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With the recent news of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King at GDC, Square Enix announced that developing this WiiWare title was a different experience. From the time constraints, to using someone else's code, to not even having WiiWare's offical specs, it was different to say the least. It all started with Shirashi's desire to do a small-scale, low-budget title. He approached Nintendo wanting to start a project, which then lead to a sim-based game revolving around an adolescent king who must build a city in barren lands with the power of "The Architect". Development started out as normal, but due to the Wii gaining a larger audience than they anticipated, the development team decided to "pull out all the stops" and make it a full-fledged Final Fantasy game.

"After the massive success of the big-budget cinematic RPG Final Fantasy VII, the production model for Square Enix games has remained mostly unchanged: Big budgets, huge teams, 2-4 year development cycles, and an emphasis on visual arts. -[producer] Toshiro Tsuchida

They reworked the game to attract a broader variety of players. To that end, they redesigned the game's tutorial quite a bit. And they also had to make sure the game looks decent compared to other Wii games. All-in-all the shift into the "Final Fantasy" series affected every aspect of the game from graphics to AI. Not only that, but they also used a script language called Squirrel, and a middleware library from Nintendo called NintendoWare. "At Square Enix, we don't... use other people's code, but since we were aiming for a Summer 2007 launch, I had to streamline the development process," said programmer, Fumiaki Shiraishi. Tsuchida told Shiraishi that they wouldn't make graphics for his game until they had a working prototype, as they weren't sure his idea would work. So they went to Akitoshi Kawazu, who produced the GameCube version of Crystal Chronicles, and asked if they could use those assets. The end result of overcoming these obstacles, and their determination is the WiiWare pioneer title Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (Yeah, it's a long title).


Reported By: Ricky S.

Cool, this game is sounding like it'll be pretty fun.

Sooo, does this mean it's a full wii game, not just a WiiWare title?

It's a WiiWare title, but it's still a full game. It's kind of a mix between sim city and FFCC. WiiWare titles can be in depth, LostWinds looks awesome.

Ok that's good, cuz I'm not really up for paying a full 50 bucks for it. But it still looks realllly good.

I think WiiWare titles will range from 500-2000 Wii points depending on the game. I think this game is supposed to be 1500 Wii Points and Defend The Castle will be 500.

$15 sounds pretty reasonable.