Name: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King
Genre: RPG/Simulation
Platform: WiiWare

A standard RPG starts off with a hero accepting a small quest from the king. Upon completing the quest, be it exploring a local cave, collecting a certain plant to make a potion, or ridding the town of some mean boss type creature, an event takes place that bumps the game’s plot into motion. This isn’t that game, and you don’t play as the hero. In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, you play as the king, giving the quests to local adventurers.

Every day you walk around your kingdom, place buildings, talk to your people, assign adventurers to missions, and shake the remote to call your assistant who will end your day, so the process can begin again. Every morning you get an obsessively detailed run down of every battle everyone fought (how much damage was dealt on each turn, what spells they used, everything), how much money was gained and spent, and can assign daily missions for adventures to complete. These happy-go-lucky adventurers can be sent to any available quests and return with bounty in hand or their heads hung low. The adventurers are varied, and watching them level up and rewarding them for their successes is extremely satisfying. Sure, you aren’t grabbing a sword and running into the battlefield, but knowing that your soldiers were successful in defeating a Mind Flayer is a win enough.

But that isn’t all there is to your life as a king, there is a kingdom to maintain, after all. Your humble land of starts off small, with nothing but a castle to its name. As the game progresses and your reach extends farther, the ability to place many types of buildings becomes available. Houses bring citizens, who pay taxes and become adventurers. Weapon, armor, and item shops equip your warriors so they can slay higher quality beasties, and other buildings can turn your generic adventures into all types of people, from Thieves to White Mages. Some days may take ten or fifteen minutes, placing buildings and investing in new abilities, others may be half a minute long, where you may assign someone a mission and then retire back to your castle.

Just like every other game that allows buildings to be placed, there is a huge amount of customization in building up your kingdom. If buildings are placed well your people will compliment them and be happier, leading to more unlockables. Likewise, poor building placement will result in unhappy citizens. People get pissy if they have to walk three blocks to go to the bakery, I assume.

There is no reason for this game to have been downloadable, and if anything, it suffers from it.  There are strange graphical glitches from time to time, and the overall presentation definitely suffers from the small file size. If the game was on a disk and could have been a little more polished (maybe coming with the downloadable content) it could have easily been a full, retail game. It is amazingly addictive and it is hard to find a reason to pull yourself away from it when another turn could only take a minute or two. The games constant rewards and simple gameplay make it extremely fun, and the price may be the highest on WiiWare, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t more than worth the money.

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