Yea you can talk to the towns folk, later on you can accept little missions from them and so on.

The "action" involves a few things:

1. City-building elements: the city itself is like the floor plan of a building in that it never changes--your job is to 'furnish' it with buildings based on space limitations, efficiency, and aesthetic appeal (though this last option is, by far, the least important consideration). Essentially, you are an interior decorator on a grand scale (I'll refrain from making any obvious jokes about the King's choice of attire--especially his holiday outfit).

2. Recruiting adventurers to fill certain roles (jobs in FF parlance): each morning prospective applicants will gather in front of the castle and you get to 'interview' them for one of these roles then decide if you want to hire him or her (generally based on who has the best stats for the job in question).

3. Sending adventurers on quests (behests in this game): at the beginning of each day you have the option of posting (or not--you can let the AI go on its merry way if you want) a behest to go explore a dungeon, kill a boss, or secure a particular resource (construction materials for buildings; raw materials for better weapons; etc.) From there, you assign the job to any adventurer that shows interest and off they go.

3. Managing the city: after you send your adventurers about their business, you get to the various resource-management aspects at hand: researching upgrades, forming parties (of adventurers), building things, visiting with the commoners (in a bid to boost morale which has various affects), etc. until the day ends.

4. Repeat above as necessary.

It's far more in-depth when compared to Actraiser and I've just given you a thumbnail sketch of what you can expect but, on the whole, there is more than enough here to keep you busy for at least 3-4 very-compulsive days of play.

Two things you'll hear a lot from fans of this game:

1. It has a surprising amount of depth compared to what was expected.

2. It's fiendishly addictive. 

As for the DLC (you didn't ask, but while I'm here):

It's certainly not necessary to purchase it (especially on your first pass) but it does increase the variety available a great deal so I do recommend considering it.

Nice summary exindguy. I'll add my two cents:

My Life as King is a cool sim game. It's fairly long (~15-25 hours). The base price is 1500 points and there is additional content that raises the total price to 3100 points but you don't need the extra DLC to finish the game. I did get the extra dungeons and the race pack. The extra dungeons add in at least another five hours if you want to clear them all so that works out to a pretty good value. The race packs add a little variety with different races to choose from for your adventurers (which is supposed to be expanded upon with some more DLC that has been announced). I would suggest this to anyone who likes sim games (SimCity, etc.).