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Nintendo: Wii Reviews

New Play Control! Pikmin 2 ^WII

Swords & Soldiers ^WII

Review

Little King's Story

92%

Format Nintendo Wii

Developer Marvelous

Publisher Rising Star

Genre Adventure

23-Apr-2009 Tiny monarch, massive adventure - the first Wii classic of the year is here

47 Comments

What with the likes of MadWorld, The Conduit and House Of The Dead currently spearheading something of a hardcore Wii takeover, it's easy to forget that the house of Nintendo was built not on guns 'n' gore but on cute 'n' cuddly.

Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Kirby... there's a time and a place for more adult-orientated action, but these are the games that a true Nintendo fan holds dear above any others.

So what with the Wii taking a recent turn for the bleak and bloody, it's great to see a game like Little King's Story come along and remind us exactly why we picked Nintendo over Sega, Sony or Atari back in our formative gaming years.

Beautiful character design; charming narratives; eccentric dialogue; huge, magical worlds to explore; polished, inventive and accessible gameplay; and a hefty challenge that belies a game's cute stylings. It's rare that a game ticks all those boxes in this day and age (especially one not made by Nintendo themselves), but we're happy to report that Little King's Story has come out of nowhere and blown our socks off. A real surprise package, there's a good chance that you won't play a finer videogame this year, first party or otherwise.

King For A Day
A gorgeous, bizarre hand drawn intro sets the scene. A lonely young lad kicks around his bedroom, when a family of rats dash across his floor. He follows them out of the house and into the woods where they lead him to a golden crown hidden in the trees. He puts it on, at which point four mysterious subjects materialise and pronounce him as their long awaited king. It's here that the gameplay kicks in.

Little King's Story is essentially a clever mix of Pikmin, Animal Crossing and Command & Conquer. You start off in a modest little shack with just a handful of followers. Venture outside and toss some of your meagre citizens, Pikmin-style, into any holes in the ground that you come across and they'll dig up some treasure. Take the treasure back to your right hand man in the 'castle' and he'll convert it into cash which you can then spend on building a farmhouse. Direct a citizen inside and they'll become a farmer capable of digging at cracks in the soil, uncovering yet more bounty.

This loot can then be used to build a Guard House, where you can train your subjects up as soldiers and then lead them out into the surrounding areas to start exploring and expanding your kingdom.

As your realm expands, citizens will start dropping 'quests' into a Suggestion Box in the town square, asking you to throw out trouble makers or take on 'guardians' causing chaos in a peripheral region of your domain. To gain control of their territory you'll obviously have to give these guardians a pasting. The combat works exactly as it does in Pikmin. You toss your soldiers at your foe and let them get on with it, while you watch for signs of a counterattack, at which point you recall them and take cover.

Defeat a guardian and you'll be rewarded with more cash, which you can use to develop their turf. As you continue to expand your kingdom you'll find various geographical obstacles standing in your way. You'll have to save up enough money to construct the necessary building in which to train your subjects as carpenters (to build bridges or staircases), miners (to remove boulders) or lumberjacks (to remove tree stumps). You can also construct buildings to train new soldier types, such as archers, wizards or veteran grunts, to take on bigger, badder foes.

Once you've completed a number of quests, recruited the necessary citizen types and opened up the right area you'll go up against one of a number of kings - essentially huge boss fights that form the backbone of the plot. Defeat all of these kings and the world will be yours.

A Royal Knees-Up
That's the game in a nutshell but we've barely scratched the surface of the wider experience on offer. From its simple, approachable beginnings, Little King's Story builds and builds, adding ever more complex elements. It's perfectly paced - you're always on the verge of feeling overwhelmed by everything that's going on but just as you're about to panic, a new element is introduced that pulls everything together.

As well as the main plot (which should take the best part of 30 hours to work through), there's also a lovely Animal Crossing-like element going on, which is almost a game in itself. There's a huge cast of characters in your town to interact with, including a terrifying evangelising monkey-priest who worships ramen noodles, a dotty art gallery owner (whose demands for new pictures to display provides an engaging sub-quest) and an eccentric astronomer predicting the end of the world.There are festivals to celebrate, flowers to plant, matchmaking to be mastered, weddings to attend and citizens to customise.

There are a few downers. There's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing from the frontlines back to your castle to continually save your progress, trade in your spoils and bring in different team members. The Kaboom Jump Cannons that blast you around your kingdom temper this a little but it can still be frustrating. The combat gets a little repetitive - victory always comes down to just deploying and recalling your troops at the right moment - although the boss fights are to be relished.

For the most part, it's bewitching, magical stuff. The enemy design is absolutely gorgeous - giant snails, killer toadstools, flying cows, psychotic sheep, cake-addicted aristocrats, fire breathing dragons, murderous turnips, pac-men on pogo sticks, obese cockerels, ravenous toads... they're all a joy to meet and you'll almost be reluctant to put them to the sword.

Your subjects are delightfully nuanced too, from your moustachioed, Machiavellian right hand man Howser, to the sheer unadulterated awesomeness of Pancho the barking cow.

We could go on for another four pages about all the genius little touches that Marvelous have crammed into the game. There is just so much to enjoy here. It's so refreshing to see a game that's not afraid to offer gamers a whopping Zelda-length quest wrapped in the sort of charm, wit and inventiveness rarely seen outside of a first party title. MadWorld and GTA might be great games, and are certainly more adult, but Little King's Story will be the one that reminds you why you fell in love with Nintendo gaming.

Fred Dutton