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 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 (as in top 10) 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.

If i had to pin Little King’s Story to a genre of literature, it would be fairy tales. 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 actions, 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 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.

9.5