YMMV / Little King's Story

• Awesome Music: What better song to play during the final fight against the Rat King than Night on Bald Mountain?
  • King Jumbo Champloon's theme also gets high marks for being an excellent remix of "The Infenal Gallop" from Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld" opera (or as it's more famously known, the Can-Can).
  • King Long Sauvage's theme. Can't go wrong with "Mars, the Bringer of War" from "The Planets Suite" as a boss theme.
• Contested Sequel: It's ambiguous if New Little King's Story can be classified as a sequel per se, but fans are split on how it stacks up to the original. On one hand, some fans like the new art style and enjoy how the storyline has been expanded considerably from the original game while also adding to the previously established gameplay by adding new features and changing some of the characters from their original iterations to give them more to their personalities and overall character arcs. On the other hand, fans who played the original argue that the change in art style strips the game of its identity, while also turning the story into an utter Cliché Storm that casts away the charm of it and its characters (speaking of, the changes to some of the previously established characters, personality-wise, design-wise or both, caught some heat as well), and the gameplay gets called down for being almost the exact same game, with its few additions being so minute that it hardly matters.
• Demonic Spiders: The giant frogs (called Yvonnes) appear out of nowhere, bother you during construction, have a hard to predict and hard to avoid One-Hit Kill attack, and can poison your men.
• Fridge Brilliance: The rats don't seem to have much reason to act evil. But, if you notice, those same rats have been mimicking the king as he progresses through the adventure, with the Rat King being the leader. That means they've watched him conquer the world, and are now trying to take the kingdom from Corobo.
• Fridge Horror: The Giga Carpenters are robots. You have to send people in to make Giga Carpenters. You just forced your citizens to turn themselves into robots just so you can have some of the best carpenters in your army.
• Heartwarming Moments: The boy who made the story world based Howser off of his grandpa who had died the year before, saying that he became a knight in Heaven. D'awwwww...
  • The conclusion of at least a few of the Princess sidequests.
    • Apricot sits with you on the edge of the Onii King's boss arena and relates that you've given her so many good memories that they outweigh the bad memories of being shut up in the vase. Accordingly, she names the area "Valley of Memories".
    • Shizuka teleports you and herself to the observation tower, and tells you to watch as UFOs form a heart shape.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • When your king dies, your people hold a funeral for him with him very visibly lying in an open coffin; the words "LIFE OVER" showing up at the top of the screen while a sad music box tune plays. The perfect combo of unnerving and horrendously depressing.
  • King Rat and Blue Rat can drag some of your men into the shadows where they immediately die regardless of life points.
    • It gets worse the more you think about it. You'd be forgiven for thinking your men are Eaten Alive, but King Rat has an attack that does that explicitly, complete with an internal view of your men being swallowed. The guys that get dragged off aren't there. King Rat drags them off, there's no corpse, and he doesn't eat them, so what the hell happened to them?
• Porting Disaster: The initial Steam release version was basically unplayable, suffering from performance issues, random crashes, and encounters that are made harder because of the exceptionally poor coding. The developers, XSEED, gave notorious fixer-upper modder Durante the source code, and he turned it into a Polished Port (though it still has some issues with certain encounters at 60 FPS, which was solved by enforcing a temporary 30 FPS lock in those instances).
• That One Boss: There are eight bosses altogether, and since each one is an Unexpected Gameplay Change, one (or maybe more than one) of them are guaranteed to be this for you.
  • A common agreement amongst players is King Shishkebaboo of the Ripe Kingdom, which is a pinball boss fight where you have to use your troops to hit him across the board. And the areas that make him lose the most calories are pretty damn hard to aim for, not to mention you may have to hit a boulder blocking that part of the board several times to make it accessible in the first place. Did I also mention you have to time your hits just right so your troops don't end up hurt? You deserve a pat on the back if you win this fight on your first try.
  • King TV Dinnah of the Primetime Kingdom is no cakewalk either if you haven't studied up on your Geography. This much is pretty obvious. (And if you have, just try to find South Korea. Say, wasn't it on a peninsula in the real world? Uhhh...) But as the fight goes on, he starts to throw out fake hints (by the end of the fight, he trips you up with two false starts before the real hint), which wouldn't be so bad on its own...if you didn't have a strict time limit. How bad? You have less than 20 seconds to guess the last one correctly if you actually wait for the real hint. Worse yet, if you only have one digger left by the end of the fight, there's no way you'll be able to stop the clock without guessing and hoping you pick the right place. And there's a lot of choices you can pick incorrectly. Did we also mention that guessing incorrectly or letting time run out gets you punted into a random penalty program that often deals high damage to your troops?
  • King Long Sauvage is also regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, if not the most difficult. His fight consists of making your way to the top of Mount Sobamanjaro to confront him at its peak. However, there are a ton of deadly obstacles on your way up, some of which can kill your soldiers instantly, there's a few blockades that'll slow you down, and there's a time limit on top of all of this (granted, a very lenient time limit, but it can still take you somewhere in the ballpark of ten to fifteen minutes to get to the top). To make matters worse, you are required to have at least one carpenter in your group when you challenge Sauvage, as you need to build a bridge to get to the peak...which means if your carpenters are all dead by the time you reach that point, you'll have to leave, go back to train more citizens to be carpenters (and rebuild your army) and start the entire fight over from the beginning. And as one final kick to the nads, even if you manage to make it up there with a carpenter, you also have to have enough troops to stack on top of each other so that you can make yourself taller than Sauvage. If you don't - you guessed it - you gotta try the fight again and do that whole Death Course over again until you finally have enough troops make it to the end.
• That One Sidequest: Gathering tunes for Princess Kokomo. You have to gather tunes by wandering around your sprawling kingdom and talking to random villagers with notes above their heads. Except villagers only give tunes between 10 P.M. and midnight on the games clock (about a 10 minute window, or 2 and a half minutes in the original). Plus, the ones that sound like they're humming? You've already gotten them; you want the ones that sound like they're talking. On top of all that, there's no guarantee for any particular location that anyone will be humming, so you can get stuck for multiple nights on the penultimate one even if you know where it's supposed to be. Oh, and at no point does the game tell you any of this.
  • Ferne's sidequest can be harder than it has any right to be. Five of the seven Kingstones are easy to get if you know where they are, and you can get the last one if you know the trick, but one of them, even if you know what you're supposed to do, may never show up for no known reason. (It's a glitch wherein, if you've gotten it while using a particular save slot, you'll never be able to get it on that same save slot until you delete the game from your Wii and reinstall.)
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game is rated T due to alcohol references, polygamy, religion and, sometimes genocide. Yet it's all presented in a delightful storybook style with vibrant colors and cutesy graphics. Well, the Wii game, anyway. The Vita sequel uses a generic anime artstyle because everyone mistook the Wii game for a children's game.

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