"Caveat emptor - Can you even call this a game?"

My main beef with this game is that it has all the external trappings of a great simulation game but none of the actual depth and content that one expects from a proper game. As the flagship title of the Wii Ware series, I was expecting a lot more from My Life as a King than I ultimately got. Square Enix has proved repeatedly that it is capable of creating a much, much better game than this one turned out ot be so there is no excuse for churning out lifeless shovelware like this. Do not buy this game until and unless you have run out of games to play on every console ever made. Or unless you enjoy paying $15 to watch paint dry.

Story
King Leo was a prince, then his father disappeared along with the kingdom. Leo and his advisers wandered around in search of him until they came across a deserted kingdom. A giant crystal in the square grants him the power of Architek, meaning he can just wish houses and buildings out of nowhere complete with citizens and shopkeepers. Now it's up to him to solve the mystery of his father's disappearance while rebuilding the kingdom of Padarak.

Along the way there's some half-hearted nonsense about Dark Lords and winning the love and trust of your citizens, but it's obviously stuff added as an afterthought once the developers realized their story had all the depth of a cookie sheet.

Gameplay
I like repetitive games in general, Harvest Moon games in particular, so I never thought I'd come across a game so repetitive it would almost make me want to hang myself. A typical day in My Life as a King goes like this: Leo wakes up. Leo reads the day's reports. Leo dispatches his adventurers to explore some dungeon or the other. Leo walks around town from morning to evening talking to people and building a few houses. Leo goes to bed. Rinse and repeat for 200 days and you have My Life as a King. I am not even making this up, people. That's all there is to this game. You won't believe me (I didn't want to believe it either), but that really is all there is to gameplay in My Life as a King. I don't doubt that life as a king would be pretty darned dull in real life, but that's precisely what fiction is for. Liven things up a bit!

Let's take things one by one. Dispatching adventurers to dungeons. It sounds like fun and games until you realize that you will never ever get to see what the insides of these dungeons look like. You never get to see any of the bosses. You don't even really get to pick which adventurer goes where: you put the request up on a board and interested adventurers sign up. The rest wilfully ignore you and do what they like all day long. There are a few things you can do to affect their compliance rate, but in general it's all up to luck.

Again, fiction would really come in handy here. You go through all the trouble of dispatching your adventurers and you have no control over what happens when they are in battle. It wouldn't have cost Square Enix that much more to include a “snapshot” option, would it now? Have your adventurers take a picture or two of the dungeon. How about a victory pose with the defeated monster? How about you actually get to see the treasure they poach from the dungeons? Half of the point of the adventures is to gather “elementite” to activate your Architek, but I can't for the life of me tell you what elementite looks like, even after over 20 hours of playing. Ridiculous!

Even for the biggest and most important storyline battles, all you get in the end is a battle report that reads like something from a Choose your Adventure book. Michelle hits Blob for 4. Blob hits back for 5. Michelle runs away! …come on, with battles as simplistic as that, would it really have been so hard to animate them? At least show me what Blob looks like and why he keeps wiping out my parties? After all there are exactly 2 face-types and 4 classes for all the adventurers, so it's not exactly the most complex programming task in the world. Coming from the same Square Enix that gave us Final Fantasy proper and Dragon Quest VIII, this smacks of cheap and lazy development, nothing else.

Leaving the battles aside and returning to the more important business of kingdom development, I have another major complaint: There's absolutely no tension in this game at all. Every good RPG and simulation game includes at least the threat and possibility of failure, or there's no point in persevering. Not My Life as a King, though. Nuh-uh. When you send out your adventurers out and they either fail and come home, or succeed and come home. They can't die, they won't be out of commission for more than a day or two and your kingdom is never in any real danger regardless of which bad evil monsters are reportedly lurking right outside your gates. You build couple of bakeries in the kingdom, but you really might as well not bother because your people can never starve to death. They can't die, they can't try to move away, they don't do anything except stroll around the square all day, and whether they like you or not makes absolutely no difference to the development and progress of the game. In fact, they can't even not like you. Everybody adores you regardless of what decisions you make. Boring!

Furthermore what I said in the beginning about waking up, posting quest behests and raising morale in town is almost all there is to the game. The only other thing you have to do is to place houses and other buildings around town. The proximity of certain buildings to houses can affect (often meaningless) rewards you get within the game… or so they lead you to think, but the truth is that you can place anything anywhere without worrying too much. Strategy element of game = zero.

You'd think that since the point of the game is to revive your kingdom, building houses and other establishments would be a difficult, vital and strategic activity. Nope. Elementite is pretty cheap, land is plentiful, building houses is free except for the elementite cost and you're never penalized for overcrowding or anything. Roads and pavements are already laid for you so you don't even have the choice of laying out your town properly. This means that just about every kingdom built by every player will end up looking almost the same. Sure the Inn might be in a different place and the big houses will be located near the gate or something, but those are all minor cosmetic details. When you think about it you might as well not bother, really.

In the beginning raising morale is important because it's the main way of making money. You need money to fund research so that your stores will stock better items (but you can't control what your adventurers buy!!), but by day 150 or so you'll have so much cash rolling in, you won't need to bother. SE saw fit to limit your wallet to a measly 9999, meaning before too long your kingdom coffers will be maxed out and you won't need to talk to anyone any more. Just wake up, send off your adventurers and go back to bed. Again. And again. And again. And again. Until you finally put the last boss out of his misery (and yours), watch the extremely bland and text-heavy ending and close the sorry chapter on this waste-of-money of a “game.” The end.

Graphics/Sound
Everything about this game is repetitive, why not the sound and the graphics too? All the houses look exactly the same, same uniform brown colour, same pattern. The bakeries are nearly indistinguishable from the houses, the stores all look the same, the Halls all look exactly the same… you get the picture. The townspeople have all of 5 face-types and there are only 4 classes of adventurers: white mage, black mage, warrior and thief. I'm talking about the basic game here, not an add-on enriched one. They already got $15 out of me, I'm not shelling out any more money for stuff that should have been included to begin with.

In keeping with the “no tension, no failure” mentality of the game, there is only one type of weather in the game: perniciously sunny. No rain, no storms, no inclement weather to possibly interfere with the My Life in Utopia gig they have going on.

The sound is just one song. Okay, two. Three, come to think of it. A grand total of three tunes (that I can remember) in a Square Enix game. Oh, the shame!

Play Time/Replayability
Play time... I actually stuck it out for a while because I could see a vast expanse of the map that I hadn't explored and I thought there might be more to the game. It turns out Nintendo/SE were expecting me to pay even more money for the privilege of sending my adventurers out to poke around in dungeons that I can't even see. Hah!
In the end I clocked a grand total of 210 game days and actually finished the game. Of course, 90 of which were spent waking-sending-sleeping once I'd built up my kingdom as far as it would go. Would I ever play this game again? Heck no. I don't even count what I did at first as playing, and there's nothing in the world that would get me to do it all over again. Fool me once, shame on me.

Final Recommendation
By this time you're probably wondering: If the game was so bad, why did I play it all the way to the end? As I said, it's partly because I thought there was something more that I had yet to discover. Also because it's easy to keep going because making the game progress takes so little effort on the player's part.

But also I'll be honest here: I like repetitive games – within limits. There has to be a point to it, a goal, an ultimate reward, an entire world relying on your efforts. Otherwise you're just wasting your time. Throughout this game I searched for something, anything to give my efforts meaning. I wanted to feel as if the kingdom really depended on me, as if my actions were making a difference, as if My Life as a King was anything other than a cheap, shallow, throwaway game that Square Enix made to suck money out of unsuspecting fans. At $5 it might be worth a try, but $15 is too much money for this empty shell of a shoddily-developed game. Let's hold out for something better.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/08