The Quest of Ki is a 1988 video game developed by Game Studio and published by Namco for the Family Computer. It is the third game in Babylonian Castle Saga series which started with the 1984 arcade game, The Tower of Druaga. The story of The Quest of Ki is actually a prequel to the original Tower of Druaga. It occurs shortly after the demon Druaga has stolen the Blue Crystal Rod and taken it to his tower. The goddess Ishtar sends the priestess Ki to the tower in order to retrieve it. The game then follows her doomed quest to the top of the tower, and leads directly into the story of the original game. The game is a side-scrolling platformer with one hundred levels. In each level, the player's goal is to pick up a key and open the door leading to the next area. Various enemies, including slimes, ghosts, and wizards, appear on each floor, and any contact with them results in death. Ki has no weapons, and thus can not damage or defeat any of the enemies. Her only abilities are to dash and jump. As long as the player holds the jump button down, Ki can rise indefinitely into the air. However, contact with the ceiling will cause her to drop to the ground and become stunned for several seconds. Many of the levels consist of puzzles in which the player must carefully regulate the height and direction of Ki's jumps. Each stage in the game contains one or more treasure chest, which hold various items. Although many of the items bestow helpful abilities, the effects only last for the floor on which they were found. After completing the game, players can gain access to forty bonus stages. These stages contain cameos from the Pac-Man ghosts and the enemies from Dig Dug.
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The game loves to play tricks on you and even has some nods to the original Tower of Druaga, in fact this is actually a prequel to it as it ends with Ki turning into a stone. Though once you conquer all 60 floors, you’ll be treated to 40 bonus floors that are really challenging and even feature Namco enemies like Nyamco from Mappy and Inky from Pac-Man. Apparently there’s also a parody of the Healing Slime enemy from DQ, even to the point said enemy is in the special thanks section. Sadly I couldn’t get far with my skills…
This is a fun game that you should give a try if you think you’d enjoy it. I’m glad to have finally sat down with this one even if it fooled me and killed me too many times. Even with Namco moving on to the PC Engine, it was nice seeing something of this quality still arriving on the Famicom. Just make sure you don’t take the early levels for granted. You’ll be taking a while to beat this one until you get good.
The Quest of Ki by Namco is a very difficult platforming puzzle game involving a very fragile player heroine that easily gets killed by anything.
The objective of the game is to navigate around the floor and collect the key to open the door to the next level, and all of this must be done within the allotted time. If the timer runs out you'll lose a life.
The punishing difficulty of the game comes from the way how you control the player character: The game heavily relies on her precise movements, feather falling, and her ability to continuously levitate upwards for as long as the jump button is held down. The are no means of fighting back other than avoiding the enemies and projectiles altogether.
Thing is, she's very weak and easily gets stun-locked if you're not careful.
• If you run too fast and hit a wall, you get stun-locked as she does her crouching-down-while-holding-her-head-in-pain animation for one second.
• If you levitate too high and hit the ceiling, you get stun-locked and helplessly watch her slowly descend straight down to the floor and does the same animation as mentioned above once landed.
• If you run too fast, levitate and hit a wall, she slowly descends down in the same fashion as mentioned above.
• During stun-locked, you're very vulnerable to anything and there's no way to move away from danger until the stun animation is finished.
• Hilariously, just by touching spikes, enemies or projectiles by 1 pixel can instantly kill you.
With these in mind, you can now imagine why the game is tough.
Each levels are varied containing specific set of enemies, traps, and projectiles. Her weakness makes navigating around the level extremely hard as anything that isn't a floor, wall, or a ceiling can kill her. Some puzzle elements would require the player to fetch certain items or careful navigation around dangerous areas to clear it.
Despite this, the game has an anti-frustration feature by removing the very enemy that killed you when you lose a life, making the next attempt easier (you only have a few extra lives, though).
There are also warp chests you can find that will instantly take you a few floors up bypassing many levels, but these warp chests are located in very risky sections of the level, so it's a reward for taking the risk.
I guess now you're probably asking "why is it even fun even though you said it's very frustrating?"
It's hard to explain, but there's a certain kind of enjoyment you'll find in ridiculously hard games like this! Most of the time the deaths are always your fault, and the devs were quite devious for placing traps in places where you least expect it. Every now and then you might get a chuckle or more for failing a lot.
Besides, this game is not meant to be taken seriously. I mean, like, the whimsical, upbeat background music says it all!
It's a 5/5 for me for its addicting and challenging puzzles, despite its quirky game mechanics. Maybe I'm that masochistic, but that's just my opinion.
(Let's see if you can finish both the main game levels AND the extra levels that has more EVIL traps ahead!)
