Much like Lester The Unlikely, I learned about King's Knight thanks to a Youtuber I no longer watch for various reasons. However, unlike LTU, which is a subpar game that wouldn't exactly benefit much from a thorough revamp also the fact I still watch AVGN, King's Knight is a game that could've been decent or perhaps even good if it wasn't for a few flaws hampering its potential. I will say though, it's kind of funny this is the game I chose for an early, non-Final Fantasy Squaresoft title, and not the one I'm actually interested in, Cleopatra no Mahou on the Famicom Disk System. Anyway...
In a "don't judge a book" case, KK plays more akin to a shmup than that of a standard RPG of the era, having you play through four characters in their respective stages before using them all for the final one. Enemies either come from off the screen or hidden within the terrain that you're uh, destroying, for some reason, and also tucked inside are various power ups or one power down. The manual details their individual uses, but even then you can make the safe assumption of "everything but the down arrow is fair game", and honestly it does a commendable job of making you feel the upgrades... with one, though really four, exceptions, but I'll get to that later. Each character starts off slow alongside average bullet power and range, but before long and with enough pickups they start to hold their own very well. In terms of enemy patterns and positioning, it's not too frightful, since there's generally enough distance between you and the targets to safely scoot by, although the hidden encounters from them can be a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes it's nothing too daunting, often times there's so many coming out of a column that it feels overabundant for the sake of difficulty. There's also caves and one or two secrets to unveil for bonus goodies, though do keep in mind that it could be better to forgo them and instead hunt for the powerups around it. With that said, if you're more than likely gonna play this via emulation, I'll make note that you should just stick with the turbo button on software such as Mesen - more specifically on my end, Mesen 2 - since mashing the crap out of the fire button can get really old, and it's not like it affects the bout too much. I'll also give kudos to the presentation, while not exactly a standout amongst the console's library and admittedly having two cases of garish greens, overall it's rather cute and the rather pitiful amount of tunes are at least nice on the ears, not bad for one of the very earliest Nobuo Uematsu compositions.
To reiterate, the four characters' trials are enough to put this as an enjoyable treat, but the last stage severely brings the package down, accentuating the problems while bringing in two new ones. Because all four characters are now in a diamond formation, this expands your hitbox to a degree that enables you to consume pellets, enemies themselves, and even getting stuck on walls or repeatedly jumping in/out the damn water to an obnoxious degree. That alone is bad enough, but this is also when the game pulls out all the stops and bombards you with enemies and attacking statues, with some cases such as this section being particularly devilish since you have to either avoid the ghostly enemies in the tightly packed walls, or accept the brunt damage and pray you still have enough health to continue on - which, by the way, you have no way to recover on your own, instead having to rely on sparse powerups throughout the stage. You'll notice on that custom-made map by a GameFaqs user that at the end of the ghost barrage, the walls are closed off. See, what you're supposed to do is use the thief's spell to burn them down. You obtain the element necessary to unlock them by playing through the trials, except you don't get the element by simply picking them up with their respective spellcaster, no every single character must pick them up for them to be viable. Doesn't matter if just one ally is missing something despite the designated individual having it, you have to reset or game over, press Select at the title screen, choose the character(s) missing the element(s), then train them all over again. Oh yea, and you can't free swap between each character at will, you gotta rely on arrow panels that, once again, can be accidentally stepped on due to the oversized hitbox of your formation, and some arrows being a crapshoot on landing on the exact person you need. I get what they're trying to do here, especially since its hinted at with each statues during a particular stretch being weak to a certain person's attack, but the way they went about it adds unnecessary tedium and frustration to what's already the most aggravating level in the entire game.
It just saddens me, I was genuinely having an alright time as my nightly endeavor before bed until that stage happened. I'm not exactly one to really get up-at-arms or feel remorse for falling back on rewinds and/or save states, but the amount of time I've used either one at that point compared to everything else beforehand is appalling, even to the point I sincerely thought about throwing my hands up and using the same invincibility code the YTer I talked about ended up relying on at the end, but I decided to buckle down and do it """""legit""""" regardless. There's only three notable things worth talking about in this relic: it was the first game on the Famicom/NES that Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on, the previously mentioned factoid regarding Uematsu, and in some weird cross-promo for FF15, it received a revitalized reimagining... as a free-to-play mobile app, that then shut down just 9 months and 13 days after. Truthfully, I wouldn't mind an actual stab at giving this a proper refresh, but that also means having a suitable platform with ways to give it a nice longevity, and I don't see Square doing that any time soon.
In a "don't judge a book" case, KK plays more akin to a shmup than that of a standard RPG of the era, having you play through four characters in their respective stages before using them all for the final one. Enemies either come from off the screen or hidden within the terrain that you're uh, destroying, for some reason, and also tucked inside are various power ups or one power down. The manual details their individual uses, but even then you can make the safe assumption of "everything but the down arrow is fair game", and honestly it does a commendable job of making you feel the upgrades... with one, though really four, exceptions, but I'll get to that later. Each character starts off slow alongside average bullet power and range, but before long and with enough pickups they start to hold their own very well. In terms of enemy patterns and positioning, it's not too frightful, since there's generally enough distance between you and the targets to safely scoot by, although the hidden encounters from them can be a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes it's nothing too daunting, often times there's so many coming out of a column that it feels overabundant for the sake of difficulty. There's also caves and one or two secrets to unveil for bonus goodies, though do keep in mind that it could be better to forgo them and instead hunt for the powerups around it. With that said, if you're more than likely gonna play this via emulation, I'll make note that you should just stick with the turbo button on software such as Mesen - more specifically on my end, Mesen 2 - since mashing the crap out of the fire button can get really old, and it's not like it affects the bout too much. I'll also give kudos to the presentation, while not exactly a standout amongst the console's library and admittedly having two cases of garish greens, overall it's rather cute and the rather pitiful amount of tunes are at least nice on the ears, not bad for one of the very earliest Nobuo Uematsu compositions.
To reiterate, the four characters' trials are enough to put this as an enjoyable treat, but the last stage severely brings the package down, accentuating the problems while bringing in two new ones. Because all four characters are now in a diamond formation, this expands your hitbox to a degree that enables you to consume pellets, enemies themselves, and even getting stuck on walls or repeatedly jumping in/out the damn water to an obnoxious degree. That alone is bad enough, but this is also when the game pulls out all the stops and bombards you with enemies and attacking statues, with some cases such as this section being particularly devilish since you have to either avoid the ghostly enemies in the tightly packed walls, or accept the brunt damage and pray you still have enough health to continue on - which, by the way, you have no way to recover on your own, instead having to rely on sparse powerups throughout the stage. You'll notice on that custom-made map by a GameFaqs user that at the end of the ghost barrage, the walls are closed off. See, what you're supposed to do is use the thief's spell to burn them down. You obtain the element necessary to unlock them by playing through the trials, except you don't get the element by simply picking them up with their respective spellcaster, no every single character must pick them up for them to be viable. Doesn't matter if just one ally is missing something despite the designated individual having it, you have to reset or game over, press Select at the title screen, choose the character(s) missing the element(s), then train them all over again. Oh yea, and you can't free swap between each character at will, you gotta rely on arrow panels that, once again, can be accidentally stepped on due to the oversized hitbox of your formation, and some arrows being a crapshoot on landing on the exact person you need. I get what they're trying to do here, especially since its hinted at with each statues during a particular stretch being weak to a certain person's attack, but the way they went about it adds unnecessary tedium and frustration to what's already the most aggravating level in the entire game.
It just saddens me, I was genuinely having an alright time as my nightly endeavor before bed until that stage happened. I'm not exactly one to really get up-at-arms or feel remorse for falling back on rewinds and/or save states, but the amount of time I've used either one at that point compared to everything else beforehand is appalling, even to the point I sincerely thought about throwing my hands up and using the same invincibility code the YTer I talked about ended up relying on at the end, but I decided to buckle down and do it """""legit""""" regardless. There's only three notable things worth talking about in this relic: it was the first game on the Famicom/NES that Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on, the previously mentioned factoid regarding Uematsu, and in some weird cross-promo for FF15, it received a revitalized reimagining... as a free-to-play mobile app, that then shut down just 9 months and 13 days after. Truthfully, I wouldn't mind an actual stab at giving this a proper refresh, but that also means having a suitable platform with ways to give it a nice longevity, and I don't see Square doing that any time soon.