The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Thanks to Pepsi, I have like a million Wii points (okay, as of this writing 8700) so I decided to spend some on a game or something. Cause, you know, what else am I going to do with them? I want to save some for the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeons and Pokemon Scramble and, of course, Cave Story, but I’ve still got plenty. Might as well enjoy something, right?

So I jumped into the painfully-long-named Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord since I had heard some pretty decent things. Those decent things were pretty correct, but man, it’s a little harder than I had hoped.

First off, I just want to say, and this is kind of a stupid problem, but I am really unhappy to find I was playing a character. The game is called “MY life as a Darklord” and the whole game mechanic is very abstracted. I expected to type in a name, and have little minions talk to me through the television screen and whatnot, but instead I get to play as this annoying girl. Yay.

Still, it doesn’t really affect the gameplay, which is quite good. The game is a Tower Defense game, because you are defending your magical, evil, flying tower. It uses some ideas from traditional Tower Defense, and is very similar, as you’re setting up things ahead of time and letting them happen, but it is very much its own thing, which I appreciate.
Basically, you build floors to your evil tower. Each floor type has a different evil artifact which can give various effects to the floor, such as dealing damage to adventurers who enter it, or protecting your monsters. Then you summon monsters onto the floors to fight the adventurers. They have a simple R-P-S system in place for weaknesses and strengths of these monsters: Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Magic, Magic beats Melee. Etc.
So, okay, you’re setting up “towers,” essentially. Big deal, right? Well, what makes the game interesting is how adventurers climb the tower. They show up either individually, or in parties, and try to scale to the top to break the Dark Crystal. When a “good guy” gets to a floor, they will turn on their combat timer (which is different for each time of adventurer) and then get into combat with the monsters on that floor. After the timer runs out, then they scamper up to the next floor. The catch is that only one adventurer can be on a floor at a time. So if another adventurer, done with a battle, tries to climb up to a floor where his buddy is already doing battle, he just skips it and goes right on to the next floor. So when a party of three adventurers rolls in? Well, I hope you have a lot of floors, because they get to skip quite a few of them.
It’s this mechanic that really makes the game feel unique. If I put a lot of monsters on a floor, I can deal more damage to the adventurers, but their combat timers stop when attack animations are going off. That means I can stall people on the floor for a long time if I use a quick monster that attacks many times for little amounts of damage, but that can also be a hindrance, keeping the adventurer from moving on while three of his buddies skip the traps on that floor. It’s actually quite a lot to have to try to juggle.

What gets me though, is the game’s difficulty. It is pretty brutal. You really have to learn exactly what types of adventurers are coming on a level and how to stop them, or you will, very quickly, continue to fall flat on your face. I’m already having trouble and I’m not very far in the game. I suppose I could buy some of the $60 (!!) of DLC for this $10 game to make it easier, but… no. That’s retarded. Extremely retarded. At least the obscene amounts of DLC in My Life as a King (which I still need to try sometime, too) gave you more and more stuff to do in the game the more you bought.
Then again, I plunk down money every month for IoTMs that make KoL easier. But donating for something in a free, indie game made by a small company just has significantly more feelgood value than giving the Squenix behemoth money for content they didn’t put in the game.

Still, I think it’s a fairly neat game, and if you’re the kind of person who likes trying many different things to figure out how something works, you’ll probably love this one. I honestly just kind of hope they port this to the iPhone. It would work really well there. The way the tower gives the game a vertical look, especially. And surely Squenix wants that money! But who know.