Little King's Story

Truly, this is one of the greatest tragedies in recent gaming history. Like most of the ill-fated studio Cing’s titles, Little King’s Story has been dying in reduced-price purgatory basically since its release. It’s a game that was advertised to the wrong market and released on the wrong system. The crowd that regularly buys stuff like Fat Princess and Katamari Damacy would have eaten LKS up and been the better for it, but instead this came out for the Wii, giving it the unfortunate ‘for kids’ label commonly associated with Nintendo’s consoles. Even worse, the game’s slightly mature sense of humor branded it with a “teen” rating, meaning it potentially became off limits for the younger kids, and I could go on but you get the drift. None of that’s actually important.

What’s important is that Little King’s Story is one of my favorite video games of the 2000s and it deserves the praise most reviewers have given it. LKS is a Pikmin-style real-time strategy game that takes place in a small kingdom called Alpoko ruled by the main character. You begin with only a few subjects, and must spread out to conquer the surrounding lands, eventually dominating the entire world. All of this is accomplished through tons of exploration, experimentation, and hilarious surreal boss fights.

While the game has a whimsical, often very silly tone, it can reach in to areas of darkness when needed–the final section of the game feels very sad and realistic, and the revelations gained feel deserved. This, combined with the game’s charming pastel graphics (the only game I can really compare it to visually is Yoshi’s Island) and excellent classically influenced score by Yutaka Minobe make Little King’s Story truly come alive, almost like a Disney or Ghibli film. It doesn’t shy away from some more mature themes either. You essentially play as a dictator in the game (who collects a harem of ‘wives’ to boot), and your subjects will openly criticize your actions. Several times throughout the game, I questioned the validity of the king’s rule and imperialism, especially when facing the other kings and conquering their lands.

Little King’s Story mostly uses a cast of flat characters, but the way they are presented makes them memorable. The bosses (these are the ones you’ll care about) all get a short but sweet cutscene before their battles begin, and each has its own unique gimmick that you will have to adjust to. For instance, the indescribable TV Dinah quizzes you on geography, then drops bombs on your party and forces you to duel him in a spaghetti western scenario (he’s flipping channels and changing forms with them). One of the bosses is a raving drunkard, and one turns the game in to a giant pinball set. Part of what makes these stand out is that despite not testing you on the game’s actual gameplay mechanics, none of them feel out of place in the game’s world. In fact, by not forcing the player to play as he normally would, the game stays fresh throughout.

Perhaps the best handled aspect of Little King’s Story is its emphasis on exploration. To build new houses and recruit new types of units, you must clear enemies out of new areas, then start digging and building houses. All of this is handled by different units that travel with the king, so it’s a relatively quick process. The sidequests in the game encourage deeper exploration in various areas (even in places you have previously conquered) so the player becomes very familiar with his kingdom by the game’s end. All of this proves to be very important when the world faces an external threat in the story’s climax. I remember the horror I felt when places I had spent so long settling and developing faced epic peril in the final phase of the game. One of the things I always hear people complain about in RPGs is that they don’t care about the world because its citizens are bland. Well, that won’t happen in Little King’s Story. When a game makes you care about the geography itself, I think it’s accomplished something.

Almost every console gamer who participated in the last console generation owns a Wii that is now collecting dust, and I would have to recommend Little King’s Story to those in that situation. It’s about a 40 hour game, but none of that really feels wasted, as the game directly rewards even random-seeming exploration and one silly boss fight makes for a great session. Take over the world; you won’t regret it.

The game feels Pikmin-lite with it’s mechanics. You command a group of followers, in this case, human citizens with different roles, and use their abilities to remove obstacles and defeat enemies. As you expand your kingdom and place newly discovered special buildings, you can assign new roles to your citizens and therefore reach new areas. You start off only commanding a few citizens but this expands throughout the game up to 30 followers.

In the early game, you are using Grunt soldiers to attack, and Farmers to dig holes. Often the holes contain treasure but sometimes unearth monsters. Plants can be picked by anyone. Animal Hunters are archers that have limited supply of arrows, but can reach enemies on ledges, and defeat flying enemies (these are rare). Carpenters can build stairs and bridges to reach previously inaccessible areas. Lumberjacks can destroy large logs that block your path, Miners have similar function but with rocks, and they are also good at digging holes. There’s upgraded versions of some of these roles, plus a few special one-off roles towards the end of the game.

If you return to your throne, the items you find are converted to cash, and the treasure items are added to your stash to equip your citizens. You can buy upgrades for your kingdom (new buildings, houses to expand population, and some miscellaneous items), and choose to save. You can only carry a limited amount of items, although this is quite a large limit; so you venture out, grab as much as you can, then return to your throne to cash in and save. Pots and plants seem to respawn very quickly, as do the enemies (until you take control of that region).

The combat involves looking in the direction of the enemy (known as UMA) and pressing A to send 1 citizen in that direction. If they hit the enemy, they will continue swiping at them until the enemy is defeated or you recall them with B. I didn’t find a way of sending out a batch, so you will be hammering the A button to swarm your enemies, then recalling when you think they are about to attack and repeat the process. You can use the down arrow to toggle between the roles, so if your Farmer is next in line, you may want to switch to the soldiers before initiating combat. I was surprised that there are no Wii-specific controls in the game, so there’s no pointing with the remote.

Most non-solider roles can attack, but they won’t do as much damage. The more specialised characters may have one specific job, like the Chefs who can defeat the massive chickens in one hit, or the miners that will defeat the large rock enemies with ease.

If your troops die, they mysteriously wash ashore the next morning. You suffer a small cash penalty when this happens too. If you don’t go to collect them, then they can die permanently. You can see your citizens don a funeral garment, and there will be a funeral service for the deceased.

I think the amount of health people have is randomly assigned and not tied to their role (maybe boosted by their role). You can increase it further with upgrades, and by equipping some treasure items you find. Other items increase attack power, or give you poison/burn immunity etc.

Your aim in each area is to find and defeat the guardian. The enemies are then removed and the land is yours. You don’t place the buildings yourself so there is no customisation, but options become available to purchase new houses to increase your population, and place the special buildings to gain new types of roles.

Some areas are ruled by Kings and these have differing gameplay styles. TV Dinah quizzes you on geography, then drops bombs on your party whilst you try and dig up the correct spot on the map, then you can battle him directly. One King turns the game into a giant pinball table. If you die in these battles then you are prompted to retry, rather than giving you the usual Game Over. This was a welcome featured because I died repeatedly on these. Not only is the gameplay different so you need to work out the mechanics, but they often dragged out for longer than necessary, then sometimes had the usual thing of increasing difficulty during the final part. Some were designed to frustrate like the TV Dinah boss where he gives you the question with slowly scrolling text while the timer is counting down, and in later rounds he then says “only joking” and gives you a different question without resetting the timer. It’s really tedious - especially when you are retrying after previously battling him for 15 minutes, only to fail to find the Andes within 10 seconds on a crudely drawn map.

Once you defeat the King, you steal their princess and marry her... so you have multiple wives. This is a pretty weird idea in what looks like a kids game. Your assistant Howser doesn’t seem to approve of the multiple wives situation, but seems hell-bent on world domination.

The final boss was also frustrating. You have to go through lots of dialogue and cut-scenese, then do a mini-game to get to the final area, and taking damage here removes a citizen. There is a checkpoint when the boss battle starts but you could end up going in with a major disadvantage. First, there’s some minions to fight, one of which can kill multiple citizens in one swipe. When you finally move onto the boss, he has two of these attacks (plus some less frustrating ones). He has such high health that I’m convinced you will need 20 citizens to take him down. Good luck with that.

The game has a day/night cycle, and if you rest, then you and your citizens are healed. You can venture out at nighttime without much penalty. It is quite hard to see, and I think there were a few different enemies in some places. Some areas go dark regardless though, so it doesn’t seem to matter if you venture into spooky forests during the daytime or not.

The game shows you if your citizens like or hate you, but I wasn’t sure what mechanics influenced this. Presumably if they die, and possibly if you don’t give them enough rest? Citizens can fall in love, and you see them following each other around in your kingdom.

The voice acting sounds gibberish, but has a hint of different languages. The music is mainly famous classical pieces. The graphics are simple and colourful, but it looks very blurred like many Wii games. There’s a nice pastel look to the cut-scenes.

The pathfinding was on the poor side, so your citizens often get stuck and struggle to follow you up stairs. Some of the level design seemed to highlight how bad it is, when you have to navigate thin paths littered with objects like trees and fences. This was a massive source of frustration.

The game is very long (close to 30 hours), and I felt it could have been trimmed down. If the pathfinding was better, it was more concise, and the bosses were made easier, I would have given this a higher rating. It felt a bit of a tedious grind, and had too many frustrating elements to ignore.