Well hello all, I hope this isn't going to be one giant flame, however I, for the Winter equinox of this year passed, received Little King Story as a present. It will hopefully be of great interest to you, who ever you may be, to know, that I did not see why Linde (may have been Reverend Anthony, I can't remember which now) likes it so much. It is kind’a of meh...

N.B. This article assumes you've listened to the podtoid where Linde/Anthony jizzes about how awesome the game is.



The gameplay first and foremost, is simplistic and not satisfying. The basic gist is, you have guys who follow you and you have to fight, to do this you press A to throw them at the enemy, and press B to retreat them, when the enemy will attack back. This would be fine if battles weren't a significant part of the game, however they are, in fact it's about half of it, due to grinding, which seems to be the very heart and soul of Japanese developed games. Not to mention, boss battles are long and tedious tasks, which requite about 5 minutes of stupidly timing A, B alternation rate.

The other half of the game, is digging and building, which is even MORE tedious. You throw your men at a hole or bridge and wait... Or rather that would have been a good idea compared to what you actually do. You throw you men, wait, and then at some random, arbitrary stage when the hole has gotten bigger, your men stop. Then you have to throw them again. The period of time between them stopping is just big enough to make it annoying to wait, but small enough so that you can't pick up a glass of water (or whatever your gaming beverage might be). As with the combat, the digging is part of the grinding process, having to dig after fighting something, most of the time.

The other bits of the game are well made, I guess... but any good points have been smeared with the wet brush that is the bad mechanics of the core gameplay. Even the charm of racist subtext is lost. Sure you have an insane general who’s been waiting for 40 years to conquer the world, and is simply using you as a puppet; however, by this stage I really don't care.

What it is probably necessary to mention, before I stop writing is I didn't finish the game, in fact I could only muster up the will to play it for 3-4 hours. So at 4 hours 1 minute, it may completely change and turn awesome, however I doubt it. Right now it’s on its way to a friend of mine. Hopefully he will enjoy it more than I did.