Step into the deadly-yet-fashionable shoes of the Darklord, a malevolent miss charged with dispatching intruding do-gooders by strategically placing traps and monsters within the tower she calls home. Players will need to get their hands on increasingly diabolical traps and abominable monsters to stop those pesky adventurers from making it to the Dark Crystal at the top of the tower. Be warned, though - with heroes of all the tribes and jobs from the FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES series storming the Darklord’s lair in real time, traps and minions will count for nothing unless deployed with true evil genius. Anything less and the Darklord’s beloved home will be reduced to rubble.


Gameplay

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord takes a common game many of us have played, Tower Defence and gives it a twist by having the player build a tower and summon creatures to defend each floor of the tower. There are a few types of floors and many different units to summon each with a unique attack type which works best against specific enemy units. Such as your ranged units work best against the mages and melee works best against bandits.

You unlock and can purchase upgrades for your tower as new floors and the number of floors, upgrade your monsters and find items. Where the game falters dramatically is that later levels can only be beat a specific way and usually it will require more trial and error than skill to beat the later levels. Also the game is extremely repetitive with everything happening exactly the same offering very little to mix up the game.

Another problem with the game is after you build your tower and place your monsters you basically just sit there and wait for the enemy to attack and there is very little for you to do but watch the enemy slowly leave their village and climb your tower and wait for the attack counter to fill up before anything happens. Other tower defence games at least have this constant action going on but this one trips over itself over and over again by slowing things down.


Graphics & Audio

This is a very nice looking Wii-Ware title with plenty of cartoonish flash and style for almost everything. But where the game begins to fail graphically is in the animation which like many of the Crystal Chronicles games has stiff and unflattering animation during combat and in the cut-scenes.

Audio wise Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord does an adequate job at times but has many annoying instances of audio which annoy me. The “voice work” which is nothing more than jibberish begun to annoy me almost instantly with its attempt to be cute, but it failed miserably. The music and sound effects were average and just about as you would expect from a downloadable Wii-Ware title.


Value

While there are a ton of levels to play in this game they are extremely repetitive because it is just tower after towers with all of the enemy units basically the same. Plus in the end the story does very little to bring you into the game so in the end I have to rate this games overall value low, which is a shame.


Bottom Line

This is a good game but not a great one which consistently trips over its design such as the overall difficulty and enemy units which attack you just leave much to be desired because they are very generic and lack any sort of personality that your monsters and floors do. It seems like the enemy units were just slapped together based on older Final Fantasy games. Buy it only if you have points to spare.