King Colossus is a top-down action role-playing game. You fight monsters by equipping weapons and swinging them in real time. There is a variety of accessories and items to find in the game, as well as different obstacles to overcome in the dungeons. Never released outside of Japan.
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In the small-but-prolific pantheon of Zelda & Ys influenced action RPGs on Genesis, King Colossus is the one with the hardest contrast of artisan ego and overall payoff.
I saw it announced for the MD Mini 2, with a glowing recommendation from Ken Sugimori of all things, and went 'damn, it's translated, I should play this'. Boot it up and you get this chilling emblem on a black screen, with the designer's names fading in and out while a chilling wind hollers in the background. Makoto Ogino's credited too, the mangaka behind Kujaku-Ou. Sega produced games based on the series twice for him (localized here as Spellcaster and Mysic Defender, respectively). So in my head, I had every reason to be hyped right? Idk, I don't think it payed off, even if it was kinda interesting in abstract and a tolerable button masher.
King Colossus tosses you into the MC's home ala Link to The Past's iconic opening, where you find your older sister and elderly caretaker. The old man sends you on a fetch quest to retrieve a missing sword, which eventually devolves into a fetchquest journey amidst human sacrifices for the appeasement of a cruel god.
Colossus is as pure a dungeon crawler as it gets - there's no overworlds, no puzzles - just dens of enemies to venture through. Combat's somewhat similar to NES zelda where you move and place a hitbox in front of you to deal damage. Your range starts pitiful on-ground, but your early swords and axes let you attack out of a jump, giving you range to move and turn during swings. at first it seems like 'just always jump and swing' is the name of the game, but as you progress, the stronger and further-ranged weapons take away your air attack, so there's still incentive to swap back to a sword for enemies that require you to stay nimble. And... that's the entire combat system of King Colossus. Keeping it simple is perfectly fine in my book, but, the problem is it never gets meaningfully hard. Even without grinding, you kill most enemies in 2-3 hits, and their AI becomes seemingly DUMBER as you progress. I had more trouble with the early game snakes and spiders than I did with any of the late game demons by a longshot. And like, being an easy game is fine, but it's so rudimentary that it comes at the detriment of the ludonarrative weight - none of the world's stakes feel justified because these trials are just jump-slashing at randomly-moving bosses. This game's story posits itself too seriously to have battles this bland.
And hey speaking of story, it's kind of fucked up if you read even 1 layer into it? For being a 'kill god' plot, it has an oddly Judeo-Christian tone to its moral. From start to finish, your character is constantly being funneled around against his will by different 'masters' - first your caretaker sells into slavery as an arena gladiator, then you get thrown in prison, captured and enslaved again by the king's daughter, and eventually dragged into a transdimensional hell. For the record, I thought this direction was fascinating for the first 2/3rds of the runtime - combined with the game's monotonous combat, evoked this ludonarrative vibe of truly being dragged through a cycle of laborious captivity. I LIKED it and respected the vision. But in the game's climaxing moments, your former captors' sins are either unacknowledged by the greater cast or outright forgiven - that is to say, they 'apologize' for mistreating you, and since your MC is silent, there's no way to take it other than 'OK'. The grander theme seems to posit that all of the suffering and domestic abuse the player received from those above him was 'necessary' in order to reach his true strength and build character. I couldn't say one way or another if the fan translation fucked this up, but it's pretty believable - and a completely unacceptable
way to handle the subject matter. If the game's plot were any more involved than a 1992 game could be, who knows how much more lecherous it could've been thematically.
Ultimately though, the failing of King Colossus is that can't live up to the expectations it sets in the player. For something that makes so much effort to tell you 'HEY, we got this MANGAKA to work with us', the fruit of its efforts never come out bc of the limited scope - not just in the aformentioned combat, but even the design and art. It's a very mediocre-looking game that reserves its spectacle entirely for the bosses - which, again, are pushovers and don't really justify themselves. Characters don't have any dialogue portraits or up-close stills for cutscenes, so the best you're seeing are these plain-looking, miniature figurine sprites that romp around the overworld. At that rate why even advertise Ogino's involvement? The only place you're seeing his work shine through is in those manual illustrations. Dungeons often recycle the same boxy tilesets too - another point for thematic repetition, but that shtick only lasts so long man.
With the solid foundation of the gameplay and the lofty ego it carries itself with, King Colossus is passably decent but multiple steps away from the same epic caliber expected from PCE and SNES RPG's of the time. Even disregarding the shit with its messages, it fumbles because the weight of its themes and its over-simplistic gameplay are at a constant tonal clash. This was a missed opportunity to produce something with similar grit and staying power to a final fantasy or chrono trigger, and instead it feels like something for dragon quest fans to chew on between releases. Fine as-is, but it's the one time where the simplicity of a genesis rpg left me wanting something bigger instead of relishing in its braindeadness.
I saw it announced for the MD Mini 2, with a glowing recommendation from Ken Sugimori of all things, and went 'damn, it's translated, I should play this'. Boot it up and you get this chilling emblem on a black screen, with the designer's names fading in and out while a chilling wind hollers in the background. Makoto Ogino's credited too, the mangaka behind Kujaku-Ou. Sega produced games based on the series twice for him (localized here as Spellcaster and Mysic Defender, respectively). So in my head, I had every reason to be hyped right? Idk, I don't think it payed off, even if it was kinda interesting in abstract and a tolerable button masher.
King Colossus tosses you into the MC's home ala Link to The Past's iconic opening, where you find your older sister and elderly caretaker. The old man sends you on a fetch quest to retrieve a missing sword, which eventually devolves into a fetchquest journey amidst human sacrifices for the appeasement of a cruel god.
Colossus is as pure a dungeon crawler as it gets - there's no overworlds, no puzzles - just dens of enemies to venture through. Combat's somewhat similar to NES zelda where you move and place a hitbox in front of you to deal damage. Your range starts pitiful on-ground, but your early swords and axes let you attack out of a jump, giving you range to move and turn during swings. at first it seems like 'just always jump and swing' is the name of the game, but as you progress, the stronger and further-ranged weapons take away your air attack, so there's still incentive to swap back to a sword for enemies that require you to stay nimble. And... that's the entire combat system of King Colossus. Keeping it simple is perfectly fine in my book, but, the problem is it never gets meaningfully hard. Even without grinding, you kill most enemies in 2-3 hits, and their AI becomes seemingly DUMBER as you progress. I had more trouble with the early game snakes and spiders than I did with any of the late game demons by a longshot. And like, being an easy game is fine, but it's so rudimentary that it comes at the detriment of the ludonarrative weight - none of the world's stakes feel justified because these trials are just jump-slashing at randomly-moving bosses. This game's story posits itself too seriously to have battles this bland.
And hey speaking of story, it's kind of fucked up if you read even 1 layer into it? For being a 'kill god' plot, it has an oddly Judeo-Christian tone to its moral. From start to finish, your character is constantly being funneled around against his will by different 'masters' - first your caretaker sells into slavery as an arena gladiator, then you get thrown in prison, captured and enslaved again by the king's daughter, and eventually dragged into a transdimensional hell. For the record, I thought this direction was fascinating for the first 2/3rds of the runtime - combined with the game's monotonous combat, evoked this ludonarrative vibe of truly being dragged through a cycle of laborious captivity. I LIKED it and respected the vision. But in the game's climaxing moments, your former captors' sins are either unacknowledged by the greater cast or outright forgiven - that is to say, they 'apologize' for mistreating you, and since your MC is silent, there's no way to take it other than 'OK'. The grander theme seems to posit that all of the suffering and domestic abuse the player received from those above him was 'necessary' in order to reach his true strength and build character. I couldn't say one way or another if the fan translation fucked this up, but it's pretty believable - and a completely unacceptable
way to handle the subject matter. If the game's plot were any more involved than a 1992 game could be, who knows how much more lecherous it could've been thematically.
Ultimately though, the failing of King Colossus is that can't live up to the expectations it sets in the player. For something that makes so much effort to tell you 'HEY, we got this MANGAKA to work with us', the fruit of its efforts never come out bc of the limited scope - not just in the aformentioned combat, but even the design and art. It's a very mediocre-looking game that reserves its spectacle entirely for the bosses - which, again, are pushovers and don't really justify themselves. Characters don't have any dialogue portraits or up-close stills for cutscenes, so the best you're seeing are these plain-looking, miniature figurine sprites that romp around the overworld. At that rate why even advertise Ogino's involvement? The only place you're seeing his work shine through is in those manual illustrations. Dungeons often recycle the same boxy tilesets too - another point for thematic repetition, but that shtick only lasts so long man.
With the solid foundation of the gameplay and the lofty ego it carries itself with, King Colossus is passably decent but multiple steps away from the same epic caliber expected from PCE and SNES RPG's of the time. Even disregarding the shit with its messages, it fumbles because the weight of its themes and its over-simplistic gameplay are at a constant tonal clash. This was a missed opportunity to produce something with similar grit and staying power to a final fantasy or chrono trigger, and instead it feels like something for dragon quest fans to chew on between releases. Fine as-is, but it's the one time where the simplicity of a genesis rpg left me wanting something bigger instead of relishing in its braindeadness.
Alright Action-Adventure game with some RPG elements. Nothing outstanding but worth playing at least once.