nastybun

Recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. It’s a WiiWare downloadable game on the Wii, not an old game but a new one. It’s basically an RTS with little to no unit management combined with a very basic city building game. You start with a blank slate of a city, and you have to rebuild it one building at a time. This of course requires resources. Being a king, you can’t just wander out and start offing monsters left right and centre.. that’s just not cricket. What you can do however is recuit the residents of the houses that you build. Of course you have to make sure the residents are both happy and well equipt, so you can also make shops, parks and training facilities to accomplish this. The strategy for the town planning aspect comes from building everything in places that are streamlined to get to.. your little warriors and co will visit shops, training areas and taverns before venturing out into the world to slay the baddies, so if they have to criss-cross (will make you jump) the whole city before leaving, they’ll have less time to attack things. Your time during the days is spent planning and expanding your city, chatting to the locals to raise their morale and spending cashola on upgrades for training and kit for your little mans. It’s oddly addictive, and is rather more fun than I thought it would be.

All is not completely rosey though.. at 1500 Nintendo Funbux (A$22.50), it’s not the cheapest title available.. and you don’t even get the complete game for that. There are extra races to download, new duds for the king and a castle renovation.. as well as some more things.. (I didn’t really explore the options..) but there is still much fun to be had with the base product. That’s all I got, but if I give it another play through I’ll probably look at getting some of the expanded content. Another downside is that it feels like it was rushed to release somewhat.. there are a few little bugs around, and it suffers from some pretty horrible slow-down when building something big. Still, it’s nothing that breaks anything for you. Just make sure you put your parks exactly where you want them.. there’s no way I could find to dismantle them like you can other buildings.

When it all comes down to it, FFCC:MLAaK has been a fun diversion for a few nights.. it’s one of those games where you’ll think ‘I’ll just do one more day.. just one more day..’ and before you know it, your sleep cycle is being compromised. It’s a very syrupy sweet game though, so if you get sore teeth from that sort of thing you might be best looking elsewhere. Though there’s just something about sending children into battle for me that I like.. it must be my inner terrorist shining through…