Story

The main boss of the game, The Darklord.

There’s not much to say about the story really. For a Final Fantasy game, it’s horrid and clearly they weren’t aiming for a strong plot. The game takes place after the events of the Gamecube game, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. A young king must rebuild and repopulate his town. His father is missing and a Dark Lord wants to take over your town and the world. At least that’s what I got from it, because

“MLAAK” doesn’t really do a great job of explaining the story and for those who didn’t play the Gamecube original may not understand what some of the characters are referring to at times. However, player’s who missed out on the original game won’t be find it hard to follow, it’s just “MLAAK” makes the story feel empty.

Gameplay

Let’s get one thing straight, If you want a fully fledged Final Fantasy RPG, don’t come looking here. This is a Tycoon simulation game. You will not see any fancy cut-scenes or fight any battles yourself. I’ve never really been a fan of Tycoon games, but I was willing to give this one a try. Like most Tycoon games, the point of “MLAAK” is to quickly build up your Empire and make it as big and as powerful as you can. There is no time limit on doing this, but you have limits on how much you can build. You need a substance called Elementite, which is found in Dungeons. Since you can’t go to the dungeons, you hire adventurers to do the job for you.

Over looking your empire at the start of a new day.

Once the adventurers go out to the dungeons, which you pick for them, you are left with pretty much nothing to do. Apart from running around and talking to the

civilians of your empire to build up Morale, this can be exchanged for making your empire better and more productive. Or you can build buildings if you have the Elementite or to stay out later at night. The adventurers also act on morale and sometimes have just plain annoying AI. Let’s say you have a Black Mage Dungeon, where only Mages can use attacks to hurt the monsters. Most of them won’t go for that dungeon for some reason. This may be because tycoon/ simulation based games aren’t my strong point. Perhaps I was doing something wrong; but then again I’m playing the role as a King, so they should just obey orders like good little adventurers.

One thing the game does well is that it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something by building the empire back up, and it does recreate the Final Fantasy world quite well. If you like Tycoon simulation games, then you most likely love it. But I found myself being left bored with nothing to do after talking to my citizen’s and ordering my adventurers to go adventuring.

Graphics

Nothing amazing to been seen really. Sometimes it looks better than the Gamecube Crystal Chronicles, other time’s it looks like a bad PS2 game. Also, later on in the game, it suffers from some slight frame rate drops.

Music

In total I think there’s about four songs in the whole game, it’s typical Square stuff really, which is a good thing, and it fits the game pretty well.

Overall

I think the sequel, “My Life as a Darklord” would appeal as a better game to people who like Tycoon / sim games. As in Darklord, you have to set out traps and monsters to defend your dungeon from adventurers, so at least it has some sort of strategy play in there too. Maybe I’m a bit bias due to not really liking Tycoon games, however some people were addicted to “MLAAK” upon release, and I can see why, as it does offer a good package, even if it’s quite flawed. The replay value is good as well, since once you complete it, you can start a new game + on Hard or Very Hard mode. Then there’s the Downloadable content, which should keep you busy for a good month. But overall, I found myself to be mostly bored whilst playing “MLAAK”, which is a shame, as I was hoping I’d really like it.

I give it a 6/10 on the Zippy Scale.