Really cool beginning but as soon as you enter the island the lack of decorum leads to you getting insanely lost very easily, which is quite boring. I love the music and how it looks but for the most part it was just GETTING LOST. That and some enourmous difficulty spikes made me slowly start dipping into cheats which sucks but I wasn't really enjoying the game. It's a fine game, very impressive for the time, but they really improved as they went along.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conquering the island of Melanat feels like such an unforeseeable fortune at first, you'd never have an inkling of that. Little by little, exhaustively exploring it while covering all the bases, it dawned on me: I had seen it through. Long live Alexander!
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.
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.
Is this game held back by being too obtuse or did me using a guide hurt the experience. No one will ever know.
A fully 3D world with no mid-game load screens on the PS1 in 1995? The console hadn't even come out overseas yet when it released in Japan?? This was From's second game after exclusively developing office software for years??? I'm obsessed with how ahead of its time King's Field 2 was. An incredible achievement.
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.
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.
King's Field is the sequel to King's Field. I completed King's Field two Saturdays ago and then King's Field this previous Saturday. I'm going to refer to this one as King's Field 2 (JP) to try and avoid confusion. Except probably I won't really have to refer to it directly that much at all...
Anyway, there are a lot of updates here that are neat to see, particularly the world being more interconnected rather than discrete floors like the last game, and also the way NPC's are utilized more. Sometimes the map is more confusing and frustrating when trying to navigate and figure out where to go next, but overall it's a nice improvement that makes the world feel more natural.
Still a very dated game, but also still fun and interesting for me to play and see how they iterated on the original.
Anyway, there are a lot of updates here that are neat to see, particularly the world being more interconnected rather than discrete floors like the last game, and also the way NPC's are utilized more. Sometimes the map is more confusing and frustrating when trying to navigate and figure out where to go next, but overall it's a nice improvement that makes the world feel more natural.
Still a very dated game, but also still fun and interesting for me to play and see how they iterated on the original.
Going back and looking into this after getting way into Dark Souls and Bloodborne in the 2010s was pretty fascinating. It felt a little too dated for me to really get too much into, but I appreciated seeing the elements of what From Software would expand on later. Did reaffirm my believe that first-person melee combat has always and will always be hard to implement in a way that isn't frustrating
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
ooh skeleton
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/
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/