Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King devs on the game’s origins
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King was one of the notable titles to have been released on the Wii Shop Channel as a WiiWare download. Siliconera now has an interview with developers Fumi Shiraishi and James Margaris, who discussed the game’s origins. Here’s what the two shared:
Fumi Shiraishi, Co-founder of Dark Roast Entertainment: My Life as a King started with trying to come up with a cool game that would still work within the downloadable size limit. I think we’ve seen RPGs before that had elements of city and hero management, especially Romancing Saga 2, so thinking about how to make the game work came very naturally to everyone. I remember when I pitched the idea to Tsuchida-san, our producer and creator of Arc the Lad and the Front Mission series. He loved the idea right away, saying he had wanted to work on a game like this also.
A side story is that I was sitting next to Kawazu-san, the creator of Romancing Saga 2, during the launch party for My Life as a King… and I didn’t have the guts to tell Kawazu-san that his game was the original inspiration…
Compared to some games, I think My Life as a King actually stayed true to the original plan for the most part. In some ways, because the game core stayed consistent, it was easy for us to incorporate small features as we came up with them.
The log based battle, for example, was not part of the original design document. I remember our project manager mentioning it, and after that it just felt like the obvious feature to add.
James Margaris, Co-founder of Dark Roast Entertainment: In our first prototype for Lucadian Chronicles the battle was in a similar log form! Instead of watching an animated battle you would just read through a log of events – that worked pretty well in My Life as a King but for Lucadian Chronicles the quickly proved to be a terrible idea.
FS: Another example, a small feature that I like a lot is how the heroes go home and get changed when their class change. That actually was a bug, which we thought gave the game a lot of character and decided to keep.
Speaking of bugs, during production, we had a problem where enemies were randomly getting poisoned. It turned out that the black mage was broken in that he could poison every enemy in the entire world! That was a cool bug, but we couldn’t find a good way to keep it. On the other hand, that bug gave us the idea for the tower bosses, who can damage every hero in the dungeon, not just the heroes that are currently fighting. The poison bug also lead to our idea for one of the DLC items, where the player can power up every hero in the world at that time.
Having a HP bar just for the last boss was also an idea that we came up with in the 11th hour, but we went ahead with it anyway.
We did have to take out features that were originally intended. For example, we had a system where when you are in a store, you can watch heroes come in, talk about what’s being sold, and make a purchase. We even had this partially working, but decided to take it out, because it seemed cool on paper, but felt rather lame in practice.
