Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

The construction elements are simple enough, and make early comparisons to Sim City seem rather misleading [curses - Misleading Ed]. This is more like Animal Crossing or, if you want a more RPG-flavoured comparison, the rather wonderful Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle games on the PS2. There are specific blocks in your town boundaries where buildings can be placed, and each structure fits into a basic square or oblong footprint. There's no fumbling about with complex 3D placement tools - just choose where the building is going, choose which way it will face, and it magically forms in front of your eyes. Characters appear with their homes, and go on to form their own friendships and relationships with their neighbours. It's obviously not as complex a social construct as The Sims, but it adds yet another layer of detail to be savoured. For those who remember Bullfrog's Powermonger, with its tiny NPC families that could be followed through rudimentary daily routines, this is the modern evolution of that idea.

In terms of map area, the town actually seems rather small when you first arrive, but as the streets fill up and the skyline rises it becomes clear that there's actually just the right amount of space to play with. You're never hampered by lack of room, but it still develops into a reasonably bustling conurbation with satisfying speed and getting around never takes too long. Should you need to move things around, structures can be demolished and rebuilt, with evicted families bunking in your castle until a new home is ready. Visually the game is lovely, very much at the cuter end of the Final Fantasy graphical spectrum, although it does come with a slightly irritating thin black border and sudden movements can cause an ugly deinterlaced effect on the characters.

Where the game starts to lose points is in the lack of variety. While it's all rather cosy and refreshing to be sending others out to do all the questing and levelling up, as the game rolls onwards claustrophobia does set in. Most of the things you can do are for the benefit of your adventurers, making your kingly duties a rather thankless task. Each day, Chime gives you a report on what your adventurers got up to the day before. You can break this down into fine details, examining each encounter they had, the exact number of hits they landed and the number of health points lost. Click on certain events and they'll even offer up a scripted comment on their escapades. But this level of detail loses its charm as the game goes on, and the simple pleasure of roaming your kingdom chatting with people and waiting for the heroes to return starts to wear a little thin.

One game day lasts for about five or six minutes in real time, so the game is paced rather cleverly to delay this weariness setting in. It autosaves at night, but you don't get your daily report until the morning. Therefore, there's always a reason to play one more day, to try that new building type, to explore that new location or to train up that new adventurer. Thanks to this one-more-go rhythm my first play lasted for about seven hours straight, with no breaks, and that may have been too much in one sitting.

The repetition becomes more apparent when you've worked through 70 days in a row, while the frustration at the action elements being so indirect starts to grow. While the twist on the central RPG concept is commendable, in the long term it doesn't offer enough variety of things to do within the town to compensate for not letting you leave. Maybe if you could actually enter the buildings properly, play some games with the people inside, explore a few subplots. Or do more to personalise your character, and the castle he lives in. Anything, really, to keep long play sessions from slipping perilously close to mindless resource-grinding with a pretty interface.