Metachronos overall score = 5.0 / 10 (according to gs)
Positive
- Charming visuals and characters
- It's fun to watch your city flourish
Negative
- Separately purchased downloadable content is required if you want any variety
- Lacks basic city-building features
- Gameplay limitations lead to major balance issues
As the boy-king of a burgeoning young kingdom, you've got your hands full. Your beloved papa is missing and presumed dead, the cackling dark lord is on the loose, and a penguin keeps following you around while tossing barbed insults in your general direction. There is an upside, though. For one, you can use a magic power called Architek to summon buildings (and their residents) onto your town's empty lots, which helps increase your sparse population. For another, you don't need to personally bother with the local monster population; instead, you just hire adventurers to do the dirty deeds for you. This sounds like a solid setup for Square Enix's sunny strategy romp, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. But while its title might be imposing, the gameplay is shallow, repetitive, and fundamentally unbalanced. Furthermore, if you want to get the most out of this $15 WiiWare download, you need to spend even more money. Want a new outfit for the king? It'll cost you $1. Want a new house to supplement the paltry selection of abodes included with the standard download? It's another $3. Getting the most out of this thin game requires spending twice the asking amount, and that's a bona fide rip-off.
YOUR HIGHNESS !!!
Of course, even the player-named king knows that nothing in life is truly free. To build homes and produce a population, you need crystal, and to get it, you have to hire adventurers and send them into the local dungeons, where deposits of the stuff are guarded by ferocious monsters. At least, the game tells us they're ferocious; you'll never see one for yourself. In any case, you start off each day by posting a couple of behests to the town bulletin boards, and the adventurers you've hired all gather there. You can then send them off on assignment, ask them to go gain some experience, or even appoint them to a new job, such as a black mage or a thief. Once they've got their mission, your hirelings gather supplies from the local shop and traipse toward their destination.
The limitations pile on, one after another. Fans of city builders will deplore the lack of real options: There are very few structures at your disposal, and you can have only a limited number of each. You can't tell your adventurers how to spend their money. You can't fire them in favor of new candidates. You can't even adjust your tax rates. Furthermore, these limitations lead to severe imbalances. When an adventurer completes a behest, you can assign a medal that increases his or her stats. However, this creates an odd catch-22, because your more powerful adventurers are the ones to successfully complete your behests. As a result, you'll assign medals to the same fighters over and over, while the ones most in need of a boost return defeated. You can work around this by benching the most powerful adventurers in favor of the ones needing a helping hand, but doing so increases the amount of time you spend dealing with the tedium of everyday city-meandering. In addition, when there are multiple behests available to your adventurers, you can't choose which adventurer takes which behest, so you may end up wasting high-level helpers on low-level tasks.
My Life as a King is a disappointing use of two name brands associated with quality games. It's shallow, limiting, and padded with unrewarding gameplay. It's also a blatant grab at our wallets--not because downloadable content is available at launch, but because that content is essentially required if you want any variety in a shallow game that begs for it. This cheery game is a nice length and has some superficial appeal, but your valuable money is better spent elsewhere.