"A shallow, uninteresting game."

I was very disappointed by My Life as King and quite frankly, it's an embarrassment to the franchise.

This game is one of the 'launch' titles for Nintendo's Wiiware system and despite it's big-name developer, Square Enix, it's a offense to the franchise and serves as a poor example for any future titles utilizing Wiiware.

The core gameplay in "My Life as King" involves you taking control of a silent child King devoid of any personality who is unable to do anything by himself. You run the king around an initially barren ruin of his father's former kingdom, magically erecting buildings and creating subjects to inhabit said buildings. Mysteriously, despite this being the King's only exclusive ability, he requires the assistance of his handmaiden Chime, a half-selkie mother/big-sister figure, to actually call upon the ability. The types of buildings you can erect are highly limited and unlocking new buildings is a slow and tedious process. Even buildings purchased as bonus content must first be paid for with WiiPoints, then unlocked in game after significant grinding before they can be added to your virtual town. Bonus content buildings either unlock additional races that specialize in specific "jobs" or unlock upgrades that give you no real discernible advantage in the game. Where you place buildings in relation to each other can sometimes provide slight bonuses to morale or your adventurer's statistics, but the effect is minimal and often invisible to the player.

Besides running around occasionally erecting new structures, the King can also issue behests to his entourage of eager adventurers, commanding them to to venture out into the surrounding wilderness to slay neighboring villages of monsters and collect resources for the kingdom. Once you've issued a behest, a random assortment of available adventurers will ask permission to undertake the quest, the remainder who don't feel like following the king's commands will either stay home or wander off to do whatever they feel like for the day. This lethargy in you adventurers is present constantly, even during major boss battles that supposedly threaten very lives of everyone in the kingdom, half of your available adventurers will spend their time frolicking in the fields while a small handful attempt in vain to defend the kingdom.

Failure however, is impossible, even if your entire collection of adventurers are completely wiped out, they simply return to your settlement tired and unwilling to adventure the next day. No enemies ever make any attempt to harm your growing village and there is never any time limit on any objectives. 'Game overs' are impossible and there isn't even a penalty when your adventurers utterly get defeated by the mysterious monsters that you will never get to see lurking in the lands around your kingdom.

Customizing your adventuring parties is present, but the game designers felt that it would be too exhausting to allow the player to have any input whatsoever in how his adventurers equip themselves. Instead the NPC adventurers do all the shopping, training, and equipment hunting themselves with absolutely no input from the player. The king can throw some money at the shops occasionally to upgrade the selection of goods available to the adventurers, but the NPCs will decide when and what to actually purchase, often leaving shops entirely empty handed when upgrades for their equipment are available. The NPCs also have the ability to switch between a pathetically small variety of jobs taken from the classic Final Fantasy universe; Warriors, Thieves, White Mages, and Black Mages. All Clavats (the default race) start out as Warriors, but can switched to other jobs by issuing a behest when an associated building has been unlocked and erected. Again, which adventurers decide to take up the new job is entirely randomly determined, resulting in frequently frustrating occasions when very few and often inappropriate candidates ask to switch jobs. Additionally it should be noted that switching jobs mysteriously causes the character to lose any and all skills they had previously learned from their former job. Each job also supposedly has it's own specialties and weaknesses, but these differences are easily overlooked due the highly random nature of encounters. Eventually, your adventurers gain the ability to team up against enemies in the form of parties, but even this feature is heavily random, often useless, and the AI often decides to run around in circles "looking for group" when it could very well be doing more productive things. You can create up to 3 groups of adventurers who will consistently band together (if you have all 3 taverns unlocked that is), but even this feature does virtually nothing to help you progress in the game that the AI won't do on it's own.

Add to all this the fact that once the adventurers finally do get around to questing, the player now has no option except to sit back and read about the adventurer's gross progress from small pop-ups in the corner. The next morning a more detailed review of each adventurer's exploits can be combed over if you so desire, revealing that the combat simulation in the game revolves entirely around invisible dice rolling and stat comparison that almost always results in clear cut victors mopping the floor with the losing parties. Both NPC adventurers and Monsters have abysmal AI and seem to simply choose random actions each turn until one or the other lies defeated. At numerous points in the game I would regularly find entire high level parties of adventurers slain by enemy monsters, only to find on the 6th or 7th day of attempting the challenge that a single, much lower level adventurer miraculously cleared the entire dungeon including the boss.

However all this "adventuring" is rather pointless since the player will never get to actually experience any of it. You're only rewarded with tiny increases in resources and periodically a new building being unlocked for use. You can run around each day talking to residents in your village, but none of them have anything worthwhile to say and most simply make inane small-talk or try to bilk you into buying more bonus content for this shallow game. Talking to villagers 'rewards' the player with bonus morale, but morale will steadily increase over time anyways without the player doing anything. In fact, aside from assigning a few behests each morning and giving your royal decree that adventurers can start adventuring, the player doesn't have to do anything at all for the rest of the day and the game will still steadily play itself out until the storyline is over. After I realized how futile all the wandering around and throwing money at shops was, I spent the last 3/4 of the game simply assigning behests, occasionally erecting a new building and simply leaving the game to run on it's own while I worked on more rewarding tasks. When the storyline had finally played out to it's completely anti-climactic conclusion the game graded my disinterested efforts as being "S" ranked, a title reserved for performance that far exceeds the developer's expectations. Considering even a half-hearted attempt at the game with no thought given to strategy results in an S rank I'm unsure what kind of ham-handed performance would be required to actually score lower, but this game's sedated difficulty is merely a small problem in the vast spectrum of bad game design it exhibits.

There's never any impetus for the player to do anything in this game and when the player does try to actually take part in the this AI controlled village simulator their actions are severely limited and never rewarded in any meaningful way. The art team for this game created a wonderfully charming and graphically pleasing village to spend time in, but the buildings are highly limited in variety and quickly become rows of cookie-cutter models while characters are no better off and have a limited variety of jerky animations. Graphical slowdown happen any time you summon Chime or attempt to construct a building and the problem only gets worse as you populate your village with more buildings and people. I would say that the game's storyline was paper-thin and characters were cardboard cutouts, but even cardboard has more depth than this game's cast. The "adventuring" mechanic is unintuitive and provides the player with no option to flex any sort of brainpower at any point. You'd probably have a more engaging experience by hiring someone to play "Kingdom of Loathing" while you sat blindfolded in the next room and gave them suggestions on how to play.

It's sad to see this as SquareEnix's premiere example of how they intend to utilize the Wii's download service. It's already the most expensive download title even before you try to purchase the game's lackluster bonus content and at it's best the game is little more than a poorly designed text-based RPG given a graphical face-lift being passed off as a "simulator". I just can't shake the feeling that this game was quickly thrown together using existing assets and hacked together by an uninspired designer to serve as a promotional tie-in product for the upcoming Wii title in the franchise. If this is level of quality that can expected from the Crystal Chronicles games in the future then there's absolutely no point in buying any of the upcoming titles. Square Enix's Crystal Chronicles team has lost them a customer and, more so, should be ashamed to have produced such a disappointingly lackluster title.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/08