For a moment, imagine playing a fantasy game where you are an adventurer. You regularly visit the King or townsfolk to get your daily quest. Then you head out to battle through the caves and foreign lands, level up a few times, gain gold to purchase new equipment only to finally return a victor in search of a hefty reward. In My Life as a King, this all happens but you are not the adventurer; you are the King who sits back waiting for the adventurers to return safely with that prized item you requested.

This game looks like a traditionally Role-Playing Game (RPG), smells like an RPG and tastes like an RPG, but I can’t believe it’s not an RPG! This seems to be a growing trend for the RPG genre. With the rise of casual players, who just don’t have 100 hours to grind levels anymore, this change seems very natural. I feel like this game was design just for 2-bit blogger. I love RPGs; I always have since Dragon Warrior on the original Nintendo. I just don’t have time to play epic games anymore. I still love the stories and battle mechanisms in these games. With My Life as a King all that’s there but without the grind. It’s an interesting concept for a game and I’d love to see it expanded on. I can see this idea being translated in military commander type games or space war games.

If you take My Life as a King out of context, it’s really a war simulation game. As the King you spend materials to build houses. People live in these houses. You can hire the sons and daughters to fight for you. Running a military means you can charge taxes for the protection of your city. With these taxes you pay for your military to go out and bring you more resources so you can expand the land. When they complete this you pay them for their hard work. You build more houses; you hire more military; you charge more taxes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. As dry as I made that sound, this game is very enjoyable and highly addictive. The game is moves on a timer that is separated by in game days. It’s one of those games where you’ll say “ok I’ll play just one more day”…30 days later and 2 am, you still haven’t quit. My description is extremely watered down. There is so much more involved, including the relationship with the actual townsfolk. The adventurers are just the gravy to this low priced meaty title.

This is also the first game on the Wii that rivals Xbox Live’s Downloadable content. These updates include anything from simply changing your clothes to adding other final fantasy races, and adding additional building you may build in your town.

Tags: Final Fantasy, Review, RPG, Square-Enix, Wii Ware

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Nintendo, Wii Ware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.