Among Nintendo's WiiWare downloadable games -- distinct from their Virtual Console cousins for being developed specifically for the Wii rather than ported from other older systems -- is a strange hybrid from Square Enix called My Life as a King. Actually, that's only part of the title. The full name is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. It's a quaint little city builder/dungeon hack combo, sort of like Dwarf Fortress or Majesty for JRPG fans. Read the review after the jump.

In my castle, there's not a lot to do except look at the downloadable content Nintendo wants me to buy. So I spend the day running around talking to the citizens. Except that I can't talk. Instead, I just sort of collect little talk bubbles for extra power. I guess you'd say I'm a good listener.

I can't go on adventures, what with me being the king and all. So I send other people out on adventures. I watch them head out the gate and disappear down the road. When they get back, they report to me about what an awesome time they had and they give me the treasure they found. They get a cut, of course. This isn't My Life as a Despot.

The only active thing I can do is summon buildings. Every so often, I drop a house, or a park, or maybe a guild of some sort. There are these weird Pokemon-looking magical cat guys running around town. They help me learn how to summon new buildings. I can also pay some of the buildings to make new things for my adventurers, but I never get to use those new things myself. It's not as if I have any use for a sword or a healing potion.

Eventually, a fairy accosts me and makes me go to bed. I am, after all, just a little kid. But it's not fair. All the other kids get to go out on adventures and have fun. The parents stay home and do the boring stuff like make bread, forge swords, and tell me their sound bites. I'm sure there's some sort of meta-social commentary here, but what do I know? I'm just a little kid.

After nearly fifty days of this stuff, I can see exactly where My Life as a King is going. It's all about placing buildings so that the little kid adventurers can efficiently work their way through town in the morning and have plenty of time left over to plunder dungeons. Managing the maddeningly random AI behavior of these little kids is what passes here for gameplay. My Life as a Parent Wrangling Kids Every Morning is more like it.

Frankly, this isn't much of a life for a king, much less a guy who likes city builders. It's Jarmusch slow and overly gated. And that's not what city builders or dungeon hacks are all about. That's what JRPGs are about: lots of dialog and waiting and watching cutscenes. It's also poorly documented and played on a fixed map. There's a harder mode waiting at the far end of whatever happens when I save the kingdom, or whatever I'm supposed to do. Something about a talking crystal and the ghost of my father. I am not Prince Hamlet, not was meant to be. Am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two. No doubt, an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous. At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.

Somewhere there's a Venn diagram of people who like JRPGs in one circle, and people who like city builders in the other circle. In between is a tiny cigar-shaped sliver between them of people who like My Life as a King. I am not one of the people in that sliver.