The interconnected world is neat especially for PS1, it's nice to have a variety of weapons and spells that don't just make each other obsolete and I like the way different in game maps have details in different areas.

But unfortunately just about everything else has aged like milk. The combat feels like being a tank that's trying to perform melee attacks with its turrent, the areas often lack any identifiable landmarks and consist of 1-2 textures making navigation awkward and visuals ugly, and making progress is usually a matter of random exploration that doesn't feel like progress as it's not clear what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. What finally made me quit was a boss near the end that was not only a ludicrous difficulty spike but also required clearing a boss rush just to try again.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this shits kinda goated ngl!
this game starts off WAY more rocky than King's Field 1, you will absolutely feel ten times more confused throughout because not only is the world far more expansive and interconnected, there's also a lot more secrets to find, the game is two or three times as long, and the walkthroughs and online maps are way shittier than they are for King's Field 1.
but once you get used to it and push further into the game, you'll learn to love this game for its new features and changed design style compared to King's Field 1. the run button is a GODSEND, Crystal Flasks are way better than one-time-use consumable recovery items and allow for MP recovery, and NPCs are actual characters with individual stories, relationships, and sometimes even small questlines.
the technical aspects of this game are also very intriguing, the (mostly) seamless world with hidden loading zones leads to a very enjoyable and smooth experience without waiting for loading screens, and the graphical presentation is significantly more impressive across the board compared to KF 1, although it does come at the cost of somewhat poor performance. the game often hangs around the 15 fps mark despite aiming for a locked 30 fps, and the game logic speed is tired to framerate. this makes things pretty choppy often, but you'll get used to it sooner than you'd think. the game runs too fast to play properly at its intended 30 fps anyways, which is probably somewhat intentional as a lot of backtracking through areas without enemies is sped up significantly thanks to the increased speed. enemies and complex geometric objects or large rooms tend to tank the FPS, which are when you most need to be paying attention regardless.
Beyond the technical issues and rocky beginning, the game proves to be really enjoyable throughout!
you'll probably finish after playing for ~20 hours, so it's a pretty beefy game for its type. if you have a week of afternoons to spend playing this game and don't mind backtracking and using a walkthrough being basically mandatory, i'd say you should play this. Try KF 1 first, though, as it's a good 'taste test' to see if you like this kind of game before jumping fully into the much longer and more convoluted King's Field II.

final note: the story and characters in this game are really interesting, there's some intriguing and well-written character dialogue and stuff throughout, but i'm not sure if the English release's translation is any good, since i played it in Japanese. if at all possible, try playing the game in Japanese, since game translations of this era don't always have the best reputations.

have fun if you decide to play!

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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