Okay, so this one is going to be a little weird, right? But bear with me. So, one of my favorite Wii games growing up was the digital only title "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King". I loved this cozy little RPG town-builder so much, I've probably played through the whole game like four times. And I've long wanted to play its sequel, My Life as a Darklord. But you know, there's just never been a good time for it. Now though, it's the game I rolled on my backlog and I'm stoked to play it but... I kind of feel like it's a little weird to play this without playing My Life as a King and refreshing myself on the whole like. Deal. Of this whole story. Because it has been literal years. And so I'm doing it. It'll double the length, sure, but I'm doing a total runthrough of the "My Life" duology. Replaying the first game and then experiencing the second one. I'm actually pretty excited about it and I hope for you, the reader, this creates a better experience overall, gives you more context. So, without further ado.
Review:
(Note, the following is only a spoiler free review of My Life as a Darklord because that is the game I'm actually clearing this time around. If you want to know my thoughts on My Life as a King, please read through to the end of that section. Thank you~)
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is a very average game. It's a decent enough little tower defense with a good sense of humor, great soundtrack and pretty easy to pick up gameplay. The key problem with it though that keeps it down is that it's really poorly paced. The game takes a pretty long time to get into a good flow and/or good gameplay loop, taking far too long to introduce pretty basic elements in its attempts to keep a specific progression going and at times just making a level unreasonably difficult by holding off said elements. Many critics have criticized the game for feeling as if, by the time you finally get all your toys to play with, all your pieces to strategize with, the game is just almost over with nothing to do. But the good parts about it are really good, it doesn't fully save its unsatisfactory gameplay and progression but it does a good job balancing it. It's fine. I don't think it's a great loss that you can't buy this anymore but it's a solid little time if you really like Tower Defenses and want one with JRPG-trappings. 6.2/10
My Life as a King Diary:
7/25/25
Man, the good vibes just rolled in immediately. This game is such a wholesome little game, I swear. It's really sad that Square-Enix hasn't made a remaster/port of this game, I think people who like city-builders and/or RPGs would really enjoy My Life as a King, even if it's pretty simple overall. It's like, the whole game is about building your own little wholesome RPG town and it gets the vibes right immediately. It also just feels good playing it again, this game, as mentioned previously, is a game I played quite a bit in the past. I even purchased all of the DLC, I think this might be the very first game I ever purchased DLC for, which is CRAZY to me. I'm not one to be taken in by nostalgia but it does bring back some great memories strolling through the town. By the way, growing up, had the BIGGEST crush on Chime and her goth outfit, while not awakening anything in me that wasn't already there, definitely fueled a flame, lol.
I'm a pretty big fan of the fact that rather than convincing people to move into your town, everyone who is in your town already lived there in the past and you're just magicking them back. My Life as a King takes place after the events of the original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, so up until recently the entire world was consumed by an evil miasma and we are among the first venturing out into the world to reclaim our towns and cities. So many of the residents are ex-refugees who are now restarting their lives and they come with interpersonal relationships and families and what have you. Despite this being a simple download game with very limited space, it really enhances it that these people feel like they already have a rapport. One of my villagers, Zack, wanted me to open a bakery in town and obviously that's a good idea but we come to find out the owner of the bakery is one of Zack's friends from the before times and he'll comment on how excited he is to have his bestie back in town. You'll also see your villagers running off to spend time with other villagers they're close to or having conversations in the street, it's nice. They're not particularly deep or complex characters but for a simple Wii era download game, it's a surprising amount of depth.
The adventurers in My Life as a King are the funniest things about this game. Like, you have to hire the town's teenage residents as adventurers to go out and replenish your stash of "Elementite", because without Elementite you can't make buildings. It's a whole thing where you pay adventurers to go find elementite so that you can build more buildings, collect more revenue, and better pay your adventurers and improve the town's infrastructure. Basic stuff. The adventurers are so funny. So the adventurers can have multiple different reactions and success rates for the day. When they show up to take jobs they'll either be excited, resolved, or despaired at the listing and you can either tell them to take the job, go on a side mission to gain EXP, or just like. Go home. If they're despaired. Take the day off. And also when they head off to gain EXP or do the job they either will succeed, fail, or just like have an existential crisis and give up. When they return to town they'll be like "am I really cut out for this, is this what it means to be an adventurer". So you can start to fill in personalities for these guys pretty quickly.
Like, my strongest adventurer, Val, is great. All her stats are really high, she gets jobs done very effectively when she's out on them, she's probably going to inevitably be the sort of "leader" of our little guild when it's built. Her stats also give her a million options on what to do about classing, she can be an excellent knight, thief, or black mage due to her high strength, constitution, agility, and intellect. The thing is though, Val is a disaster. She has no confidence in herself, she often freaks out while in dungeons and comes home early feeling miserable, she often has to take days off. This woman has just the worst case of imposter syndrome I've ever seen, despite being the best in the village she really does not think she's cut out for this. Like part of me is like "girl, you can quit if you don't want to do this" but also I desperately need her not to quit because right now she's holding the fort down because ya boy thought he was doing a million IQ play by recruiting someone with really high wisdom for when I unlock the white mage school and he sucks and I want to fire him.
My Life as a King also does the fun thing where it has a singular theme that gets increasingly intricate as the game goes along. It could do more, admittedly, I believe it ultimately only has three iterations, an early, mid, and late game version. But it has a pretty simple melody that grows more grand and complex as it goes along. I feel like this is probably just a common element of city building titles that I simply find novel because I'm largely unfamiliar with the genre, but if city builders are not doing that, they should. It's such a good thematic element for the genre, I'm brought back to the early days of New Horizons, the best part of New Horizons really, where before you had the hourly themes you just had this "island music" that would grow and change as you turned this island into a proper town. It's such a good note, and it's really a shame that here we only get it in these three parts, because the music is also real good. The My Life as a King soundtrack is short, I think only 13 tracks, and for all I know is reusing tracks from the first Crystal Chronicles, I've never played that one admittedly, but it's real good. I'm sad Kumi Tanioka doesn't seem to do composition work as much anymore, it seems like it's for good reason mind. She apparently prefers live performance to composing. But her music is super nice and super unique, she has a lot of "world music" influence, and her main thing is mixing and matching various culture's musical stylings to create super unique sounds. She mostly did Crystal Chronicles and bounced, only doing stuff from time to time mainly on Minecraft strangely enough. Her composition stylings are missed.
Oh also there are tons of frogs. Like just so many frogs. We're told by one of our advisors in a story about our parents that the Queen loved frogs (based) but the King hated them (cringe). However, the King loved his wife so much that he made the entire Kingdom frog themed. The royal crest is a frog, hanging above the door to the castle is a golden frog, the job boards are frogs, the wooden has frog prints carved into it. There are even frog prints carved into the stone work around the town. Our dad is already dead by the time the game starts but we already know that, a, he was a wife guy, and b, he had just full commitment to the bit always. And you know what, good on him, I love seeing all these frogs about. I wish I could capture from my WiiU so I could show you all the frogs, frankly.
7/27/25
The villagers in this game are so funny, y'all. So, in this part we finally meet the antagonist of this game, simply titled "The Dark Lord". In a shocking turn of events, the Dark Lord appears to be our own father, not just in his appearance or his mannerisms but he even has a few of our father's memories. It's a pretty decent plot twist for this early in the game, especially since so much of this game is built on this idea that our father was this kind, noble king whose footsteps we're following in, so seeing him be the villain in all of this is pretty wild. But like, most importantly though, our villagers react to this in one of three ways: despair at the revelation, resolve to double their efforts to defeat the Dark Lord, and, the funniest, simping. Many of the female townsfolk had crushes on the king, who is a handsome man admittedly, and now they're just like fully on team Dark Lord because of this revelation. Hilarious. 10/10 writing.
I've finally unlocked the class system in the game! Every single adventurer you hire, at least if they are human (which they're always going to be if you don't have the DLC) starts out as a warrior and then as you progress in the game, you unlock the facilities necessary for changing their class. Namely a casino for thieves, a school for black mages, and a church for white mages. Moreover, the game not only incentivizes you to keep a variety of classes in rotation but also to kind of set up your town to where the adventurers all live near their facilities. Like, your adventurers will get better at their jobs if they live close to the black mage school or the church or whatever. It's also just good for convenience to keep everything together because the more you add to the town for adventurers to do, the longer it takes them to go off adventuring, which is a problem as they frequently will be out much later which like. I don't KNOW if it has an effect on their performance, but it feels like it does, especially if they are on their own.
Which, speaking of being on their own, I unlocked parties! In classic RPG fashion, you have to build a tavern for your adventurers to meet in order for them to form a party. Such a good bit. I love how taken aback Chime is by your want to build a Tavern, which, by the way, isn't just like RPG shorthand, it's a literal tavern, they serve alcohol there. Their sign is a barrel of beer. But then she is the one who runs the taverns, she sits there and serves drinks all day while also tending to the kingdom's taxes and helping you build buildings. Having parties is nice because, a, it cuts down on the amount of time adventurers need to spend preparing for quests because the party leader will just arrive at the board in the morning while all the others gather their supplies for the day automatically but also, unsurprisingly, your adventurers are better as a unit than they are as individuals and are better equipped to handle tasks accordingly. Parties will form naturally, but you can also assign a party to each tavern, so officially my girl Val is the first time leader of my little town. So proud of her, she's adapting to the role well, she doubts herself way less now.
I also unlocked the non-human races this past play session. I need to expand my ability to build houses before I can really do anything with it mind, the game puts pretty hard limits on what you can build at any given time until you progress in the game for balancing reasons. Still an RPG at the end of the day. These guys were, originally, DLC and the main thing about them is that, unlike the humans, the other races in the game are class locked but excel at that given class. It's not something I'm the biggest fan of, admittedly, I know for a long time that loads of RPGs either locked your available classes to race or strongly incentivized you to go with a specific class setup dependent on your race. But like, idk, it's always felt weird to me to be like "oh all of this race is just naturally good at stealing stuff, they are all thieves". It's really amazing how little fantasy tends to have evolved from the Tolkein days sometimes, I swear. But like, it's nice having them, I feel like the eccentric races are something that makes the Crystal Chronicles series visually interesting and it's kind of bonkers they weren't already in the game, y'know.
Unfortunately I've gotten to the part of this game where you're just like. Waiting. Constantly. I mean you get to walk around and talk to your villagers and that part's nice but they run out of new things to say pretty quickly. The sad truth is that at least half of your days are wasted in this thing, you hit your caps on buildings you can build and you're kind of just waiting around for your adventurers to find new stuff for you to do. Thankfully the game lets you skip to the end of day at any point so if you can't do anything that day you can just skip to end but like. Idk, I wish that progress was happening at a faster pace, you know. Like, I get it, it's a way to get more content out of a pretty basic game and I appreciate the effort given that this was, originally, one of the most expensive WiiWare games at $15 I think it sold for. But still.
7/29/25
Y'all, I need to tell you about Oz. So, Oz is one of the first villagers I gained in my little Kingdom, in fact he lives basically in town square, I would not be surprised if he was one of the first five houses built in the town. Oz lives in a small house with his younger sister Alma, who wants nothing more than to be an adventurer and help the kingdom thrive. He's often seen wandering the streets throughout the day, in particular seeming to prefer crossing town to get better prices on his baked goods. And Oz is the most hated man in my Kingdom. For a long time, I did not actually know who he was or where he lived, I would just hear the legend of him. I would check profiles of my villagers and if they ever mentioned Oz, it was always the same message: "Oz has been distant". Which is just a pretty nice way of saying "we don't like him". But he was usually at home, seemingly not bothering anyone. I thought maybe, genuinely, people were just expressing concern, saying he has been distant because he's such a homebody. And then Oz started roaming around town and boy howdy, did I find out why he's hated.
I mentioned Oz walks across town to go to the bakery, it just so happens that the route he takes just so happens to take him to basically every house with a young, unmarried woman in town. And he never stops in to say hi, just always leers at them through the windows it feels like and then makes uncomfortable comments about them. He doesn't even buy anything from the bakery, it's literally just an excuse to be weird. He also appears to be a habitual drinker and is always stopping in to see Chime who, I'll remind you, is also the prime minister of the kingdom. He makes several comments about catching the woman bending over, revealing her stockings to the world. This guy sucks, just the worst guy, throw him in jail, nobody likes him and nobody will miss him. I don't even think his sister likes him. That's not true, his household affinity score is always very high, Alma might be the only person who likes him.
As the town fills up more and more I genuinely feel like there's less and less I can do with it to still make it look good? My Life as a King has specific lots where you can build buildings and it often feels like the deeper into the game you get, the less likely you are to find a place to put things to make them look and/or feel good. It feels like there are also specific lots where the game is choreographing you to place things, like. The school and the church are the largest buildings you can place, being 6 squares each, 3 wide and 2 deep. There are two exactly 6 square lots in the town, both of them near town square, and it feels like they're telling you just "hey, put these here". And like, admittedly, it's a convenient placement, but it also ends up looking pretty ugly because no matter how you arrange these two buildings in the lots in question they don't look good. They block each other and mess up the sight lines. But also they equally don't look good anywhere else because there's not really a better lot for them where they don't look off center. It's rough. I would love to see this idea re-explored with way more freedom, I think that would go hard.
I'm also never sure how to feel about the dismantling system. Like on the one hand, I kind of like how inefficient the ability to move things is given how choreographed the town layout tends to be. It really makes you have to live with your choices because undoing a bad placement is a time sink, you have to mark something for demolition and then wait a day and then rebuild it and you can only dismantle so many buildings in a day. Your town becomes unique because of the errors you made, in effect. On the other hand, like, in the late game especially when you really want to start being serious about what the town layout looks like, you're spending just a lot of days dismantling and moving. It honestly kind of feels like dismantling was an after thought, something they realized they should add later on into production. Like again, I do love this game, but I'm really starting to realize why for all the times I've started a new kingdom, I've only ended up finishing one like twice.
Oh also I unlocked Inns. That part is cool. Inns, obviously, bring in more revenue to your kingdom but the fun part is that adventurers, while they're staying in town, will help out around the city. They'll show up to the quest board and be like "hey, I want to help out your guys, I like your kingdom's vibe". This can sometimes help you out immensely, the traveling adventurers tending to be at or above your own highest level adventurers. It also incentivizes you to leave your options open when planning dedicated party structures as to allow these new adventurers to aid and assist properly. Or you could just be like me and have so many adventurers wrapped in existing dynamics that the wanderers end up squadding up with each other most of the time, that's cool too I guess. The other neat thing about inns is that they bring in new random NPCs into your kingdom who have very unique descriptions. One of the first outsiders staying in my kingdom, for instance, was a traveling diplomat from another nation having a brief vacation in the countryside. It makes the world feel that much more alive, you know? And I think in the base game, it was the only way to encounter the other races of the Crystal Chronicles world?
8/2/25
Progress stalled this session, my god. For some reason, none of my adventurers were accomplishing like ANYTHING for what felt like an entire in-game month. They would keep going out on missions but because they took so long at the start they would basically get to the dungeon and then immediately turn around. It was so frustrating. The worst part about it is that like, I needed them to complete the tasks given to them specifically so that this exact scenario wouldn't happen. One of the buildings locked behind one of the dungeons they weren't completing was the Emporium, a massive bazaar which not only drastically increases the happiness of your townsfolk, but also improves the stock of every adventurer shop in the city. It unlocks stuff like Daggers, Shields, and most importantly, torches. Torches allow adventurers to stay out later, making them far less likely to come home early from a mission because it's getting dark. So the situation torches were designed to prevent was exactly the thing stopping me from getting torches. Infuriating.
The Dark Lord finally showed himself truly. I guess technically he showed himself last time and I forgot to report on it because I was too busy talking about the real villain of this game, Oz. Something I find really interesting, and which sets up the theming of the next game very well, is that the Dark Lord's appearance creates something of a sympathetic atmosphere among the townsfolk. The Dark Lord reveals that the kingdom that we are currently occupying was originally built by him, designed to be a safe haven for the monsters of the realm, and that our father stole it from them as they retreated when the miasma cleared. It's why the Dark Lord seems to have a vested interest in the continued development of our civilization, it is his hope that he will one day return to claim it for his people. And the town has largely adopted this atmosphere of "we don't believe what the Dark Lord is doing is right, per se, but we do wonder if a future can exist where we can coexist with the monsters that we fear, rather than just sending our adventurers out to kill them".
Something insane I learned, or at least remembered, I guess, is that because of how the game determines how parties function, if you have three parties set but only two job boards, then one of your parties will just go on autopilot and train forever every day! My best party, the one belonging to Val, just spent several days this play session going on unproductive training missions. What I have to guess is that the way the game codes parties, it counts the party leader standing at the board accepting the requests as if the entire party is there, accepting requests. And it is not coded to accept/understand the idea that 8 or more characters will arrive at a board seeking jobs. So it forces a completed party to go on autopilot until another job board is added to the village. What a wacky way for that logic to work! I fixed it though, the third party I made is benched as a cohesive unit until I unlock a third job board.
I don't know if I'll have another update between now and the end of the game. I'm kind of in this weird point in the game where like, the next story beat is going to be end game, iirc, and it's just a matter of clearing dungeons until that happens. I know it seems like I've been increasingly negative on the game and I will admit, it definitely kind of goes wonky in the midgame, but I really do enjoy this game a whole lot. Part of it may be nostalgia, mind, like I said me and this game have a pretty intimate history together. But this game is just so warm and cozy. I would love an improved remake of this game a whole bunch, I've said it a million times but I think there's a real untapped market for this city building game where you make a cozy RPG town. I'm really happy I replayed this, it's been a fun experience. And I think it's good to look back on things you're nostalgic for and re-evaluate them when you're older, tbh, rather than just letting your nostalgia lead you for the rest of your life.
8/3/25
I beat the game! The final boss is actually super interesting, they effectively do a raid boss for it. Like, instead of how the game usually functions where dungeon bosses are taken on by individuals and/or parties as a specific job, when you declare the battle against the Dark Lord, your entire selection of adventurers are put on that job for the day. Or at least as many adventurers as can fit on a singular job board because instead of making it appear on every job board it just appears on one, causing the issue to happen that I mentioned in a previous section. Anyways, you send out everyone and then they battle the Dark Lord, taking down as much HP as possible before they die. Pack it up, restart the next day. The Dark Lord doesn't appear to heal in between days, it may in fact do so, mind, but on a day to day level it's so minimal that it's not even noticeable. I think you'd likely have to leave it alone for an extended period of time for it to heal any health for it to be a real problem. It took me like an in-game week to defeat it, all told. And the person who took down the final boss? My girl Val.
I'm pretty sure there was a spy in my kingdom. One of the people who would come in and out of staying at the inn was a traveling diplomat from the Selkie people, a race of primarily attractive women. I believe there are males but if you see a Selkie, it's going to be female. Even our prime minister, or "chancellor" as the game calls her, Chime is half-Selkie. Anyways, this diplomat's descriptor literally says she keeps coming back into town to learn the secrets of the king's magic, the Architek that he uses to summon buildings. I'm like PRETTY confident that she was spying on us, especially since other townsfolk often imply the Selkies tend to keep up unscrupulous company, with some even positing that they're closer to monster than human. A rumor even starts that the Dark Lord himself, under all his armor, is a Selkie mage. She also was very weird about the King, commenting how handsome he was despite being, you know, underage, and saying stuff like "I look forward to seeing you grow up". Weirdly common thing in this game actually, older women hitting on the King, it's such an out of pocket detail.
I'm surprised how long it takes you to unlock villager requests. You have to raise your town up pretty high before the game allows you to gain the ability to do favors for your villagers. Or rather, spend a day sending your adventurers to do favors for your villagers. It's a surprisingly late game ability, you upgrade your town into a different civilization type by using spheres you collect by talking to your townsfolk or them talking to each other. And I think it's the upgrade that requires 16 of them that unlocks villager requests! They're fun little bonuses though, especially if you have three job boards but only two available jobs for that day. Just send your adventurers around town looking for some rando's lost trinket. This is a scenario that happens more often than you think, actually, there's always like one party out exploring a new dungeon and another party fighting the boss of another dungeon and party three doesn't really have that much to do!
Something I found extremely cute was that, when you get the cutscene to be like "okay, go fight the final boss now", everyone says how much the King and Kingdom means to them, except for Chime who can't bring herself to really say it. Instead, what Chime does is write it in her journal, the game is revealed at this point to be Chime recounting the events of it inside of her journal, and as you go around town entering all these buildings you built, Chime has little comments to say about them. How the King was so worried about his people getting hurt that he built a weapon shop, or how he built a bakery so the town would stop having to subsist on stale bread from the castle's storerooms. Basically every building has one of these, unless it was a DLC exclusive building. It's really nice going through town and reliving all these memories, hearing what these buildings meant to both the townspeople and Chime herself. This is YOUR town, that you built up from nothing into this thriving civilization.
I'm really glad I revisited this. Sorry I've been lacking on the saucy drama department, unfortunately my villagers end up kind of boring and nice 90% of the time. I still think this game is solid, I think it's a perfectly fun, perfectly fine time. But I also found more criticisms with it than I did back in 2009. It's definitely an excellent concept for a game, I don't know how this hasn't become a more common practice in the life sim/farming sim boom. Executionwise though, you can definitely tell the game is really padded. Like, it was a downloadable Wii title, this thing is tiny, it lags when you try to go to end of day because it has to make a hundred different checks on the adventurers you've sent out to see if they succeeded or failed their missions. It's simple, it's basic, it could be fleshed out way more. But I still think it's a fun little time. In the past I would give it like an 8/10, maybe an 8.5/10. I think now my rating is more like a strong 7-ish. It's very imperfect but still very fun. And like, I'm never going to hate this game, I have too much nostalgia caught up in it. 7.2/10
My Life as a Darklord Diary:
8/5/25
My Life as a Darklord starts out with a very interesting idea on rip: that the giant battle with the Dark Lord, the thing that took me an in-game week to complete in the previous game, was staged the whole time. That the Dark Lord, seeing that he was fighting a losing war, intentionally let himself be imprisoned so that his people would be spared from any further assault by the people of the Kingdom from the first game. This game then picks up an indeterminate amount of time after the first game. It's really hard to figure out how long exactly, as none of the characters from the first game have physically aged at all, but also it's been long enough to have people begin to settle the wilderness that the Dark Lord once ruled over. We pick up with our new protagonist, Mira, the Dark Lord's daughter who recently turned 16 and thus is finally old enough to ascend to the throne her father left vacant. And she is MAD.
Mira is so funny, y'all. So, her father literally sacrificed himself to make peace with the humans, right. Just totally took the L so his people would stop being killed en masse by an invading army. Mira, frankly, thinks this was dumb. Mira is not about the "live peacefully with humans" life AT ALL. What Mira wants is to crush the entire world under her boot, bringing in an era of monster domination that made the miasma days from the OG Crystal Chronicles look easy by comparison. She is a petulant, spoiled brat who truly believes that she's owed world domination just because she's the Dark Lord. She's so funny, I love her so much. She assaults her own soldiers for annoying her too much, she almost executes her chancellor, Tonbetty, yes really, for thinking that apples are an appropriate end goal when clearly apple pies are what we should be after, she throws temper tantrums when she loses and gloats relentlessly when she wins. She's so good, she's such a brat. But she does also have a softer side, she is quick to hype up her minions during battle and is fiercely loyal to those who are loyal to her at the end of the day. She's a spoiled child who was gifted a mobile fortress for her 16th birthday and is now like "time to crush everyone" but there's also a heart in there somewhere.
Speaking of the mobile fortress, My Life as a Darklord goes in a very bizarre direction for a sequel to My Life as a King. Like, it being so closely tied, you may think it's a city builder from the other side, maybe building up a monster encampment in the wilderness to try and reclaim your father's kingdom. It's a tower defense. You build up the literal tower of your mobile fortress, using dark energy you obtain from knocking out adventurers to add floors to the tower and then staff those floors with monsters. The goal being to not allow adventurers to climb all the way to the top and take the crystal sealing your father that you have hidden up there. I think Mira mostly needs it to channel her dark magic through, tbh, because otherwise there's not a lot of reason why she specifically would even want her father to stick around. She seems to resent him actually, he gave up on their dreams of world domination!!!
Low key, I actually thought this was going to be an immediate wash. Like, I don't know if this is just a me problem but it's not necessarily that I dislike Tower Defense games. Plants vs. Zombies is literally one of the only games I've ever rated 5/5 stars and is the reason I even started dabbling into PC gaming. But it's definitely the genre where like, at the start of it I'm usually going "this is boring and simple, I don't know about this". That being said, I also feel like this game is taking way too long to introduce mechanics. Like, I understand using my example of Plants vs. Zombies, that game is always introducing mechanics, in the vast majority of levels you are getting a new plant that can completely change how the game is played and how you choose to strategize going forward. But I think by the end of level 1 or 2 you still, like, get it, you know? The basic gameplay loop is spelled out for you and so it's just up to you to figure out how to strategize with the different pieces they add in later. Darklord introduces a class triangle, warriors beat thieves who beat mages who beat warriors, but by the end of Chapter 2, when they finally introduce warriors, they have not given you the tools to dispatch with them. So you're just like low key hoping you can outpace them in damage before they get to the top of the tower. I'm not asking the game to hand me a win con without any work, mind, but I do wish they would get on with introducing mechanics so I feel more like I'm making educated decisions.
Speaking of class triangles, I do find it super interesting how the game handles adventurers climbing the tower. When an adventurer climbs up the tower they HAVE to stop at a floor if it is unoccupied by another adventurer. Each floor has a built in trap to it and the trap will go off if an adventurer stops on the floor, assuming the trap is not meant to provide support for monsters that may be on the floor. If there are no monsters, the adventurer will attack the trap, dealing a bit of damage to it, before moving on to the next floor and repeating. Here's the fun part though, if there are monsters, they will initiate a JRPG battle with them. This is your primary way of stalling out and defeating adventurers, forcing them to battle your waves upon waves of summoned minions until it wears them down. Each adventurer only spends so much time on each floor, however, so you really have to bulk up the tower ASAP if you're going to be battling a wide variety of adventurers. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, floors that are already occupied by another adventurer will be skipped over by other adventurers, so you really have to rely on your tower's height as well as its defenses to properly deal with adventurers.
It's very funny how they choose to incorporate the characters of My Life as a King as well. Like these are characters with their own specific roles and histories in the original game, many of whom are not even proper adventurers in the first place. Like Chime, the chancellor of the first game, very clearly tells you that she has no stomach for adventuring and, despite her education at the Black Magic Academy when she was very young, she only really uses her abilities to better serve the King as his advisor. And in this game, she's the first boss! She's now a powerful wizard, defending one of the cities from your mobile fortress. It's kind of an insane place to take her, given that she strongly implied that once the war was over and the King was able to take on more duties of his own, she was going to take a sabbatical to get married and raise children. Like, settling down was legitimately a very important, hopeful note for her, and now here she is, defending a sister city from a giant monster tower roaming the countryside. Objectively it seems like things have gotten worse for her! And also the world! It seems like the war is going poorly, actually!!!
Admittedly, I'm not super sure if I'm going to ride this one out until the end? Like, I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong, it's fun enough. But I feel like I kind of "get it" already, you know? Like, again, I don't dislike Tower Defense games, but I tend to feel like of the genres, it's the one the one more than others where I get a couple hours in and go "okay, I feel like I've seen everything this game has to offer". I'll do at least one more play session, but don't be surprised if I bounce off this one in the end. Which would be a shame because I put so much time into playing an entirely different game to prepare for this one, completely reshaping how I felt about a favorite growing up, only to then be like "yeah I'm just not feeling this one", lol.
8/7/25
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is not long for this world, y'all. I mean, it literally isn't, it's a WiiWare game so officially there's no way to play it right now. But I also just... I don't know. Maybe it's because Tower Defense isn't my speed, but I've gotten most of the way through chapter 3 and I'm like "I don't think I really want to continue this". I'm very sorry if this is, like, anticlimactic, but you gotta go with what you feel, right. And I just was not feeling this that much. I frankly wish they had just made another city builder and tweaked it a bit, that would've gone hard.
So the big reveal at the end of Chapter 2 was that Mira is half human. This is not unexpected, Mira just does not look like a monster. It's kind of something that I haven't been super fond of, that they really didn't go hard enough with making the Darklord look more monstrous, especially when there's so many ways to make a monstrous character design look cute. Mira just looks like a teenage girl with weird hair and different colored eyes to indicate her monstrous half. It's disappointing, I want a proper monster girl. Anyways, she does not take this news well at all. She assaults her own citizens in anger for not telling her, and then realizes they didn't know either, which is even worse for her. Because that means the only person she can talk to about this is her father, and she hates that guy. I had speculated she hated her father before, but in this part of the game she just says it. She thinks he was a coward whose quest for peace made him weak. So talking to him, not exactly on the table for her, instead she's going to rampage across the countryside until she feels better.
So, the thing that finally made me go like "nah, I'm good" was the introduction of White Mages. White Mages are, on the surface, pretty unproblematic. They don't deal any damage to either your units or the floor and kinda just slowly go up the tower, stopping on each floor to do nothing. The only thing they can do is heal! This is the reason why they made me give up. White mages are so overtuned. First of all, they don't really have any weakness per se, so unlike most units in the game you can't counterpick them to get an advantage. You simply have to outdamage them. At the current capabilities I have in the game, the highest damage output I have available to me is a room of 3 Scorpions with a trap that deals damage such as the Iron Ball. This setup will net us about 45-50 damage on a white mage. They heal for 30 on each of their turns. At level 1. If they're a higher leveled white mage, they heal for considerably more. White mages warp the entire game around them in a very unfun way, you no longer are really rewarded for smart planning, good strategy, and good improv. You're now only rewarded for having a real big, real well stocked tower that can hopefully out damage the white mage's healing capabilities. It sucks, it's so bad. It almost feels like luck sometimes, like if my monster's movement bars aren't in the right sync, I just lose.
I do want to compliment this game's soundtrack, real quick. Kumi Tanioka returns to do the soundtrack and I loved her work on the first game a whole lot, y'all know. I think this one is leaps and bounds better. It's honestly kind of a shame that this game is unknown that it doesn't even appear people have uploaded the soundtrack, it's a super underrated one. It has this great main battle theme which evolves over the course of a battle as more powerful units start coming in. The boss theme is great. A lot of the incidental music is fun. Kumi Tanioka cooked and so few people get to enjoy the dishes, travesty. Maybe I need to learn how to get music online so I can introduce y'all to this great soundtrack (I won't, that takes effort, lololol).
Having now given up on Darklord, I decided to just go ahead and look to the future, see what I was missing out on. It doesn't seem like the strategy gets great at any point unless you bought the DLC which, you know. I can't anymore. But the plot seems to go exactly where you think it's going to. Eventually Mira realizes she has to talk to her dad and hash things out and finds out his wish was for Mira to finally be the bridge between human and monster. I can only imagine she doesn't take that well but as she nears the end of her campaign, she comes to realize that her father was not a coward but rather a noble leader doing what is best for not just his own people, but for all the races of the world. And after confronting the kingdom of the first game and taking down the little King, she decides to form an alliance, ending the way once and for all. I do like that these two games, King and Darklord, do have this thematic throughline of "maybe there is a better way, maybe monsters and humans don't need to fight" and it's realized through Mira's conquest. She may be a reluctant bridge, but she is a bridge nonetheless.
I don't think My Life as a Darklord is a bad game. I know that seems contradictory because I've abandoned it but like, low key, I've abandoned a lot of games I've liked or even loved. I think if I was MORE of a tower defense person, I would've seen this to the end, but like. I guess Tower Defense needs to move faster and be more of a vibe for me. I did enjoy this entire process though, revisiting such a fun game from my past and finally experiencing its sequel. I have to wonder if I had played it when it was new, if I would've enjoyed it more too. I feel like I had more patience for games being kinda mediocre when this came out, certainly more than I do now. And like, this game IS fun, when a level was going well or had a neat structure I was having a blast. I just think it's kinda too slow, too poorly paced. 6.2/10
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