, but I found myself somewhat wishfully hoping that there would be some kind of freeplay mode available after you finished the game’s story.  Unfortunately the only options available were to replay the game over again fresh, or to replay the story on a more difficult setting that allows you to reuse your existing adventurers.  All in all Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is a pretty good game, but feels entirely too short.