Little King’s Story Review
Little King’s Story is a Wii game based on much the same concept as My Life As King, though both games started development at around the same time. The idea is that the player is the King, and has control over essentially everything and everybody in the kingdom. Rather like Harvest Moon meets Pikmin, it’s a game about management and strategy, and has a very fascinating cartoony style that sucks you in.
Things at the game’s beginning play out in a very similar fashion to Where The Wild Things Are, and I guess a lot of other kid’s stories. Basically, the main character(a young boy) ends up magically transported to a world where he has been appointed King. The question is, is this young boy really in this magical kingdom, or is it all in his head? This is left a little open to interpretation. One clue may be that the cutscenes portraying the kingdom’s legends look like they were drawn with a crayon.
Surprisingly enough, Little King’s Story does not feature motion control or IR support. Still, the controls work perfectly. The analog on the nunchuk is used for movement, A is for talking and other actions, and the B trigger is for recruiting men and having them follow you to do your bidding. Press 1 to dismiss followers. The D-pad controls the camera, the C button zooms the camera, and pressing Z shows you your king’s line of sight.
The idea is (again, much like in My Life As A King) to build up your beginning town and spread out your kingdom. At first, you have this little house with a small throne room, and many of the men around you are slackers, but that changes over time. As you hunt for treasure and complete other tasks you earn gold, which can be used to fund the building of new structures, such as town buildings, or bridges, or a myriad of other things that help the people expand and grow. As the wealth of your kingdom builds, the more changes will take place in the economy. You will start to see more beautiful houses and carefully constructed buildings, and peasants will be clothed in much more elegant garb.
Little King’s Story is already out in Japan, and will soon be released in Europe. After that, it will come to North America. At the very least, it will serve as a more full-fledged offering of what My Life As King attempted to do.
