Happy #LKS11 everyone!
I guess now’s as good a time as ever to talk about what makes Little King’s Story so special, why I’m still talking about it 11 years later, and why it remains my favourite game. There’s much more to this one than meets the eye.

So, firstly, what is it?

On its deceptively simple surface, LKS is a Lifesim RTS-RPG hybrid game, with action-adventure elements. This game has often been compared to the likes of Pikmin, Zelda and Animal Crossing in the same breath. It’s an ambitious idea, and one that almost didn’t reach fruition.

The game was hit with many delays, several staff changes, cut and reworked ideas, and a complete shift in direction partway through.

Despite a troubled development, LKS was released to critical praise, and is crowned as one of the highest rated third party titles on the Wii.

The main character is a young, accidental monarch named Corobo. He rules a small, desolate country called Alpoko, and he must gather his men, train them into fighters and cultivators, and ransack neighbouring lands to expand his kingdom for the sake of his subjects’ lives.

How does this translate to gameplay?

The villagers of your towns can be hired into your Royal Guard, and converted into over 15 types of job, each with their own specialities: shooting arrows, digging, woodcutting, etc. You command them at enemies and obstacles alike.

Citizens have individual names, HP, opinions, weapons or armour, and relationships with other citizens.

And that’s the kicker: if a citizen falls in battle, they may survive, but if they don’t make it, a funeral is arranged by their friends and family, dressed in black.

This is why LKS is so loved, why it’s so set apart. It has a heart and a soul, and it sticks by it.

Throughout the story, Corobo is responsible for his actions, and the other characters won’t let him nor you forget it. For all its cutesy looking shtick, LKS can be flat-out grim.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons to a game like Undertale, to some extent, with self-aware humour and colourful cast disguising their sinister themes.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that LKS’s director and producer, Yoshiro Kimura, has been a friend of Toby Fox’s since 2012.

And speaking of which, LKS shines at its brightest through its characters.

The rival rulers of other lands are packed with personality and even simple backstory, while also forming some of the most memorable and original boss fights you’ll likely ever have the pleasure to play.

And these kings lie in bizarre lands across a huge world, full of varied locations and hidden areas. Half the fun of LKS is simply in the discovery.

This game has a Japanese beer garden kingdom ruled by a drunk king who fights by vomiting and breathing fiery beer breath. Yes.

Little King’s Story is a lot of fun to play, hilarious, as weird as it gets, while also managing to have a lot to say and do. There’s a lot of emotion and downright one-of-a-kind experiences. I could honestly say so much more, but you owe it to yourself to discover it on your own

So I guess you’re probably asking, if this game is everything I say it is, how come you’ve heard so little about it?

The sad reality is that LKS is a little *too* deceptively simple, a blessing and a curse. For a relatively short story, it has a somewhat slow start, admittedly.

I’ve seen too many people give up early, around the first proper boss, thinking they’d seen it all. And I can’t really blame them; it’s not at all like most Lifesims.

But I’ll say this: I’ve never seen someone play this game to the end and not love it. Not one.

Unfortunately LKS also suffered from being on the console with one of the biggest libraries of any system, in a time before Nintendo had quite learned how to promote their systems’ games online. Later, it suffered from a lacklustre PC port, and has since fallen into obscurity.

This game, more than any other I’ve played, deserves a second chance. You can easily attain the Wii version first-hand at a very good price. The main story can be beaten relatively quickly, yet the game has a wealth of content. And there’s no shame in playing on Easy mode.

Little King’s Story was the brainchild of Yasahiro Wada (Harvest Moon) and Yoshiro Kimura (Moon Remix, Rule of Rose).

Kimura & LKS’s Monster Designer Kazuyuki Kurashima have since formed @oniongames, and recently released Dandy Dungeon 2 & a limited physical copy of Blackbird.

The soundtrack is incredibly unique, comprised of remixes and rearrangements of over 60 pieces of classical music by Yutaka Minobe (Skies of Arcadia) and Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts, Mario & Luigi, Super Smash Bros.)

I hope this explains why this game is truly my favourite, and has urged you to try it yourself.

And don’t just trust me; look online and see for yourself what people have to say, or look at other tweets with the #LKS11 tag.

So, on this day, I know what game I’m going to be playing.

... Mario Maker 2. I mean, it just got that new update and all