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/