The PlayStation Vita didn’t have a lot that interested me. In the early days Sony attempted to bridge the gap between console and handheld gaming with it, but their half hearted attempt fell short. In the end the powerful portable was cast aside to instead become an indie darling. Somewhere in between these two strategies were a few very overlooked but amazing games. One of these is New Little King’s Story which was released to mixed reviews. This was however one of the first games for the platform that I fell in love with, and I’m here to talk about it today.
New Little King’s Story is actually a re-imagining of an earlier released Wii title called Little King Story. It seemed to me at the time that the developers re-tooled this one to make it more appealing to Sony’s fanbase. The whimsical and nonsensical art style has been replaced by something significantly more anime-crentric. I prefer the style of the original release, but not to the point that I went into New Little King’s Story holding any sort of grudge.
Our story begins with a castle under siege by an army of demons. You play as King Corobo, a rather young and inexperienced leader, as he’s led through the basement to escape. He reaches the surface with a few advisors and only a handful of soldiers. The group vow to restore piece and to take back what is rightfully Corobo’s. Unfortunately seven princesses from other kingdoms were visiting at the time of attack. They have been scattered by the enemies to parts unknown. Before he can take the kingdom back Corobo must first rescue the various damsels in distress.
It’s not a particularly well told or interesting story, but it’s enough to carry the action along. New Little King’s Story is a mis-mash of different genres and gameplay modes. You have a home base that you’re in charge of managing, an entire map to explore, and of course enemies to slay. The simulation elements are rather light and you have a minimal amount of options. You can choose to have buildings constructed, make weird laws for the town, interact with characters, as well as managing your troops. I found this aspect of New Little King’s Story to be a little boring.
You move throughout the 3D world in real-time and can carry with you a small army of up to 30 different characters at once. You’ll have to work up to commanding such a large force, and in the beginning you’re limited to just a few additional characters. Combat in this game is similar to gameplay found in Nintendo’s Pikmin franchise. By pressing the R button you bring up a line of dots which you use to target enemies/objects. The action button sends the closest member of your force along it and they interact with first thing they come in contact with.
This system is both good and bad. It makes New Little King’s Story feel like an RPG with large-scale battles happening in real-time, but the engine could have used some serious tweaking. Your aim has to be exact because the game doesn’t even try to guess what your intention was if you miss when sending a unit forward. It will run past enemies and objects and there’s downtime before they can return to your control. This is downright infuriating and will no doubt cost you some victories in battle. I found myself particularly frustrated during boss encounters when I was constantly on the move and didn’t have time for pixel perfect accuracy.
What makes matters worse is that your teammates can perish in battle. Their life is measured by a triangle formation of dots, and when these run out the character is dead for good. This adds a sense of urgency to battle that, again, the aiming system does not pair well with. You can recover your characters by sending them into one of the various hot springs found on the map. These are common enough but more recovery items would have been welcome. Corobo himself can only take three hits before he dies, but you’ll want to keep him in the background of most fights anyway. He can slash his sword, but it’s a slow attack and the soldiers are much more adept at combat than he is.
This brings me to another big issue with the game. New Little King’s Story gives you several different types of person that can join your army. Think of this as a job system of sorts. You have your basic soldiers that are focused entirely around combat, carpenters that can build in specifically designated areas, farmers that can dig, etc. You’ll need these other guys to open up new areas of the map. Unfortunately they aren’t nearly as good at fighting enemies. This means that after using them to access a new area you’ll be less powerful unless you go back to town to trade them in for soldiers. The map is pretty big so this is extremely cumbersome.
The fact that they follow behind you in a long formation is also annoying. Not only can they still be enemy targets while behind you but they can fall off edges in the environment. This can make exploring some areas headache inducing. Marvelous really should have re-tooled this aspect of the game. It’s enough to turn most players away from New Little King’s Story. Sometimes you’re actually forced to fall off to put them back in your ranks. There should be some sort of warp system in place so that you don’t have to worry about them constantly because there are some very narrow cliffs you’ll have to navigate.
These problems are huge, absolutely, but none of them were enough to ruin the game for me. I most enjoyed the game’s sense of humor with some hilarious boss characters (with inventive encounters that make great use of the game’s mechanics) and a fun world to explore. The town creation elements are the weak link, but they can be mostly ignored thankfully. You can dig deep into the customization aspects should you choose, and there is quite a bit to unlock. You can even alter each individual character that joins you by choosing their equipment. I was way more excited than I should have been to discover that altering they armor changes their appearance.
New Little King’s Story was a little much for the PlayStation Vita hardware to handle. This is evident in the rampant amount of slowdown this engine suffers from. The game stutters on a pretty regular basis, but especially so when you’re rotating the camera around. Same goes for when the characters in your troop are all performing actions at the same time. Aside from that there’s a weird blur/bloom thing going on, but this is probably an artistic choice. The anime characters are pleasant in design even if they do get a little creepy with some of the princesses. Audio-wise the game is decent but nothing special. Mostly the music consists of classic compositions re-done with a more techno/modern arrangement. It’s okay, but I would have preferred something more… epic. You know?
The game has it’s problems, believe you me, but New Little King’s Story is chock full of heart. The world is a very memorable one full of charming characters and locations. It is however the bosses that really stand out in my opinion. I had a fun time with the combat. On the flip side I hated exploring the world because of how clunky and awkward your forces move. New Little King’s Story is actually one of my favorite games on the dearly departed PlayStation Vita. I recommend seeking out a physical copy of the Australian version. This is because the North American release has been de-listed from the PSN store.
