Vertically Conscious Review: "My Life as a Darklord"

If Square simply would concede that Crystal Chronicles is its own universe, we wouldn’t be stuck with the tongue-tying title FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES: MY LIFE AS A DARKLORD. On the bright side, the unwieldy name is this game’s biggest shortcoming.

At its heart, FFCCMLAD — you know what, let’s just go with “Darklord.” At its heart, Darklord is a tower-defense game. Waves of adventurers assault your tower, and you must build defenses to dispatch them before they reach the top. Instead of building towers, you build floors in your own tower and fill them with monsters. You are given an army of Goblins, Bombs and other Final Fantasy favorites. Between levels, you level up your monsters to make them stronger.

Every floor comes with an artifact, each of which has its own powers and effects. Some poison your enemies; others shield your monsters from damage, and so on. Adventurers climb the tower fighting the artifact and whatever other monsters you’ve placed on each floor.

Evil Puppet Show may be a useless floor, but it's the most satisfying.

Battles between adventurers and your monsters are governed by simple rock-paper-scissors rules. Melee beats ranged, ranged beats magic and magic beats melee.

Enemies, meanwhile, move at differing speeds, stay on floors for different amounts of time and use different tactics. For example, an illusionist will stay on a floor casting spells on all monsters and artifacts for 25 seconds, whereas a thief fires off two shots at the floor’s artifact and moves on. The adventurers skip any floor already occupied by one of their friends, so when and where you build a floor becomes just as important as what you build. The upshot of all this is that no level requires the same floors as the one before it. You need to think long and hard about what floors you’re going to need, where they should go and when you should build them. Ultimately that’s what makes any tower defense game worth your time.

The game balance does teeter a bit toward the end. You unlock new floors and monsters as you progress through the game and some of these are ripe for abuse.  Also the new monsters are simply better then the ones that come before them.  Instead of giving you new tools the game basically has you level a new set of monsters and discard the ones you used in the first half.

Cutesy graphics don't mean people aren't about to be viciously mauled by a Behemoth.

Graphically this game is as polished as you would expect from Square. The Crystal Chronicles trademark style of bedtime-story-meets-Final-Fantasy is back and looks great in action, though cutscenes between battles do suffer from the Japanese belief that a portrait with text underneath is an acceptable storytelling technique. It doesn’t detract from the game, but moving characters would have been nice. The writing is a little juvenile and the plot makes absolutely no sense, but I didn’t find myself sweating it.

For 10 bucks, Darklord is the perfect length — I wrapped up the final levels just as the game started to drag. I had a blast playing through it, and anyone who likes puzzle or tower defense games will find it engaging. I haven’t had a chance to play the expansions, but Square will need to throw a few new tricks into he mix to keep the game feeling fresh. I don’t know that I’d buy 20 more levels of the same, but the standalone package gets a recommendation with no reservations.