Not your typical Final Fantasy

You are a young king; destined to rebuild your kingdom. When you first reach the borders of your kingdom, you discover a crystal in the center of town. The crystal gives you a mysterious power, called ‘Architek’ that enables you to embark upon a long quest to rebuild your kingdom, and to unravel the mysteries of your father, King Epitav.

Unlike your typical Final Fantasy game, My Life as a King is more of a city-building game. Starting in a barren land with only a castle and a crystal, the young king must use the ability that the crystal gave him to build a variety of structures in order to populate the land.

Adventuring

To build structures, something called ‘elementite’ must be obtained from crystals found in dungeons and caves scattered throughout the land. Your assistants will not let you journey to these dungeons and caves. Instead, you must employ adventurers to embark on daily missions to travel to these dungeons and caves to gather the elementite.

In order to employ adventurers, you must first acquire money to pay them. In general, the easiest way to obtain money is to collect taxes that citizens in your kingdom pay to you. You can also obtain money by employing adventurers and sending them to dungeons and caves. If you are lucky, they will not only return with elementite, but will bring treasure (money) along as well.

Each morning your assistant Chime will present to you an adventurers report as well as a financial report. The adventurers report essentially summarizes the activities of your adventurer’s activities for the previous day. The financial report summarizes the amount of elementite and money spent and earned for the previous day. In addition to this, Chime will allow you to post a ‘behest’. Behests are assignments that adventurers may decide to complete that day but they do require you to pay in advance.

Leveling a kingdom

My Life as a King has an intermediate learning curve but becomes quite simple after playing it for a few hours. You may not exactly know everything the first time you play through the game, but you can certainly accomplish all the major objectives without having any major conflicts.

To increase the level of your kingdom, you must first obtain morale spheres. Morale spheres can be gained by interacting with citizens as well as when people buy items at a store. In the early stages of the game, you will only be able to have a single morale sphere at a time, but as you progress throughout the game, you will eventually be able to have a maximum of five spheres.

After gathering the set amount of morale spheres you can talk to Chime back at the castle. Once you have given enough spheres to her, Chime will promote your kingdom to the next level. In total, there are six different levels.