DLC… Darklord Style- My Life as a Darklord Reviewed

“Microtransactions”, is a big word with a dirty secret. The secret is that it’s essentially a nicer way of saying “nickle and dime-ing”. Ideally, downloadable content should remain complimentary rather than essential and this is usually the case. Unfortunately, gamers are sometimes left feeling like the game they just purchased was stripped of content, so they could be charged for it later. Business practices like this are legal but the ethics are debatable. They do a disservice to the art of games, and the people who play them. This “stripped DLC” as one might call it, is a monetarily expensive way to artistically cheapen a game. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is a great game that features a perfect example of how not to do DLC.

My Life as a Darklord is a WiiWare game that acts as a sort of sequel to the previously released

My Life as a King. While King was a sim game, Darklord is a tower defense game that actually does a bit to rejuvenate this genre often rife with redundancy. Instead of taking place in a battlefield, the setting in each stage is within a single tower. At the top is a crystal concealing the soul of the former darklord which must be protected by, his daughter Mira, the main character. The storyline is bordering on negligible but there’s some cute and amusing gags that had me chuckling at times.

At the beginning of each stage, the tower contains only its top floor, the one you cannot let any invading heroes reach. You must use your limited “negative power” or “NP” to build additional floors, and summon monsters within them, to place distance and danger between the enemies and the top floor. As one might not expect, you can place floors between ones that have already been built. In each stage, heroes of various types and levels will intrude over time, often in groups, and placing the proper types of floors and monsters is necessary to defeat them. They’ll spend a certain amount of time on each floor battling, then move to the next. Floors already occupied by a hero will be skipped by ascending heroes. Successfully defending a tower often yields rewards such as new monster types, floor types, spells and items.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that most of the DLC is active right after purchasing. “Good!”, you say? This completely throws off the balance of the game’s difficulty. Anyone who purchases much of the DLC at the beginning of the game may find it too easy. Anyone who doesn’t purchase it, may feel like it’s too hard or that they’re missing out. When is too early to purchase what content? When is too late? It’s a bit like purchasing additional parts of a movie and having little idea where they fit in.

I really do recommend Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, especially to tower defense fans wanting something a bit new. I can assure you there’s enough game, for the base price of $10 USD, for you to be quite satisfied. I just wish the looming over-priced, unregulated DLC didn’t mar the experience a bit.