Video Game / Little King's Story

No pressure.

Little King's Story is a Real-Time Strategy game for the Wii developed by Cing. You're a young boy who found a magic crown and now rules a kingdom. With your "helpful" ministers at your side, you set out to dominat... er, unify a candy-colored fantasy setting under your rule. So storm the oddball kingdoms of the rest of the world with an your swarm of various troops, collect all the treasure, conquer every monster, and marry every princess.

Despite the rather childish design motifs, the game is fairly deep with a huge number of optional sidequests and clever combat mechanics. Beating bosses literally expands your empire. Once you've beaten an area's guardian, you can build a strip mall over it.

A remake, entitled New Little King's Story, was released for the PlayStation Vita, featuring a revamped art style, touch controls, and a story that isn't quite sure if it wants to be a sequel or a retelling.

Not to be confused with the WiiWare title My Life as a King by Square, which has a similar premise, but is a city sim game where you simply dispatch other adventurers on escapades instead of directly controlling anything.

The original game was ported to PC and released on Steam on August 5, 2016.

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This game provides examples of:

• Adaptational Badass: Any of the princesses who were retained from the original game gain a pretty big boost in badassery in New Little King's Story, where they're capable of joining you in fighting on the front lines, instead of being relegated to sitting around in the Princess Manor, or wandering around back at your kingdom.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: Comes in two flavors; Several non-combatant UFOs steal all the animals, including cows, during Princess Shizuka's Princess Quest, while a UFO you fight as one of the game's mini-bosses can abduct your soldiers and drop headless cattle to fight you with as its only other means of attack.
• All in a Row: A very long row with thirty followers.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: In an odd way. Completing Princess Ferne's Princess Quest doesn't let you edit your clothes, but lets you change the color of your scepter's gem, from prismatic Dynamond to glowing black Akumamarine.
  • Played straight in New Little King's Story, where defeating certain bosses nets Corobo with different outfits.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only have as many soldiers as you have command badges. It maxes out at 30.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: King Jumbo Champloon, easily the single biggest boss of the entire game.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Happens in the opening after Corobo smashes open a giant boulder to find a crown.
• Backtracking: Lots of it for the Princess Quests.
• Balcony Speech: How the king calls subjects to come and join his party.
• Big Bad: The Rat King serves as this in the original game while the Devil King takes up the mantle in New Little King's Story.
• Bullfight Boss: Many of the bosses and enemies have this type of attack.
• But Thou Must!: When Skinny Ray comes to you telling you that the sky is falling and he needs help researching it, the game obviously intends for you to believe him and help, but your ministers put it to a vote and defeat the motion every time. This eventually gets pretty ridiculous, since you're in control of a monarchy, and there are no other situations where they disagree with your decisions.
  • Pretty much any time there's a vote, expect the majority to go in one direction, effectively deciding what you're doing for you (though it doesn't matter for the most part...)
• The Caligula: King Duvroc of the Jolly Kingdom loves to guzzle booze like it's going out of style, throws parties as often as he can in the hopes that the whole world will get drunk with him, and has a very laissez-faire approach to his monarchy... but he can still put up a fight with fire and ice breath, and has a legion of Oni at his beck and call to even the odds.
• Canon Name: The main character's real name is Corobo, though you can name him however you wish. This canon name can be seen in the fact that one of the enemies is a scarecrow parody of you called Korobokle. This doesn't change if you use a different name for the king.
• Catching Some Z's: Pancho, the cow that sleeps in the throne room, has blue Zs coming from him, which stops when he wakes to drag the king from the door and leaving before talking to his 2 ministers at least once.
• Chasing Your Tail: Ogre Ergo, whom you must chase around and attack...unless he gets angry, at which point he starts chasing you instead.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: Corobo's just a little kid, but the people of Alpoko are all too willing to follow his rule.
• City Guards: In a fun twist, you can turn your citizens into a guard class. They'll stand around the city gates when they aren't in your team.
• Collection Sidequest: Many of them. Every princess gives you a new one, and there's an overarching quest to find all the artworks in the game.
• Command & Conquer Economy: You have to order every building to be built, and despite a profusion of farmers, lumberjacks, and miners your economy is solely based on your king picking up candy and turnips from dead enemies and random bushes. On the other hand, you can tax your citizens, which implies that they are making money at their jobs, just not giving it to you.
• Concept Art Gallery: Most of the sidequests reward you with this, including one where what you're collecting is art from a design-an-enemy art contest.
• Convenient Questing: As per the usual form; if an area is inaccessible at first, it's usually due to some obstacle or enemy that you must remove or defeat in order to open up more of the world map. However, it'll always open up whenever you're ready to open it up, meaning you can pace yourself and enter any area when you feel you're sufficiently equipped to do so.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: King Long Sauvage's battle is done in this style, though it's far more prevalent in New Little King's Story than it is in the original game.
• Cool Crown: Undoubtedly, the king's signature crown and possible mind control device.
• Cypher Language: Jumbo Champloon is an odd case. His speech appears to be nonsense (Hamburger mantis toilet!), but finding bits of paper around his kingdom reveals that it's a word substitution cypher.
• Damsel in Distress: Each king you defeat nets you a princess, whom you immediately marry.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The ghost haunting the cursed suit of armor you bought from the merchant? He's actually a pretty noble guy who volunteers to become your right-hand man and bodyguard.
• Death Course: King Long Sauvage's fight consists of making your way up to the top of Mt. Sobamanjaro, which is very heavily defended, lengthy and difficult to traverse. One section is even defended with instant-kill swinging beards...
• Degraded Boss: Several of the early area guardians show up later as regular enemies.
  • The Yvonne, a giant frog, is a weird example, because if you go to its arena before accepting the quest to kill it, you'll see tiny versions of it that you won't see again unless you accept a sidequest to defeat the Mt. Ribbit Family.
• Demoted to Extra: Liam goes from being Alpoko's Anything Minister in the original game to having his position taken over by Azul and subsequently resigning in New Little King's Story. It's brief, but can be saddening to those who liked him.
• Door to Before: All the other kingdoms are arranged around yours in such a way that after you've been forced to hike all the way around the entire map to reach one, you can build a bridge or find a gate that takes you right back to your kingdom.
• Doppelgänger Spin: The Rat King, who commands three other mice to destroy your kingdom...just as you've been doing for the whole game.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Even after he's united the world, upgraded the quality of life in the kingdom to the point of luxury and helped solve as many quests as were given to him in the suggestion box, the villagers will still talk to Corobo as though he were a servant.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Though it's a bit odd to have it in a medieval setting, it's there for the convenience of the player. Though, given the reveal at the end of the game, it makes a lot of sense.
• Ermine Cape Effect: The king always wears his royal outfit, even when exploring the unknown world.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Granted, you are invading everyone else's territory.
• Expy: The blonde, pink dress-wearing Princess Apricot according to Word of God is based off of Princess Peach.
• Fartillery: The Rat King isn't averse to using his own shit as a weapon against you during the final battle. The same applies to the yellow rat.
• Finders Rulers: How Corobo came into possession of his kingdom.
• Forced Transformation: The Guardian Radeeze can turn your troops into turnips, which is effectively a One-Hit Kill and spawns additional Turniphead enemies.
• Foreshadowing: Once you conquer the Tiptoe Kingdom, you can climb the mountain and look through the telescope, revealing a sight of your castle, one of several toys hanging down from a ceiling, and what appears to be the interior of a room with a crack, with an eerie red glow behind it. Depending on the order in which you tackle the kingdoms, you can do it as soon as you rescue your fourth princess.
  • Even earlier, you can enter the guard tower on your castle's island, and see places you won't be going for a few chapters yet.
• Fungus Humongous: The mushroom forest and its enemies, including two giant toadstool bosses; the Mush Bro and the Mush Geezer.
• Gainax Ending: You go beyond space to the giant bedroom of, and appear to be either toys or imaginary characters created by, a boy who looks just like the king. The world is ending because of rats chewing on the toy stage that is your world, and you get a running news ticker during the final boss fight describing areas of your world that have been wiped off the map by the fight outside! Oh, and the princess you chose to go with you gets swallowed by a giant rat that gets casually tossed out the window. Hope you didn't like her too much. Of course, depending on your interpretation, it was All Just a Dream anyway.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The Onii Crabs.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: The little Oniis are fond of using pieces of dragons and live cows as weapons. If the Rat King manages to eat some of your party, he may spit them out at you.
• Harder Than Hard: Beating the game unlocks Tyrant Mode, where everyone starts with just one point of health on top of the normal additions on Hard. Additionally, unlike the other difficulty levels, you cannot switch to a different difficulty at any point in the game.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You get to name your Heroic Mime, of course.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The final boss fight is against rats who are destroying the game's world by eating the cardboard box diorama of which it is made. There are four of them and they come in different colors. The color scheme is a little off compared to the traditional description of the four horsemen, though.
• Hotter and Sexier: New Little King's Story gives everyone a fresh coat of paint...and by this, we mean the characters were redesigned to appear less chibi and more like a seinen anime.
• HP to One: The UFO uses this as their one and only means of attack...much to the eternal frustration of the player.
• Hub City: You build your own as you go, and it ends up taking up significant portion of the game map by the time you're done.
• Humongous Mecha: The Mechanical Onii, which serves as the replacement boss for New Island in New Little King's Story.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • The onii enemies attack you with everything from pogosticks and pieces of dragons to fan-tanks and a live cow.
  • You can find (and equip your troops with) weapons such as a giant ham, a squid, a squeaky mallet or a pillow.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Almost every optional quest unlocks literally hundreds of pictures that you can use to decorate your castle. Which is nice, because all the picture frames start out with a cow's face.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a day/night cycle to give the player a sense of time progression, but it can get pretty aggravating when certain sidequests require that you be in certain areas at very specific times. Each in-game day lasts 30 minutes of real time, which works out to 75 real seconds to 1 in-game hour.
• Job System: A very basic one. All your Pikmin-esque troops can be placed into numerous different job classes.
• Kid Hero: Corobo himself. The kid can't be any more than eight to ten years old by the time the game begins.
• King Mook: The Onii King, quite literally.
• Level Ate: The Ripe Kingdom. The fight with King Shishkebaboo combines this with Pinball Zone as you literally play pinball with the boss.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Culinary Chef. It doesn't really have any specialties in combat or digging, which makes it seem like they're useless. That is until you find out that they can perform a One-Hit Kill on Cockadoodledos, a variety of enemy of which can only be killed by Chefs. (Still, at 500,000 Bol a pop, it's pretty pricey...)
  • The Gourmet Cook in the original game is only slightly less necessary, as both Cockadoodles and, despite what some in-game text tells you, Concodores are able to be killed by other combat jobs... but unless you just neglected to bring one or let him die, why wouldn't you just let him deal with them?
• Mascot Mook: The designers really seem to love the cute little Oniis.
• Meaningful Name: Most of the enemies in the game. Some examples are: the Onii King, who commands the Oniis; King Omelet, who lives in a giant egg; King Shishkebaboo, who is defeated by skewering him (on a fork); and King TV Dinnah, who has a TV for a head.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Very literally. Although if it hasn't become obvious by the time you've reached the Primetime Kingdom, it comes to a head once you reach New Island.
• Mind Control: How Corobo gets people to follow him around.
• Ms. Fanservice: Princess Ferne is easily the most sexually designed princess of the seven that you save. Princess Iris, who replaces Ferne in New Little King's Story, also qualifies to a lesser extent.
• Mission-Pack Sequel / Video Game Remake: New Little King's Story is perhaps the first game to genuinely blur the line between the two.
• Modesty Towel: The picture for the Hidden Hot Spring Wonder Spot features Apricot in one.
• Monster Compendium: Princess Bouquet's Princess Quest involves recording all of the monsters you fight in a book she made for you to study them with. Any monsters discovered while the quest is active will be added to the book with the added bonus of giving you new artwork to hang up in your castle.
• Multiple Endings: A feature unique to New Little King's Story is that you can get a different ending depending on which princess you spend the most time with during regular gameplay (and if you did their Princess Quest). Unlike the original Little King's Story, the game doesn't subvert expectations if you get the "Harem" ending, wherein you Marry Them All and they all seem pretty content with this fact. Additionally, Shizuka's ending is the sole ending that has a stinger...which throws in a fairly shocking implication into the mix.
• Non-Human Head: King TV Dinnah looks like an ordinary man in a suit... except for his head, which is an old-fashioned television, with the screen displaying a large eye.
  • Jumbo Champloon's second head is a toothed rooster.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: No matter what happens to your troops, most of them will wash up on the beach the next morning in perfect health. They seem to get over it pretty quick... as soon as you use your mind control on them. That said, this doesn't always happen.
• Obake: The most common enemy type is the Oniis, which look more like adorable muppets than ogres.
• One-Hit Kill: A handful of enemy attacks and other phenomena will instantly kill any of your troops they hit. Examples include a Yvonne's tongue attack, the dragons' 360 degree tail sweep, and two different attacks used by the rats in the final battle.
• Organ Drops: Livestock-based enemies drop meat, Oniis drop horns, Turnipheads and Radeeze drop turnips...
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Naturally, as the most common enemies are based on Oni.
• Permadeath:
  • Usually, when one of your villagers dies, he/she washes up on shore the next day. However, sometimes, when killed, they stay dead until you either load a save before they died or start anew (which isn't worth it, seeing as how they are easily replaced by other townsfolk).
  • During the final boss fight, the Rat King swallows your Queen whole, and she doesn't come back out when you beat him. This implies that she was digested alive along with any of your soldiers that get hit by his swallow attack.
• Permanently Missable Content: Possible with some one-of-kind treasures. The Legendary Bow appears at the end of the Onii Bride battle, but if your inventory is full before you reach it, it might not be there when you come back for it.
• Polyamory: When you defeat any rival King, you rescue a Princess and are instantly married. This backfires tremendously toward the end of the game; before you take off in the completed flying machine to investigate the causes of the earthquakes, you're given seven sets of divorce papers - one from each princess you've taken in, and Verde (your Records Minister) turns in her resignation letter. This leaves the player with being able to choose only one of the girls to accompany them on the trip...although it can be said that the girls you don't choose can be considered lucky, given what happens near the end of the final boss...
  • New Little King's Story can play this straight if you get the "Harem" ending. There's no sudden announcement of divorce or anything this time around; the girls are all too happy to share you with each other.
• Pop Quiz: The fight against King Omelet takes the form of this.
• Prehensile Hair: King Long Sauvage takes a lot of pride in the sheer length of his beard...and naturally, he utilizes it as a weapon during your trek up Mt. Sobamanjaro to confront him.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: Pomp and Circumstance, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the William Tell Overture... Pretty much every single song in the game is a remix of a classical composition.
• Puzzle Boss: Numerous; King Omelet is fought by way of a quiz game, King Long Sauvage's fight is an obstacle course, and King TV Dinnah's fight is a geography test! (That said, you do also fight him when you find him each round.) And we already mentioned how King Shishekebaboo's battle is a pinball game...
• Rags to Royalty: In the opening cutscene, you find out that Corobo was a lonely boy with no friends and a rodent problem before accidentally finding a crown and instantly becoming the king of Alpoko.
• Rat King: The final boss is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; it's a huge black rat who commands three other colored mice to destroy your kingdom. It and its followers symbolize the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the Rat King itself symbolizing Death.
• Regal Ruff: King Omelet wears a ruff, and is much more intelligent and refined than most of the other kings in the game.
• Remember the New Guy?: Played straight (?) and inverted in New Little King's Story. Azul is new to this game, but everyone seems to already know him — he's even apparently known Verde since they were kids. Meanwhile, although almost everyone from the previous game reappears with little or no re-introduction, Kampbell is introduced as though no-one has any idea who he is.
  • This also extends to the new princesses, which can be pretty jarring to those who've played the original game and were expecting Bouquet, Spumoni, Ferne and Martel to show up, only to find them replaced with completely new characters and being treated as if they've always been a part of the world.
• Requisite Royal Regalia: The king wears a brilliant red cape, an expensive-looking medallion, royal boots, a "magic" scepter, and his golden crown. Said staff is replaced with a sword in New Little King's Story.
• Retcon: Remember the weird Gainax Downer Ending of Little King's Story? Totally didn't really happen. Corobo ruled the world happily until a mysterious force dethroned him and imprisoned the princesses.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Oh yes. Somewhat realistic in that smashing a bush gets you a sellable plant and raiding trashcans yields worthless garbage.
• Ribcage Ridge: The Skull Plains are littered with giant bones for no apparent reason. There are also trees with foliage made out of bones.
• Robot Girl: Corina, the princess saved in New Island in New Little King's Story, replacing Martel from the original game.
• Secret Character: The Doctor, Steel Knight, and Rainbow Magician are optional secret classes that you can get late in the game.
• Save the World: After you defeat the other kings your quest becomes saving the world from earthquakes caused by rats eating the toy stage that is your world.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players occasionally go out of their kingdom without their posse. Corobo can hurt enemies with the command action, and doing so makes taking down enemies and bosses far more difficult than if they're fought normally. For example, Duvroc can be taken down with only Corobo, but doing so turns him into a Marathon Boss thanks to his damage output being incredibly low and needing to be mindful of his attacks and minions thanks to his low health.
• Seven Deadly Sins: It doesn't seem like it at first, but all of the boss kings represent each sin in one way or another. To elaborate:
  • As the Onii King demonstrates in his boss intro, he clearly isn't the charitable type, claiming that "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" and states that you're taking "his" territory when the kingdom of Alpoko was clearly claimed by you before he issued his challenge. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for him to be the representation of Greed.
  • What King Duvroc wants is nothing more than a good drink, a great party and an undying hope that the world will stop fighting or doing anything just to get wasted and relax their days away; his position as the representative as the sin of Sloth fits like a glove.
  • King Shishkebaboo's sin is a no-brainer. He gorges himself on numerous sweets and food and thinks almost of nothing else (not even Spumoni, whom he's got trapped in a vase). Being a creature of over-indulgence, it's only natural for his sin to be Gluttony.
  • Contrary to what many might think, King Omelet, eternal worrywart that he is, represents Wrath. Saint Thomas Aquinas said that wrath can be characterized by either misplaced anger, hasty anger or complete passivity. Omelet's approach to battle and everything around him therefore makes his position as the representative of the sin of Wrath actually makes a lot of sense.
  • A hotshot television reporter who enjoys being the center of attention as the premier information network of the world, confident that his geography test will trip you up and humiliate you all on national television... Yep, King TV Dinnah has the representation of Pride down pat.
  • King Long Sauvage represents the sin of Lust...which might raise some eyebrows at first, especially since there's almost no hints as to why he's represents this particular sin. ...Until one realizes a few things; The Divine Comedy makes reference to those who are lustful being on top of the mountain in Purgatory, the fact that Sauvage takes great pride in being incredibly tall and having a monstrously long beard, which visually invokes Combat Tentacles (and by extension, possibly Naughty Tentacles), and there's his name, which could be something...much more racy if one replaces the "v" in his name with an "s". Sobamanjaro's heavily defended state indicates a serious lust for power...and then there's the fact that he's the king who's holding Princess Ferne captive, hinting at a potentially perverse side, so all the subtle hints ultimately add up and give Long Sauvage's position as the representative of Lust much more weight. New Little King's Story makes the connection embarrassingly obvious, however.
  • King Jumbo Champloon might seem to be a hard one to point out...until you remember that his island has only recently been built and he's new on the scene in the grand scheme of kingdom ruling. Then he sees you rising to the top as a better constructed and far more powerful kingdom than his own, and issues a challenge just to claim his kingdom superior to yours. Envy is a powerful emotion indeed, and describes Jumbo Champloon, Talkative Loon that he is, quite well.
  • The Rat King appears to break the chain as it doesn't appear to embody any other sin that hasn't already been covered by the other bosses...except as the eighth boss, it actually embodies the forgotten sin of Despair. This actually makes perfect sense; being the representation of Death of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, its attempts to destroy your kingdom by tearing apart the toy stage containing your world and its successful attempt in swallowing the princess you chose to accompany you on the trip to the real world - in addition to any soldiers who die during the final battle - helps represent the feelings of loss and despair very well...both the despair Corobo must be feeling and the despair the player themselves is likely going through.
• Shout-Out: A lot of them. Someone on the development team must've been a huge pop culture nerd.
  • Howser is an old knight with grandiose ambitions who has a cow named Pancho; was an old man who traveled for many years with a companion named Sancho.
  • The person who sends the "Cow Bones in the Graveyard" quest is named Captain Beefheart.
  • Near the Worrywart Kingdom there is a cube with question marks on the sides. Break it, and a red mushroom comes out.
  • You can get far too many villagers with the names of Touhou Project characters for it not to be a Shout-Out.
  • Princess Apricot is clearly meant to be a send-up of Princess Peach; Word of God even outright says she's supposed to be an Expy.
  • One of your grunt soldiers calls your army the SOS Brigade.
  • One of the plants you can find out in the world is Neil deGrass.
  • There are several to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
    • TV Dinnah's travel show during his boss battle is called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the World".
    • The Animal Book says that the dog found "...the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything!"
    • The Tunesmith Book, when talking about the song "Brave New World", about the universe, it mentions "...the restaurant at the end of it!" This refers to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book in the series, which is about the character's journey to a restaurant that is built to be frozen in time when the universe was ending.
    • According to Princess Spumoni, Shizuka has a weird laptop with the words "DON'T PANIC" written on it. This is an actual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, in the books, is an encyclopedia with information on the galaxy and all of its creatures (along with some stuff on towels!)
  • Playing with the "random" button when naming the king makes the names "Cheech" and "Chong" appear.
  • Verde mentions Galactus during one debate.
  • According to the Gourmet Book, the White Tangerine "Tastes like teen spirit."
  • As per the ending, a little hero leading an army of toys against invading rats isn't exactly unheard of...
• Smooch of Victory: You can get one from each princess after rescuing them.
• Speaking Simlish: The spoken dialogue is actually gibberish composed from multiple languages. This is mysteriously absent in New Little King's Story, where the dialogue spoken in-game is perfect English.
• Spoony Bard: The Doctor and Rainbow Magician classes can stun enemies, but by the time they use their impressive stun attacks your soldiers would have already beaten it.
• Status Effects: Your troops can be poisoned, paralyzed, confused, immolated, or turned into snowmen.
• Sucking-In Lines: King Jumbo Champloon's chicken head can fire a laser that charges up with this effect. The Vacuum Onii on New Island can also do likewise.
• Suddenly Voiced: After you beat the game for the first time and unlock Tyrant Mode; amongst other features, Pancho, Howser's faithful companion who was previously believed to speak solely in moos, talks to you casually in English.
  "Moo moo moo. What's up, Corobo. I'm Pancho. How ya doing? Sorry I kept it a secret from you all this time. I can actually talk, but I kept quiet about it. Now that you're trying out the Tyrant Mode, I thought that I should greet you formally. I'm so glad you made it to the ending. It may be a bit late but congratulations. Now then, welcome to Tyrant Mode. It's gonna get hard, so be prepared."
• Take Over the World: The goal for 90% of the game.
• Talkative Loon: King Jumbo Champloon. He's not the only one; New Island in general seems to be made of complete crazies.
• Theme Naming: All the princesses have plant-related names, though some are a bit of a stretch.
• Token Mini-Moe: Martel qualifies in appearance and mannerism (if not age) in the original game, while Amabile and Corina take up the mantle in New Little King's Story.
• Toy Time:
  • The New Island area is this combined with arts and crafts in a Macro Zone.
  • The entire game turns out to be set inside a toy stage.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: Not totally unexpected, since you spend half the game building a flying machine. Not exactly a Shmup either, since you have no weapons. It is a level though.
• Valley Girl: Kokomo Pine, which isn't uncalled for, given her high profile and fame, even among the other princesses.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: You know you've reached the finale when you've exited reality and find yourself on the bedroom floor of the real little boy who imagined up this world.
• Victory Pose: Corobo will do a little salute with his scepter when you complete a mission. With guardians, he often jumps up on their corpse for his victory pose.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Your regular troops usually wash up on the beach if they die (yes, even if they get swallowed by a giant frog), but sometimes they don't come back. In that case, any villagers that were close to them dress in black for the day, and you can attend their funeral at the church. Which makes it all the more horrifying when you see reports of the apocalyptic calamities happening to them during the final boss fight.
• Visible Silence: After the first two buildings are built in the original, Howswer has this when he can't come up with a plan:
  Howswer: Good morning, my king.
  [Player cheers]
  I've searched for the true king for 35 years, and wanted to come up with something to impress you, but...
  I cannot seem to conceive of a plan to get us out of this crisis. I feel so...inadequate...
  ...
  Hahaha! I guess I'll just leave it to others!
• Wham Shot: Shizuka's ending in New Little King's Story is the only one with a stinger...one where you wake up in what is implied to be the real world after you and her got married, followed by the line Shizuka says after your vision clears up...
  Shizuka: We meet again, Your Majesty.
• Where It All Began:
  • The area in which you fight the Devil King in New Little King's Story is located at Corobo's castle...the same one you escaped from in the beginning of the game.
  • This is the clue for the final Wonder Spot: It's the area where you fought the Onii King, and therefore rescued Apricot, who gave you the sidequest in the first place.

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