Rising Star games had, rather unexpectedly, a playable beta build of Little King’s Story on display at the eGames expo. It’s the latest project from the creator of the Harvest Moon series, but it’s something else entirely. Something along the lines of a ’life-kingdom-harvest-combat-strategy-simulator’, the game looks somewhat like Animal Crossing but oozes a story book atmosphere with a humorous tang. .

You play as the Little King, a boy who finds a magical crown and is given rule of the world... or so it seems. The rep on hand walked me through about half an hour of the first kingdom, of which there are seven. Your town is, at first, rather small. You begin in your tiny castle where you can talk to your loyal servants, such as Howser the bull riding knight, and weigh up the events of each day. Head out and you can begin to recruit your villagers. They’ll follow you when you call them and from there you can change their profession and set them to work.

Moving around your kingdom is remarkably easy, and so is commanding your citizens. In the build on hand you could have knights, archers, farmers and carpenters, with a maximum command of eight people at a time. I was told that there were more professions and levels to gain, as well as the ability to command more citizens with each surpassing kingdom. With a total of seven we should see some rather epic scaling. Leaving your town and heading out to the wild lands of your kingdom puts you in mortal danger – better bring a few knights!

There were quite a few enemies around, including black bomberman lookalikes, giant turnips, rather angry toadstools and evil cows, completely with bat wings and devil horns. The cows were by far the most ferocious. Combat has a definite Pikmin feel about it – throw your knights at the animal and they’ll latch on and bash away at an enemy, while archers stand back and fire at will. By the end of the day my little King had grown a rather funny looking beard, so I headed back to the castle and grabbed some sleep. Marvellously the beard had left overnight, and I was ready to tackle the next day. I had some pretty high casualties after fighting the ferocious cows and was told to head to the beach. Each morning a batch of new citizens wash up on the shore if you’ve lost many through combat, so you don’t have to worry too much about emptying your kingdom. With the cows defeated I could convert a few citizens to carpenters and build a ramp up to where the boss of the kingdom lived. A quick trip back to turn the carpenters to archers and I was ready.

Cry havoc! A giant version of the black-bomberman foes appeared as well as several of his smaller flunkies. I threw my knights straight into the fray. Enemies popped up on the surrounding cliffes and started throwing boulders at my troops... the King can’t fight, but I used him to draw fire away from my archers. The boss was soon bested and peace was brought to the kingdom. A cutscene that I can only describe as beautiful followed. Howser runs in with his cow close behind. The cow handed him a saliva slathered letter and he reads out. ’What terrible handwriting! “Chal...enge?” A letter of challenge! King, let me read it to you! “Dear King of the Al-jerko kingdom, you’re a jerk, you’re the biggest jerk around, you’re a mega jerk! I’m the real King, you jerk!” He called our dear Alpoko kingdom Aljerko!’ exclaims Howser. Funny, and beautiful to watch.

Apparently the game should take some twenty hours to complete; the first couple of hours before you become king, and then two to three for each of the seven or eight kingdoms after that. There are plenty of aspects of the game that I didn’t see – building up your town, bringing in harvests and some of the other aspects of combat. Still, it isn’t hard to tell that this is a very promising and possibly addictive game. Rising Star Games is a UK based company, the same ones responsible for publishing No More Heroes and the Rune Factory series and they’d come down especially for the event. Little King’s Story is looking to be released around March 2009 in Australia and Europe, apparently earlier than it will be in Japan or North America, and localisation on the title is already well under way. Keep an eye on this one.