Having just finished My Life as a King; I've come to realize that I've been subliminally tricked into enjoying adding numbers and other such mathematical equations in the myriad role-playing games I've played for well over two decades. I never thought myself a closet statistician; then again I never thought I'd keep an online diary of my videogame playing habits, either. That reality is OK with me; whether it's weighing the stats of an old axe versus a new one or getting a poo-eating grin when I see those blue numbers pop up letting me know what a success my level up was, I derive simple kind of pleasure from it. Which then eased me into being alright with liking My Life as a King; because in essence the best part of this royalty simulator is the various progress reports and tithe round-ups that you read before you even set foot in your kingdom.
The plot comes straight from the RPG cookie cutter mold set; the Dark Lord (no beating around the bush here, he's just called the Dark Lord) destroys a kingdom and supposedly it's king with it. A few year later, his spunky, 10-year old spawn strolls in with a midget bodyguard and a consul who suspiciously acts like your nanny in the hopes of rebuilding the kingdom into grand form. And maybe along the way, give that Mr. Dark Lord a good old what's-for! Square Enix surprisingly didn't add much more back story than that; and everything that goes on plot-wise afterwards doesn't excite either. They could at least pretend that things are more epic than they might truly be. Before I move on to talking about the game itself, I wanted to air my grievances at SE literally tacking on the Final Fantasy name onto pretty much everything they publish anymore. Crystal Chronicles is a beautiful and intriguing setting; it's sad that they seem so scared of it failing that the need to add a moogle here and a few familiar name drops there to keep the wheels greased.
Anyways.
At first, being the king kind of blows; it's not particularly proactive when you're playing, because you want to be the one going into dungeons acing monsters, not the guy that sends the heroes to do the smiting for you. Your claim to fame is having the ability to use architek, "the magical ability to build homes, businesses and schools!" Ahem. Yeah. For a world building game, it would seem a bit more structured than you might expect; the blank canvas of a kingdom always has the same landscaping, you merely put buildings up on certain plots of land. The layout is just fine though, and you quickly forget when you're so busy customizing the city to fit your needs. Strategy starts playing a part further in when you realize that people who live by certain places (i.e. a black mage training center) tend to have better stats in spell-casting, for example. It's very clever, and pulled me much more than I first thought it would. Maybe we could call it an interactive study in culture.
As your town begins to bustle, it falls on you to hire adventurers to keep it safe. I've always gotten a charge out of keeping tabs on my party, but the thought of keeping up with an entire gaggle of them seemed a bit overwhelming. It wasn't as bad as I thought, so long as I just kept updated on their overall level and left the nitpicking to when I got to award medals when they completed one of my behests. Things got complicated when my wards went from all being warriors to wanting to change classes, such as thieves and white mages. Even more perplexing was when you weigh things like where your soldiers live, what they're stats are and even their race can play factor on what job best suits them. Heady stuff, to be sure, but also entertaining when you begin wiping the map clean of evil with your troupe of well-trained adventurers.
The two game play types (city building and adventurer management) work well together; I eventually formed a routine in which I'd weight stats and money in reports in the morning and possibly give medals to the worthy, then send my parties out looting quickly followed by me walking around town chatting with locals and building new things on occasion. It's a very rewarding system...until you get about halfway in. At that mysterious point in the game, things start do drag and feel like...work. Cue dramatic music in your head after having just read that. Just like a standard RPG, you want some kind of prize for all the effort you put into leveling up and such, and it's here where the well starts to run dry. The completionist in me hates this aspect; I began to run out of room for my newest building acquisitions and I had already maxed the cap for elementite (used to build) and cash, making anything other than hunting down the Dark Lord a moot quest. I don't want to juggle different buildings around...I wanted to put them all up. It's a nice touch to add a new game plus feature, but playing all the dungeons on higher difficulty levels just didn't get me excited because there wasn't anything else to do once your town is built.
But before I ever got to the point of boredom, I logged in many hours crafting my empire. Many enjoyable hours, at that. My Life as a King is the type of game that should be looked upon as that bridge between the invisible gap between what makes a downloadable game just as quality as a disc based one. It's huge, it's pretty and it's most definitely not a weekend dalliance. Much like Braid, the lack of replayability is made up in kind by the impression I got from it the first go around. Maybe when I'm a little low on new games to play I'll come back to my burg and press on through the few dungeons left unexplored; especially the one I payed for via DLC so my village could have an awe-inspiring library. Libraries...bane of hardcore gamers everywhere or gift from the heavens to one player stuck on playing an arbitrary game of numbers? The world may never know.
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