Eagerly awaited WiiWare title, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As King has been revealed and detailed recently at the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco. The game’s designer, Fumiaki Shiraishi, has revealed several interesting details regarding the title, namely what it’s like to develop for WiiWare, as well as the advantages and disadvantages the platform brings to the table. More Inside Key upon Shiraishi’s comments was that ‘My Life As wasn’t initially developed with the WiiWare platform in mind. In fact, it began production without a target platform! When the WiiWare platform was decided, Shiraishi commented on how he couldn’t use Square Enix’s common game design model for the project, as the medium wasn’t suited to storing large amounts of high quality CG video.
Furthermore, the WiiWare system and it’s memory limitations meant that Shiraishi had to practically remove the battle components, as well as a global world map. Instead, it’s been replaced with simple text. On top of that, all the villagers that players will be encountering in ‘My Life As will look exactly the same, albeit with different names.
Finally, Shiraishi commented on the memory limitations Nintendo have alledgedly set in place. Shiraishi mentions that his team estimated between 32 – 40MB to be dedicated to My Life As King. And, with the final product nearing completion, it weighs in at a 40MB download – Shiraishi’s predictions were accurate.
So what does this mean for WiiWare? With one title taking up 40MB of the Wii’s 512MB internal memory, how long is it before Nintendo realises that players around the world will need some form of PROPER external storage, should they want to embrace WiiWare? Only time will tell.
Source: Gamespot
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