The latest installment of the Nintendo Crystal Chronicle series hit the Wii a few weeks ago, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A Darklord. It offers players a shot at fighting on the wrong side of the law for once. You play as the defeated Darklord’s daughter, Princess Mira. Working her way to fame by defeating renowned heroes. Her aim is, of course, nothing short of world domination.
It has a unique tower defense type game play, where you build floors into a tower, and then place monsters on the floors to stop heroes from getting to the top, where the crystal containing the essence of your father lies.
It introduces five different monster and enemy types, each of them conflicting differently to opposites. So each type has a strength and a weakness. That’s where most of the strategy comes in, especially because heroes can skip floors if they’re already occupied.
The waves come actively, as you build floors (which come in a variety of types) simultaneously while you place monsters. The waves progressively get harder and harder through each assault, and they can also kill your monsters as they advance, or cause hazardous status effects, or even knock down a whole floor at once. On top of all this they have boss stages where they will throw a boss into one of the waves. Just another challenge to look forward to.
The game starts out a little slow, just to introduce you to the system, but it builds quickly, and is very expansive. Far more so than the Crystal Defender games (which are a lot simpler, but easily just as fun.) One of the elements I like about this game is it is a bit more like an RPG, as far as you go on optional side quests and collect different artifacts that power you up.
Even at some of the early stages I had some close calls, where a hero was on the top floor of my tower, but like a lot of tower defense games, the farther you get, the more complicated it gets, but also the more you can annihilate the enemies with ultimate fire power. What sets this one apart is how few chances you get. Death can happen very suddenly.
Unlike most tower defense games I’ve played, this one actually has a story. Although it isn’t very compelling it is pretty funny. It’s also brief enough, that it doesn’t drown out the gameplay in any way.
For 1000 Wii points, it has a lot of playability. It also has some expansions that seem like they might be worth checking out. On the downside, I have never been a fan of paying for additional content, and this game has almost $70 dollars worth of extra stuff you could buy. The nice thing is, you don’t need to, you get a really good game for $10.
To sum it all up. I think the greatest thing this game has going for it is its harder to get bored of a game when you are constantly killing heroes. (Or at least knocking them out of a tall tower.) Even though Mira is a pretty cute little girl, and her right hand man happens to be a stuffed animal named Tonbetty, just having it in the back of your head that everything you’re doing is a step towards deeper darker evil, keeps it sharp and fun.