::A Geek in Korea::

When looking for information about the latest Final Fantasy release on the Wiiware service, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: My Life as a King, I disliked the design choices that underpin the game. I started thinking about why I find some games rewarding, and others pointless.

FFCC:MLaaK is a marked departure from the typical RPG. In this game, you play a King confined to his castle. You have to rebuild your kingdom by harvesting the minerals found in the dungeons. This is a pretty cool concept. When I first heard of this, I thought, “It’s more of a resource management game. Neat. SimCity + Final Fantasy + Dungeon Crawling. Awesome.”

In SimCity, you needed to allocate resources wisely, because if you didn’t collect enough taxes, you couldn’t keep the city running for the next year. Then things started getting worse and worse, and you could only hold on so long before something came along and wiped you out. FFCC:MLaaK removed all the “risk and failure” from this model of game design, and I’m scratching my head why anyone would want to play it.

When the idea of FFCC:MLaaK was introduced, I thought that there would be a certain building you needed to build at a certain time to equip your forces with what they needed, and that if your troops were defeated, you’d lose the game. There had to be some sort of time limit driving you to work fast, otherwise you could just sending your forces to lower level dungeons to level them up, then clear out harder dungeons easily. If there is no consequence for failure, like the inability to raise taxes in SimCity, why continue?

Instead of controlling the people you send out to collect the materials (AKA, gain income on your own) in the dungeons, adventurers simply send back reports from the dungeons. If they come back with the materials by killing the boss, success. If they fail to defeat the boss, they come back wounded and need to rest for several days before returning to a dungeon. There is no time limit for when quests must be completed. There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of beating a boss to get income for the kingdom other than leveling the troops by sending them to easier dungeons. The only other way to use money is to donate it to the buildings in town to make better items to increase their chances of succeeding the first time.

Later, you can group the troops in different configurations with skills and medals to support each other. They still fight on their own without your help, but they pass or fail as a group. If you give them medals for achievement, you can manipulate statistics to further increase their rates of success. You still don’t directly control them. Your are the king in the castle. You don’t want to soil yourself with the “adventure”. You get to construct buildings that influence the townspeople. Now THAT’S exciting.

There is no danger of going too slowly. There is no benefit to going quickly either. Finish fast or slow. It doesn’t matter. Fail a quest? Try again. It doesn’t matter, you aren’t actually going to the dungeons, your adventurer proxies are fighting for you.

Beating the game opens up “New Game+”. The only difference here is that the higher level dungeons take a longer time to open up. This means that as long as you put time into the game, eventually the troops you are sending will level up and defeat the boss. Any outcome of the resource scarcity introduced by the game is handled by the game itself. There is no strategy, because all you have to do is try again and your chances will increase each time because your adventurers level up between battles.

You can make the characters in the game happier by building bakeries or parks. This might make it easier to beat the game, or not. I guessing you’ll need to build each item possible to progress through the game, because that justifies the quests into the dungeon. Each demand of residents means you need to continue with the questing portion of the game to get more resources. The resources you get are determined by the adventurers you send off into the dungeons, but don’t actually control. The game demands something, then gets it for you if you’ve played long enough.

All you do is press a button to complete the loop. It is basically masturbation in video game form.

Basically, the lack of consequence for failure or strategy mean the game is entirely pointless. I play games that have heavy consequences for failure (roguelikes= permadeath of characters), or heavy strategy (Magic the Gathering). Removing one of these elements of game design can still be fun, (card games without keeping score) but I can’t wrap my head around someone who would want to pay money to play a more active version of Progressquest.

When I asked about the gameplay for some clarifications to see if there was more of a point, the best response I got was, “All RPG games are just time sinks. It’s joy to play and looks pretty, and isn’t that enough?”

If I don’t control the outcome, and there is no strategy involved in the game, no it’s not really enough for me. It is pretty. The character art has a good design. You can even pay more to buy new costumes for your characters that do nothing. There are new dungeons to download, and different races to unlock, but you never actually fight to acquire the resources you need.

If there is no gameplay of consequence, why do I care?

I. don’t. get. it.

(EDIT) It’s been brought to my attention:

Some quests can only be defeated by certain classes, so you need SOME strategy in troop deployment (AKA, Reading a report to know why the person you sent before failed, then sending a different class.) If you fail a mission 13 times, you don’t lose the game, but there seems there is a Ranking system based on how you completed the game.

There IS a consequence, however slight, for being faster and or better at completing the game. You get graded on the happiness, speed, and other factors of how you managed the kingdom. Getting a better score MIGHT even unlock different content, but no one knows. There is a “point” to completing the task, if you play a game to get a ranking.