Nintendo's Mii Creator, Animal Crossing, and the original MySims are just a few games to capitalize on the comedy and charm of cartoony characters with disproportionately large heads. MySims Kingdom, the sequel to last year's MySims for the Wii, is the latest installment in that category, dropping players in a medieval kingdom in need of a little shine and polish.

Your custom-created character is entrusted with a magic wand that enables you to build and decorate items in the kingdom's various islands. Each island has a distinct theme, a la Disneyland's Tomorrowland, Fantasyland or Frontierland.

Large quests in the game generally center around locating/obtaining key pieces of an object and assembling it in order to solve a certain problem in that land. During one portion, we had to put together an irrigation system so that a citizen could water their garden. We also explored one of the kingdom's more technologically-forward islands, helping a scientist rebuild his rocketship and a robot fulfill his dream of opening a shop -- instead of being blasted into space.

This is where MySims Kingdom hits its stride. Making the building and decoration mechanic a funtional part of the storyline made us feel less like we were just collecting resources and more like a valuable contributing member of MySims society. Completing quests and helping citizens opens new islands to explore -- but the game is nonlinear, so you can move on to unlocked areas and play various quests at your leisure.

Other minigames pop up when you talk to the certain inhabitants. We ran into one of the kingdom's crankier citizens who insisted we round up her escaped pigs before we were allowed to leave. It's a side quest we've seen before in adventure games (finding chickens in the Legend of Zelda comes to mind) but the creatures are cute and it's a good way to get acquainted with that particular area of the island.

EA has made a few major improvements over the previous MySims game that make gameplay much smoother. The first is the ability to build anywhere, on the fly. Instead of going into a workshop area, one button click enables construction mode, which eliminates the transition between third-person and first-person perspective that somewhat breaks the connection with your character.

Another improvement is with loading times, which for the most part only take place in the background during character conversations. EA said that they had learned a lot from working on the first MySims and were able to fix performance for the sequel.

In addition, your character now has the ability to jump. It's a small feature on the surface, but one which allowed developers to create a more dynamic and exciting environment for us to explore.

MySims Kingdom captures the feel of adventure that was slightly lacking in the first game. With loading times virtually eliminated, a seamless transition between exploration and building modes, and what looks to be a solid set of quests, MySims Kingdom is definitely a Wii title we're keeping our eyes on.