It Is Awesome to be the King
Before getting into details let's remove all the comparisons out of the way. Little King's Story is no Pikmin clone – even though it is absolutely inspired by it – and it is also no RTS game despite the fact that you do build structures that produce different army units, finally it is far from being a Harvest Moon title in spite of the always on going lives of your kingdom citizens.
Little King's Story borrows many concepts from different vastly successful sources and mixes all of those in order to create one of the deepest longest experiences the system has to offer, meanwhile the game is still able to maintain a huge feeling of originality and creativity due to its overwhelming art and quirky humor.
On the game you are a lonely little boy that all of a sudden – while wandering through some woods – comes across a shiny crown. Once he wears such an enchanting artifact he becomes the mighty king of Alpoko Kingdom gaining on the process the ability to summon citizens and assign orders to those whenever he feels like. At first your kingdom is so tiny and poor the royal residence resembles a small shoe box, but as things get better and World Domination takes place your Kingdom will vastly expand allowing the king to enjoy the richness of life while leaving on a golden castle.
But achieving such a wonderful life requires a lot of hard work and that is where the player comes in. By wandering through your kingdom you can press B to recruit your citizens, initially all of them are carefree adults that don't do nothing throughout the day and can be found sleeping on the sidewalks or benches, that is it if your kingdom has any of those, otherwise they will probably settle for the grass.
When thrown inside Job Structures carefree adults will become professionals, the game offers a huge variety of 20 jobs each one with their own unique abilities and weaknesses that need to be used wisely if you plan on succeeding on your quest for World Domination. These jobs include soldiers, farmers, hunters, cooks, doctors, carpenters, miners, lumberjacks and many others.
Citizens have lives of their own some of them like to walk around on the late hours of the night while some go to sleep early. Others fall in love and can eventually get married giving you another new baby citizen on the process. Losing a life on the battlefield affects your kingdom as not only will you have to pay a certain value due to that but a funeral will also be held on the cemetery in order to honor the deceased person.
After building a nice and varied army it is time to explore the land and that is when the game gets truly interesting. Featuring a huge world the game manages to be refreshingly open-ended. Players can expand their kingdom by defeating nearby bosses, explore the land, seek treasure to build new structures and areas within your land, take on quests that are frequently sent you by mail or focus on defeating the other Kings that dare to stand on your way, which is the main quest of the game. While some of those things are mandatory and others optional the time when you will decide to do those is up to you.
In order to do so you shall control your army through the land pretty much the same way it is done on Pikmin. Initially you can only take another five citizens with you but as the game goes on that number will be expanded to up to thirty soldiers. Your minions' path finding abilities are slightly lacking so unfortunately occasionally they are going to get stuck on some walls as you climb a ramp and leave them behind. This can be annoying at times but if you keep following your path those stuck soldiers will magically rejoin your other forces slightly reducing the occasional frustration of having a bunch of important units stuck on the lower level of a hill.
The lack of an IR interface is quite disturbing for the game would have benefited of one especially when battling UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animals). When facing your foes you will have to turn the king into their direction so you can aim properly and throw your soldiers into battle, aiming can be a little tricky and it is common to miss. The use of a pointer would have made such a process much more comfortable and accurate. After reaching the enemy your soldiers will proceed to attack them, if you notice the enemy is about to land a blow on the nearby soldiers all you need to do is press B to make your forces quickly retreat.
Controlling which unit will be sent into battle is quite simple as a click on the D-pad will reorganize your army and tiny icons on the lower left corner of the screen will show the units that are up next. Unfortunately on very rare occasions during the most intense battles players will certainly run into a few camera angle problems as the camera won't rotate into a better position and get stuck on a not so comfortable view.
If you are a fan of big bosses Little King's Story will fulfill all your demands because it has tons of those, and by tons I mean more than twenty. Bosses can be qualified as Kings or Guardians. Beating the latter is required in order to expand your Kingdom's area allowing you to build and develop a new part of your growing town while the former are the rulers of your rival kingdoms.
The other seven kings are full of personality. One is a drunk man leading a kingdom focused on partying, another one watches TV from an underground base and one likes to spend his day eating his sweet kingdom up. Battling those kings is one of the game's biggest joys. The battles are very unique: one happens on a pinball table, another takes place over a vast world map where the player needs to find the country where the king is located based on a short description and one is more of a quiz show than an epic battle between two Kingdoms.
The developers also made the very wise choice of allowing players to restart the battle right away if they lose, instead of having to walk back into the battlefield and watch a cutscene once again. This obviously does away with any unnecessary frustrating backtracking.
After defeating each one of the kings the powerful King of Alpoko Kingdom will be awarded with lots of treasure and a princess. Every one of the princesses has their unique qualities and defects and it is up for the king to choose among his 7 wives the one that will truly become the queen. Aside from playing the role of damsels in distress each one of the princesses will have a request for the king, those requests usually deal with collecting stuff around the vast world map and make up for extremely nice sidequests that will certainly keep you playing for hours after you have finished the game.
Technically speaking the game is also excellent. While its graphics may not be among the Wii's best they certainly do their job especially because of the wonderful art work the game has. From the cutscenes that look like moving oil paintings to the colorful and charming visuals that mask some very dark subjects such as Religion against Science ,and death. The character animations are pretty good even though your soldiers may walk in a funny way due to the limited amount of animation frames they received.
The soundtrack may bother some players because you would expect a unique soundtrack from such a charming special game, but the developers decided to go with public domain reorchestrated tracks which are indeed very lovely and fitting.
Overall Little King's Story is one of the Wii's best games. It is a huge package with heavy focus on exploration and world domination. It features between 30 and 50 hours of entertaining and highly addictive gameplay with a very nice level of difficulty. Up to now no Wii third-party games have been able to reach the standard set by Nintendo but this one certainly managed to climb that high.
Actual Score: 9.6