Little King’s Story (Wii) Review
Wow. This is a really great game. It’s really great for a lot of reasons; it’s original in so many ways, it looks very nice, it sounds great, it’s long and constantly entertaining and challenging, it’s genuinely funny and quirky throughout, and most of all, it is absolutely the most charming game to grace the Wii to date. A big call, but spend a bit of time with Little King’s Story and I’m sure you’ll feel the same way.
Charming really is the word here. The game’s presentation really is superb; if you’ve seen any trailers you’d have had a taste already. Your introduction to the Little King is bold and boisterous, and more than a little bit magical. If you were ever a lonely kid reading about dragons, knights and kings, you can probably identify with the little lad, though it’s unlikely that you stumbled upon a magical crown that marks you as the king of Alpoko. That’s where Little King’s starts off – you put on the crown and Howser the Bull-Knight, the first in a very long and hilarious cast of kingdom quirks, charges in on his cow (Pancho!) and announces you as the true king (which he has sought for the past 30 something years – a fact he will constantly remind you of).
The actual game play is pretty simple, and revolves around a few key ideas. You put together teams of citizens and go out into the wilderness. You will primarily be treasure-hunting, exploring, or expanding your kingdom by defeating monsters. These all blur in to each other as you’re playing, but you can focus on any one thing if you like. Simply walk up to a citizen, press the B-button, and he’s part of your team. At first you can command 5 carefree people (they look like hippies), but you’ll be controlling ten times that by the end of the game. If you’re familiar with Pikmin you will understand how to control them – the king does nearly nothing himself. Press the A button to send them flying off in the desired direction to attack or build or dig or whatever. You can turn on a guiding line that helps greatly. Take note that the game doesn’t use any motion or pointer controls – and really doesn’t need to.
Your kingdom is initially very small as the game holds your hand through the first learning phase. It’s a very natural and non-intrusive tutorial, which is a blessing rarely seen in these sort of games. Soon you’ll be out taking quests from villagers (in the form of funny little letters notifying you of nearby boss type monsters), building stairs and bridges, digging up treasure, and generally branching out. Each guardian boss you kill opens up that area for development, meaning you can spend all the money you earned from treasure hunting on new buildings, giving you more citizens or new job facilities, as well as some other unique structures – more on that later. Play is neatly divided up into days, nicely sized chunks that give you a bit of lenience either way; you can stretch a day quite far, but the game will remind you to give the King a rest.
The story revolves on you, under the Bull-Knight’s guidance, taking true kingship over the land. So, it turns out there is a tiny bit of land beneath your kingdom inhabited by monsters known as Onii. Beat the Onii King and you expand your kingdom. And then, in a pattern that will become somewhat familiar, Howser will reveal that the world is a slightly bigger place. Eventually the big reveal comes that shows off the entire Little King’s world, and it is really quite big.
The constantly building scale of the game is really something. Your tiny world turns into a huge one, your small party of citizens expands exponentially (and they’re no longer hippies), your shed-castle turns into a vast, stone goliath of a place, not to mention the Princess’ castle next door. And all the time you’re expanding your outer lands as well, building new districts. You start with farm land and end up with big royal neighbourhoods, soldier’s grounds, mining regions and so on. Don’t forget the side-quests, of which there are a lot; search for paintings (drawn from a fan-art contest) that you can hang in your castle, catalogue every monster, visit every place. There is tons to do.
Exploring and fighting are by and large painless, though there lie my only real complaints with the game. The combat is fine and entertaining. Plenty of ordinary monsters dot the landscape, but the real fun comes with boss fights. The strategy for every single one is different, though it mainly consists of knowing when to attack and when to retreat. As you gain new units your options will increase; using different combinations of knights, archers, chefs and so on, you can play pretty much how you want. It certainly pays to have one of each class while exploring, to make sure you can take out any obstacle, but you can get by without them for much of the game.
Moving around the world is where the game can get a bit frustrating; walk up a ramp or near a cliff and it’s likely a few of your guys will fall over the edge and be stuck there. This is partly remedied when you buy new formations for your troops later, but it’s still a problem. If you move far enough away they’ll appear nearby, but in the meantime it leaves them vulnerable. Switching through units is pretty fast using the D-pad on the Wii remote, though later on it gets a bit tiring if you have a whole lot of different classes with you.
The game’s open structure is superbly implemented. Most areas are quite big but with pretty linear paths through them. The great thing is that you always have at least a few places you can go, all in completely different directions. You can barge ahead and explore straight to the next big kingdom, or you can take the time to explore the more immediate surroundings and defeat the guardian bosses there to open up more development. You can go through the whole game without so much as looking at them. Once you’re into the big wide world, you always have at least a few options of where to go, at least a few bosses to choose from.
The presentation, as I said, is quite spectacular. The water-coloury cut-scenes are beautiful, and this style translates well into the game world; even though the graphics are technically rather average, they are still pretty and do the art justice, bringing the world to life down to pretty small details. It’s easy enough to draw a comparison to Animal Crossing, but Little King’s surpasses that in the multitude of tiny details and action going on. Animation is smooth and watching your ever-growing party of followers skip along behind you is great, and more than a little endearing. You’ll move through lovely green pastures, farm-land, magical forests, dank caves, and the game handles the atmosphere of each well. The change when you transform these areas into your own land is a particular joy.
To complement all of this is the music and sound; purely regal in its vibe and probably the best area of the game’s production. It puts its mark on a good amount of classical tunes from history’s favourite composers, and backs it up with plenty of original songs as well. That bold ‘dun dumpity dun!’ intro song, the playful, whimsical tunes of your own Alpoko Kingdom, to the touching violin score that accompanies the princesses’ occasional morning visits all work to create and complement the games character. Every single tune is top-notch quality. The voice acting is similar to Animal Crossing in its jumbled letter tones, but once again a tad more quirky and each character has their own instantly recognisable voice, with occasional words jumping out. It’s almost a shame we missed out on the mega-cute voiceovers of the first trailers (hi, I’m apricot!), but unless it was consistent it wouldn’t be worth it.
You cannot resist growing attached to your citizens as you move on in the game. Ever had a dog that’s followed you around everywhere? They’re like that, but almost more endearing (Peter Molyneux would be jealous). Your early few will be your favourites no doubt – I found that I didn’t mind losing some random grunts in battle, but if it was from the first ten or fifteen of my citizens, I’d be on the beach the first thing the next day hoping they’d washed up (they come back from the land of the dead, but it’s not guaranteed!).
The charm and humour of the world and its characters is standout. This is partly due to clever writing and translation, partly due to character design, and quite a bit to do with just playing the game. You have Howser Oreganostein with Pancho (his Bull) and your two ministers (Your ‘Anything Minister’ Liam and ‘Records Minister’ Verde) who are essentially old friends taking advantage of your newly found kingdom. Then there’s Mr. M the naked musician (Don’t worry, you can’t see anything!) and the ever waging war between Science and Religion with Skinny Ray the panic-stricken astronomer and Kampbell, the priest of the Soup sect (Ramen), always trying to disprove each other, though they’re saying essentially the same thing (there’s a message there, kids). You grow a beard if you don’t go to bed soon enough. It’s quite funny. In fact, I can’t help but feel if the entire game world is a dig at Yasuhiro Wada’s pedigree (he created Harvest Moon before this), because it’s absolutely over-flowing with evil cows, chickens, sheep and turnips. No one does cows quite like him.
Little King’s Story is a really great game. If the game was a person and that person went to a dinner party, everyone would want to sit next to them, because they’d have so much character. It’s a storybook adventure with a text-book execution. Every part of design comes together wonderfully; the combined style of sound and visuals, the open-ended possibilities of game-play in all of its many facets, the characters, humour and the rather deep philosophies behind them all. The constant growth of your kingdom in scale and grandness is perpetually rewarding. It is long and it can be very challenging (if you’re new to games, I’d recommend the easy setting. I died a fair bit on normal!), and that is a good thing, because the play remains fresh throughout. It’s thoroughly original despite some obvious inspirations, taking the good parts and making them its own. I sincerely hope that this game does well, because it certainly deserves to.
Certainly one of the Wiis best and brightest games. Every part of design comes together to create something quite spectacular. Look past the cutesy box art and you will find a deep and challenging adventure in a living and breathing world.
Graphics 7.0
The game by no means looks amazing. However, it runs smoothly throughout, theres a hell of a lot going on just about all the time, and the art direction is great. The water colour cut scenes are a sight to behold.
Gameplay 9.0
Its all about exploring, treasure hunting and monster hunting. All three of these things are a lot of fun. If I had to classify the game Id call it an RPG, but theres so much thats original about Little Kings Story that no one genre quite fits. This
Sound 9.9
The best produced part of the game. Unlike a lot of games where the soundtrack takes a back seat and youll never notice it, Little Kings Storys tunes really jump out and bring the world to life.
Tilt 9.0
Its rare that youll find a game this long that remains exciting throughout. After five or six hours you feel like youve barely scratched the surface. The pace certainly picks up as your kingdom expands, but there are still heaps of kingdoms to take, lo
Value 9.0
Ive had a really great time playing the Little King. You cant help but get attached to world and its characters. The adventure is straight out of a storybook, but with a lot more evil turnips.
