Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles - My Life as a Darklord : Wii
What a title! Those Square Enix boys never stop with the ridiculously long game naming. Ah well, let’s put that aside for a start. My Life as a Darklord is a WiiWare tower defence game that you can download for a few measly points (I think it works out at about a fiver, which is great). As it carries the FF moniker, it gets to delve into that universe for its graphics and its flavour and this it does with aplomb - as soon as you load it up you know that you are playing something which lives alongside ‘real’ Final Fantasy games. In comparison though, this is a little diversion.
My Life as a Darklord is really good. As tower defence games go, it is up there with Plants vs. Zombies. The graphics have that same cartoony, friendly look, it’s as simple to jump into with a nice low learning curve and it begins to feel instinctual very quickly. In Darklord, Square Enix have taken the idea of tower defence kind of literally and you spend your time defending your tower from the good guys - yup, for once you get to play the bad guys and you have to place monsters in your tower to kill the horrible adventurers who would like nothing more than to dethrone you. It’s a great premise for an enjoyable game, but the story has buried itself firmly on the younger side of the audience camp, which is a real shame. Seriously, do we really need a ‘we can all be friends and love and hug each other’ storyline? But then, if I were eight years old, I might be coming across this sort of thing for the first time. That said, if I were eight years old, would I really be able to complete this game?
Darklord has something very special going for it - it gets hard. Not smash-your-face-in-you-are-never-doing-this kind of hard, but you-are-going-to-have-to-think-about-this kind of hard, which so many tower defence games fail to do. In fact, I am not proud to say that one of the side missions I wasn’t able to complete before I finished the storyline. Just one mind - it’s not THAT hard.
Jumping on the DLC idea, this game is a bit of a naught beast for that sort of thing. Downloadable add-ons come in two flavours; ones which are essentially cheating by making you stronger with no balance on the other side (i.e. ‘help me, I can’t do this’ add-ons) and make the game longer extra level type add-ons. All of them are things that as a fan you want to get, especially as you can claim some of the guys from Final Fantasy IV as team extras (I want!). The problem here is the price. If you were to buy all the DLC for this game, it’d end up costing you about £40 all said. That’s a full price game, and not even a full price game you can buy second hand six months late, but an always full price game. Is My Life as a Darklord worth £40? I’m not sure it is, even for ardent Final Fantasy fans like me. What I am sure of is that it is worth £5 without thinking and I’m likely to download the extra levels to extend the game for the £3-£4 they cost. I hope they have a decent amount of content though.
In terms of gameplay, the only downside to this game is probably that it isn’t varied enough without the DLC. The download content gives you more monsters to place (you only get two of each type with the basic game - ten in total), and more rooms to create (your tower is made up of rooms with abilities) - this sort of content should probably have been larger in the first place. I’m not against the idea of DLC, but I think there should just be a little more in the initial package. That all aside though, there is plenty to be getting on with. It took me 20 hours or so to complete, with plenty of replays on some levels to get it right, and that does me fine.
It’s hard to write much more about a game like this - if you know tower defence, then you get the idea very quickly, and if you don’t, well this isn’t a bad one to start with as it does, as I have said, ease you into the idea at a decent rate. It’s pretty, it’s funny in places, and it touches the Final Fantasy fan inside. If you have a Wii, it’s very much worth getting, but if you don’t, I wouldn’t be rushing off buying a Wii for it.
