Games aren’t about bringing families together; they’re about blowing them apart. Daddy, Mommy, Billy and Sarah, the eerily perfect nuclear family at the heart of Family Table Tennis, and now Family Glide Hockey, understand this only too well. Ever since they discovered the joy of humiliating each other through competitive sport, they’ve been determined to strain their familial bonds via ruthless, cold-blooded competition.
Call us musty old role-playing traditionalists, but the first thing we generally do after a monster drops an item is cram it in our over-stuffed invisible backpacks. We don’t, for instance, wear it on our heads, like Echoes of Time’s helpful AI companions choose to. It’s a bold fashion statement, no doubt about that, but we think we prefer the other way.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is about building a city (around the prerequisite FF crystal). When you start playing all four walls of the city are in place, which is all the play area you're ever going to need. After all, it's the job of the king to stay home and build his kingdom - not go out and adventure. But to acquire the resources to fuel your building, you'll need to send your teenage adventurers out to fight in
Traditionally, the Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles games have been a good match for Nintendo consoles. From the original Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube to the DS and WiiWare titles of only a few years past, the role-playing games have kept things cute with sprites and snappy with varied types of gameplay from action to tower defense.
We wouldn't blame you for writing off Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon at a glance - previous Chocobo games have suffered from overly-simplistic kid-friendly gameplay, which sounds like a recipe for disaster when mixed with the dungeon crawler genre. But with its variety of dungeon types and robust job system, Chocobo's Dungeon kept our interest for far longer than we expected. And with famed composer Nobuo Uematsu supervising the
Bah +10! A pox upon Square Enix and their unquenchable thirst for WiiWare micro-transactions, because they’ve gone and hobbled something that could’ve been quite special here. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is fan service with a smile; less a true sequel to FFIV and more a ‘where are they now?’ update set 17 years after the original. Needless to say, those who enjoyed FFIV will be in their element here.
Time constraints meant that it was a toss-up between reviewing either this or Cocoto Platform Jumper, and it’s a damning indictment on Cocoto that Fish ’Em All! won out. Whereas Icarian (NyxQuest) and Let’s Catch are shining examples of what we love about WiiWare, this insipid, joyless, pointless nonsense makes us want to weep.
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