King's Field--the hour of destiny is at hand... Your kingdom is once again under attack by the ruthless minions of evil. This time they have possessed King Alfred himself! As the King's son, Prince Lyle, you must bring forth the tide of change that will effect the universe from now until the end of time. The fate of the world is in your hands! Re-enter the realm of King's Field for the most explosive debut on the PlayStation yet... ASCII Entertainment went all out to provide a fully non-linear three dimensional world that even blows away the original! The intense action and powerful storytelling will keep you riveted for months!
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
(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.