Re-release this: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King
Re-release this: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King
A spin-off of a spin-off where you're ordering other people to go play Final Fantasy.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Chances are good that you know all about Square and Nintendo being close partners on the NES and SNES. It was a mutually beneficial relationship for the two parties: Nintendo got to be the exclusive home for some killer role-playing games at a time when they were growing in popularity — especially in Japan — and the Big N’s supremacy was being threatened by Sega. Square had Nintendo’s help in promoting the original Final Fantasy overseas, with the latter publishing it (and other games like Rad Racer) on the NES, and the SNES was a platform that showed off the immense talent of the studio’s visual artists and composers, to the largest userbase going.
The relationship was, at first, going to continue into the era of the Nintendo 64, which made a lot of sense. The N64 was, as the name tells you, a 64-bit system, perfect for once again showing off the skill of an increasingly ambitious Square, but there was a snag. That ambition was hampered by the cartridges that Nintendo continued to use for their new platform, whereas Sony’s disc-based Playstation, while less outright powerful, was better suited for the kind of game design and cinematic storytelling that Square was interested in creating, in a way that called (and calls) the N64’s actual power into question.
This isn’t conjecture, either, but straight from the mouth of someone who’d know. That’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy:
If you wanted to make a 3D action game on a Nintendo 64 cartridge with that limited space, you could do it. But I wanted to create a 3D role-playing game. It was very clear in my head what I wanted to make, but that would have been difficult on Nintendo’s hardware. …
The biggest problem was, of course, memory. Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge. So our main reason for choosing the PlayStation was really just because it was the only console which would allow us to use CD-ROM media.
As that oral history also says, there were some “communication issues” between Square and Nintendo that resulted in this decision, as well, but “out of respect” for Nintendo, Square has stuck with the storage differences as the primary problem.
From the business side, there was the fact that the cartridges used for games were produced and owned by Nintendo, and their control over this portion of the process meant they made a significant chunk of change from third-party games, as publishers had to buy the cartridges to put the games on in the first place. Square (and other companies that jumped ship to Sony) didn’t approve of this tactic, but had put up with this kind of behavior in the past when there was no better alternative. The Playstation, with its far more open and studio-friendly model, was such an alternative. How Nintendo handled Square’s exit over these issues is up for debate: there are those like Sakaguchi who will tell it as if Nintendo basically said “hey, it’s just business” in an understanding way, while Square Japan’s Hiroshi Kawai apparently heard that Nintendo had said something to the effect of, “If you’re leaving us, never come back.”
Regardless of which is true, Nintendo taking one on the chin during the N64 era after a decade on top caused them to change the way they operated, because it was that or be forced to give up like NEC/Hudson and Sega had before them. And it also resulted in the reuniting of Nintendo and Square, and the return of Final Fantasy games to their platforms. In some cases, this was just remakes and ports of existing games — the Game Boy Advance received the first six Final Fantasy titles, remade or just updated a bit, which had already released on Nintendo consoles. In another, however, was a spin-off exclusive to Nintendo: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. It took place with some Final Fantasy staples in place — spell and item names, Moogles, crystals as a central plot device, some enemy types — but was very much its own thing.
Crystal Chronicles was a multiplayer action RPG, developed by a shell company (The Game Designers Studio) to avoid legal complications over using the Final Fantasy branding on a non-Sony platform, with 51 percent of the company owned by Akitoshi Kawazu — of SaGa fame — and the other 49 percent by Square, with Nintendo investing in the game development. Nintendo, obviously, wanted to be reunited with Square at this point, but Square, too, welcomed the opportunity to produce more games on more platforms following the disastrous financial fallout of the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Sony had purchased a 19 percent stake in Square after that expensive flop, so their one condition for allowing all of this to go down was a promise that it wouldn’t interfere with Square’s work on the Playstation 2.
Crystal Chronicles might seem basic in some respects as a multiplayer action RPG in 2004, but it had some innovations that make it stick out even now. It could be played as a single-player game, but if you plugged Game Boy Advance systems into the GameCube using the Link Cable, other players could join in on the fun, using the GBA itself as a controller and its screens as menus so as not to clutter up what was on the television. Individuals could cast spells that, when combined with spells cast by other players, would allow for more powerful magics. You created your player character from four different available races. There was a competition aspect, rewarding the player who was the best in a particular dungeon, and teamwork became a must, since you were not just navigating dungeons and outdoor environments as well as whatever puzzles were within them, but also defending a caravan from monsters until it reached its destination.
It was very different than standard Final Fantasy, is the thing, which should have been clear the moment Kawazu’s name was mentioned. But Crystal Chronicles would also become different even in comparison to itself. A sequel for the Wii and DS, Echoes in Time, used a similar mechanic for multiplayer albeit with a DS and its wireless connectivity instead of a GBA (though, you needed copies of the game this time around for it to work, rather than just plug-and-play). The Crystal Bearers was a single-player action adventure game not played from an overhead view, but third-person, and involved things like psychokinetic gravity powers instead of sword fighting. In between the original Crystal Chronicles and that most major of breaks from the series’ expectations, though, was a comparatively more minor break. And that was My Life as a King.
This was a launch game for Nintendo’s WiiWare downloadable service. It wasn’t a multiplayer game, nor was it an action RPG. Instead, Square — they weren’t using the shell company to make these games by this point — made a city-building game that takes place in the Crystal Chronicles universe. There is adventuring to be performed within My Life as a King, but you aren’t the one doing it: you’re the king sending these adventurers out on missions to fight the battles that need to be fought, which will help you build up this kingdom that had been lost during events of a previous game.
You’re 10-year-old son of the previous king, who is among the missing, and you were left with some undeveloped territory to make your own. Here, there’s a crystal, which seemingly has no more uses now that the miasma plaguing the land in other Crystal Chronicles titles has been dispelled, but when you arrive, the crystal speaks to you, and grants you the power of a magic called “Architek.” You can probably guess what that lets you do. You can now construct homes, which won’t build them from scratch: it actually builds them from memories, and then warps the people who used to live in those homes to them. A pretty convenient system to reclaiming a past life, if you can manage it, though, one citizen you bring back this way laments the fact that they had just started making new friends in their new life. At least Square acknowledged how ridiculous the premise is this way: these are real people, you know, but you’re a monarch, and video game people programmed to love a king will do so. Just like real people programmed to love a king, really.
You’ll use “elementite” to (re)build these structures, which you can find in the various caves and dungeons and meadows and forests and mountains that surround the castle. Well, you won’t find it. The adventurers you send out daily will find it, assuming they can complete the missions you send them out on. Those missions are known as “behests,” though, despite the name, adventurers are under no obligation to actually follow your command there. Some will feel excited about the prospect of whatever you declare as the mission of the day, while others will want to do their own thing, be it exploring some more elsewhere or training in-town once the appropriate building exists. You can pick which of the interested individuals — or parties, later on when you can form them — will attempt to complete the behest, and then close it for the day otherwise, or you can send every interested party out if you want. More chances to succeed are better, but if your adventurers aren’t up to the task, they’ll fail, and morale will suffer for it.
This morale matters on a number of levels. Your entire kingdom is powered by it: morale is required for adventurers to do a good job, but it also influences the growth of the kingdom itself. Morale collects over time, and when the meter fills, that essence is transferred to an orb, and the meter can be refilled once more. You cash these orbs in at the castle to help your kingdom grow in size, which opens up more opportunities for specific behests, or allows your own powers to grow, and so on, or, you can use the orbs full of morale to boost morale around the kingdom for a set period of time. This will let you do a few things. While morale is boosted, you actually collect more morale from conversations and purchases your citizens make at local shops, their relationships with their neighbors will improve when you speak to them directly during these phases, and speaking with your adventurers before they exit the city to go off on their task will temporarily boost their stats for that day. Think of it as a spend money to make money situation, except it’s with the concept of morale instead of cash. (Morale can also be boosted for adventurers who successfully complete a behest; in addition they’ll receive a medal that boosts a stat of your choosing.)
Speaking of cash. You need to bring people back to populate your kingdom not just to fill some space, but also because each home has a prospective adventurer within it that you can commission for 100 gold if you’ve got the space to add another. Citizens also pay daily tithes to you, which you will use to create behests and pay your adventurers, and to invest in shops. So, you need as large of a population as you can get in order to bring in the money to finance a kingdom with even a smaller population, given your need to make adventuring seem like a respectable, worthwhile position for these people. Who, again, you ripped out of their existing lives with magic to bring here to be your subjects.
At first, things seem pretty simple, just by nature of how little there is to do and how empty your kingdom is. Send adventurers out to gain some experience or explore, one behest per day, and just up to five adventurers total, all “warrior” class, which means basic sword-and-shield stuff. Except they don’t have shields or armor yet, and their sword is dull. Eventually, you add the ability to send out more behests. You get weapon and armor and item shops. You get guilds for specific classes — thieves and white mages and black mages — which come with their own specially upgraded abilities. White magic spells for white mages, black magic spells for black mages, and thieves get the ability to find shortcuts and hidden paths, as well as to be able to figure out how to get certain dungeons that shape-shift daily — making progress through them slower due to higher chances of getting lost — to stop doing that.
The way you build the city itself also impacts how effective all of your adventurers are. Building homes near a black mage temple will cause the people who live there to have base stats more in line with eventually taking on that job. If you accidentally make your city something of a back-and-forth maze for your adventurers to get through every day, they won’t have much time to actually adventure before the day becomes night, and everyone is back home resting up for the next morning. This is a typical late-game day for, let’s say, a thief. They exit their home, and head toward the board to check if there is a behest they’re interested in. If it’s not near their home, it will take longer to get there. Once you’ve given them the go-ahead, they head out to start shopping. They’ll go to the weapon shop to see if there’s a new sword for them, then the armor store to see if they can upgrade their protection. They’ll restock their items at the item shop, then check out the gaming hall where the thieves hang out to see if there’s a new skill there to acquire. They have to have money to afford all of these things, so they’re not just checking what’s available but whether they can afford it, and that will change depending on whether a shop is holding a special sale that day or not, as well. The money the adventurers has is based on how much you’ve upgraded the pay rank at this point, which impacts not just their wallet and gear, but their morale, as well.
After doing all the shopping, they’re ready to go adventuring… unless they’re part of a party after you’ve built a tavern, in which case they’ll head there as their final stop to meet up with the rest of their party before setting off on adventure. If you put all of these elements all across town instead of in a more centralized district, it’s going to take half the day, or more, before they ever leave. Which means it will take you more days to complete each behest, which will impact your final grade after completing the game. Luckily, exploration progress is saved unless a dungeon shape shifts, and bosses don’t recover their lost hit points, so you can spend a few days defeating them if that’s what’s needed. Still, though, this efficiency, or lack of it, will manifest itself late-game in ways you can’t help but notice, so designing your city in a way more structured than “well I guess there’s some space here for this building” is a good idea.
You will spend your mornings setting up the days’ behests, assigning them, speaking with adventurers whose morale is low who now need a day off with your permission, checking up on villagers around town to see what they’re thinking and to boost overall morale, constructing more homes or shops or whatever is needed if you’ve got the elementite for it, and making sure that the adventurers are actually staying on task and not just sitting outside a shop pouting because they’ve got money burning a hole in their pocket but nothing to spend it on. Speaking with them will bump them to their next item on the to-do list instead of having them just stand there for 10 seconds wasting precious time, and also remind you to pay them more so they can afford the gear that’s on sale, or to upgrade said gear so it’s worth it to them to purchase it if they do have the funds.
The adventurers do the adventuring, yes, but you’re not just sitting back while they do it. You’re micromanaging. You have two advisors, but they’re more there to tell you that hey, you can do that thing now if you want than to actually do things for you. Moogles are around to assist where they can, and a talking penguin will talk to some citizens if you command him to, but otherwise just follows you around all day. Which is to say that you’re plotting out every single thing in this city on your own, from the adventures to who even gets to be an adventure to which adventures they specifically can take. You plot out the parties, you spend the money and elementite and morale, you design the city to be its most efficient, you choose who becomes what job class to maintain a balance… you’re real busy here, despite never picking up a sword yourself. Sure, some computer-controlled characters are doing the fighting, but they aren’t getting very far if you aren’t on your game. Think of it like a Rune Factory game where you still do all of the farming and relationship bits, but you’re sending someone else to do the dungeon crawling while you’re busy with that stuff.
My Life as a King is broken into chapters, which will end when you complete a specific area on the map. You’re not required to go in order out there with your behests, so don’t feel pressured to complete things as quickly as possible just because progression is tied to them. You can spend time just telling your weaker adventurers to gain experience where they please for days on end, and have a couple of stronger adventurers fully exploring off the beaten path, or taking on bosses or challenges, until you feel it’s time to progress the narrative. It’ll take you about 12-15 hours to get through the game on its initial difficulty, but you can replay on increasingly tougher settings, with some features of your previous plays unlocked to make it easier to progress, but with the basic, core game being the same each time out in terms of setup.
All of this actually rules, in a vacuum. My Life as a King might seem a little odd, considering the layers of franchise branding on it, but it’s a delightfully well-made game that scratches the kind of “just one more turn” itch something like this produces. The problem is that it (1) hid a bunch of content behind downloadable content and (2) that DLC was expensive. This is Square Enix, we’re talking about, and their history in the downloadable games space has been pretty consistent since the start. The base game for My Life as a King wasn’t overpriced, despite some grumbling that occurred back in 2008, but the sum total of it plus its DLC certainly was.
And now that the Wii shop has closed, none of that DLC is available anymore, either. Which is good, in the sense that the DLC that basically promised “hey if you buy this you can unlock X faster” is no more, but the gameplay systems that encouraged you to make those purchases do still exist, and that’s without even getting into how certain dungeons like the Infinity Spire — an endless dungeon full of rewards and opportunities for XP — aren’t even available at all without DLC. If you play My Life as a King once, it’ll feel a bit incomplete, as, for example, you’ll still have room to upgrade your kingdom but without the ability to get the number of morality spheres needed to do so, as that’s tied to the number of bakeries you can add, which was something you could impact on the Normal difficulty through DLC if you cared to. You won’t max out the number of behests you can send out, which will be obvious given the way the menus display their information, and you might also notice that there’s just the one kind of weapon for warriors — swords — even late-game.
Playing more than once and on a higher difficulty does alleviate all of this, and let you see that the “real” My Life as a King is an even more involved, layered experience, with additional considerations and challenges to meet. But you’re going to have to want to commit to at least 30 hours of this compared to 15 for that to matter to you, as you need clear data to move to a higher difficulty setting. It’s unfortunate that Square, back in 2008, was already at the forefront of the “if you don’t want to spend more time on this you can just pay to get around it” movement. But again, none of that matters so much now, since the game, and the DLC, aren’t available at all anymore.
Square could do something about that and re-release the game, and in a superior form, however. Just include all of the DLC from the start, rather than actually having DLC. Sell the game in a package with its WiiWare pseudo-sequel, My Life as a Dark Lord, which is a tower defense game in the most literal sense: you are in control of the Dark Lord’s tower (seen in the distance from your kingdom in My Life as a King), and the adventurers the king sends out are trying to ascend it day after day, so you’re trying to stop that from happening by setting up opposition forces and traps. It would give this game that deserves a second chance in an era where people actually buy downloadable titles — and would likely have more acceptance of a city-building game with Final Fantasy branding on it — that very chance.
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