I recently played Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as A King and it was a cute experience. I played it originally on and off, on the Wii at my parents, and I had good but blurry memories of the game. So I decided to boot it up again.

I played the original game, without DLC, which turned out to be a mistake for reasons I will expand upon. The game seems to take place after the event of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and you are the prince of a lost kingdom. Upon arriving in your kingdom ( a city) you receive the power to build houses! After using your powers to place a few of them, the inhabitants offer you to become adventurers and go slay monsters in your place. After all, as the future King, you’re too precious to lose. It is your duty to expand your city and send adventurers on a quest each day.

And this will be the main gameplay loop of the game. You start in games day by sending your adventurers to quests. As they solve it, you become able to erect new buildings that unlock equipment, job specializations, and skill training for them. Each day, you watch them happily wandering in the city, buying stuff, and going to their destination and you await eagerly their return.

The character models are what you already known from Crystal Chronicle (which means they are lovely) and the buildings are pretty. All of it in a pastel palette going with one of the 3 (catchy) tunes of the game.

And that’s it, that’s the game. It’s fun as long as you unlock new buildings and give new stuff to your character, but by the end of the game, you have nothing to unlock. You start some repetitive hours, of sending your guy on a mission, going to bed, send them back, until the last boss.

Of course, this hole in content is supposed to be filled with the hard mode and DLC, which I didn’t play. It adds other crystal chronicles races, and raises a few limits, allowing your parties of adventurers to be more diverse and specialized.

Despite the lukewarm end, it is a cute game, and it’s astonishing how much they could fit on the 45MB of the Wii ware. My nostalgia is filled for the moment. Although, I am kinda curious about my Life as a Dark Lord now…