KF2 is bigger and better than its predecessor and nothing conveys that better than getting dropped off onto the open-air coast of Melanat. The level design is excellent, with an interconnectedness that lays the groundwork for the Souls series. This layout works well for alleviating some of the pains of backtracking since you'll be coming through each area several times naturally. There's a few thoughtful improvements as well, like the addition of a bindable shortcut button.

One of the big issues I had with this game is how ridiculously easy it is to softlock yourself. Sure, maybe it's on me for jumping down a hole in the ground, but sometimes you can see something down there! And if you get down there without having found the items that let you back out...well, hope you saved recently. It's also pretty overly cryptic about some things, I never even realized there was an item appraiser since they spawn randomly or something and I never met them. But I think tracking down old forum posts to glean game info that may or may not be correct is part of the From Soft experience so it's all good. The game also has some major performance issues on the NTSC version so pick up the PAL one instead.

The more I think about it though, the more I feel this game really is something special.

Because the first King's Field never released outside of Japan, King's Field II is just named King's Field in the US and Europe; the same holds true for the Japanese King's Field III being titled King's Field II internationally. Beyond being silly, this makes Googling information about the first two games incredibly frustrating — these are already old and obscure games, and now you want a tiny, scattered fan community to come to a consensus on the naming scheme? I firmly believe that this should only be referred to as King's Field II, but I am biased by not growing up playing this on the PS1.

It's possible to make a number of comparisons between the design of the first King's Field and the later Soulsborne games, but much more than its predecessor, King's Field II actually feels like a prototypical Dark Souls. Gone are the complicated-but-disconnected series of dungeon floors; this time, the entire game world is open from the get-go, and it's up to the player to decide the order of progression based on what enemies they think they can handle. The number of NPCs has been greatly expanded, and paying attention to their cryptic (and often humorously translated) requests can reward you with gear that aids exploration or bolsters your strength. Whereas the first game pigeonholed you into using the Moonlight Sword and its corresponding Sword Magic to defeat the final boss, this time around, there are a variety of entirely optional hidden weapons and magics that you can discover and use to push through the endgame. All of these elements come together to serve as a strong improvement over the first game, and were it not for the combat and returning quality of life issues (more on that in a bit), I'd say that King's Field II deserves to get talked about in the same breath as the Souls games it inspired well over 10 years after it released.

I do want to praise the level design, because it is truly fantastic for an early 3D console game. While I'm no game historian, this is one of the earliest examples of a first-person Metroidvania I can think of; System Shock, released in 1994, is the only earlier release with such qualifiers that comes to mind. The game begins with the player waking up on a dark beach and with no directions, an ocean with instant-death drop-offs behind you. From there, you are naturally drawn towards a nearby cave, but there are several other dangerous points of interest nearby, such as another cave guarded by a giant squid, that will quickly reinforce the need to return to difficult areas later down the line when you're more powerful. The fact that sections of the world are implicitly gated by the player's strength rather than by a linear sequence of levels (as in the first game) is great. This design philosophy largely continues throughout the entire map: if you have difficulty progressing forward, it usually means it's time to return to an area that scared you off earlier in the playthrough. Also, despite being dramatically larger and more interconnected than the first King's Field — and the fact that there are three different maps with their own coverage of the game world — the level design flows beautifully. Secrets are just as hidden as ever, but I rarely got stuck and needed to consult an online map to move forward unlike the previous outing. Overall, the strong level design does feel like bedrock for the design of the first half of Dark Souls: the simplest path through each area is clear to the player, but secrets and hidden areas require much more dedication to locate. The aesthetic variety does not come anywhere close to Dark Souls — most of the map is fairly repetitive stone hallways — but I chalk that up to the game's age, budget, and target platform more than I do to the vision.

Though the map flows well, that does not mean it's easy to keep track of everything! This is the first game I've ever played where I wish I took notes -- remembering the location of locked chests and NPCs, and the details of NPC questlines, gets more and more mentally taxing the further you progress. As a result, I ended up having to look up where to find somebody several times, which isn't helped by the fact that the scattered villages are all visually identical. This isn't so much a knock on a game as it is advice: if you decide to play this game, be prepared to keep notes as you go if you want to minimize your reliance on external walkthroughs. For the later King's Field games and their adjacent contemporaries, I intend on taking notes and only using the internet if I get truly stuck, as I truly enjoy the thrill of discovery that these games bring.

My biggest complaint about the game is unavoidable: the combat is very outdated and slows down exploration rather than engaging or challenging the player. The tank movement is totally fine, since the enemies are designed around your limited turn speed, but each fight plays out almost exactly the same. Move forward, whack the enemy, back up to dodge their attack, optionally use a magic attack while your stamina is recharging, repeat. For some enemies, you can shake this up by tailgating their ass in a giant circular motion and smacking them repeatedly as a sort of goofy ancestor to a Dark Souls backstab. It doesn't matter what enemy you're fighting; this is how every fight in the entire game plays out unless you're using the bow, which is not engaging either. I actually didn't mind the combat in the first King's Field despite it being functionally identical to the combat in King's Field II, but the fact that King's Field II is several hours longer than its predecessor means that the basic combat is stretched very thin by the end of the game without new mechanics or improvements. The exploration being so good and ahead of its time makes the combat — of which there is no shortage in King's Field II — drag down the experience a bit.

The lack of quality of life features, though not unexpected for the time, has only worsened due to the larger scope of this sequel. Since there is no storage system, your inventory will be bloated by the end of the game unless you sell or discard your consumables and key items. For a gamer with a hoarder mentality like myself, that is completely antithetical to how I play these games, especially since there aren't that many items you can discard unless you're religiously following a walkthrough and know when each item has served its purpose. This bloated inventory system also means that using multiple items sucks. You have to fill up each individual potion flask in your inventory at a fountain, which takes ages; using multiple healing items at once during combat is no different. Items still don't have displayed stats either, so equipping a new piece of loot requires navigating through a few menus and doing needless mental math to make sure you didn't just weaken yourself. Much like the combat, I was more willing to excuse this in the first game when the experience was shorter and From Software had no prior game to build upon, but it's disappointing here, even though it does not come anywhere close to ruining my perception of the game.

Overall, I liked King's Field II and found it to be a memorable experience anchored by the rock-solid exploration, but the combat and outdated user interface make it difficult to recommend to the average person. If you're a rabid fan of the Soulsborne games like myself and want to see the roots of the series, it's a no-brainer to give this game a go, and you'll almost certainly walk away with an appreciation of how From Software was able to further refine the strengths of this game (and patch up the weaknesses) in their later spiritual successors.

This game is definitely a lot better than the first one, It was rough in the beginning I felt like "Man am I gonna be able to complete this game" but once I got passed the first few hours, got some Crystal flasks, got my fountain going things really came together. I hate to do the "Dark souls" comparison but these games most likely inspired it. That being said, This game has some cool interconnectivity, once you've explored a good chunk of the world and unlocked some shortcuts stuff starts connecting together and you get a "Eureka moment" similar to how you would when you figured out which areas connected to what in Dark Souls.

This game also as NPCs again function very similarly to the NPCs in Dark Souls, you talk to them and exhaust their dialogue, they give you hints, exposition or quests. This game is just really neat and impressive for a 1995 PS1 game.

Also some advice if you play this game definitely keep a Bow on you and do not sell your Magic crystals unless you know what you're doing.

What begins as insurmountable odds, fighting against the controls and difficulty with sparse saves, eventually gives way to a satisfying and almost addictive metroidvania adventure. The island feels massive at first, you wonder how you will ever survive it, but then you find a slightly better sword, maybe pick up a piece of magic, and then the rest of the game snowballs until you are bowling over every enemy.

The only things that really hold it back from being great for me are the too-similar environments and a frankly near-impossible penultimate boss fight that I can really only see defeating by cheesing. The whole game has a claustrophobic and elegiac look that seeps in over time, and when you do find yourself outside under the stars it feels like a real fresh breath of air. You will run into other people here and there who feel so trapped in this world, it can be haunting just how hopeless it feels. The score does a lot of lifting and perfectly matches the visuals and style. A pretty fantastic game overall and is the kind that I'd really like to see a fresh perspective on if From were to ever return to this series. A remake could do wonders.

I'm always skeptical when a series tries to westernize itself, but for the first time I really don't think that's what broke the experience for me here.
It's definitely an upgrade from KF1 in almost every way, but somehow loses a fraction of its charm in how convoluted the map design and objectives are (in all my searching, I couldn't find a map that was both comprehensive and legible, the one I was mainly using seemed to leave out entire areas and didn't show items, and the others were so layered and hard to read I couldn't find where I was even with important landmarks nearby).

I was trying to go in authentically (with save states still, of course), but I genuinely think my playthrough would have been improved if I'd started off with a guide, as I found myself doing full circles for an hour at a time, wandering into areas I wasn't supposed to be in yet, and inevitably getting locked in an area that literally has no exit and losing 3 hours of progress. I hesitate to say open-world fatigue got to me here, since this is still a relatively small world, but it really did feel like I was just wandering aimlessly for 90% of my experience. I didn't even find a new weapon until hour 4, let alone magic, and passing by bosses that you have to return to later is an interesting idea, until you start to feel like you're missing something -- because when you think about it, you've literally just been grinding exp this whole time while wandering, and it still doesn't feel like you're advancing at all.

It's a shame it didn't click for me, because there's a lot of FASCINATING stuff here, but it's just lacking the simplistic charm of KF1 and feels like some amount of quantity over quality. Even the world being designed as one full space with no loading screens is a good idea as a sales pitch, but it makes it impossible - or at least less fun - to navigate and map anything due to the intricacy. Most of the time, it felt like the only reward for exploration was more monsters to grind exp, and my performance was tanking pretty bad in any larger areas where combat is necessary, so even that aspect lost a lot of its allure.

An unbalanced mess. However -- it's a fun one and quite engaging.
King's Field II is a complete improvement on the first game, improving camera speed, movement, more songs and a freer map design, but the problem is that King's Field has such a connected world that you can go from the beginning to the endgame zone in 30 minutes easily. Obviously the enemies will destroy you since they also have ranged attacks, but it's really worth the risk since the gear endgame literally makes you almost invincible wtf like there is a helmet that regenerates hp, another armor that gives you mana + another ring that gives hp, and they are quite visible, you just have to have the right key which is not that hard to get since you can buy it easily. The problem is that there are like 7 different keys and you have to open menu --> select menu --> select item with EVERY key and on top of that there's an incredible input delay lol


Another thing that really pissed me off is that you can easily get softlocked if you don't know how certain mechanics work that are never explained to you, and the main path is blocked by diamond keys that can be used infinitely--only in the direction you opened the door. This is on purpose, to create one-way trips that you can't get out unless you have another key or use an item to teleport, if you even understood the mechanics lol

The combat felt much more clunky than before but in a way it also improved... I don't know how to explain it.

While I'm more of a fan of the previous level design, concentrated on different floors instead of everything being connected, Fromsoftware really stepped out of their comfort zone with the second game and tried lots and lots of new things and I'm glad about that.

EDIT: I forgot to talk about the story! And I really liked that it was darker and better told than the first game :--) I also like that you can more or less imagine what's going to happen in the third game, really well crafted everything.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which you can find here:
https://youtu.be/MNNIF60Q0B0

After someone has decided they’re going to make something, they have to overcome one of the largest hurdles in the path to completing that project: where to start. Which part of the project is the best to act as a foundation for the rest to build on top of? For a video game, there are a lot of options. The programming team may need to construct a new engine or get a key mechanic functioning that will go on to inform everything else. Perhaps the art team has a collection of assets that just have to be in the game, or a style that’s so new and refreshing that it’s destined to become the centre of the project. Maybe a director lays out a map of their ideal first level or hands their department heads a written script to base their work off of. In any case, something has to come first and define the game’s direction throughout production. In From Software’s 1995 game, King’s Field, the driving component behind the game’s production isn’t obvious, and only after putting some considerable thought into it have I been able to develop a theory. King’s Field contains level design that the player character is not equipped to overcome, enemies that aren’t conventionally battled with, a questionable definition of optimisation, and a suggestion of a narrative that ends in a way nobody could have ever expected. And yet, the game is a sequel. Someone at From Software had a vision for a 3D game with no loading screens, full of traps and secrets, and they wanted it as soon as the technology was there. They were going to make it irrespective of the rest of the game’s design. King’s Field is defined by its level design, for better or worse, the game is exactly what it was meant to be, and it’s brilliant.

In 1994, a small Japanese software company made the jump into the video game market. The advent of affordable 3D development tools meant that the barrier to entry was fairly low and small companies weren’t risking too much by dipping their toe into the medium. That team of software engineers managed to get a development build of Sony’s new Playstation and were ready to drop their 3D dungeon exploration game two weeks after the console launched. King’s Field was relatively well received by the Japanese audience, though there were certainly detractors. The game was much more difficult than most of its contemporaries which left many unimpressed. Reviews said it relied too heavily on secret items and keys, in similar looking hallways filled with enemies that were challenging to defeat. Many were still coming to grips with the idea of a 3D video game, and From Software were out here punishing the player for falling into a pit that may have contained a secret or an item required to progress. Six months later, the team had a new game built in the same engine and the reception in Japan was significantly better. While the first King’s Field game had been cryptic and impenetrable, the sequel was far easier to understand while still offering a challenge. The game’s reception was so positive that the developer was approached by multimedia corporation ASCII in order to gain international publishing rights for King’s Field, which From Software accepted. King’s Field 2 would be translated to English and released in the US in February of 1996 to middling reviews. The game’s poor frame rate and challenging combat were again criticised, but the setting and expansiveness of the game world received great commendation.

Melanat is the name of the island that the player has washed up onto. It’s an isolated rock in the middle of the ocean that is difficult to get onto and off of, and as a result, the people on Melanat cannot leave. A fisherman near the player’s starting location explains this in a fairly roundabout way, but he also claims that many of the island’s residents are trapped on the island because of an addiction to the crystals that can be found underground. There are a handful of villages on Melanat in which the player can find more people to speak with, as well as a few of the island’s magical fountains. The water that springs from these fountains has a high concentration of crystal dust that heals the drinker when it is consumed, which is likely the reason the inhabitants are addicted. Deeper beneath Melanat resides the vast majority of other people on the island. Members of an army that had begun mining for the crystals to move back to the mainland, now lost to their enveloping need to consume them. The player can find these crystals scattered throughout Melanat and use them for trade, or have a tradesman fashion a crystal flask to hold some of the magical water to consume during battle. The player rarely gets to see the sky as they explore the island. Most of the pathways are a knot of tunnels that meander between larger rooms, but there are a few bridges and the ridiculous minecart network deep down. The mines and lower tunnels extend far deeper than I expected them to, and it becomes quite difficult to remember where things are located as the paths overlap and spiral around each other. The presence of enemies and other obstacles in these tunnels can also impact the player’s ability to memorise the path they took, and the maps the player can find are not particularly helpful either.

The level design in King’s Field contains a number of quirks that give the game an isolating atmosphere, while it also includes some things specifically to be kind of rude to the player. The game opens on the beach, on a small rock surrounded by shallow water. Except it isn’t all shallow, it’s actually much more precarious than it looks and it's a great example for the way the rest of the game will function. The player is always teetering on the edge of destruction, whether they know it or not. There’s a massive play space in this game. I spent about 18 hours with King’s Field, and the majority of that time was spent navigating and trying to figure out where the game wanted me to go. And while it appears to be open for exploration, Melanat won’t allow the player into places they really aren’t ready to go, whether that involves killing the player immediately upon entering a new location, or simply locking a door that leads deeper. Right across from the starting rock is a doorway into the island. Inside there are a few enemies to fight, as well as a collection of barrels to rummage through for loot. This room also contains a well filled with Melanat’s magical water which the player can use to heal, offering a kind of base to make excursions away from for the first few minutes of the game. Right beside the well is a false wall. It doesn’t look any different to the other walls in the room, though the player might notice the texture warp or the geometry flicker which I don’t think was deliberate but it does show that there are secrets behind some of the walls. In this first room alone, the player has experienced combat, recovered from any damage they may have taken, found a piece of armour in a container that isn’t a treasure chest, and learned that there are secrets to find by interacting with the walls. This is all fantastic stuff, but this area asks far too much of the hardware, which is another key aspect of the game introduced at this stage. And as the levels become more complex, or they start to contain more enemies and traps, things start to get very clumsy. Not only for performance problems but also in terms of the challenges presented to the player. The character’s mechanical capability is fairly limited; they can walk, or they can run at the cost of stamina, but there isn’t a jump. They can equip and swing a variety of weapons, but the equippable shields only increase the defensive stats, there isn’t a button to raise the shield to block some incoming damage. So when the level includes pendulum traps that occupy the entire hallway, the player has no choice but to get smacked if they try to pass through. And while some of these traps can be deactivated via a switch somewhere, sometimes that switch is beyond the trap. Similar situations can arise from invisible pits throughout the game, although with some luck the player can run across these. I don’t find these things to be bad choices, but they are strange. King’s Field is quite good at telling the player they’re unwelcome in one location and that they should look elsewhere to progress, so when I was hit for 100 damage by these swinging spiked balls I felt incentivised to look elsewhere. The game’s combat also adds to this incentive.

Without a dedicated button for blocking or dodging, the player’s best option to avoid damage in battle is to move away from the enemy, or to circle around and get behind them which the controls don’t make comfortable. King’s Field uses tank controls with the R1 and L1 buttons used for strafing, which I’m totally fine with. This control scheme works for exploring and combat against regular enemies, scenarios where the stakes are low and there are plenty of escape routes if things do get out of control. It is possible to add an item to a shortcut button to use when necessary which I would typically assign my crystals bottles to heal from. A single offensive spell is assigned to another button, and the player has to cast other spells from the spell menu directly. Magic is a surprisingly important part of King’s Field combat, particularly when battling the game’s bosses. Hits cause a not-insignificant period of stun on enemies which heavily factored into my preference for which offensive spell to use. Even if it did the least amount of damage, the Fire Wall spell hits enemies multiple times which allows for safe approaches and some free sword damage. Without sufficient resources to cast this spell repeatedly, the player has to choose between tanking a lot of damage or circling around the enemies endlessly until the battle ends. This strafing strategy is very effective against most of the enemies in the game, though I found it to be sort of uncomfortable to use. In order to circle around an enemy, the player has to input one of the shoulder buttons and then wiggle between the up and a horizontal direction on the d-pad. It’s easy to make a mistake here which can leave the player vulnerable to an attack. I didn’t find doing this to be fun. I found it to be funny because it's very silly, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

There are 8 bosses throughout King’s Field, though there are a few rematches here and there, bringing the total number of boss battles to 11. Most of the bosses are larger versions of regular enemies, though they usually have attacks in boss form that they wouldn’t have otherwise. The first boss the player is likely to encounter is the big squid enemy near where the player awakens at the start of the game. This guy is far beyond the player’s capability when they first find it, and I struggled to defeat it as the third boss I took down. The Huge Kraken has a massive pool of health that causes the fight to take a long time even if the player is prepared for the battle. It cannot move, and instead flails its enormous tentacles at the player, hoping to knock them into the deep ocean just in front of the Kraken’s lair. This fight is frighteningly familiar, actually. Most of the other bosses in King’s Field aren’t rooted in place like the Kraken, although the Termite Queen is. It’s strange that she can only be damaged via projectile weapons and magic, and the enemy pathing problems make this battle quite disappointing. Enemies cannot leave the room they’re assigned to, even if there’s nothing that would keep them from leaving, so it's possible and practical to defeat the Termite Queen from outside of the room since the termites she summons can’t actually reach the player. The necessity of projectile attacks for this battle also doesn’t really make sense. The Queen is standing in a hallway, near enough that sword swings should be able to hit her no problem, but they just don’t work. So the player has to leave and find a bow and some arrows in order to defeat this boss. Almost every other boss is a mobile enemy that can be circled around to varying levels of effectiveness. The Bronze Knights and the Huge Tarn have relatively slow turning speeds, so once the player gets behind them the fight is essentially over. The Earth Elemental, the Demon Lord, and Necron aren’t so slow so there’s less opportunity to lock them down with backstabs. Of course, the Fire Wall spell does keep these enemies in hit stun for a bit, but nowhere near long enough for the player to be able to keep them permanently stunned until death. These three enemies are also the back end of a boss rush toward the end of the game, and they don’t go down effortlessly. Necron might even be a bit overtuned, especially since the game doesn’t run great in his arena.

I think vision and ambition had blinded the developers to the biggest problem within their game. All of these corridors, traps, enemies, and the choice to never use loading screens come at the cost of the game’s framerate, and in some instances the gameplay suffers tremendously. There are many enemies in King’s Field which have a wind-up animation linked to their primary attack. This signals to the player that the enemy is about to deal damage to them and that the player should prepare to get hit or move out of the attack’s damage zone. Skeletons are a great enemy type to demonstrate this as they have to lift their sword first before they can attack. In some locations a skeleton moves rather quickly, so the player has to be watchful of them and try to take them down as soon as possible. Unchecked, a lone skeleton can deal some significant damage to the player, but since the game is running at its best, the player can react accordingly and eliminate the threat while taking minimal damage. Toward the middle of the game, particularly around the big castle structure in the centre of the island, the game runs much worse. These skeletons don’t have any design differences to the previous skeletons, but since the player can’t turn as quickly and there’s a longer period of input delay, they’re actually more dangerous than before. Fortunately, the location that runs the poorest is free of any enemy presence at all, since the player will return there frequently to heal and regain their magic points. It’s a nice looking room, but I can’t help but think a pause to load every so often, and loading less would have greatly benefitted the overall experience.

I played King’s Field on an original Playstation and translated the AV signal to an HDMI signal in order to record the footage, so the resolution is low. Luckily, there isn’t much to see here. It’s a Playstation game so I wasn’t expecting the poly counts to be high, but these environments managed to exceed my expectations. There are a lot of flat corridors with some middling textures to differentiate the various regions throughout Melanat. There’s a lot of this stone texture early on, and it reappears toward the end of the game too. Then there are these strange, snotty corridors that I guess are supposed to be covered in moss or algae. King’s Field doesn’t look too bad compared to its competition at release, but with the Nintendo 64’s launch in 1996, as well as the drastically improved visuals present in fully 3D Playstation games like Crash Bandicoot and pre-rendered graphics like those of Resident Evil, King’s Field falls far short. It’s very likely From Software still didn’t have official artists on staff by this stage, and their programming team was probably responsible for the game’s presentation too. Oddly, the music is fantastic. It’s moody and does a lot to set the tone of the game’s locations, something the visuals can’t manage on their own. When combined with the way sounds carry down the hallways the atmosphere leaves the player nervous, like they’ve swam too far away from shore while something lurks beneath.

From Software have never really done direct storytelling in their games, and yeah, King’s Field is no exception, but there is a bit of lore to explore to contextualise some of the major events. Necron and his followers had been part of an army sent to the island to begin mining and exporting the powerful crystals that can be found there. The army had sent some supporting civilians too to manage the daily lives while the main force mined. Before long, almost everyone on Melanat had succumbed to their crystal addiction and crystal loads stopped being delivered to the mainland. The crystals aren’t magically powerful for no reason, however. Long before Necron’s army had landed on Melanat, the island had been home to a small elven civilization. The elves were mainly responsible for the many routes around the island, and they were also the ones to leave much of the magic power behind. Their deities, two dragons, were the ones to bestow the crystals upon the elves. Seath received much adoration from his subjects, and Guyra grew jealous. Guyra created the crystals, empowering the elves, but also lashing them together. Eventually, the elves were destroyed by their own addiction and Guyra fled into the sky, while Seath did what they could to try and pick up the pieces. Functional, I’d say. Any context is welcome, and I’m very happy for there to be something to explain what the whole deal was with the ending, because as it stands, it’s quite the departure.

With Necron defeated the player can access a pair of portals that both lead to what appears to be a space station filled with robotic versions of enemies found down on Melanat. After progressing through the maze of corridors and portals the player enters an open area. This is the stage for the final battle against Guyra and it’s certainly an experience. The translucent platform is pretty funny and the dragon model doesn’t match it at all. If Guyra had been in a room somewhere on Melanat it’d look appropriate, but out here on the ISS chessboard it makes this area look unfinished. The actual mechanics of the fight are very King’s Field; Guyra doesn’t move, and it has a handful of super powerful attacks that are totally nullified by standing in a specific location in the room. There is another layer to the fight, though. Guyra is accompanied by a bunch of yellow orbs that shoot lasers and absorb all of the player’s magic attacks. Where other boss encounters in the game are mechanically closer to powered-up regular enemies, Guyra is distinctly a boss encounter. Almost like an MMO encounter in how the player has to manage a mechanic before the actual target of the battle is vulnerable. There’s a finite quantity of orbs in the room, though, and I think I’d have preferred having fewer in the room at the start and spawning new orbs as the fight goes on. That way the fight at least maintains a level of challenge as the player progresses through it, instead of there being a high likelihood of death at the start of the fight but it gradually diminishes over time to the point where the player is just whacking the dragon with nothing to threaten them. Well, aside from their own hubris.

So King’s Field is defined by its level design. A gigantic proportion of the game’s content, as well as the Playstation’s processing capacity, consists of walking through the island while searching for the path deeper. The environment itself holds a majority of King’s Field’s secrets and examining it will be the bulk of the player’s activity. There are sometimes enemies within those environments, and sometimes the environment is designed to facilitate a more powerful opponent, but these things are more like distractions from the process of moving through the world. The non-player characters don’t even tell the player where to go, the level design is entirely responsible for that. And the presentation couldn’t use more of the console’s processing power because it was all needed to keep entire dungeons loaded so there weren't any loading screens. Some psychopath was determined to make King’s Field this way. They never cared to make concessions for the sake of performance or accessibility. King’s Field stubbornness turned many potential audience members away, but the final product is the designer’s strongest desire, and it’s brilliant.

Another legend next time.

King's Field II ambitiously advances the series. It takes the (very) basic gameplay and style and drops it into a seamless, interconnected world -- an important iteration that eventually leads From Software to the Souls series.

Though the model and texture quality here are only slightly better than the first game, the environments are much more interesting and coherent. Caves and fortresses are more starkly foreboding -- thanks in part to better ambient audio. "Villages" offer moments of respite, while maintaining a surreal atmosphere, thanks to incongruously lit skies on this island otherwise perpetually covered in a veil of night. The final area of the game adds to the dream-logic these games use in a way that possibly recontextualizes things but is also just supremely strange.
NPCs mostly embody a sense of doom with many of them accepting their deaths and the deaths of their neighbors as inevitable or doing what they can to exploit things to their advantage. There are a few glimmers of hope here, however, a child who is just happy to explore and give you tips, a tradesman you are able to rescue from prison (a common theme in Souls games going forward), and a father and daughter you can reunite. These character moments are straightforward and simple but give your time on the island a sense of impact and worth beyond your quest.
Like the original King's Field, this sequel seems to play with time in a way that makes the narrative feel very strange and disconnected. NPCs speak of important events and people as though they just happened, or were just there, though as you progress farther into this island fortress things feel ancient and inevitable... as though events have been progressing for much longer than seems possible. It gives the whole game a suspenseful and uncertain air that isn't common.
Your home Kingdom of Verdite's greed for artifacts and treasure has, here on Melanat, turned into greed for the crystals that are mined on the island. For the player, crystals act as a source of magic power as well as currency, bringing you directly into the economy that has been established by the people attempting to survive here. As you continue your quest, the goals of the ruler of the island become more clearly related to the crystals and seem to tie directly (if mysteriously) into the first game.

Advancements have been made in the structure of this entry in the series.
Where the original feels like a series of dungeon levels you progress through (more or less) in turn, the Isle of Melanat is one seamless, fully realized environment consisting of caverns, mines, villages, and temples for you to explore. Part of your quest is deciding where you want to go and figuring out how to get there as you map the twists and turns of this world in your mind. King's Field II isn't really interested in giving you goals or direction in its open world, though enticingly darkened cave entrances and threatening monsters draw your attention to places worthy of exploration. Inching your way through this haunted, monster infested island is a harrowing but satisfying experience.
One interesting addition is the existence of three different maps in the game, from three different sources (a soldier, a miner, and Necron himself) all giving you different contextual information that makes sense -- the miner's map has caves even Necron doesn't know about, for instance. It is compelling to cross reference each of these maps and they are genuinely useful for navigating the Isle of Melanat.
Combat is the first person melee and spell slinging you recognize from the original with very few changes (and very few improvements). Magic is a bit more powerful, sword magic feels a bit less powerful, though it is more complicated, with multiple spells available per weapon. Learning magic is more interesting, rather than gaining a specific type and learning it as you level up, there are magic crystals hidden throughout the world that level up individual magic types, giving you more options as a reward for your diligence in searching the environs. I like this system a lot, and it helps tie your power directly into exploration and the themes of this world, making your magic extremely powerful by the end of the game -- a tangible reward for having scoured every inch of Melanat.
As in the first game, your advancement and mastery of the systems here are hard-won and continue the overall gameplay and world cohesion that is this series' greatest strength.

King's Field II still takes a lot to get used to but is far more rewarding than the first game. The world is more coherent, exploration is more natural and rewarding, and your goals are more clearly identified and more satisfying to achieve. I had a great time fighting my way through this game, learning its intricacies, and thinking about its world.
Work through the control jank and bland visuals if you are interested in the genre or the games that come directly from this series. It is a rewarding experience that still holds up in a ton of ways.

[Japanese version reviewed]
The game feels unnecessarily difficult, which I know is kinda FromSoft's thing, but the combat just isn't enjoyable at all.

First-person melee is tricky because it becomes so hard to judge reach. Moreover, there's no crosshair of any kind, so you end up wasting precious MP when spells miss.

The large interconnected map is incredible and easily the most interesting aspect of the game, but you're in for some annoying backtracking, and the key/gate warp mechanic is a nuisance.

I admire them for trying to do everything in 3D, but the frame rate is really, really bad, dipping into single digits in the outdoor areas or when a lot of enemies are around.

Completed the game, did not get all the magic and equipment possible. Completed without guides, used info from the internet a couple times.
Overall, I enjoyed it. The game was suffering a bit from slowdowns, but I am not sure if it is expected or because emulation on PSP is underperforming.
The game is strong in its atmosphere of hopelessness and not knowing what to do and where to go. But as you play the game and explore the island, you get the sense of accomplishment and everything starts to make sense bit by bit. At first, you will die to squids, but then you learn to circle strafe and become stronger both in terms of stats and in terms of your skill. In a sense, this is a predecessor of Dark Souls as much as it can be in the year of 1995.
Unfortunately, as much as the game tries to explain how to play it to the player through notes and NPCs, it doesn't always succeed, and I often found myself stuck in endless labyrinths, or trying to find certain places, and I wish I could leave notes on the map so I could navigate better.
Having many "secret" doors in the walls in style of Wolfenstein3D, where you have to press every wall to be sure to not miss a secret passage or treasure without any indication of them being there is quite annoying as well. I have at first missed Flame Sword, for example, which was hidden behind a wall mounted enemy, and I would struggle a lot later in the game without it.
The difficulty curve is a bit uneven. It is very high in the beginning, goes down in the center, but then spikes up in the end, because the enemies are dealing a lot of damage and tanking quite a lot of hits even with the best equipment possible. The final boss took several tries, because the game was laggy, he was casting a flame spell that was taking half of my health, I was shot by his flying minions and he kept knocking me out into the water, because he was standing on the bridge.
But all in all, it was surprisingly a much better experience than I could expect from a game from 1995 on PS1.
Apparently this is the second game in the series with the misleading title, so I will have to beat the actual first game that was released in Japan with English patch to be able to compare it to.

This game is insane for a PS1 title from 1995. Custom fast travel points? More hidden walls and secret rooms tucked away in pits than Ive ever seen in any game, even a game like Dark Souls? Several partially incomplete maps you gotta cross reference based on the location? They even got their crummy NPC questline bullshit figured out already in their cool ass high fantasy narrative and this time theres no Vaati to spell it out for you (yet, I guess)

That being said I am now stuck in a glitched state where I randomly cast Lightning Bolt every minute or two (regardless of what magic I have equipped, at no MP cost) and this spell can harm the player, so I am constantly almost killing myself while trying to open a door or talk to an NPC.

(This is the 106th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

How stupid am I? I played King's Field II instead of King's Field I because I didn't realize that King's Field II was called King's Field I in the US since King's Field I never released outside of Japan. You know? Either way, there is only a year that separates both of these games and apart from minor differences, they appear to be very similar in terms of gameplay. King's Field II is about twice as long though, which is worth pointing out.

Anyway, whether I played the game I wanted to or not, I got the King's Field experience alright, so I'd like to share my thoughts on the game for those of you curious about this game. As you probably know if you're looking to play (or have played) any King's Field game, they were some of the first games developed by From Software, who have built on the foundation here just a tiny bit to bring us games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and most recently, Elden Ring in an Action RPG subgenre that they've pretty much pioneered.

King's Field is not quite a soulslike than it is a dungeon crawler / Action RPG that doesn't change up the established genres all that much, but it's FromSoft finding their footing in the video game industry, so I wanted to see their first attempt (second attempt...) at developing a game by playing King's Field (II).

It's a game alright, and has some good ideas, but the experience is dragged down by sloooow combat and the obtuse nature of everything from dungeon design to itemization and overall progression.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 4/10

The game starts with the camera flying over the island of Melanat, where the game takes place. You find yourself washed up on the coast of Melanat, which is in control of either a god or a demon (the storyteller itself wasn't quite sure). The writing isn't so good in this one. Your purpose isn't explained much further, other than what you can make out yourself. Go into the depths of this place and kill whatever controls the island.

As you make your way through the labyrinthine island, you will stumble upon multiple NPCs, who either give you lore on the island, the enemies and important people, or they will ask you to find something or someone. They'll give you helpful tips as well, and in classic FromSoft manner, you gotta talk to them multiple times to get all the information out of them that they have to give. There was one character in particular who stopped eating his soup to tell me that he is too fat to go down into the underworld. What, there is only a tiny hole that leads there? I laughed quite hard at this line just because of how blunt and out of nowhere it was. If you're wondering whether characters have personality here, that's as much as you'll get out of the ones that you'll see within your first 5 or so hours of playing the game.

Still, there is an effort here to tell a story of a hostile place filled with hostile enemies and one that is bigger than 'em all. Even though it's a story that has been told 80000 times in games by now, effort counts, especially during the early 90s, though the bar is definitely about to be set much higher as more and more PS1 games come out.

GAMEPLAY | 7/20

I know every console has its stinkers and its diamonds, but I still find it fascinating that the only two PS1 games I've played for more than a few hours are THIS and Metal Gear Solid. Talk about two ends of a spectrum.

King's Field has its fans, and I never want to take anything away from them when I play and review these games myself, but if I'm addressing this review to not just obtuse and retro dungeon crawler / RPG fans, then I can only say that these people should stay far away from King's Field, or at least that they should expect to drop it after their initial curiosity as Soulslike fans runs off.

Controls can be optimized thanks to emulation these days, but the basic controls look like this. D-Pad buttons to walk in four directions, L1 and R1 to strafe left or right, L1 and R1 alongside a directional button to circle around an area and turn around, and L2 and R2 to look up and down respectively. You will kind of get used to it but I never got really comfortable.

The game runs at a solid (/s) 20 FPS for most of the game but has some spikes both up and down from time to time. Don't know if it's emulation that rescues some frames from time to time or whether it's simply the optimization of the game, but what you need to know is that frames correlate with speed of attacks. Not just your attacks, but enemy attacks. In a game where staggering your enemy is key, not attacking the second your stamina comes back means opening yourself up to being hit. Get hit a couple times against most enemies and you're dead. So if the game plays fluidly for a few seconds, it's not something to be happy about when you're in combat.

If the game runs at its normal FPS, combat is very slow. First, you need to position yourself. Facing an enemy head-on, especially when there are more than 1 enemies in a given room, is guaranteed death. When you swing towards an enemy from the front, the one who hits sooner wins. If you hit the enemy, you stagger it and avoid damage. If you are hit, you don't get staggered but a hefty sum is taken from your health pool and you might be poisoned or paralyzed to boot. And even if you do hit first, you know have to play a game of timing your next attacks. Each swing depletese your entire health pool, so you have to wait for 1% of it to come back in order to swing again. Time it right and you can stagger-lock the enemy for the duration of the battle. Click too early and you lose precious frames before your input is finally recognized, meaning the enemy can get a fatal attack in. And EVEN if you manage to time it correctly every time, killing an enemy takes an agonizingly long amount of time for the first few hours. Then you level up a couple times and instead of taking 30 seconds, it takes 20 or 25. I can live with a lot that this game has to offer but combat was at no point satisfying, and having to circle around enemies to cheaply hit them from the side or back to avoid damage very quickly felt repetitive and even less satisfying, as you never really are besting the enemy but the game.

As I mentioned, death comes quick, and unfortunately this means you usually lose a lot of progress as well. In fact, the game drops you back at the very beginning of the game, even if you reach the first save room that is likely 1-2 hours away at least when you first start playing. If you do save, you spawn at the start, have to go into the menu and load the save point, which takes 20 seconds longer than spawning at your save point immediately would. Emulation and save states will be your friends.

Talking about the menu, this is where you use and equip stuff. Being low on health means opening the menu, going into "Use Items" and using the item before exiting the menu and returning to gameplay. Being poisoned means the same thing. It's not a big deal though because you can rarely heal anyway (I could only bring one healing potion with me 5+ hours into the game), so you mostly open the menu to use items or equip stuff you find.

Stuff you find is another thing. Merchants usually give you items that you find in the game world anyway, and anything that you can't is really expensive, so they don't feel useful at all for the first half of the game at least. Finding stuff is kind of fun, but then you have items like the knight's helm which is in some random corner and not even visible on the spot it's supposed to be on.

Items also have no information on them, whether it's for their use or what kind of stats they have (for equipment), so you equip and then go back to the stats screen to figure out what changed. This is pretty archaic even for 1994.

This all creates a pretty unsatisfying gameplay loop for someone who is into retro games but not quite a hardcore retro RPG gamer. Combat can be fun in 1994, games don't have to be this obtuse in 1994 and games can perform better in 1994 ... well, maybe not quite for that last part, especially for the new 3D market. But still, more likely than not, King's Field will not be enjoyable for you, unless you are part of the more hardcore retro RPG fanbase I mentioned, in which case, go solve this island and hopefully, you'll have some fun along the way.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

There are 10 or so large areas in the game and one track playing in each. One. Luckily the first few actually are nice to listen to and set the tone nicely, but it still gets very repetitive. The ending music is pretty nice.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10

The visuals look really bad. The only saving graces here are the villages, which have some retro charm to them thanks to the odd character design and the vibes the locations give off, as well as the enemy art design, which I found to be somewhat well done. Enemies repeat a lot, but they look disgusting, and I think that's a positive for a game like this.

Other than that though, the gray just tired me out after a while. Areas look way too similar, which in a game with no map is not great for getting your bearings. Textures look bland and I can't say that the visuals added much to the atmosphere as a result, other than telling me that I'm trapped in this ugly world, at least until I found the X to close the window.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10

The game is not scary, and the island does not have this mysterious feeling to it that I got in some other dungeon crawlers I've played as part of this challenge I'm doing. Even games from 1990 like Elvira: Mistress of the Dark oozes a lot more atmosphere than King's Field (II). 3D will have helped with immersion a lot more at the time, but I felt more immersed in those point-and-click style dungeon crawlers from years earlier. That said, death is truly around every corner in this game and the soundtrack at least pulls off a certain adventure-like vibe.

CONTENT | 6/10

It's a shame that I disliked combat and dungeon design so much, because the game has some fun content otherwise. Lots of locked doors, secret paths and items that unlock cool stuff can be found in this game. Finding a dragon stone to put into a stone tablet to finally get a MP-healing source was pretty nice for example. The game is pretty long, so I'm sure there is a lot more where that came from. Unfortunately, you gotta be OK with the gameplay itself, which will probably decide whether you have the interest to play on.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Not the worst. As mentioned, areas have lots of secret rooms and paths to discover, which will lead you to lots of enemies and treasure. Much of it felt optional, so if you want to experience more of what King's Field has to offer, it felt like more was always next door, you just gotta find a way to get there. That said, the poor visuals and repetitive design of the dungeons as well as poor economy design are some clear weak points here.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

This Kings Field game wasn't the launch title, but it's still worth mentioning that that one was launched close to the release of the PS1, and games like these were not at all common at this time. Still, you can see the very short development time in the overall quality of the experience, which, no matter which way you put it, means that this sort of innovation was not for the best, at least not with the execution found here.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

You'll probably miss out on lots of secrets after your first playthrough. If you still want more after that, there will likely be plenty to find still.

PLAYABILITY | 4/5

Works well, but the low FPS is headache, and the odd spikes even more so. There is also head-bobbing enabled at the start, which I suggest you turn off asap through the options menu.

OVERALL | 49/100

There are many better dungeon crawlers and RPGs of all kinds available from 1994/5 or earlier. I'd suggest you play those. King's Field has very poor combat that is not only slow and hard to figure out at first, but once you do, you realize it's really not hard to cheese the game. The challenge for me was to stay awake as my character swung 25 times to kill a generic enemy. Maybe you'll feel differently, but I wouldn't personally recommend the game.

Was für ein Spiel. Keine Ahnung ob ein sonderlich gutes, aber was für ein Spiel.

Diese Spiele wurden schon zu Tode besprochen im Internet, nachdem ein paar Souls Fans herausgefunden haben, dass es das Moonlight Sword auch hier schon gab und ihnen nebenbei noch ein paar andere Ähnlichkeiten aufgefallen sind.
Wusstet ihr, dass
-die exploration in Spielen mit exploration sehr ähnlich ist?
-Rollenspielelemente in Rollenspielen sehr ähnlich sind?
-Geschichten über verfluchte Orte häufig an verfluchten Orten spielen?

Nicht selten hört man Begriffe wie "Proto Dark Souls" oder, dass hier viele Elemente ausprobiert wurden, die From viele Jahre später erst mit den Souls Spielen perfektionierte und hier der Stepping Stone gesetzt wurd.
Ich finde ja, dass From mehr oder minder das selbe Spiel wieder und wieder und wieder rausgebracht hat, bis es irgendwann mal funktionierte.
Aber so allgemein find ich es extrem unfair die Arbeit von diesem Entwickler darauf runterzubrechen, dass jedes Spiel nur so viel Wert ist, wie es meiner Analyse zu Dark Souls weiterhilft und ansonsten keinerlei eigene Qualitäten zu bieten hat.

So...
und nun, wo das gesagt ist... Kings Field.
Kein sonderlich gutes Spiel, aber ein sehr faszinierendes. Die Novelty eines Wizardry-Klones, aber in vollständigem 3D, mit flüssigen 360° Movement, Echtzeitkampfsystem und richtigen düsteren Höhlen die man erkunden kann, muss zu PS1 Release schon erstaunlich gewesen sein.
Ich kann mir vorstellen, wie das hier das erste 3D Spiel, vielleicht sogar das erste Spiel überhaupt einiger Leute war. Man läuft rum, bekommt Angst vor seltsam wiggelnden Kreaturen und ehe man sich versieht, Todesschrei, alles nochmal von vorn.
Das Spiel ist von Sekunde 1 an extrem unfreundlich. Nichts wird erklärt, nichts wirkt einladend. Es gibt NPCs die mit einem reden, doch deren fehlende Gesichter und steife Animationen erfüllen das Herz auch nicht gerade mit Freude.

Was ich an dem Spiel so faszinierend finde, ist, wie es wie absolut Arsch aussieht, sich furchtbar steuert, du jemanden bestimmt überzeugen könntest, dass dies das erste 3D Videospiel jemals war - und trotzdem ringen die Emotionen die man erwecken wollte durch.
Du hast Respekt vor jedem Encounter. Du hast Angst vor Feinden die du nicht kennst. Du freust dich richtig einen neuen Gegenstand zu bekommen und bist erleichtert sobald du den ersten Savepoint erreichst.
"Oh, was macht dieses Ding?" "Was ist dieses Item?" "Will ich hier wirklich lang?" "Oh wow, ich hab DIESEN ORT gefunden!". Das sind Gedanken die mir ständig durch den Kopf gingen beim spielen und auch wenn Kings Field definitiv nicht das einzige Spiel ist was diese Reize entlocken kann, find ich es trotzdem faszinierend wie wenig man manchmal dafür braucht.


Dazu muss ich auch sagen, dass ich mag wie der Kampf abläuft. Ja, er besteht eigentlich nur daraus Fehler der KI auszunutzen, was aber recht gut funktioniert und balanciert wirkt. Ich mag auch die Exploration... zu einem gewissen Punkt. Und die Höhlen und... noch mehr Höhlen dieser Insel zu erforschen, fühlt sich sehr belohnend an. Und auch die fieseren und kryptischen Elemente mag ich irgendwie sehr.

Ich wünschte nur es wäre kürzer gewesen weil ich irgendwann einfach nicht mehr konnte. Und sobald die novelty aufhört, dann wird jeder Trip zurück, jedes erneute suchen wo ich nochmal sein wollte, jedes eeeewig lange speichern, zur Tortur.

Oh und alles am Ende ist shit. Wie man an das eine Schwert kommt ist Shit, der Bossrush ist Shit, der Boss danach ist Shit, der Raum danach ist Shit, der letzte Boss ist richtig shit. Aber bis so 10 Stunden davor, hatte ich trotz allem eine recht gute Zeit damit

I think a big problem for people going back to play an old game is not being able to immediately survey the linear progression in game design between games of the period. I remember when I first got a PC, I was so excited to finally play Half-Life 1 after loving HL2 on The Orange Box, but sadly on first playthrough I totally bounced off. It was very frustrating because I was playing it like I played Half-Life 2: slower, and not using all my resources creatively and appropriately. Way later, I went even further back and played Doom, then Quake, which both directly affected how I played shooters - seeing all my weapons and ammo as necessary resources to be traded for progress, instead of just using the shotgun all the time (i like the hl2 shotgun a lot). Now when I go back to Half-Life 1, I see it as the natural progression of those games and can apply the skills I learned in them.

It's a joy when I do go back to an archaic, hard game, but I don't have to go back further to instinctively understand what the game's design is gesturing towards. In King's Field's case, it's no secret that they influenced the Souls games, and the effect of that is I can see all the strands connecting their game designs together. It's probably incorrect critically to assess the game through that lens - King's Field is King's Field and presumably had no pretentions to have decades of influence - but I can't not love seeing the vestigial elements of FromSoft's later works all the way back here on the PS1, in all its blocky polygonal skeleton glory.

The game starts with you being plonked down on a beach with no fanfare. At this point, your retro games sense may tingle and tell you to read the manual. You read the manual. Ok, I know who I am now. Let's go. The playable space is the most compelling part of this game. Unlike most PS1 games, I can't really say levels because there's no loading screens: every footstep is your own, except for when you engage with its strange teleportation system (which if you haven't figured out within a few hours of playing, you should probably look up because there are totally pits in this game you can get softlocked in and have to load a previous save. really.). The space in this game is pretty inventive for the time, occasionally looping on itself and having a nice amount of traps and intrigue to keep you on your toes. As you're starting out, you may notice that the framerate, for lack of a better word, sucks gorilla donkey dick through the anus of a warthog. It hits 30 sometimes. When it feels like it. But mostly it loves to be around 10-20, depending on how many triangles exist. This is a problem, because the game will often slow down and speed up mid-combat, leading you and the enemies to go from moving through treacle to slipping on custard, with no equally tasty in-between. This makes timing attacks harder, and is easily the game's biggest flaw.

Let's talk about the combat in all its satisfactory glory. In this game, you will see mind-boggling enemies with mind-boggling effects. Oddly enough, approaching enemies is fundamentally the same as a Souls game even though you're in first person. You observe them, bait an attack, move around, know the timings and hitbox of your weapon, and strike until dead. For some reason, it was funny to me how the premium technique for most enemies is to get behind them; years and years before you'd be able to backstab them, stunlocking and staying out of their hitboxes still works beautifully. All this is just far clunkier than it would become, as you'd probably expect. It plays how it looks - very chunky and functional. Chunktional. In addition to straight combat, you have spells and items. I couldn't help but notice how healing is done through consumable grass, refilling flasks with different effects, and spells using an MP system. FromSoft would be doing riffs on these systems for years to come.

The music is fairly standard but moody fare. The game's mood is entirely drab and depressing actually; the colour palette is muted, NPCs have no faces which means you're always emotionally isolated if not physically. This plus the lack of variety in textures became draining for me towards the end. My brain was stretched to the absolute limit of similar looking corridors it could remember. Luckily, the game ended soon after that. And what a truly fascinating ending it was. I have no idea what happened to be honest; I think I broke out of reality in a way I'm 100% certain no future games will ever reference. There are interesting smaller stories within the game though, even if the overarching one never coalesced for me.

I recommend this one if you're interested in old RPGs or are a huge Souls fan. It carries the same flavour of being stranded in a mysterious Western fantasy environment, but through the eyes of Japanese devs. I've put some tips throughout this review, but ultimately when you go into the past like this, part of the fun is discovering all the novel layers of bullshit that newer games have ironed out. Read the manual, look a few things up, use save states to a degree that saves you from tedium but still preserves challenge (it's a learning curve), and you might find it as weirdly compelling as I did.

Just like its Japan exclusive prequel, King's Field 2 (or just King's Field as it is known in the US) managed to fascinate me greatly, with its dark atmosphere, strange inhabitants and hostile environment. There are villages now, that house several merchants and other people to chat and trade with. Sadly, the map layout of those villages drove me nearly to insanity, as they are not in an open area, instead they are courtyards with one or two houses in them each , that are interconnected via smaller passages or stairs to the other courtyards.

Unlike the prequel, I never used a guide or walktrough for my playtrough. The game is perfectly playable as of today, as long as you use savestates often as it is quite possible that you will softlock yourself during your run, all thanks to those dumb rhombus keys. I have probably missed a bit of content and gear, but I did search for hidden doors and loot wherever I went. I really liked the first half of the game more than the second half, as the environments where more varied and the enemies not as annoying (looking at you, paralyzing archers).
I found it interesting to see NPC questlines implemented nearly the same way as they are in from software games today (Dark souls, elden ring and so on). Even talking to NPCs is the same as nowadays. You keep interacting with them until they repeat their final line.

Visually and design wise, the game is quite a big upgrade over King's Field 1, but I can not say that I liked this game much more than the prequel. I feel like it surely aged better, but the world was quite a bit too large for me and I really did not like the rhombus key system.
The final boss was way better this time around though and the addition of ranged weapons is welcome, even though aiming with them is quite difficult.
I am still baffled as to why the mechanics of sword magic are once again not at all mentioned or explained ingame or in the manual.

I highly recommend using a cheat to lock the game at 20fps, as that is the speed the developers wanted the game to run at and it feels a million times better when the speed of this already sluggish game does not change all the time. To prevent slowdowns below 20fps, you shoud overclock the emulated cpu a bit. You can find the aforementioned cheat here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/k8kx77/howto_emulate_kfii_kings_field_at_its_intended/

Really enjoyed this game playing it for the first time in 2023. Even more than the first Japan only King’s Field. Nice sense of atmosphere and Metroidvania like gameplay. The exploration and rewarding gameplay is first class. Still nothing really like it today. Recommend it. Stick with it as it’s a bit slow paced at first but the game is designed around that style of gameplay. Almost feels at times like a first person souls game.
Sure the graphics are nothing special but they definitely have a certain charm to them (especially if you play on original hardware on a crt tv or with filters on an emulator to give it that retro look) seeing how they were technically constrained yet achieved a lot with what they had.
Very impressed.

Maluquice pensar que desde 1995 a From Software já era capaz de criar uma apresentação audiovisual tão tensa e atemporal. A atmosfera desse jogo é sem dúvidas o seu ponto mais alto, não só pelos cenários muito mais criativos e cativantes que o primeiro, mas principalmente pela sua trilha sonora, eu sempre achei extremamente envolvente as composições de dungeon synth que esses jogos de rpg do psone têm, e aqui todos os temas de todas áreas são muito marcantes.

Em relação ao level design, a principal e mais notória melhoria é que ao invés de ser aquela estrutura de Dungeon Crawler dividida por andares, agora o jogo é basicamente uma ilha inteira com áreas interconectadas, bem semelhante a Dark Souls por exemplo (em uma escala muito menor, claro). As áreas são muito satisfatórias de explorar e as missões e NPCs que encontramos pelo caminho são muito mais interessantes do que os do primeiro jogo.

A movimentação recebeu uma grande melhoria, além do jogo inteiro estar mais rápido, agora tem um botão de sprint que melhora e muito a fluidez de tudo, graças a isso agora os combates estão um pouco mais dinâmicos, o backtracking não é mais tão maçante, a exploração é muito mais satisfatória.. no geral, essa evolução acabou melhorando o jogo em todos os aspectos.

Em última analise, King's Field 2 é muito mais um 'jogo' mesmo do que o primeiro que era muito mais uma tech demo cheia de experimentações, aqui a From realmente começou a se encontrar nesse tipo de jogo e nessa estrutura de combate/exploração.

An immense step-up from King's Field. Whereas that first title was structured as a series of floors with no geographic interconnection, King's Field II feels like Dark Souls' true spiritual predecessor, with a single map that is so joyfully interconnected. Dark Souls' famous ladder and elevator moments, the ones that made everyone including myself fall so deeply in love with that game, are echoes of moments here in King's Field II.

I didn't need an external map for this one, unlike the first with its loosely designed winding hallways. Frankly, I barely used the in-game maps either. Each route is so well-defined and with many points of interest, I had a great idea of the entire game's layout despite the lack of environmental detail and repeated low-resolution textures.

There really is nothing else like it from this era of gaming. For all it's slow clunky combat, poor performance, and ugly visuals, the overall design of the game shows such a knack for creating an environment that is both atmospheric and interesting to explore, it's truly special. The only major thing bringing the game down is its inability to turn the normatively bad combat, which is intended more as a way to engage in exploration than a satisfying combat-system in its own right, into climactic moments. I wasn't a fan of the final level and boss of the first game, and frankly I didn't find this one to be much of an improvement. Still, I cannot recommend this one enough, especially for those familiar with the modern Fromsoft titles.