NES Obscurity Quicky!
permalinkSquare Soft
The very name speaks of ...well, JRPGs. But before Final Fantasy made "AIRSHIP" and "FLOATER" household names, and dared to posit that an evil knight could be named "GARLAND," Square Soft made some other games.
They even made a game in the popular medieval/fantasy-world genre that they'd grow to dominate*
*: and they'd go on to establish an even more irritating "standard fantasy world" than the Tolkein/Dungeons & Dragons-style "Shakespearian-English-speakin' Pomposity." Square Soft would sweep all that away and replace it with the black hole of creativity and innovation that is the "WHINY ORPHANS SAVE THE WORLD (probably with love, and/or ESPers)" genre.
Anyway, what NES game are we talking about?
King's Knight, a medieval/fantasy-world game, you say?
To be more precise, a medieval/fantasy-world SHOOT-EM-UP.
To bring an even greater magnification of precision to it, it's a:
- medieval/fantasy-world SHOOT-EM-UP which is
- abysmal,
- confusing,
- complicated,
- incredibly difficult,
- These blue things are INDESTRUCTIBLE WALLS that ONLY POP UP WHEN YOU GET CLOSE, and the CONTINUOUS SCREEN SCROLL will crush you unless you get through, by the way:
- horribly-designed
- with ludicrous enemies
- where the emphasis of the gameplay is bass-awkward:
- instead of shooting enemies, dodging their bullets, and occasionally nabbing a power-up to make your task easier,
- you have to focus on destroying every inch of destructible terrain (which usually covers 60% or more of the screen) because you need to do so to collect necessary items to defeat the last level, very few of which help you in any appreciable way during actual gameplay...oh, and while you're doing that, enemies run around and shoot at you, incidentally. If you have time, feel free to shoot back.
- and when you die, you lose that character and are sent to the next level (as the next, even weaker character)...
- even though you can't really win the game's 5th and final level without EVERY character surviving,
- because 1/4th of each character's "destroy this kind of statue" spell is hidden in each level,
- so to win the game you need to blow away background so that you find 4 different items from 4 different levels, hidden amongst dozens of small ill-defined items,
- AND if you somehow win all four character levels to reach the 5th and Final Level,
- you have to navigate it with all four characters walking together in a circle,
- making a huge target for the shoot-em-up style enemies to crash into or shoot,
- AND the only way you can change your primary character is by gathering "rotate to the left", "rotate to the right", "rotate the guy in back up front", etc icons from the ground.
- Also, the key perils in the Final Level is "statues that block your progress as the screen scrolls" rather than, I don't know...SHOOTING MONSTERS.
- Additionally, if somehow ALL your characters survived their stage, there's a way to "try again" to beat their substage that involves pressing the "reset" button and the undocumented use of the "select" button on the title screen...
...but I can't withstand another second of thinking about this game, so you'll have to look up how to do that on your own.
Well, I hope that this gets you up-to-speed about King's Knight
That's all for this week, and take a tip from KID THIEF 'TOBY':
Stay in school, or you might end up in a horrible video game like this one!
— carlmarksguy, 2012-10-19
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