Every console launch needs at least one racing game. This was an unwritten law for decades and it's telling that it took Atari a full year to get one on shelves. What they wound up releasing is a basic polygonal 3D racing game made as an "homage" to Virtua Racing. I'm torn by how technically impressive it is for this style of racer to have come in at 2MB and the fact that the game itself is bad.
The original Checkered Flag was a Scaler Racing game released on the Atari Lynx back in 1991. It seems to have reviewed very well and from what little I've poked at it; I would say it's probably the best handheld racing game of its time. Whatever cache that would have earned the Checkered Flag name would have been the reason for Atari licensing it to Rebellion to get a racing game on the Jag. Rebellion wasn't a big studio, so it seems crazy to me that they were responsible for back-to-back major releases for this system. That coincidence is both ominous for the console and an explanation for how this end product turned out.
They couldn't even maximize the draw distance
This thing has the bare minimum feature set to qualify as a racing game. The game launches straight into a race option menu, where you can select car color, track, mode, and other standard options. From there you're sent straight into the race or practice with little to no fanfare. The racing is straightforward, though the handling feels really bad. There's a kind of momentum on the turning that is reminiscent of scaler racers, but without the kind of framerate you would need to make that work. Not that it chugs too badly, running at a mostly consistent 20-ish FPS. The Ai isn't particularly bright and serves mostly to get in the way. Actually, the more I describe this thing the more I realize it's literally just a scaler racer with polygons. It isn't even as good a one of those as its '91 namesake.
I need to reemphasize how hard it is to not hit the walls
The need to utilize 3D processing is what really kneecaps this game. There isn't much you can do polygonally on a 2Mb cartridge, meaning that not only does it look primitive and run under 30 FPS but also lacks most visual anything you would want, going as far as to rely on basic Gouraud shading instead of textures on the environment. The sound design is also heavily scaled back as well, relying on short and simple MIDI loops that get old almost immediately. There are also even fewer tracks here than in the Lynx game. If anything, Checkered Flag works as a tech demo for the Jaguar's processor and nothing more. This thing hitting North American shelves at full price less than a year before Ridge Racer is dire, to say the least. I can see how Rebellion would have wanted to put more effort into getting Alien vs. Predator ready, and I don't blame them.
Now onto whatever in the Sam Hell this is supposed to be. Best as I can tell, Club Drive is even more of a tech demo non-game than Checkered Flag, which at least had the advantage of copying the format of a three-year-old handheld release. If you were able to see my face, you would be able to tell that I'm stumped. Let's go through a description and see what we can arrive at.
On paper, this is a 3D Racing game in open maps and geared towards multiplayer. The thing is, there isn't really any racing to be done. Yes, there's technically a checkpoint racing mode, but without AI opponents or any sense of direction. In the game's four levels, you mostly just drive around collecting glowing pick-ups with the session ending after gathering a pre-determined amount. Everything's polygonal and basic looking. Two of the levels are kinda large, the house and the skatepark, and two are absurdly small and simple, the parking garage and the old west town. The driving itself has a squirrely RC-car feel that is likely intentional, and there are way more camera options than are necessary. That's it. That's the game. I can see how this could work in a local multiplayer setting, with my mind going to the arena modes in the Mario Kart games. But those modes wouldn't work as standalone, full-priced titles.
Also none of the camera angles are any good
I can't escape the tech demo aspect of this thing. Not only is it fully polygonal and open zone, but it was apparently the first Jaguar game to run in next gen 480p resolution. Story even has it that there's online multiplayer code buried in it which was never used because the Jaguar internet modem got cancelled. It probably demoed well in convention settings, and it should have been left in that context. Yet, I can see why it was packaged for release, with Atari needing everything they could get their hands on for the console's wide release in late '94. Still, despite the circumstances this is still a cartridge that people could have bought. As such, there is maybe five minutes of moderate fun and then absolutely nothing else. While that makes Club Drive a bottom-feeder, it still isn't the worst experience this system has to offer.
Man, that was a great segue, because this next game is a real stinker. Setting aside all of the other baggage involved with this thing, it is on its face a trash tier pseudo-Fighting game with no redeeming value. Yet, when you do consider everything, this is an incredibly bizarre cultural relic that is worth brief consideration.
Getting the game itself out of the way, this is supposed to be a cross between a Fighting game and a Beat 'Em Up. You progress through a fight ladder/stage progression with combat that seems like Fighting game combat on its surface, but actually functions like a simple brawler. The moveset is limited, the controls feel terrible, and the whole thing is generally kind of ugly. There is no redeeming value to this gameplay. There's also not much of anything at all going on around the edges of that gameplay either, so there isn't anything within the package itself to latch onto. Yet, the context of this thing is kind of insane.
Technically a fighting game
So, before playing this game, I hadn't heard of the 1993 movie, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. It was a dramatized biopic about Lee and was apparently well-received at the time. I guess it also played a large role in building the mythology around him. Those kinds of movies can be kinda sketchy depending on how involved or approving the person's family is of the end product. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be a concern since Lee's widow, Linda, was involved in the production. The other thing that makes it potentially sketchy is the fact that it was originally released two months after the death of Brandon Lee, Bruce's son. Yet, again, Linda gave her approval, and the film was dedicated to Brandon. For something released in such a bizarre and morbid context, the movie isn't particularly problematic.
What is problematic is this stupid fucking game. You don’t see many games based on biopics, a genre not known for action, yet here we are. The stages in the game are taken from every possible instance in the movie where a punch is thrown with no context in-between. The team at Virgin also weren't able to decide whether they wanted a Fighting or Beat' Em Up game, which is how we got this end product. Also, this Jaguar release is a full 18 months after the movie hit theaters, so it wasn't exactly a marketing tie-in. That’s somewhat unfair. The game was originally released for the Mega Drive in Europe only 12 months after the movie came out. While that film isn't disrespectful despite the context, this game is disrespectful for no other reason than for being crap. Ugh.
Time to Wondering If MyHouse Can Run On A Jaguar: 27 Minutes
And here we are at last. Every fifth-generation console had a Doom on it, and the Jag got it before any of the others. It’s also somehow the most faithful console port of Doom until 2003. This is the gold standard that all of the other ports were based on during this generation. Though, that doesn't mean it's a perfect conversion by any stretch of the imagination.
This thing came out during the initial wave of Doom ports, chronologically nestled between the 32X and SNES versions. It's a more complete representation of the original Doom episodes than any of the concurrent console versions, but still not 1:1. There are a few levels missing, the remaining levels have had some tightening up, the boss fights have been reworked, but most importantly, almost all music has been removed. Even though the Jag hardware was completely capable of running the wads, the 3Mb cartridge limit really hamstrung what could be done. Still, this visual representation of the Doom experience would give the PS1 version a run for its money, which is saying something.
That imp is as surprised as I am at this thing's quality
Yet, the lack of any and all music during the levels is weird and uncomfortable. At least half the aesthetic came from the sound design, and that's severely handicapped in this version. Also, being a faithful port, the 60mph movement is faithfully implemented. That sounds great, but in practice the d-pad with button strafing controls isn’t as responsive or easy to use as the old keyboard set-up. This makes the game harder to manage than it should be when at speed. Now that I'm looking back at it, slowing down the pace of the later PS1 port seems more like a correct decision. This all leaves the Jag version of Doom in a slightly awkward impasse of being slightly too faithful in some respects and not faithful enough in others.
Still, the final product works well enough to be one of the bast games ever released on the Jaguar (spoiler). In fact, this was good enough to serve as the design basis of later console ports. The 3DO version is a half-assed implementation of this port, the PS1 version builds on this one by adding a bunch of Doom II levels, and the Saturn port is a half-assed implementation of that PS1 version. Turns out Doom was a really good game, who would have known. Though, I still think the more deliberate pace of Wolfenstein 3D works better with the limitations of the Jaguar, though that might just be me.
Somehow, we're 2/3rds of the way through '94, which also puts us 1/5th of the way through the entire Jaguar catalog. You knew this was going to get dire before you even started reading. Let's cram these into the Ranking of all Jaguar Games and rip and tear our way out of here.
1. Wolfenstein 3D
…
3. Doom
6. Checkered Flag
8. Club Drive
10. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
…
12. Evolution: Dino Dudes
I've accumulated a bit of a backlog, so the next post will be on FromSoft, and the time after that we'll go back over to look at our journey with the Saturn in the first half of '96. There were 48 games, and they need to be considered before proceeding into the back half of the year.
Next time with the Jaguar, we're going to close out '94 in the worst way possible when we look at Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, Kasumi Ninja, Val d'Isère Skiing and Snowboarding, Zool 2, and Iron Soldier.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of Saturn and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
Time to Welcoming Our New Alien Overlords: 25 Minutes
Continuing the pain train from last week, we get to take one final look at Shockwave. I originally had a very unfavorable opinion of it in Part 012 of the PS1 series, back when I had standards, and pecked at what few crumbs remained in terms of commentary when looking at the original 3DO version. Now that EA has dumped their old multiplatform titles on the Saturn, I can now close the book on this thing. I have nothing more to add about the game that has not already been said. There might be something in trying to dissect the creative choices behind the game, but since it originally came out in the wake of Rebel Assault, it wouldn't be difficult to figure out. In fact, this thing came out the same year as Tie Fighter and Wing Commander III. I know they're not in the same exact genre, but the narrative-space-shooter thing was all the rage in '94. Dumbing the concept down would have made for a quick and easy console cash grab. I'm just spitballing at this point. This is like a warmed-over Sega CD game and I'm glad I'm done with it. Wait, did I say I was done? I meant to say that there was a sequel released for the 3DO that I will have to play at some point. That's right kids, the ride never ends.
This is where I confess my, not really, dark secret: I've never played a Shining game before. Unless you count Beyond the Beyond, but that game doesn't count for anything. I'll have more to say on that topic in a few months. It looks like this is also an outlier in the Shining series, since those tend to either be Fire Emblem knockoffs or Dungeon Crawlers but this game is a full-throated Zelda-like. Well, it does have precisely one gimmick, but we'll get to that.
For anyone who's like I was and is innocent of the Shining franchise, here's a short summary. In 1990 a few members of the Dragon Quest development team left Enix and formed a couple of studios under Sega, Climax and Sonic! Software Planning. Before you ask, yes, it appears they named it after that Sonic. These new teams very quickly turned around and released an aggressively mid Wizardry-style dungeon crawler called Shining in the Darkness. Taking the basic world structure from that game, they rapidly began pumping out a series of Fire Emblem knockoffs under the Shining Force name. I don't use the word 'rapidly' without reason, since between the Genesis, Game Gear, and Sega CD they put out six games in about 39 months. Shining Wisdom would release about two months after the last Game Gear Shining Force entry and would shake up the formula by being a Link to the Past knockoff. Sonic! Would keep chugging along with a second attempt at a dungeon crawler and one last go at Shining Force before shutting down in '98 with the death of the Saturn.
This is for all the zizz lovers out there
The original founders of the studio got out during the generational transition and founded Camelot Software, putting out Beyond the Beyond on the PS1 at around the same time Shining Wisdom hit the Saturn. That first Camelot title is basically a Shining game in all but name, but that's a story for a different time. When their sister studio went belly up, Camelot landed under the Nintendo umbrella and has been making Mario Sports games ever since, which is the strangest possible outcome to their story. Meanwhile, Sega would revive the Shining franchise with various different developers during the PS2 era as C-tier Tales knockoffs. The latest entry being 2018's Shining Resonance Refrain, which I've heard described as, "that game with that one anime girl on the cover."
Let's play name that Shining game! Go on, I'll wait. (Yes, this is a trick question)
As mentioned earlier, Shining Wisdom is a blatant 2D Zelda clone. It's a top-down Action-Adventure game where you have a sword, special items, and an overworld dotted with puzzle dungeons. This could have been a Genesis game, and by all accounts it was originally going to be until Sega realized they needed to throw everything they had at the Saturn. There are two three main differences separating this from the archetypical 2D Zelda experience. First, there’s a lot more talking in this game. This developer was used to making plot-heavy Turn-Based Strategy games and the game engine was made for talking. Not that the characters, world, or overall writing are worth anything, but we'll get to that. Second, this thing is heavily concerned with its run mechanic. You have to fast tap the C button to build up speed, represented by a Super Mario Bro.'s 3 type meter, in order to move at a reasonable pace. This mechanic is also used for like half the traversal puzzles. The game really wants you to play this like an old Konami sports game and it's inexplicable.
It also doesn't make sense in context
That leads us to the third and most impactful difference. Shining Wisdom is poorly designed. From the very first screen of the game, everything feels badly thought out. From the deranged and questionably translated monologue by the player's grandfather in the opening, to the immediate demand to master the unexplained dashing mechanic in order to exit the first screen, to the fact that after that screen you need to traverse the overworld without a map or a weapon, everything going on here is badly considered. At some point you do gain a sword, but the game doesn't tell you and you have to just notice it in the inventory that you aren't given any reason to open until the end of the first dungeon. That led to me doing an accidental pacifist run for like the first 30 minutes of the game. The map layouts are uninspired, the puzzles aren't fun, and the boss fights are basic. When all of that is added to the impressively uncompelling story, you end up with a game which gives you no reason to experience it.
It feels like the localizers are talking directly to me
Not that this thing is kusoge or anything. There's a minimum of quality throughout and none of the bizarre choices make it unplayable. It's exceedingly mediocre with brief flashes of insanity. This is entirely due to the basic competence of the combat. It works exactly like you would expect from looking at it, nothing more and nothing less. It looks and sounds like a decent Sega CD game and runs well, which is the bare minimum considering it uses a previous-gen engine. The character sprites look weird and wrong, but that probably is the only thing making it memorable. This isn't bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to be fun, which is probably why I hadn't heard of it before now.
Time to Knifed By An Elf (Not A Euphemism?): 27 Minutes
Now for another classic franchise that I don't really know what to do with. I have precisely zero attachment to Golden Axe since I never knew what Genes-is as a child and only ever experienced what Ninten-does. I've probably poked around with it as an adult, but it left no lasting impression of any kind, to the point that I regularly confuse it with Altered Beast. That means I came into this thing with no brand familiarity whatsoever and thus no reason to care.
So, apparently there were a bunch of Golden Axe games? That's news to me, and it looks like The Duel was the last thing done with the series in the 90's. I suppose there's a certain appropriateness in playing this back-to-back with Shining Wisdom. Both are genre outliers in their franchises that weren't good enough to go anywhere. Yet I digress, this thing is a 2D Fighting game originally released to Japanese arcades in 1995. Failing to port an arcade Fighting game to international markets doesn't set up the console version for success, though that might not have mattered in this case. This is an offensively middling Fighting game. It moves poorly, the characters aren't interesting, the specials aren't compelling, and the potion system to fill the special meter doesn't make sense. While streaming it, I was informed by helpful degenerates genre fans that this thing is basically a lazy Street Fighter II re-skin. This would have been in the bargain bin of arcade Fighting games in the mid 90's.
Someone needs to write a think piece comparing fighting games where the characters go behind versus in front of the bars
Not that the conversion is bad. This is the Saturn, so of course this 2D Fighting game runs immaculately. This is the first time I would call this kind of quality workmanship a wasted effort. I mean, I liked Dark Legend and that game is probably even more forgotten than this one. This is such a nothing game. The only character I remember is the serial killer knife elf, and that's only because his fight is where I got stuck on the singleplayer ladder. I think the series villain is playable? Is his name Gigadeath or something? I'm not going to look it up, that's how little I care about Golden Axe. I'm not even interested enough to write an outro line for this review.
Time to THE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS DO NOTHING: 12 Minutes
When I played the PS1 port of vanilla Mortal Kombat 3 all the way back in Part 005 of that series, I held out hope that UMK3 would be more playable when I eventually got to it. Whelp, turns out I was as overly optimistic as usual. Though, I made it further than I did with the Saturn version of Mortal Kombat II. The inherent problem with these early MK games is that they are not meant to be played in singleplayer, which is what I insist on doing. They were expressly designed for two players standing within punching distance to play against each other. The fight ladder is there for either showing off, high level practice, or to separate suckers from their quarters. That design mentality translates poorly to consoles. I'm pretty sure I've harped on this before, so I'll spare you the rest. Really, I'm just trying to justify why I have absolutely nothing to say about this experience. I guess I would recommend this over MKII or MK3, which may or may not be a hot take.
Oh no, this is so violent, won't someone think of the children?!
Last but, somehow, not least we have Worms. Not the one you've played, that was probably some variant of Worms Armageddon. This is the first one. The one originally released on the Amiga, which is as big a red flag as we can encounter. Yet, inexplicably, this is one of the better Amiga ports we've seen thus far in our journey. I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
Worms was the brainchild of a random British guy named Andy Davidson, who seemed to have developed the original version while messing around with Amiga programming in the early 90's. After shopping his prototype to various publishers, he caught the interest of Team17, whose early history I won't go into because it confuses me. The original gist seems to have been based on taking gameplay concepts from the defunct "Artillery Game" genre, adding the UI from Lemmings, and throwing in some very basic humor. Maybe I'm being unfair about the humor, since referential comedy was mostly acceptable before Seth MacFarlane ran that genre into the ground. Either way, the little worm guys are kinda wacky and say short jokes or references in high-pitched voices.
Get it? It's the thing from the thing.
You might have also noticed that I put "Artillery Game" in sneer quotes. I guess this was a thing back in the 80's, when games where two players throw simple physics objects across terrain would have seemed advanced. I haven't heard of any of the examples I've seen, with the Worms franchise being exponentially more successful or recognizable than any of its conceptual predecessors. I feel weird describing the Worms gameplay loop, but some people might not have ever seen one so here it goes. Different teams of anthropized worms are dropped into a procedurally generated 2D stage with the objective of killing each other and the last team with any members remaining wins. Each team has a wide arsenal of weapons, including a variety of guns, grenades, rocket launchers, bombs, and other miscellaneous junk. Each individual worm takes turns moving and attacking with the uncertain trajectories, severe fall damage, and destructible terrain adding all of the uncertainty to individual actions. Each worm has its own health values, and ammo is pooled within each team. That covers everything, really. It's a simple game that is complicated by the intended chaos and match settings.
That gets me to the crux of the problem with pretty much every entry in this franchise: these games are meant for multiplayer. You're supposed to have one player per worm team, and the chaos is supposed to inspire jests and jeers among groups of friends. This formula works well for that, and basically nothing else. The singleplayer component of these things only ever captures a fraction of the fun. A lot of that comes down to opposing AI, who either gang up on you, make trick shots, or are otherwise better than you at the game. This original entry is bad about this, but it doesn't get that much better in the sequels. So, aside from the corny humor, this would be the biggest problem.
The opening of each match tends to be a bloodbath
Also, this is still a console port of an Amiga game. The gameplay screen is completely screwed, with a less than useful lower third taking up space while you have to scroll in four directions around the screen, and there isn't enough room to fully fit the team health bars without scrolling. You navigate with a d-pad cursor, which is unforgivable in this context. It doesn't look or sound particularly good either. Interacting with this thing on a Saturn controller is actively awful. This game is janky and crusty even by the standards of the time, and it's an actively unpleasant experience because of that. Even still, the basic appeal is there, fully formed in this first iteration of the core gameplay loop. Everything somehow balances out to middling, which makes this the best Amiga port I've seen so far? I don't even harbor any ill-will towards this thing or its creators, even though I should. That's the highest praise I'm willing to give.
That ends the first half of 1996 for the Saturn. I feel like I've made the out with a bang/whimper joke too many times, so I'll just express relief that we're going to jump back to PS1 soon. Let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games and bounce.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
36. Shining Wisdom
55. Worms
65. Golden Axe: The Duel
68. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
73. Shockwave Assault
…
95. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Now that we're done with the first half of '96, we're going to stop and look back at this brief heyday of the system the next time we return with this series.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of PS1 and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
When we first saw this game in Part 027 of the PS1 series, I noted the bad gameplay and how it really didn't nail its blaxploitation A-Team concept. The Saturn version is basically identical, and all of my previous commentary applies. I also hoped out loud that I would have something to say about the giant red flag at the core of this experience by the time we got here. In that regard I set myself up for failure. The only thing I can add is that something which would otherwise be a negative, poor sound mixing in the cutscenes, is actually a boon for this game considering the quality of the writing and voice acting. At the same time, in the intervening months I figured out that one of the producers of this thing is Afro-British, which raises enough uncertainty with the development background that I hesitate to jump up and down on it too much. The only other part of this game with enough substance for critique is the fictionalized Yugoslav Wars setting which, if anything, was a choice for 1996. Notice how none of what I've written about so far involves the gameplay, since there's nothing of substance to latch onto there. I'm just going to follow in the footsteps of contemporary reviewers and never think about this game again.
Our first of two new games for this week is, well, it certainly is something. This is a competitive Tile Matching Puzzle game originally released to Japanese arcades in 1995. That puts this a year before Puzzle Fighter, which is my touchpoint for early games of the genre. I don't think this was one of Sega's bigger titles, since it was made on the Titan Video instead of Model 1 or 2 architecture. The Titan Video board was basically a Saturn in an arcade cabinet. Yet, none of this high-level description conveys the weirdness of the thing.
If you've played any kind of battle Tetris or Puzzle Fighter type of game, you understand the basic concept. The gameplay revolves around matching colored blocks falling from the top of the play area in large enough chunks or combos to generate junk on an opposing play area, and the first area with a stack touching the top losing. The gimmick in Baku Baku involves the Animal part of its name. Each block color has two types, animal blocks and corresponding food blocks. You need to stack up food blocks of one type and drop the matching animal anywhere next to it. The more food blocks the animal eats in one go, the bigger the score. Visually this is represented with pairings like pandas with bamboo on the green blocks or bananas with monkeys on yellow. The presentation is colorful and cutesy, as you would expect from the genre, but also kinda deranged in ways that should be noted.
This is all you need to get an idea of the gameplay
Instead of doing the sane thing and sticking with 2D art, like what Taito did with Bubble Bobble, everything but the blocks are in polygonal 3D. In some ways, the look reminds me of Mystaria but with the sensibilities of Clockwork Knight, which is not a flattering comparison. There really is no polygonal rendering that's janky in quite the way that you get with the Saturn. Here are a few glimpses into this fever dream:
That's right, when you lose a giant lion head eats the player character. I'm sure that's the only question you have. Stuff like that, the random boob nurse, metal versions of all the characters, and the fact that the main two kids are called Poly and Gon demonstrates that there is plenty of personality here. There is a plot premise, which I think is about a zookeeping tournament in a fantasy kingdom or something. I dunno, the point is the puzzle battles. There also isn't much in the way of modes, mainly consisting of the expected ladder and two-player options. That's thin, but normal for arcade ports. It's all generally competent, but not really anything to write home about.
Baku Baku Animal reviewed decently in both Japanese arcades and international home consoles. There isn't really anything particularly wrong with it but also nothing to get excited about. I don't know enough to be sure, but I would guess that the core gimmick doesn't hold up well in high-level competitive play, which might be why it fell to the wayside as quickly as it did. Also, I have a hard time fathoming why this was released outside of Japan. I mean, I'm not complaining, but it's clear that a bare minimum of effort was put into translating the in-game text, and without it having spent time in western arcades, no one would have known what the deal was with this game. They didn't even bother to localize the title. Apparently 'Baku Baku' is a Japanese onomatopoeia for a chomping noise. This could have been a cult classic if it was better than good or released on the PS1, but instead it had the same fate as most other Saturn exclusives.
It feels like there's a lot that should be said about Gungriffon, but I don't feel like I have enough experience with Mech games to speak authoritatively about it. I've never touched any kind of Mechwarrior or Steel Battalion anything. I've just recently touched an Armored Core game (more on that in a few weeks). I can only speak to what I've already seen from these 32-bit consoles. As such, that means I'm going to compare this experience to stuff like Ghen War or Crazy Ivan. I see that Mechwarrior 2 came out around this time, but I don't know nothin' about it.
Because this is a somewhat convoluted first-person mech shooter, it's likely in the same vein as the old Mechwarrior games but simplified for console play. Though, the setting is much closer to the more problematic aspects of the Front Mission series. So, I choose to view this as, "what if Battletech was in the Front Mission universe." Though, these mechs are called Armored Walking Gun Systems, which are totally not lances or wanzers, I swear. They also don't have cores beneath that armor, apparently. I'm not going to go into detail on the premise, partly because of confusing retcons and partly because it's massively stupid. The basic gist is that in the future Europe and Russia form a multinational union state and all of east Asia form another one in retaliation, leading to WWIII. This means that the missions take place in former Soviet regions and northern China. There's briefing text throughout, but since each mission boils down to the standard 'kill everything' objective, none of it matters.
The UI is hard to parse
There are eight of those missions in total, and they're kind of motherfuckers. This comes down to the controls and what the game demands that you do with them. I want to describe them, but I think I need a visual aid to really get it across, so take a look:
I don't get it either
To move you use the two left buttons to throttle forward and back, there isn't a direct control over the walk. Holding down either the left trigger or B changes the d-pad from turning and up/down aiming to either independent turret rotation or strafing with up/down aiming. There are four weapons that are swapped with the C button, the loadout of which doesn't change. The jump/hover doesn't feel great, and the Z button isn't convenient placement for it. Finally, the less said about the night vision the better. There's a lot to keep track of and a bunch of abnormal handholds you need to do. That's because each mission has way more enemies than you have health and ammo, meaning you need to do some fancy footwork and accurate weapon usage at the same time. Combine that with the busy UI and limited field of view and you get a very severe experience.
This is what happens when you put guns on a griffon
The missions are a combination of broken urban environments and open fields, but in either case the helicopters are going to be the biggest problem. That's because they like to hover right above you and you can't aim that far up, which makes you use the hover jump to shoot them while exposing yourself to ground fire. Also, there is a way to recover some health and ammo, which is to get over to a resupply helicopter, assuming it doesn't get shot down on the way. The amount of healing and resupply is poorly communicated and feels inconsistent. Oh, and each missions has a hard time limit, so you can't carefully pick off enemies, you gotta always be oscar mike. From that information, it shouldn't be surprising that in my hour-and-a-half with this game, I only beat one out of the first four available missions. On the easy difficulty. That brutality is a symptom of the overall issue with this game, it tries to inhabit a middle point in a genre that was only able to support two extremes at the time.
Same
When looking at more action-oriented mech games, such as the contemporary Ghen War and Crazy Ivan, they play more like plodding First Person Shooters than anything else. They're maybe one step removed from the Genki-style corridor based mech shooters, such as Kileak ("Kill-eek") or Robotica. At the other extreme or those PC-based Battletech games, which were oriented squarely at the grognard simulation audience. Gungriffon tries to place itself in the middle, with moderately paced action and an interface simple enough to fit on a six-button controller but deep enough to feel like a piece of military equipment. It doesn't really nail any of those ambitions, but it was also kind of the only game inhabiting that niche on consoles until Armored Core dropped the next year. That was enough for it to review well at the time, likely because it made action game reviewers feel smart, and sold enough to get sequels. In fact, the Gungriffon series would go up until 2004, dying out only slightly before Game Arts' other two franchises, Lunar and Grandia. Oh right, this was made by the Lunar and Grandia people. I probably buried the lede by only mentioning that now. Whoops. Anyway, despite this being a bad game that I suck at, I still have largely positive feelings towards it. I can't really articulate why, maybe I'm like the contemporary reviewers and just feel smart because I figured out how to play damn thing.
It was bound to happen eventually, and it has happened here. I was reticent going into a Saturn blog series because I was under the impression that Saturn emulation wasn't fully baked. I've largely been proven wrong about that so far, which has been a pleasant surprise. That is, until now. Sadly, or luckily as we'll get to in a second, this game didn't work after the opening cutscene. This thing is apparently in a similar style to Cyberia, which itself falls into the loose genre of cinematic multi-gameplay experiences that heavily utilized pre-rendered graphics. I regard Rebel Assault as the template for this kind of game. Though I wouldn't know anything about this one firsthand.
Honestly, I don't think I'm missing much. The contemporary reviews were excoriating in a way that you don't see for games that had any budget behind them. I mean, IGN gave it a 2/10 with the warning to "avoid…like your life depends on it." So, the busted emulation probably did my mental health a favor here, but at the cost of keeping this thing off the ranking list. If this turn of events bums you out, don't worry, there's a 3DO version.
The opening cutscene is certainly a thing that I saw
Time to The Need To Stop Playing This Game: 21 Minutes
This is the third, and hopefully final, time that I've had to touch this game. We've been here before, looking at the original and weird 3DO release and the miserable expanded experience in Part 021 of the PS1 series. This final release is functionally identical to the PS1 version, so there isn't anything to say about the gameplay itself. To reiterate, the game is bad. It's a bad racing game. But there is one thing I want to stop and talk through before moving on.
It shouldn't be surprising that this thing is going to rank below average in the Ranking of All Saturn Games. It also didn't fare too well in the PS1 or 3DO rankings yet looking back on all three experiences I have the kindest opinion towards the 3DO original. That's weird, since there is almost no content in that game. It's a glorified tech demo, yet the act of playing it was more enjoyable than either version of the later update. If you recall, that 3DO release of Track & Speed Presents: The Need for Road featured only a handful of point-to-point one-on-one races and the entirety of the content could be seen in like half an hour. It's a terrible value proposition in the context of being a full-priced game, and I dinged it as such. Yet, it is far less frustrating of an experience than any of the shit going on in the game after an additional two years of work. I consider this an odd case of a game getting worse after having its flaws fixed. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that.
Also for the third and final time, we have to look at the 3DO Road Rash game. I hate to say it, but dealing with EA releases specifically is making me look forward to the post-1997 era where it was physically impossible for publishers to put identical games on the PS1 and N64. I've covered this game all the way back in Part 014 of the PS1 series and more recently in the 3DO series (CW for plumbers and ties in that link), and now we have to acknowledge it for the third calendar year in a row. This is literally the same game as the other versions. It was decent in '94, mid in '95, and crusty in '96. For some reason, I think the gameplay looks slightly different between the three versions, but that could just be in my head. Even still, as done as I am with this thing, I would still probably take it over most other Saturn third party games, which might be the most damning thing I could say about this system.
We're two-thirds of the way through June and nearing our mid-year checkpoint with the Saturn. I swear these middling multiplatform games are going to be the end of me. Oh well, let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games and get out of here.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of Saturn and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
Jeff Minter is a weird guy. For starters, he's British, which has so far proven to be a red flag when it comes to game development. Then there's his affinity for woolly mammals; he chose 'Yak' as a nickname at an early age and has raised sheep and llamas for at least half his life, hence his studio's name. That's just the shallow end of the pool when it comes to odd details about the man, but this isn't about him. Instead, we're here to look at the game he is, probably, best known for, Tempest 2000.
This game is a sequel to the 1981 Atari arcade game, Tempest, which is a very early Vertical Scrolling Shooter where the player's ship moves around a tubular playfield. If you don't recognize the name, you have almost certainly seen the concept. This particular style was widely cloned for a couple of years but didn't catch on far enough to solidify into its own genre of Tube Shooter, but that was a memo Minter didn't receive. When the 90's rolled around and the Tramiels cast their net for developers willing to work on the Jaguar, they caught relatively few fish with Minter being one of them. The resulting collaboration allowed him to get his hands on the extremely dormant Tempest name and show the world what a Tube Shooter could be.
Groovy
The result is one of the very small number of Jaguar games that anyone might remember. At its core, this is just Tempest, you move a ship between two-dimensional lanes wrapped to resemble a three-dimensional shape. The graphics are still in the vector style and all the tube shape variants from the original make their return. Yet, the game options have been expanded and the presentation has been revamped into something much more…stylish. Yet, those expanded game options boil down to three similar flavors of Tempest and a nightmarish competitive mode. For the three modes (Traditional, Tempest Plus, and Tempest 2000) I tend to go with Geometry Wars Retro Evolved as an analogy. You know how that game had original and "evolved" modes? That's how it works here, with Traditional literally being Tempest, 2000 adding all the new gameplay elements, and Plus acting as a weird in-between mode.
Those new gameplay elements serve as a straightforward modernization as much as anything else. Various power-ups are available, there are weird first-person bonus levels, and stage warping. This is less important than the changes in presentation. The sound effects have been improved, the visualizations made more dynamic with trippy color gradients and movements, and floaty text pop-ups occur when you perform certain actions. A thumping techno soundtrack pulls all of these elements together into the strongest vibes you're going to see on these early 32-bit systems. Because you're concentrating on the punishing early arcade gameplay, you end up letting the sights and sounds wash over you like a particularly out-there drug trip, which was almost certainly the intended effect. There's really no other game like this from the time, at least on consoles, so this would have been a one-of-a-kind experience only available on the Jaguar.
It looks better in motion
That isn't to say there aren't issues with the thing. The biggest problem, which ends up ultimately being a dealbreaker, is that lane movement feels bad. The original Tempest was designed around the use of a knob controller which, in case you weren't aware, is not a feature of the Jaguar controller. D-pad movement has never been great for this kind of game, though Tempest 2000 does what it can with only partial success. Lastly, I have to mention the two-player mode. It's kind of superfluous, but too bonkers to not bring up. If you can scare up another person to play with you, the splitscreen multiplayer battle mode features one player on either end of a tube stage shooting at each other. The game moves fast enough that any semblance of tactics or skill gets drowned out in utter chaos. This mode is an unmitigated nightmare to such an extent that I have to admire it for the sheer audacity of subjecting players to that kind of torture. Even still, I enjoyed my time with this thing more than any experience I've had with the 3DO, as low of a bar as that is to clear.
One of the more famous game development stories from the 90's is the rise of Id Software and their role in the creation and refinement of the First Person Shooter genre. The personalities of guys like John Carmack and John Romero are famous, with anecdotes about early Id taking on a borderline mythical quality. There's a book, multiple documentaries, and supposedly an upcoming dramatization about them. It's a whole thing. As such, I ain't touching any of it. Instead, we're here to look at the Jaguar port of Id's original FPS, Wolfenstein 3D.
Simply, this thing was a big deal when it hit shareware in 1992, and it's the foundational game of its genre from which all others followed. Yet the year is now 1994 and this port isn't even the first console FPS. That doesn’t even include other efforts to port Id's catalog to previous gen consoles, since both Escape From Monster Manor and Iron Angel of the Apocalypse came out on the 3DO several months before this. That isn't even to mention that the PC market for this genre had decidedly moved past Wolfenstein-clones and firmly into the Doom-clone era. In fact, Doom II would be released a couple of months after this thing. In that way this would have been something of a throwback for anyone in the know. In that context, this release is a complete afterthought and forgotten as such.
I already made the 'mein laben' joke, so I got nothing
Yet, in the narrow context of the Atari Jaguar, this is a massive deal. Besides name recognition, this is actually a very well-done console conversion for a genre that had been prickly at best to translate to consoles. This, among other games we'll get to, is something that Atari could have pointed at to showcase the power of the Jaguar and its dual 32-bit processors. This game looks and feels like Wolfenstein 3D. The frame rate feels the highest of any console shooter of the time, and the gamepad controls work well enough for the relative simplicity of the game. As an individual experience, it's better than anything that could have been found on either of these 32-bit consoles at the time it came out. That's not to say it's a one-to-one port, the levels have been simplified and likely wouldn't hold up in a side-by-side comparison. Still, as someone who hasn't played Wolfenstein for a while, it seems close enough.
But there's still that wider context. Good games on the Jaguar are medium sized fish in a very small pond. The FPS genre was moving so fast at the time that this game would have been antiquated. Everyone who had the disposable income for a Jaguar likely had a PC and had played either this very game or the more advanced Doom by this point. No one bought this port, and it left no impression. We're going to run into more extreme instances of these same positives and negatives when we get to the Jaguar port of Doom, so I'll save the lengthier discussion for then.
Time to Never Having Seen A Football Game: 11 Minutes
I was going to start this off with a joke about Amiga developers being the only ones willing to work on this console, but I think I came up with a real reason for the phenomenon. Commodore had a lot of mindshare over in dreary Albion both under the Tremials and after, so it's easy to imagine that the family had more extensive connections in the British development scene than anywhere else. That makes sense to me and works within my conceptualization of this era of Atari existing solely to poach business from Commodore. Anyway, I bring up the Amiga because Brutal Sports Football is the most offensively Amiga-ass Amiga game on the Jaguar.
The concept is that of a fictional sport in the vein of something like Mutant League Football, with structure and play vaguely reminiscent of Football (actual), Rugby, and Football (Soccer) but which comes across as being designed by a European who had only a loose grasp on the concept of American football. A match consists of two teams of seven who try to move a football into goals on either side of a field, with the ball capable of being either passed or run. The gimmick is that this is also a 2.5D Beat 'Em Up where you pick up weapons on the field and whack away at opposing players during play. It's all very cartoony by modern standards, but the violence is explicit enough that it might have inspired a few clutched pearls back during its original release in '92.
These character designs were certainly a choice
The aesthetic matches the jumbled gameplay. There's an oddly rote feeling mishmash of post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy junk, where the teams consist of dwarf looking vikings and fantasy creatures who are all Mad Max-ified cyborgs. I was nonplussed by the mild rudeness of it all, but then again I'm not a 12 year old British kid with only an Amiga to keep him company. I've been talking about it in terms of the original release because the Jaguar conversion is basically ok. It controls moderately bad and there's some occasional hitching, but it does play better than contemporary conversions on the 3DO like Soccer Kid or what have you. That's somewhat of a running theme I'm starting to notice with the Jaguar. The games all run and look fine, but there's nothing substantively going on that would be worth the price of admission.
That really sums up this game. There is multiple tournament, single game, and multiplayer modes with multiple teams of fantasy weirdos to choose from, some basic team management mechanics, and a basically coherent gameplay loop. It checks all the boxes for qualifying as a minimum viable video game and nothing more. What kills it in the end is that the damn thing isn't fun. The basic act of moving the little guys around, fighting, and handling the ball feels bad. The throws never go where they should, ball stealing is inconsistent, and the pick-ups all kinda suck. Also, any tactical considerations with weapon pick-ups and player damage go out the window because you by necessity are constantly changing your controlled player, and it isn't really possible to set-up plays or do the kind of planning you would want from a sports game. The whole thing is kind of a drag, which I suppose is to be expected.
Now for the big one. If there's one game anyone who knows the Jaguar existed could name, it would be this one. It also had the longest and deepest impact of any game on this system, the effects of which we're still feeling even in these modern times. Then there's the fundamental concept, which is the whole thing. A person could probably throw together a multi-hour video essay on the history of Alien and Predator crossovers, and I'm sure someone has. On top of all of that is the bizarre detail that this is the first breakout game from Rebellion Developments, who have had a wild ride over the last thirty years and are known now as the Sniper Elite people and owners of 2000 A.D. This game shouldn't be as significant as it is considering that 2/3rds of it is trash. Though, that last part is completely normal for the output of a British studio in the 90's.
So, both the Alien and Predator franchises were owned by 20th Century Fox back in the 80's. Aliens was hit big in '86 and Predator was a major success in theaters the next year. Fox had landed on two completely unrelated and highly successful Action/Sci-fi/Horror concepts at roughly the same time, and such successes demanded merchandising. All the more so since sequels to both movies were in the works to be released in '92 and '90, respectively. The upshot of this was that Dark Horse Comics came into possession of both licenses at around the same time. Someone there had the bright idea of making a story where Aliens and Predators fight each other. This was an objectively good idea and the resulting 1989 miniseries, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator, gained immediate traction. This was followed by more comics, novelizations, and, of course, video games.
It's a stand-up fight AND just another bug hunt at the same time
The first video game adaptation was a truly awful Beat 'Em Up, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator, which was released for the SNES in 1993 and rightfully forgotten by everyone. This was accompanied by an even more forgotten Pseudo-Metroidvania Game Boy release. Early '94 saw the launch of the arcade Beat 'Em Up that everyone actually remembers, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator. That finally brings us to our game of the moment, the uniquely titled Doom-style FPS, Alien vs. Predator. This wasn't the first game in the franchise, but it's the one that left the most lasting impression. That impression has long been interpreted as, "the marine campaign is cool but the other two are ass." It shocks me as much as you for that piece of received wisdom to be 100% correct.
That brings us to the game itself. There are three campaigns, one for each faction. Each one features its own texture palette, combat loop, and a couple of unique gameplay mechanics. The marine needs to collect keycards and guns before escaping, the predator has to manage an invisible honor stat to unlock weapons on the way to killing the Alien Queen, and the Alien can set up respawn points on the way to rescuing the Queen. In an odd quirk, the campaigns aren't level based. You're dumped into a multi-floor combat maze and left to wander aimlessly until you find your objective. It's almost run-based in its set-up, and each campaign could probably be completed in less than an hour by someone who knows where they're going. On paper, it sounds like only one or two steps up from Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, and in many ways it is.
The predator cloak piss filter, just like from the movies
The part that makes it stand out is the atmosphere, specifically in the Marine campaign. The technical limitations around sound design and draw distance are utilized for effect by having the minimalism create tension. The other important factor is the fragility of both the player and the xenos who are aimlessly wandering around. Combat is less frequent than other shooters of the era and correspondingly more decisive. It was enough that the game got a good jump scare out me while traversing some air ducts. Games from the 90's rarely have that effect on me, so that's something. I'm not going to go into the other two campaigns, because they're borderline unplayable trash. That leaves us with 1/3 of a great game, which is better than most of its peers.
This might sound like faint praise, but it was good enough for this thing to be the highest selling game for the Jaguar, at roughly 50,000 units. That's a very small number, but also an almost 100% attach rate, so it's like the Mario or Halo for this system. I'm not sure if that was enough to break even, but it did signal that Rebellion was onto something. They would later try again with the concept on the PC in the post-Half Life era with the groundbreakingly titled Alien versus Predator. That one is the most well-regarded thing in the entire Alien vs. Predator multimedia franchise, which means very little. That franchise was kept alive through the 90's by the video games and novelizations until 2003's creatively titled film adaptation, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, which is, uh, a cult classic? Maybe? It's certainly something. Anyway, Rebellion spent most of that decade making questionable project decisions before returning one last time to the well with 2010's throwback-titled Alien vs. Predator. People tend to forget how aggressively mediocre that game was because of how poorly things went for the Aliens franchise in the proceeding years.
So, what does any of this mean? Not much. It's cool when individually cool movie monsters fight each other, and the Jaguar was probably the best d-pad based console for First Person Shooters. If there are any two things you can take away from this blog, let it be those.
I Think I'm going to maintain a mostly positive attitude on the Jaguar going forward, at least until I run into Bubsy. Let's get our Ranking of All Jaguar Games set-up and filled out.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of Saturn and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
In this series I am attempting to play through every game made by FromSoftware in a journey to discover why all of them are bad and identify the specific ways in which they are bad. I recommend doing what I did and start from the beginning.
As we saw in the last entry, the first King's Field landed on Japanese shelves in December 1994 with a dull thud. Sony had low confidence in what was an obviously janky game and the marketing for it was practically non-existent. From what I can tell, Naotoshi Zin and his crew of developers had come off most of a year working under crunch conditions without any expectation to break even on their project. The time from finalizing the game code to the end of 1994 was spent working on their slapdash game engine for potential non-game 3D rendering uses. The idea was likely that they expected to immediately bounce out of the game industry. Yet, it looks like FromSoft and Sony noticed the slow burn of consumer interest sometime in late December or early January, and that would have been when Zin made the call to rapidly push forward with a follow-up to King's Field.
We can only guess why Zin chose to have his team crank out a sequel with only six months of dev time. Maybe there were concerns that word of mouth would die out if they waited too long for a follow-up, or maybe the need to quickly recoup the costs sunk into standing up a game development team was more dire than anyone knows. Regardless, King's Field II was released a little over seven months after the original with seemingly as little fanfare. Like with the original, I haven't been able to find any kind of marketing materials for this thing from the Summer of '95. FromSoft would have almost certainly attended the Tokyo Toy Show in June, showcasing alongside the rest of the second wave Playstation and Saturn games, but they weren't a big enough deal for any surviving documentation to float over to the English-speaking internet. The upshot is that the game and some third-hand translations of interviews conducted well after the fact are all we have to go on for this period.
Toshifumi Nabeshima, Shinichiro Nishida, and Yasuyoshi Karasawa. Nabeshima will be important much later.
What we can discern is that the creative team at the company had become a bit more structured and formalized by this point. For all I can tell, the main creative direction of the two King's Field sequels fell to Shinichiro Nishida, at least according to him. I would go so far as to say Nishida, Yasuyoshi Karasawa, and Hiroyuki Arai are the key players in guiding early FromSoft's design philosophy, but only time will prove that out. Really, all we can solidly take away from what few details we have is that the first half of 1995 was probably a living hell for the development team at FromSoft. Let's see what got produced under those conditions.
Music & Sound Effects: SOUND KID'S, Corp. (Koji Endo, Kaoru Kono, Yasushi Kawakami)?
Office Staff: Minako Gotoh, Noriko Ozaki
The Game
Going off the minimal plot from the first game and the few paragraphs in the instruction manual, the story so far is that the kingdom of Verdite has had a persistent monster and magic problem, leading to the assassination of a good king by his evil brother and the excavation of a graveyard built on ancient elven ruins. That led to the events of King's Field, where our boy John Alfred descended that excavated cave of horrors within human comprehension only to find the good dragon god Seath, the OP Moonlight Sword, and the now dead evil king's eviler son who had gone and turned himself into the evilest tree. John takes the most sensible course of action and kills everything, thus ending the game. The backstory for this sequel fills in that John got proclaimed king upon returning to the Verdite capital, because why not, and ruled as a super good and cool king for some number of years. Now, the Moonlight Sword has been stolen and monsters are pouring out of a cursed island sitting in the middle of a giant lake bordering the kingdom. This isn't a mystery, though, because everyone knows the evil wizard Necron stole the sword and is on that island, named Melanet. After a Verdite military expedition ends in the expected "never seen or heard from again", John has tasked his bestest friend in the whole wide world, our player character named Alexander, to go to the evil island and sort everything out. Alex gets shipwrecked by sea beasts enroute to Melanet and washes up on its shore possessing nothing but his wits, which is where the game kicks off.
That's more plot than matters for the game experience itself. Also, the writing in the manual, events of the previous game, and opening text crawl of this game contradict on a few points. That can very easily be due to shoddy translation, intentional mysteriousness, or both. Knowing FromSoft, it's likely both. Regardless, we start the game on a dark beach with no idea what anything is or where we are. Unlike the first game which starts the player in a straight hallway, we start here in an open area with a wall in front, instant death behind, a midgame boss to the left, and the main path to the right. With this we can already see the beginnings of FromSoft's house style.
This fella is literally a five second walk from the initial spawn, and it will one hit kill you
The entire starting area, which we eventually learn is the Western Beach, is here to introduce us to the various technical and design changes in this game. First, you're technically in an outdoor environment with a skybox and everything, so I guess good on the dev team for figuring that out. Next, the paths available for the player branch early and often. This thing was designed with non-linearity in mind, and it throws you in immediately. This zone also feels big and open, even though the walkable area is limited, which will be a running theme. You will also find some verticality to the environment within the first few minutes, which seems to have been a point of pride among the devs. That discovery will likely coincide with learning about the relatively strict fall damage. The boys at FromSoft got a bit carried away with this, though we'll touch on that more later. Some players might see the giant squid guy a few paces to the left of the starting point and try to fight him, which invariably leads to instant death. That big guy is the Giant Kraken and he's a midgame boss that kills low level players. Unlike the last game, there is more than one boss fight here, though all but two are just inflated versions of regular enemies. Remember the weird room last time with the big enemies? Imagine if their health inflated with their polygon count. There are six of those big chunguses (chungi?) in this game with two being reused. Finally, if you go in the correct direction from the start, you'll encounter a random old guy fishing in the monster infested waters; talking to him will give some much needed context for what's going on. There are significantly more NPCs on this island than were in the royal graveyard. They're also more spread out and talking to them is actually important for progress.
You don't need to hurry
In addition to using the same game engine, the combat, menus, magic system, inventory, equipment, and levelling all work the same as last time. The difference being in quantity, with about three times as many spells and roughly 50% more equipment. The movement is still pretty bad due to framerate issues, which we'll talk aboutlater, but the addition of a run button adds both faster traversal through the levels and fun new ways to die horribly. While we're on the subject of dying horribly, the first major landmark in the Western Shore is a big Minecraft looking lighthouse across the instant death water from where you start. There are a couple of harrying paths you can take to it, and once you get there the first elemental crystal is waiting at the top. Here's the thing, remember that fall damage I mentioned? The stairs up the lighthouse are narrow and spiral around the sides without any railing. In addition to that being a clear OSHA violation, it's extremely easy to accidentally fall off with the imprecise movement. That wouldn't be an issue if the fall damage wasn't severe enough to immediately kill a low-level player after the 1/3 point up the stairs. That's a bit absurd, and from what I can find the team was disappointed with how the handful of drop points in the first game worked out. I suppose they thought that if they were going to add more verticality than it should be more realistic. The result is the game teaching the player very early on to not fall off anything at any point, which turns out to be something that you very much should do at several points throughout the game. We will return to the topic of needing to throw oneself down various holes.
Verticality!
Now to address what you find at the top of that lighthouse. The method of acquiring magic has been altered from the first game. Before, an NPC would teach you a type of magic and you would get new spells as you levelled up. There were eight spells in total and the whole system was sloppily implemented. Here, you learn magic by finding unique elemental crystals across five flavors. Each elemental flavor has four spells of increasing severity, with 20 total, and only one can be equipped at any given moment. You start this game with the same low-level light spell as the first, and the other 19 spells are learned through using those crystals which are either squirrelled away in various corners of the island or rewarded from boss fights. The fire crystal at the top of the lighthouse is likely to be the first one you find in the game, giving you the basic Fireball spell. Remember that you didn't get that until halfway through the first game. This is much more fleshed out with a higher variety of spells providing more gameplay options in the late game, though gating that core mechanic behind hidden collectibles has its own problems. I played this thing using a guide and maps and still somehow missed a couple of crystals.
Notice how I tempered my praise of the improved magic system by including the phrase 'late game'? Do you also remember how magic wasn't useful for the first half of the last game because of the limited MP restoration? Well, good news first: in this one, magic isn't useful for only the first third or so of the game. The bad news is that while magic could be used in a limited capacity during the first half of KF1, there is just about zero way to restore MP for the first third of KF2. I ran through my initial MP while in the starting zone and didn't use magic at all for three or four hours afterwards. That's very poorly balanced resource availability and is also why I'm not going to mention magic again for a while.
You need to remember to use these in the inventory to get the spells
Anyway, the western beach introduces some new MoBs, such as bastard dragonflies, bastard fish, normal krakens, and innocent slimes alongside our old friend the maneating plant. There are a couple of side areas you can potentially find your way into containing midgame enemies who will, as always, kill you instantly. I should also mention that the first secret room you can reach (this time you have to press X to go through the hidden doors) contains a skeleton that kills you. I guess it's going to end up as a running gag for FromSoft to put midgame skeletons next to the starting area. After being murdered a sufficient amount, you can make your way through a hallway and up a staircase to reach the next section of the map. This is where we get to talk about the main gimmick of this thing.
After the initial load, there are no other loading screens in the game. The core idea underpinning the design of KF2 is that it takes place in a seamless, intricately interconnected game world where you have immediate theoretical access to 80% of the environments. You would recognize the concept from Dark Souls. In fact, this game is where the idea came from. Though, this being an early PS1 game, there are significant trade-offs that FromSoft had to make to implement the concept. Instead of having distinct and separate floors in a dungeon, there are distinct and internally complete zones which are connected to each other by hallways, stairwells, and slow-moving doors. It struck me as being like Tony Hawk's American Wasteland or an early Dynasty Warriors map. Yes, you don't have the loading screen, but you spend an equivalent amount of time travelling through featureless corridors. This has been a common technique in 3D games even to this day, though the connecting sections are shorter now to match reduced load times. You know how games will have you do a bespoke animation to squeeze through tight spaces to reach the next area, or when you need to wait for an NPC to open a door? Those are more elegant implementations of this type of design. I'll have more to say later regarding the actual layout of the world, so for now keep in mind that playing the game involves backtracking and fast travelling (I'll explain later) quite a lot.
These hallways have the additional benefit of being visually uninteresting
After exiting the starting zone, two village areas, one north and one south, become available. The north village is somewhat of a dead end at this point, but it's the closest and the combination of an accessible shop and low-level graveyard areas makes it the most reasonable place for new players to get their bearings. There are more or less four villages in the game and most of the NPCs are found in them. Most of these idiots aren't important for progression, but they add more flavor to the world than what we saw in the previous game. A couple of them also provide some of the only humor in the series, such as our boy Al who loves him some soup. The game progresses a bit more in the south village, where you can find the key vendor and the small mine. That area is called such because it's the smaller of two mines in the game, in case you couldn't guess. That area is mostly there for early levelling and to house a weird wizard guy who is used for some late game item swaps. The NPCs in these areas provide a little bit of unimportant world-building, letting you know that Necron controls the island, they're all stuck there for reasons, and the only way to earn a living is to mine Verdite ore, which is becoming increasingly scarce.
'That dude can put down some soup. - Justinr258
The main thing to note for this side of the map is the introduction of two new enemy types: soldiers and termites. There are humanoid enemies with spears or bows littered all over the island, and I guess they're part of Necron's army or something. They're also extremely annoying to deal with in the early game, as they short-circuit the standard combat loop by having semi-random attack patterns and much longer range than the player. You might think this provides variety and challenge, but the randomness of it all combined with their having a possible attack pattern that instantly kills you makes them an annoyance more than anything else. Next, the termites. The special thing about these little jerks is that their hitboxes are very close to the ground, which forces the player to fumble with the awkward down/up camera controls to fight them. Both of these enemies are obnoxious, and they are the most prevalent MoBs in the game.
After some wandering and dying you'll eventually reach the prison area, where you unknowingly need to find the jail key, free an NPC, talk to him until he gives you an extremely important item, and then find a secret door in an otherwise inconspicuous wall to gain access to the fountain area. This place serves a similar role to the fountain in the first game, and it's the closest thing to a hub area you're going to find. I'll go into how this is poorly done later, but for the moment know that when you first arrive there are three canals feeding into it, with only one activated. This is feeding blue water, which restores HP, and the other two canals can send red water, which refills MP, and green water, which cures status ailments. If you get all three going at the same time the fountain fills with gold water, which does all three. The canals are each activated by having a specific item inserted into a corresponding pedestal, and that item locks in once placed. Conveniently, the mysterious item the prisoner gave us is one of those, with the last one found in a random hidey-hole later on. The fun part is that the canals aren't labelled or visually differentiated in any way, so I activated the status cure canal instead of the MP canal that I desperately needed. This whole thing is an obscure pain, and yet it is the single most important thing in the game. That importance stems from the crystal flask items you acquire throughout the journey, which can be infinitely refilled at water sources. These are the conceptual origins for Estus Flasks. You need to have a dozen gold potion flasks on you going into the endgame, so you're going to have an extremely bad time if you never figure out this mechanic. This continues the trend in these games of the most important content and mechanics hidden away while the critical path is littered with dead ends and junk.
You have to refill each flask one at a time
Back to the prison, the door just beyond that leads to a branching intersection. One path leads to the central village and the other to the Big Mine. The Big Mine is a mid/late game area that will kill you at this point. There's no in-world signposting and you choose the path while under fire from two archer enemies on raised platforms. It shouldn't surprise you that I initially chose the wrong path. After a soldier gauntlet you can eventually get to the central village containing a much-needed shop and crystal vendor, but you can't get in until you find a young boy who has wandered off somewhere. You're told that he probably went into the termite nest, which sounds ominous. Because the shop is blocked off, you'll have to go into the termite dungeon and first boss fight only with what you looted or brought from the South village, which is a considerable walk back the way you came. That termite nest is conveniently nearby but inconveniently is only entered through a one way drop. Even more inconveniently still, it's structured as a disorienting loop and filled with a crap ton of termites.
This is likely the point where casual players hard bounce off the game because the Termite Queen boss isn't possible to defeat if you don't use the specific cheese strat of wedging yourself between her and the wall while wailing away like there's no tomorrow. You need to do this because the boss, who's just a giant termite, is stationary in an alcove with only her head sticking out like our boy Giant Kraken. The room in front of the alcove features infinitely spawning termites who'll harass you while she slaps you around with her mandibles. Wedging yourself in the nook between her head and wall puts you outside the small termites' patrol radius and keeps you away from most of her attacks. Once she's dead, you find the lost kid just kinda vibing in the alcove behind her. I guess the monsters are cool with everyone but you, so I don't know why the kid needed rescuing.
Just hanging out, minding her own business
Up to this point, the game has used locked doors and encounter design to funnel the player along a critical path. The character and equipment level needed to kill the Termite Queen is high enough that afterwards most of the island becomes accessible without incurring the penalty of instant annihilation. That means there are several things that become feasible, opening the game world and achieving some of Nishida's intended non-linearity. With the kid back home, the vendors in the central village open up, letting you finally convert crystals that are found in random chests around the island into flasks which, again, are absolutely necessary. The termite nest also contains the second fountain activation item, so that can now be dealt with. The combination of flasks and an operational fountain means this is where magic comes back into play. You should have also picked up enough gold along the way to start affording keys from back in the south village, which makes some previously inaccessible chests lootable. This is all supposed to subtly encourage the player to schlep back to the western shore and explore the mid-level areas that had been bypassed. This is also where I took the opportunity to smack around our Giant Kraken buddy and loot the cave behind him. One of those areas is a small skeleton base, accessible by throwing yourself off a specific catwalk. Remember what I said about fall damage? This is the point where you need to unlearn the painful lessons from the beginning of the game and start yeeting yourself off anything that doesn't send you to a bottomless pit. Technically the critical path doesn't require it, but you're gonna have a real bad time if you don't get the items found at the bottom of various drops.
When you don't duck and weave
I was being overly generous saying that the game opens at this point. While it is possible to get to the Big Mine and temple area, you're probably not going to make it to the bosses of those zones. The actual correct route at this point goes through Harvine's Castle and the eastern shore. So, Harvine was apparently the ancient king who tried to lay claim to the island and was responsible for most of the ruins, including a big castle at the center of the map. That castle is now overrun with way too many fire demons and skeleton wizards, but it has to be navigated to lower the bridge connecting the central village to the eastern shore. That eastern shore zone contains what is technically supposed to be the east village, a ton of graveyard areas, an obnoxious central canyon, and Leon Shore's house. "Who's Leon Shore?" you might ask, "he's the only important NPC in the game," is the answer you won't figure out until it's likely too late. He's necessary to craft the game's ultimate weapon in a process that is very poorly signposted during the late game. He's not home on the first visit, though you can talk to his spooky ghost mom for incoherent lore. The only person who is home can be found in the east village, a small girl who tells you that all the adults went to work in the Big Mine, including her father who she hopes returns safe. Like with the lost boy, I assumed the father was extremely dead.
This area has the most instances of needing to throw yourself off things, as there are plenty of useful items to be found. This is also the first area where most of those places you fall into have no exit back to the main area. This creates a soft-lock situation if you have not already engaged with the fast travel system, so now I need to explain how that works. Every save point has a pedestal next to it in which you can slot one of three different keys, labeled Moon, Star, and Sun. Each key corresponds to items you can acquire called Gates, which are labeled in the same way, and using those items will teleport you to the save point with the corresponding key. So, you can have three save points with keys and teleport to any of them from anywhere with a moderate MP cost. If you're poking everywhere and talking to the right NPCs at the right times, you'll end up gaining the Moon Key/Gate during the early game, Star in the mid game, and Sun in the late game. Of course, this thing is incredibly oblique about how any of it works, but it is absolutely necessary to have available when adventuring down holes and off ledges.
If you hit the bullseye, you get the worst magic sword and an easter egg. If you miss, instant death.
After all the running around and looting in Harvine's Castle and the eastern shore, it isn't immediately suicidal to tackle the Big Mine. The special thing about this zone, other than the poison cave and bastard Earth Elementals, is the bifurcated nature of the level. FromSoft has now caught up to the design skills of T&E Soft by adding poorly implemented mine cart rides to the experience. The first half of the level contains the entrance from the prison area and the exit to the temple zone, with two different minecart tracks connecting to the mine system itself. Fast travel is handy here, as there is no convenient way to leave the mine once you enter. Also, even though it isn't technically on the critical path, it's still necessary to loot the mine for everything it's worth. Aside from being dark and confusing to navigate, there are the two previously mentioned points of interest. You can check off the 'Poisoned Area' space on your FromSoft bingo card, because like a fifth of the mines deal constant poison damage when you exist in them. You can visually distinguish these areas by the worst wall texture imaginable. Second, at the bottom of the mine is an area filled with the second worst enemy type in the game. The Earth Elementals are big ol' dinosaur dirtbags who have too much health, deal too much damage, and like to gang up on you while blocking narrow passages. I ran past most of them trying to get to the items at the end of the caves, only to run into the third boss of the game, who is a Giant Earth Elemental. Because those creeps are already pretty big and hard to handle, I didn't initially realize I was fighting a boss until after I killed the thing. So, the most out of nowhere difficulty spike in the game is accompanied by the boss fight with the lowest increase in difficulty compared to the surroundings. Fantastic.
Too big for the screenshot
For as much as the Big Mine sucks, going through it powers up the player character sufficiently to deal with the third to last zone of the game and all the nonsense accompanying it. This zone has three main areas, a fire mini-dungeon, an ice mini-dungeon, and the elf shrine. I've seen these areas referred to in a couple different ways, so for the sake of consistency I'll call them all temples. You enter this zone through a standard soldier lobby spiced up with our old friend, the egregious swinging blade trap. Even though you can technically weave your way through the blades, you aren't supposed to, and the resulting sequence skip provides no benefit whatsoever. You're supposed to meander your way through the fire temple, find the small prison area, get poked and prodded down a central hallway, and go through the ice temple to defeat the boss at the end. The fire temple is a hassle reminiscent of Harvine's Castle and isn't worth writing home about. Though, the small prison area is extremely important because that's where you find Leon Shore. If you free him he'll head back to his house, and you should talk to him after dealing with this zone. In the central hallway there's an eccentric endgame vendor just kind of hanging out in a random side room for some reason, and I mention him because doing business there is kinda essential for equipping up in the late game. The ice temple contains some yeti-shaped ice elemental enemies who aren't particularly hard to deal with at this point and the boss is of course a big one of those. The whole reason to go through this is because the hallway leading to the endgame is frozen over and that ice wall only melts by killing the Big Ice Elemental. Not that the game has any signposting for this.
The ice elemental is made of the same texture as the ice walls. Which, sure, but it still looks bad.
With the path open, you could technically charge through to Necron if you have your druthers up, but we know by now to scour all corners of the map first. The elf shrine has a one-of-a-kind and extremely annoying key/rotating cog puzzle mechanism to open the door, but there's important loot inside so it should be dealt with. It's also full of ghosts, but those enemies are more funny than dangerous because their AI was programmed with a hard invisible boundary that doesn't quite reach the doorways of their rooms. That's a long way of saying that if you stand in the right spot they'll fly up and stare blankly as you whack away at them. After looting the shrine, which is more of a graveyard, for all its worth you can go to the next zone and struggle through the opening soldier gauntlet to the one save room in order to put down a fast travel key. Now it's time for everyone's favorite late game busywork, backtracking and sidequests. At this point, the key vendor can be fully bought out, almost all inaccessible parts of previous areas can be accessed, you should through yourself down any remaining holes, and all chests can be opened. Also, the weird wizard in the small mine can be bartered with for a few important items. Out of everything though, Leon Shore should be checked on, this is because it's now time to do the most obscure side quest possible to get the best sword in the game.
Did I mention these guys constantly grunt at you and float just outside of sword range?
I'm just going to lay out the quest steps and let the convoluted mess speak for itself. First, you need to get a statue of Seath. Leon's ghost mom will give you one if you talk to her and there are two more hidden around the game; these statues act as extra lives if you're wearing a specific piece of equipment. Next, you need to rescue Leon from that prison I mentioned earlier, and then talk to him. You then need to talk to the girl in the east village and then Leon again. At some point in this you get the amulet that lets you use the Seath statue. You shouldn't use it on yourself, though, because you need to go to the Big Mine to look for that girl's father. Turns out he's that partially mummified corpse you might have come across earlier in the poison cave. You need to use the amulet on him and then the statue (this is the only time you do this kind of thing to an NPC) to revive him. Next, head back to the east village and talk to him then back to Leon. At this point you will need to have picked up a specific stone from the Elf Shrine so that you can hand it off to Leon to make into a sword. You then need to leave for an indeterminate amount of time and come back to talk to him, at which point he'll tell you that Necron made off with the sword. You then continue the endgame as normal and after the Necron boss fight you'll get the Dark Sword, which is the best in the game. I shouldn't need to tell you this is all poorly signposted or explained in-game. So much so that I missed the last step in the questline, even though I was using a guide. The good news is that the Dark Sword is not necessary to beat the game and the second-best sword, also found in the Elf Shrine, works just as well. This is as good a spot as any to throw in that even though the sword magic system from the previous game is here, and also follows the same 60-60/80-80 tier system, it isn't in any way needed and I didn't use it once.
There's also a talking giant skeleton with surprisingly important lore
So, after the standard trudging back through every area of the game, it's time to get it over with. Though, as one last piece of business, there are a couple of extensive side areas forking off from the boss room where you can find the dumbest possible Wizardry reference. Some of the side rooms contain random high-tech stuff and big 'ol specimen tubes. Most of these contain the demon enemies that we might recognize from the explosion gauntlet that was KF1's final floor. However, two of the tubes contain elves, who I guess are getting the magic juice sucked out of them or something. You can talk to them for deep lore, but at the risk of exposing yourself to story elements that could not matter in the least amount. Short version, turns out Necron is doing the bidding of the evil dragon Guyra and using the island' magic to do evil or something. With this last explorable area done, it's on to the boss rush. That's right, in a game where all the bosses have just been big normal enemies, we get to fight four more before even seeing Necron. First is a Big Knight, who is an inflated version of an enemy found in Harvine's Castle. Next is our old friend the Big Earth Elemental, then the Big Ice Elemental again, because why not. Finally, there's a Big Demon, who is one of the more annoying fights of the game due to his squirreliness more than actual difficulty. After that the big doors open into the actual boss arena. Now, a funny quirk of this game is that if you walk out of this area to refill your flasks after beating the boss rush, you have to go through it again to open those doors. This means you'll probably need to do all six of the endgame boss fights in one run.
The demons are overpowered, which is compensated by their trash AI
That little kick in the shin is made worse by the Necron fight itself. After entering his boss room, which I guess is a coliseum, he'll say some evil stuff and then come at you. This is the first in the long tradition of FromSoft bosses who are just proportionally normal guys in large, round rooms. Also in that tradition, this little jerk outclasses the player in just about every metric other than hutzpah. It's easy to go from full health to dead in a couple seconds should the wrong attack pattern hit. Maneuverability and blocking aren't a thing here, so you're only option is to kill him before he kills you. It took me several tries and I don't know how I eventually did it. If you had done all the steps in the Dark Sword sidequest, this is where you would receive it. With the main villain down, all's that left is the actual big bad, the dragon god Guyra. Remember Seath, the dragon who was vibing next to the final boss in the last game? Guyra is his evil twin or something.
The boss that kills you instantly
To get to His Scaliness, you need to hop through an interdimensional portal and go through a teleporter maze. This wouldn't be a bad JRPG from 1995 without a teleporter maze. Luckily, it isn't a big maze. Unluckily, it's filled with cyborg versions of various enemies, with cyber termites being the biggest hassle to run past. I say "run past" because remember this all needs to happen in one run and none of these cyber idiots is worth the trouble. It also doesn't help that this area looks like a backdrop from Tron, probably so that they didn't have to make textures for an evil dragon dimension. Whatever the reason, it's disorienting. After running around long enough, you'll eventually stumble on Guyra's boss room. Remember how the Termite Queen and Big Kraken were just large enemies crammed in an alcove that whacked at you while smaller enemies nibbled your heels? I hope you liked those because that's what the Guyra fight is. The one twist here is that you can't hit him with magic until the little orbs floating around the room are killed, since they'll absorb any magic you shoot out. That gets annoying because the little shits spend most of their time loitering out of sword range and must be lured in with yummy magic spells. The game of course doesn't indicate in any clear way that this is what you need to do. Once they're out of the way, you can dump everything you have into Guyra from a distance and get it over with. Once he dies there's a short cutscene where you pick up the Moonlight Sword he was sitting on and leave. The ending text crawl has some stuff about saving the world and what not, but was it truly worth it?
Guyra really needs to see a dentist
How To Design A World Map When You're In A Hurry
Before unpacking all the surprisingly little going on with King's Field II, let's take a moment to scrutinize the world map Nishida and company thought up. I couldn't find any visual representations of how all the zones fit together, so I used my unparalleled artistic abilities to make one.
While I think my notation is self-evident, I'll still define the different elements. Each box represents a distinct zone, with each arrowed line representing a literal connecting passage. The red dot is the starting point, the capital S marks are for save rooms, and the animal symbols represent bosses. I tried to place the save rooms and bosses as close to their relative positioning in their zones as I could.
Looking back at it from a high level, it seems that more thought and effort went into designing the first half of the game and the rest was just kind of slapped together without as much care. It should go without saying that shoving most of the boss fights into the back third of the game doesn't produce a balanced experience. Also, the last few zones could have easily just been independent floors in a traditional dungeon, which would have saved the trade-offs that came with their 'no load' philosophy. Then there's the design of the zones in relation to how the in-game maps work. Below I have an example of the in-game map of the starting zone next to a legible map of the same.
The focus on having stairs and multiple floors incorporated into the zones broke the mapping system that had been baked into the game engine, and they compensated by just overlapping everything. While this is technically functional, it's practically unusable. Everything about the level design is emblematic of overambition. Unlike with KF1, there were ideas about distinguishing the various zones and non-linear interconnectivity, but it proved to be more than FromSoft was capable of handling. This is certainly less amateurish than the first time around, but I wouldn't go so far as even calling it a journeyman effort.
Reference Material
I needed fewer reference materials here than last time, with it boiling down to a usable map and a guide that can be referenced for the broad strokes of the critical path.
King's Field II is more video game than the first, which is the minimum bar a sequel should cross. The polygon count is higher, there's a larger variety in enemies and boss fights, more combat options from the new weapons and spells, and significantly more creativity in the level and encounter design. For a Dungeon Crawler, that would be more than good enough if the core gameplay were any good. Sadly, this thing moves and feels even worse than its predecessor. The ambitions that went into the development of this game came at the cost of technical stability. The framerate is bad, but not consistently so. At any given moment, depending on how many polygons the engine thinks it might need to render, the framerate can fluctuate anywhere from 5 to 30 fps. This leads to a bizarre and disorienting effect during combat where the game jumps randomly between slow and fast motion, requiring the player to gain an innate sense for the unstable passage of time on top of the animation and attack range shenanigans carried over from the first game. Combined with the ugly texture work and uncontrolled texture warping, you end up with an experience that can only be physically tolerated for at most a couple of hours at a time.
Additionally, while FromSoft generally and Nishida specifically learned a great deal about game development and design from making King's Field, they still only had a basic grasp on the fundamentals. That isn't a great place to be in when deciding to make something more technically demanding than anything yet made on its system. On top of that, this thing was thrown together in six months of what I can only imagine to be hellish working conditions. Also, from what I've been able to find, the code pipeline that they had hacked together in early '94 was wildly insufficient for the task at hand. My assumption at the beginning of this write-up that the company needed to climb out of a money hole following the slow initial sales of the first game is the only reason I can imagine for why they would put themselves through a half year of severe crunch after a previous nine months of severe crunch. Even just another three or four months of development time would have likely resulted in a far more playable video game than what they released in July of 1995. This could also involve their inexperience with planning game development projects. I think this is the last time I will be able to cite their inexperience as a reason for some of their decisions.
...or at least until the next game
By the time this game released, FromSoft would have likely realized most of their cut from the almost 200,000 sales of the first game. I can't find sales number for this thing, but I would guess the total Japanese sales would have been somewhere between 160,000 to 200,000 units. I specify the region, because ASCII Entertainment had the bright idea to localize this game for the North American and European markets in 1996, where it seems to have sold somewhere around 160,000 additional units by the time Armored Core was released. Both games combined probably brought in well over a billion yen in revenue off half a million in sales for Zin and company between the end of '94 and the end of '97. I'm terrible at foreign exchange, but that probably translates to somewhere between $10-15m in 2023 money over three years. That would be enough to keep the lights on for a small technology company, and that's exactly what it did. This is likely why they were able to take a full year to rebuild their game engine and develop King's Field III a bit more carefully. We will see the result of that extra tlc next time.
As a final note, we should consider how this game was received outside of Japan. The II at the end of the title was dropped, since there was no interest in porting the original game, leading to a similar modern inconvenience for archiving like what we see with the Final Fantasy numbering scheme. Aside from that, the hilarious Doom-clone speculation I showed you last time was related to this game. I found the EGM and Gamespot reviews, and it's clear none of them finished the damn thing before publishing their write-ups. That might explain part of the reason for the sentiment being all over the place with, for example, Sushi X giving it an 8.0 and Greg Kasavin giving it a 6.7. I'm inclined to agree more with Kasavin because, regardless of any other bias, his review reads as though he put in more than an hour. That's all in comparison to Famitsu which apparently gave it a 35/40, though I can't find the text and I also don't take their old reviews that seriously. I'm going to call it an overall positive but muted critical response.
The hell is 'VR Feel' supposed to mean?
There's an old line about pre-Souls FromSoft games, something about how the same 70,000 weirdos in the U.S. would buy every game and no one else would notice. In reality, the number was more variable, but the sentiment holds truth. Starting from this point, most FromSoft games will receive international releases and find a niche just below the radar of the rest of the game playing public. We'll see over time how Zin would make use of this small-time success, but for now we must move on to the last part of the original King's Field trilogy. Was time and practice enough for this team to make a decent game? We already know the answer: no. Why? Because All FromSoft Games Are Bad.
Sources
I reused some of the sources from last time, with special attention to the most helpful Reddit post of all time.
A bit of housekeeping before calling it quits. Since King's Field II saw a U.S. release for the Playstation, that puts it inbounds for my main blog series, All PS1 Games In Order. While I haven't yet reached this thing's release date in that series, I've already played and written extensively about it, so this will likely count for when I eventually catch up. As such, that means I will need to rank this game against every other PS1 game, though my memory will have faded by then. So, I'm going to rank it now and let the anachronism languish on the list. Without further ado, I'm slotting it at #55 of 102, between Hardball 5 and Epidemic. I feel dirty putting it that high, but FromSoft gets to benefit from Genki's love of making bad shooters. I'll continue with these anachronisms for all FromSoft's PS1 titles.
I streamed my entire misadventure with this game over on my Twitch channel, which are archived on YouTube here. The first installment can be watched below.
I'm asking that everyone reading this please contain their overabundant hype, because we're starting this month off with a middling, forgotten Tennis game. Oh, and don't pay any mind to the release date, I didn't feel like covering this in the last installment. The only genuinely interesting thing I was able to get out of this one is the randomness of its developer. Imagineer was/is a Japanese game studio that started life in the 80's importing and translating American games such as SimCity and Lemmings. When they branched out into their own original development in the mid 90's they started with games that aretoo obscure for me to describe. Virtual Open Tennis appears to be their first game to have gotten any amount of international release, and likely played a role in giving them the room to make the series they are most known for, Medabots. I know absolutely nothing about the Medabots franchise, though it appears to still be going. They never really set the world on fire, but they're still around which is something.
Tennis in spaaaaaaaaaaace
As for the game, there's very little of note going on here. You have the by now expected single match, tournament, and two player modes with the welcome addition of a pretty good practice mode. The gameplay itself is typical of the genre, right down to questionable acceleration in player movement. I'm also as bad at this thing as I was at the contemporary V-Tennis. Speaking of which, these two Tennis games had just about simultaneous launches on competing systems, making them a good test case for comparing these consoles. The problem is that I have a hard time even remembering V-Tennis, since it is so unremarkable that all knowledge of it escaped my brain weeks ago. Digging back through my notes, the only thing I can say for certain is that this game looks worse than its PS1 competitor. If anything, Virtual Open Tennis looks more like a polygonalized Genesis game. Though both games have the quirk of the racket's hitbox extending noticeably past the model. I'm not even sure which of these I would recommend since both are going to go down the memory hole as soon as I publish this post. Maybe this game edges out just from the practice mode. Regardless, we can all agree that Power Serve 3D Tennis is the absolute worst.
We last saw this thing in Part 020 of the PS1 series. Even though this Saturn version was released about three months after the PS1 version, this is largely an identical experience. The only difference I noticed is that it runs worse here, with more slowdown than I remember, and a noticeable loading pause before boss fights. For those reasons, the PS1 release would be the recommended version if you're for some reason choosing between console ports of this game.
Really, the primary difference here is that the extra three months puts this port of In The Hunt as coming out after the arcade release of Metal Slug. Remember that this game was made in '93 by the team at Irem who would quit to form their own studio, Nazca, and build on what they had been developing without corporate interference. I'm not sure if putting out the home port of their previous game before or after Metal Slug makes more sense. As far as I know, it took a while for that series to build a fanbase after release, and it wouldn't be until 2001 that one of those games would come out on anything other than the Neo Geo in North America. I'm guessing it didn't matter what Irem did with this game, since it likely would have been just as forgotten either way. That's a shame because this ought to be better remembered as a "Metal Slug Zero".
Oh hey, it's the first Sega Sports branded Basketball game for the Saturn. They missed the previous year with NBA Action '95 coming out on the Genesis, because I guess the Saturn wasn't important enough to warrant the effort. But now Sega has their very own Basketball game to go up against Sony's NBA ShootOut. Remember ShootOut? I for one try not to. Let's see how these two compare and whether we can glean anything about the relative quality of the consoles from this comparison (spoiler: we can't).
On the surface, this has all of the standard modes and options we've come to expect from Basketball games of the era, so on the surface it's normal enough. As is usually the case, the experience takes a turn for the worse once we get into a match. First, this thing doesn't look particularly good. The polygons are noticeably jagged, the animations are jittery, and it's tricky to keep track of the ball. That last point is due to the two biggest problems, this thing uses a down-court camera and there is too little UI letting you know which player you're controlling at any moment. I've gone off on this type of camera angle before since we've seen it in both NBA in the Zone and Slam n' Jam 96. I'm looking forward to when games stop doing this because it's just awful. Think about it like this, when the camera is looking down-court it has to move to follow the action, which means up to one half the court can be behind you and out of sight. Also, being an early 3D game, there are depth perception issues along the axis extending away from the camera, which in this case is the hoop you're trying to shoot at or defend. This creates problems where your character can easily fall off the screen playing defense and shot distance can be hard to determine on offense. Compare this to a side-on camera angle, like that used in NBA Live and ShootOut. Less of the court falls out of frame as the camera pans and the depth issues are on the thin part of the court. There a clear cut good and bad way to present basketball, and this game falls on the wrong side.
OH GOD YOUR FACE
Other than the camera, there's no visual indicator of who you're controlling for defense and the controls generally feel unresponsive. Playing this game is a hassle and never at any point enjoyable. These are problems shared between Action and ShootOut. Since Sony's game has technically better graphics and the correct camera angle, I'll have to give it the edge, but at this point we're choosing between the worst of the best and the best of the worst. Not that any of this mattered at the time, NBA Action received little attention or fanfare and likely undersold compared to its Genesis predecessors. There's also an odd thing with Sega trying to make this a yearly series in the mid 90's but having a different studio work on each one. There isn’t any real creative reason to do that, so it seems to me like this franchise was a rambling catastrophe. That conclusion is supported by the fact we aren't going to see the next and last NBA Action until the end of the Saturn's lifespan, missing the window for the '97 season and jumping straight to ‘98.
Hey, remember Skeleton Warriors? You know, the 2D Action game based on the failed early 90's cartoon? The one that's a knock-off of the sDold-style Castlevania games? Well, no one at the time seems to have paid much attention either. We last saw it in Part 023 of the PS1 series and it is, so far, a frontrunner for "Most Surprisingly Mid Game of 1996". Of more pressing concern for us is the Saturn version being just about identical to the PS1 release. I played this one most of the way to where I left off last time and noticed no meaningful difference. That leaves extremely little to talk about. Actually, I'm still kinda baffled as to why this thing even exists.
It's unclear why Neversoft cut work on their Genesis game using this license in favor of making something for next gen consoles. The show went off air in late '94, and even though Sega's 16-bit consoles were winding down, they still could have gotten it out in early '95 and done about as well as this thing on the PS1 and Saturn. Maybe doing it this way secured more funding from Playmates? There's nothing in the gameplay demanding NEXT GEN POWER. The only stuff I can see that would require 3D processing are the action figure-esque character models and the extremely poor vehicle sections. I dunno, man. The more I think about it the more bizarre the existence of this game gets.
We last saw our friend Frank Thomas not too long ago in Part 025 of the PS1 series. This was another surprisingly good game and the best Baseball game I've yet seen on these consoles. Happily, this version is basically identical to its PS1 counterpart. Sadly, that leaves us with almost nothing more to say about it. Let's see, apparently Frank Thomas got his nickname "The Big Hurt" from a commentator who said he put the big hurt into a home run ball. I was going to say that’s kinda dumb, but all sports nicknames are at least a little dumb when placed under enough scrutiny. Why do athletes get nicknames anyway? I can see why it would've happened in the age of radio, but there doesn't seem to be much of a point these days. I suppose sports are very tradition oriented in general, so it could take longer for habits to die out after they stop being useful. This is becoming too mysterious for my taste, so I'll leave you with a reminder that winners sometimes cheat, and cheaters always win. But not Frank Thomas, he would never.
Man, it's been a while since Part 008 of the PS1 series. In reflection, I think my writing has improved but I've definitely become much less committed to the whole premise/playthrough/graphics/sound/conclusion format that I tended to lean on. Maybe I'm burned out after playing so many similar or repeat games. Maybe Crystal Dynamics broke me as a person. Can we ever go back to who we used to be? Should we even want to? Is any of this even worth it? What the hell are video games, really?
Anyway, Primal Rage is still a bad 2D Fighting game with novel claymation sprites and an exceptionally misguided notion about "what the kids are into". It's the tribal post-apocolyptic game where you play as dumb t-rex and King Kong knockoffs. Going from memory, I think this Saturn version looks a bit sharper and moves smoother than the earlier PS1 release. That's not saying much, but it does technically make this the best console port of the game.
It really was all downhill after April, huh? I don’t have a lot of hope for what we’re going to see after Nights Into Dreams comes and goes in July. Oh well, let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
I streamed all these games, and you can watch the archive below.
In a month of ports, we kick the show off with a showstopper. We last saw Psygnosis' first good video game back in Part 010 of the PS1 series. Now, you might be wondering two things. First, Destruction Derby was inconvenient for my joke, so I ignored it. Second, yes, Psygnosis was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony in 1996 and no, I don't know why they were allowed to put wipEout on the Saturn. Regardless of the reason why, Psygnosis could have ported all of their PS1 games on a six-month delay and it wouldn't have changed anything in the end. The upshot is that we get to see how one of the Playstation's early marquee games handles on the Saturn.
Looking back at my initial impressions a year ago, the first release of this game fit into the same pattern of big name first-holiday releases for the PS1, a lot of earned technical hype coupled with largely miserable gameplay. wipEout survived that trap better than a lot of its peers through sheer force of style, which I will reiterate still holds up. The full experience is here warts and all in this version, though I felt like I had slightly better control over my hover car with the Saturn's d-pad than on the PS1, but that could just be in my head.
I guess we now have our second-best looking Saturn racing game
It still boggles the mind why anyone would design a racing game with a Mario Kart style tournament structure where you fail out of the whole race sequence when you don't get a podium. It's more egregious when the AI drivers accrue tournament points when they finish below third, but the player gets booted entirely. I don't recall the 16-bit Nintendo racers resorting to that shenanigan, so this restriction isn't solving any kind of intractable problem. If you only have 12 or 18 tracks in your game it's ok to let players continue after finishing last, they're gonna replay the damn thing regardless. The sad part is that even with the overly floaty controls and prohibitive structure, this game is still the best futuristic racer on any 32-bit system at this point.
It took me about ten minutes after launching Iron Storm to realize I was playing a Daisenryaku game, which means we now have to unpack this whole thing. Gendai Daisenryaku was a strategy game released for PC-88 computers in 1985. The easiest way to think about it is to start with the later Famicom Wars, turn the square grid into a hex grid, and use modern day units and factions. It isn't particularly playable by our standards, and Famicom Wars would end up being a better video game in just about every way than most entries in the Daisenryaku franchise. When I call it a franchise, I'm underselling it a bit. There have been 75, and counting, releases of Daisenryaku games or off-shoots in the last 38 years. They tend to switch between modern and WWII settings and are cheap enough to produce that SystemSoft has been able to keep it going for this long relying on a niche but loyal fanbase. This might all be new to you, unless you're a meganerd, because approximately three total entries have received officially localized releases in North America. Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy is the first of those.
Before discussing the gameplay or the audiovisual experience, we have to address the subject matter. This is a WWII strategy game, which even by the mid 90's was a well saturated genre. This even included games that suspiciously flirted with Axis apologia. The thing with the Daisenryaku games is that they don't really try to hide their Japanese nationalism. Expressing that through exuberance for the JDF is one thing, which the franchise also indulges in, but expressing it through an outright celebration of the worst parts of the Imperial Era is quite another. There's been a bit of whitewashing over the decades, so I'll put a reminder here: the Japanese Empire from the death of Meiji to Hiroshima killed tens of millions of people in a genocidal rampage through east Asia, and was a state that belongs in the highest category of historical villains along with Nazi Germany and the frickin' Mongol Empire. My opinions get progressively spicier from here, so let's leave it at that.
I want everyone to take a minute and really examine this faction select screen
That goes a long way to explain the, let's say, limited appeal of the Daisenryaku franchise outside of Japan. So then, why did Working Designs decide to try their hand at importing one of these games, and why this one specifically? I have no idea, the overall game industry paid very little attention to this thing. What I do know is that they felt the need to donate $0.50 for every copy sold to the National Holocaust Museum. On one hand, that's admirable and certainly better than what SSI was doing, on the other hand that's a strong indicator of either some kind of pushback from some advocacy group or internal misgivings about the subject matter. If you're a company importing a video game with such content that you feel the need to pay off the Anti-Defamation people, maybe you shouldn't. That likely forms part of the reason why Working Designs didn't touch this franchise again. There's a lot with the content of this game that could be picked apart for its horrible imperial revisionism, but for the sake of time let's assume you know nothing about history and want to know how this thing is as a video game.
In the end it's just one of these
Without sociopolitical elements, it's fine. If anything, it plays better than Panzer General, with better designed menus and UI. Also, unlike Panzer General, the combat sequences are rendered in polygonal 3D that are kinda neat for twenty minutes before players inevitably them off. Most of the units make sense and the mission design didn't feel unfair. If you've played an Advanced Wars game, you could hop into this with minimal adjustment. Back to the polygonal sequences, those are the only interesting looking parts of the experience. I spent a decent chunk of my time with this thing thinking it was a lazy port of an MSX game or something. This is an original title for the Saturn, but it looks and sounds more primitive than the cross-gen Koei strategy games we've seen. The Daisenryaku games don't have much of anything to differentiate themselves outside of the right-wing nationalism, as far as I can tell.
I don't even want to rank this game, being tempted to just ignore its existence. Yet, I ranked Panzer General so I might as well stick it somewhere with an asterisk. At least the translation is largely competent, which is something Working Designs usually gets in trouble for, so there's that.
While we're on the topic of games that look and feel like cross-gen releases, here's what is by far the most egregious cross-gen release we have yet seen. The Earthworm Jim games are Run-and-Gun Platformers for 16-bit consoles that mark a nadir of the early 90's preteen-targeted grossitude aesthetic. I have no desire to become a scholar of youth-oriented media in the 90's, so I don't have a better descriptor than that. The titular earthworm isn't quite a Poochy type of character, nor is he that close to a Gex or Bubsy. It feels like he was born from a similar mentality to the Nickelodeon slime, except more so. I have zero affinity for this series, so let's see where we end up.
There's an aggressively immature and "hello fellow children" vibe right from the start, which I'm guessing is a continuation of nonsense from the first game. We're thrown into the opening level without much fanfare to figure it out, which was standard for 16-bit games. I would call the gameplay standard, you run, jump, and shoot. If it weren't for the brazenly terrible level design choices effusing every screen of this thing. The first level features a buttload of silhouetted foreground elements obscuring most of the action, because I guess that's what the kids were into. There's also a pig carrying puzzle mechanic that is extremely mediocre, and I guess the joke is that the pigs are heavy because they're fat…and because they’re pigs, I guess. This is clearly supposed to be a comedic game, what with the snot rope grappling hook power-up and non-sequitur sight gags, but I don't know man. I don't think I would have been amused by this junk when I was the intended age, there's just nothing to thematically latch onto.
Not seeing what's going on is totes poggers -- wait, wrong decade
On top of everything else, the actual feel of the platforming and shooting kinda sucks. I made it as far as the over-extended gag about old ladies and stairlifts in the second level, which also served as a weirdly demanding platforming challenge, and checked out. The core gameplay loop, puzzles, and minigames are all basically miserable to interact with. I don't even want to address the artstyle, audio, or gags because I'm hoping they'll go away if I ignore them. None of it is actively offensive like the previous game, it just makes me tired. I can make it through an hour of average early tactics gameplay, but after only 15 minutes I was exhausted by the puerile mediocrity of Earthworm Jim 2.
sure
Oddly enough, Earthworm Jim the brand saw more success than many contemporary also-ran video game mascots. This worm eventually wound up with four games, a comic tie-in, two season cartoon, guest appearances in other games, a toy line, and one of the more inexplicable followings I've ever seen. I can't identify what, if any, secret sauce there is in this series. Even cursory investigation shows that these things were made as explicitly cynical cash grabs by Playmates before the rights got sold around. On top of that, the series creator seems to be a massive pile of shit, the lead programmer looks like an ok guy and this could probably be left out of his resume without hurting anything, and of course Tommy Tallerico has his name on this thing. It also doesn't help that the two games after this are infamously terrible. Everything about Earthworm Jim 2 specifically and the Earthworm Jim property generally is deeply cursed.
The first of our rapid-fire check-ins with the subpar multiplatform games which littered the back end of May. We start with the most mediocre game available, Magic and Kareem's Wild Ride. We saw this thing not too long ago in Part 023 of the PS1 series and this version is about as identical as possible. After giving it a second pass, I can say with greater confidence that this game is as terrible as I initially thought. The core act of playing basketball feels terrible, and the camera angle kills all sense of depth perception, which is kinda necessary. I would say I'm glad to never have to look at this game again, but the original Slam 'n' Jam for the 3DO is out there somewhere, waiting to pounce when I least expect it.
Now we get to revisit what might be the worst 2D Fighting game of the generation, which we last saw in Part 019 of the PS1 series. The mechanical problems which condemned that version are present here, do-nothing 00-23 difficulty selector and all. The Saturn version gets the added problem of being on a system that is specifically geared towards 2D Fighting games. That puts all of the visual and control issues in even more stark relief. I mean, this game looks worse the crisper the image gets and putting this thing on the Saturn's six-button controller accentuates how bad the combo system is. I'm going to say this once and move on: PC-based Fighting games were a mistake.
This was the most painful of the batch. We last went to Wrestlemania all the way back in Part 006 of the PS1 series. At the time, it was one of the first Fighting games I had looked at for this project, and it was a breath of basic competence after suffering through Battle Arena Toshinden and Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. I thought so highly of it at the time that it had to be included in my mulligan a few weeks ago. Yet, after everything I've seen, this game just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. When it was the second 2D Fighting game released for either the PS1 or the Saturn it stood above its peers without question. Seven months and a boatload of CP System II conversions later, it doesn't stack up against most other available options. This was a real bummer of a discovery to make. Also, I think something went wrong with making the jump to the Saturn. Maybe I'm going crazy, but it felt off, like the AI had been messed with or something. Visually it's identical except for the lower quality shadows. I dunno, all these ports feel wrong somehow.
Man, Acclaim was just projectile vomiting these things, huh? We last saw this budget Soccer title in Part 018 of the PS1 series. I was up and down on it at the time, but I've held a broadly favorable view of it before going into this version. Now is the point where I became convinced I had lost my mind, because this game is terrible. It looks worse, animates worse, and feels so much worse than what I remember. I think the camera spends more time zoomed out in this version? I don't know, maybe I just have standards now for whatever reason. Maybe something happened to the movement acceleration in the conversion? I'm so tired. This is the worst version of this game and that's a bummer.
It's never a good sign when a console has a frickin' Daisenryaku game as the only exclusive for a month. We've also seen a month that saw only three games followed by a month consisting of soggy leftovers. Oof. Let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
We're starting with the original version of a game we've already looked at on the PS1 and Saturn. As of now, we have covered every console version of the first four games developed by Crystal D, who were determined to spread the misery around to as many places as possible. Maybe I need to do more in-depth research about these chuckleheads.
This being our third go around with Off-World Interceptor, I super have nothing new to add. Even though the later ports tacked the word 'Extreme' onto the end of the title, they're 99% the exact same as this original release. For whatever reason, I had the idea in my head this whole time that the shitty joke track layered over the FMV was the big change made for the 'Extreme' ports, and the original had the unaltered live action footage. Turns out I was completely and totally wrong about that. The FMV is sadly as unchanged as the gameplay. That's a real bummer, because these jokes make me increasingly angry every time I watch it. The only differences I could spot are that the 3DO version runs slightly worse and seems to be balanced at a slightly higher difficulty. Those are two things that do not mix well together.
Still don't know what the deal is with these
My issue with the writing came into even sharper focus when I streamed it. If you watch a cheesy movie or any other low quality dramatic performance with other people, either physically or virtually, the tendency is to make fun of it. It's a communal exercise to think of funny or clever goofs, and it's enjoyable even if no one involved comes up with anything good. That's the whole idea behind MST3K, except in that case those jokes were carefully chosen by a room full of writers who watched the footage multiple times. Lazy knock-offs like you see here will have one or two guys watch the footage once or twice and they'll crap out the first things that come to mind. It doesn't help that in this case the voiceover uses a frat bro affect, which only heightens the annoyance. You know, I've complained about this enough times that I might as well show you a cutscene compilation. As a warning, watching it deals significant psychic damage.
There's always at least one game per entry in this 3DO blog series that can be described as 'inexplicable', and that's the only word I can come up with to describe this thing. Basically, Strahl is an old school Interactive Movie in the style of Dragon's Lair but with anime. You might think that's very explicable, right up until I tell you this was originally released on the Pioneer Laseractive. If you know what that is, don't spoil it for the person sitting next to you, this is gonna be a journey.
Pioneer is a moderately large consumer electronics corporation in Japan known mainly for their early involvement with optical media and their current emphasis on car accessories. That first part is of interest to us, because they were one of the biggest companies who tried to make LaserDisc happen. You remember LaserDiscs, right? They're everyone's favorite absurdly large optical disc format. Anyway, there's not a ton of information in English about why, but in 1993 Pioneer put on sale an enormous box called the LaserActive for something like $1000, and it might be the most absurd 'console' ever put on shelves.
Big chonk
The LaserActive is a little more than three times the volume of an original Xbox and three times the weight. The top half is a combined LaserDisc/Compact Disc player and the bottom half is modular, which can switch between Mega CD, PC Engine CD, and karaoke modules. You might think you read that wrong, but Pioneer did in fact do business deals with Sega and NEC to make this monstrosity fully compatible with Genesis and Turbografix games. Trying to explain how this physically works gives me a headache, so read this instead. The main thing to note is that all of the games released specifically for the LaserActive needed to use the LaserDisc player in conjunction with either the Mega CD or PC Engine CD modules. So, any individual game would come with a big 'ol LaserDisc and a smaller CD or maybe even a Genesis cart or Hucard, which made them prohibitively expensive. Because of this bizarre mixed media setup, there were exceptionally restrictive constraints placed on what kinds of games would work on it. This means the 50-odd games put out on the thing during its three year lifespan were all either some flavor of Rail Shooter or Interactive Movie. One of these was Strahl.
Not that Strahl was developed with the LaserActive in mind. As far as I know, it was originally developed in 1985 as an arcade LaserDisc game meant to ride the coattails of Dragon's Lair. My guess is that Data East got in too late and by the time the game was ready for distribution the interest in LaserDisc cabinets had bottomed out. So, Strahl was put on the shelf until an easy publishing opportunity presented itself. It would sit there for a decade. I don't know why they decided the LaserActive was the right platform instead of the earlier CD based systems, but I guess once the work was done to make the game functional on a modern system it wasn't that hard to port it over to the CD format entirely. That's as far as I can reckon how it made its way to the 3DO.
Genuinely clear instructions
With all this build-up, is the game itself anything to write home about? Of course not. The experience consists of an intro cutscene and eight disconnected playable scenes. You access those scenes from a stage select screen where you have three options for the first level and then the remaining six in any order until you unlock the final scene. That makes progression slightly open-ended, and supposedly playing the scenes in different orders unlocks different endings. If you fail a scene, you get booted back to the stage select to try any of the available options again. It seems like you have three lives and if you run through them you start from the beginning. This is a significantly simpler structure than the Bluthimation games, where each scene leads into each other semi-randomly. Strahl is much fairer than those games, which is why it wouldn't have worked in an arcade setting. Continuing from that idea is the generous and clearly communicated input prompts found here. In that regard, the gameplay works more like modern Quick Time Events than in Dragon's Lair; this will be the only time you see me express a positive opinion about QTEs.
I love to evilly lurk
The premise driving the action forward is almost nothing. You play as some guy who is instructed by an old man, who is actually God, to gather seven crystals and defeat an evil wizard or something. The narration implies your guy is supposed to become the rightful king of the land after the adventure, but I got an ending where he seems to transform into some kind of bodhisattva so who the hell knows. The scenes themselves are disconnected from each other thematically, with each usually revolving around some kind of boss fight. That brings us to the footage itself. The animation here is on the same tier as a mid-budget 80's anime OVA. That would have provided a fine counterpoint to 80's American animation, which is generally gnarly to look at, but this is the mid 90's at this point so the entire look and sound of this thing is downright anachronistic.
Overall, it's easy enough to play and you could have an alright time watching someone else play it **hint** watch my stream archive **hint**. Though, I can't imagine paying full price for this thing at release. Also, as a housekeeping note the copyright on this game is 1995, so it looks like the LaserActive release was '94 and it was ported the next year. That would seem to invalidate its inclusion in the '94 3DO line-up, but here's the thing: nothing is real and the world is chaos. As such, I'm putting it on the list and you can't stop me. As a consolation, here's a contemporary EGM review of this game.
This same reviewer gave Rayman an 8.0 so I don't trust anything he says
We last encountered this game with its Saturn version released in September '95. If you're wondering whether this earlier 3DO version is literally the same game, the answer is yes. The only difference I noticed is that it seems to run at a lower resolution and the onscreen cursor doesn't move as well. Even with those minor technical flaws, this still might be one of the better 3DO games we've seen so far by default. That's all I have to say. There are better ways to play Mahjong Solitaire these days and the PC version of this would have been a better choice back in the mid 90's. I've also gone over the history of this franchise, so what else is there…
Some of the alternate game modes are kinda interesting
Right, where does Mahjong Solitaire even come from, anyway? The Shanghai series of video games got started in 1986, but the idea had to come from some earlier source. As far as I can tell, The first documented instance of this style of game comes from an American guy named Brodie Lockard, who programmed the first Shanghai game on a PLATO terminal, of all things, in 1981. He claims to have seen someone play the turtle configuration in real life, but I don't know of any documentation of that being a thing at any point before 1981. As far as I'm concerned, he made it up, which is wild.
Then there's Mahjong itself, which has all kinds of legends around its origins, but no documented evidence can be found any earlier than the 1880's. That's surprisingly young for something so ubiquitous. Best anyone can tell is that it developed as a combination of a kind of card game dating back to the Ming era and dominoes. There are also the similarities between Mahjong and Rummy, which is a rabbit hole I am in no way equipped to explore. I suggest you do what I do and assume every card and tabletop game is less than 200 year old, no matter how traditional it seems. I don't have anything else to say about this…oh, did you know that nice, full sized mahjong sets are stupid heavy? Ok I'm done here.
I already discussed this thing way too much in my Starblade Alpha write-up in the PS1 series. That game is an almost completely straight port of this one, with only some performance differences between them. That might be understating it a bit. While this game has the same old/new graphics option as the later port, the new graphics here cut the framerate clean in half, which is incredibly jarring. In fact, that mode is almost unplayable with its performance problems. I think that's all I have to say on the experience itself. I still don't know the rationale at Namco to initially publish this thing on the 3DO before putting it on Japanese Playstations. The past is mysterious like that sometimes. Anyway, here's a video of some old amusements resellers prepping a Starblade cabinet for shipment to a museum.
It felt like I had a lot of build-up for this game. That's due to this thing tangentially came up when I went through my research on Virtual Hydlide and King's Field. It's almost like I'm closing a loop on bad mid 90s Ultima Underworld knockoffs. That's what Slayer is, in all honesty. It takes the hot new first person free movement gameplay from Doom and adds the AD&D ruleset on top of it. That seems novel on the surface, but it was actually a terrible idea that never had a hope of working out.
Do I need to explain Advanced Dungeons & Dragons? I really don't want to, mainly because I have no affinity for the old Infinity Engine games and my only D&D experience is from playing a 3.5 campaign like 15 years ago. I know that AD&D was the second edition that cleaned up a bunch of the initial bugs in the original version, and that it was the main version for most of the 80's and 90's. I'm not researching it further because of my above stated reticence. I know that THAC0 stands for To Hit Armor Class 0 and is important, not that I could explain it since every time someone tells me the knowledge evaporates from my brain after approximately 80 seconds. It might as well be anti-memetic knowledge. The upshot of all this is that I can't evaluate this game from the AD&D angle, and as such I will assume it's a moderately poor implementation of that ruleset and move on.
Like any self-respecting Rogue-Like, there's basically no plot
What I can evaluate is the game experience itself, which is atrocious. That's in spite of the strong first impression it gives you. The character creator is highly detailed and customizable in a way that generally wasn't seen in console games at the time. Additionally, the difficulty selection is reasonable, and the random seed dungeon generation is a cool thing to see for the time, even if it wasn't brand new tech. Yet, the whole thing goes off the rails the moment you enter gameplay. While AD&D: Slayer does have free movement, that movement feels bad with weird and uneven acceleration. That puts it in an awkward no man's land that isn't the smooth 0 to 60 of Doom, the slow steadiness of Ultima Underworld, or even the consistent-ish 15 FPS crawl of the contemporary King's Field. Every press of the d-pad is mildly unpleasant in this game. That still makes movement better than the combat.
Now we have to touch on this game's fatal flaw. The developers attempted to combine real-time first-person action with the inherently turn-based ruleset of AD&D and it doesn't even slightly work. When you get into attack range of a MoB and swing your weapon, it doesn't matter how you're positioned or where you're specifically swinging at, as long as you are facing the enemy, you'll trigger a dice roll to determine whether you hit (I think this is where THAC0 comes in) and another dice roll to determine damage. Your attacks are on a multi-second cooldown because turns in D&D are abstracted as some short time range. Also because of this, it's sketchy to attempt a King's Field maneuver of walking in to hit and walking back to avoid counterattacks. If you or the enemy are within range at the beginning of an attack the dice still roll.
I forgot to mention the graphics and audio. They exist.
Another consequence of the real-time AD&D implementation relates to the relative strictness around hit rates inherent to the ruleset. You're going to whiff most of your swings no matter what, and if you're underpowered compared to an enemy you'll stand there whacking away doing absolutely nothing. That can be mitigated in a party focused turn-based game, especially with a humane Dungeon Master, but in a single player dungeon crawler it kills the experience dead. There's a magic system that hits better, but you only get so many spells between rests. There's no way to go about the combat that isn't a tedious chore. None of this is even touching the inventory system, which pisses me off just thinking about. In the interest of my own mental health, I'll just say accessing inventory doesn't pause the game and the in-menu cursor is less than ideal.
Not a particularly fun guy
In the end, we have a procedural Rogue-Like Dungeon Crawler with a poor implementation of the AD&D ruleset. It's barely playable, which still sadly puts it above more of its 3DO contemporaries than I would like to admit. As far as background goes, this was the second to last product of the long-time collaboration between the publisher, SSI, and the D&D rights holder, TSR. Previous output in this relationship includes the Gold Box and Eye of the Beholder games. I have no experience with those, and I imagine they're nightmares to try and go back to. I guess SSI used this as a side hustle to fund their faltering Strategy game business. The relationship between SSI and TSR seems to have been acrimonious and I imagine that would make for an entertaining story. I don't know that story and I encourage you to look it up on your own time. Regardless, the 3DO finally has an RPG and I'm glad to have this thing behind me.
With that, we wrap up our first set of '94 3DO games as expected: not with a bang, but a wet fart. These have been the 25 games for which I found release dates when I put together the calendar. You might be able to go on Wikipedia or somewhere and "well actually" me about some release date or another, and to you I only have one response: nothing is true. As such, I draw an arbitrary line here separating these games from the 40 others we have yet to address. Before getting into what happens next, here's an update to the Ranking Of All 3DO Games.
1. Road Rash
…
2. Shanghai: Triple Threat
5. Starblade
8. Strahl
22. AD&D: Slayer
28. Off-World Interceptor
…
39. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Yeah, this was one of the better weeks we've had, overall. What a cursed console. Now that we've dealt with that, what's next? It's easy to forget that there was a competitor in North America to the 3DO, because consumers at the time sure did forget about it. That's right, next time we're going to revisit the Atari Jaguar and its journey through 1994. It shouldn't surprise anyone when I say it's going to be a relatively short journey. So, prepare yourselves, because in three weeks we'll look at Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, and Alien vs. Predator.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
One of those streams covered the games featured in this article. You can watch the archive below.
We start April off with the home port of our third and last post-SFII successor game. X-Men: Children of the Atom originally hit Japanese arcades all the way back in December '94. This would have placed it directly in-between the releases of Darkstalkers and SF Alpha. The timing on this Saturn version was less advantageous, by the time it reached North American shelves both Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Marvel Super Heroes (a pseudo-sequel to this game) had been in U.S. arcades for some months and X-Men vs Street Fighter would be around before the end of the year. Now that I've typed it out, Capcom might have been too prolific with their CP System II Fighters.
In full acceptance that I'm going to sound like an ignorant jackass, I'll attempt to summarize the gameplay developments Capcom worked through between Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha, a period of roughly 16 months. The original Darkstalkers came first and changed up the Super Turbo formula with EX specials, air blocking, chain combos, crouch walking, and super meter drain. Next was this game, which didn't seem to build on Darkstalkers so much as go in a slightly different direction from Super Turbo. Here we see super jumps, rolling after knockdowns, projectile aiming, throw follow-through, and an informally segmented super meter. While those changes seem milder, X-Men also just feels so much faster and chaotic than Darkstalkers, but we'll get to that. Next is Darkstalkers' Revenge, which doesn't change that much from the first, except it walks back the super meter drain which I guess was unpopular with players. When Alpha eventually hit arcades in mid '95, it carried over air blocking and chain combos from Darkstalkers in addition to the segmented meter and rolling after knockdowns from X-men while adding a special counter mechanic. If I knew anything about high level Fighting gameplay, these developments would seem very important and/or controversial. Because I'm not quite that sick in the head, I'll just note that Capcom was busy cooking in the mid 90's.
Who would win, the lightning lady or the guy with a metal skeleton I'll give you a minute to figure it out.
None of that is getting into the weird and wild release schedule of the various home ports for these games, all of which we've seen before at some point, and completely out of order, in this blog series; it seems appropriate that we're seeing the middle game in this line-up last. All this being said, how is the actual game in its own right? It's alright. These Capcom Fighters are fundamentally good. Not just in the controls and mechanics, but in terms of visual artistry, music, sound design, and overall personality they were unrivaled in their genre until Arc System Works got in on the action. Speaking of Arc, If the experience in X-Men stands out from its peers in any way, it would be in the frenetic feel of the matches and density of nonsense happening onscreen. From my limited time, the flow of the fights feels just slightly over the edge of readability and into incoherence. I'm not able to put it into better words, but it feels like a predecessor to the later Anime Fighter sub-genre, and since it was made four years prior to Guilty Gear I can make that kind of statement without getting into trouble. This is also burying the lede on its other, more direct impact. While Alpha and Darkstalkers would go on to have their own series, X-Men is going to lead into Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Capcom, and then the whole Versus meta-series of Fighting games.
I've spent this much space on background info because I didn't make it very far into the game itself. It has all of the features we've come to expect from CP System II ports, with the only notable addition being a group battle mode where two players pick five characters each and have a kind of competitive ladder fight. That's a neat idea and it’s easy to imagine turning that into the 3v3 system we know from the Versus games.
Then there's the subject matter. I would say that I know a moderate amount about marvel comics stuff, though the 90's tended to produce characters and storylines best left in the past. That's why the roster in this game would seem weird to modern players. Let's take a look. We've got Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Iceman, Colossus, Psylocke, Omega Read, Spiral, Silver Samurai, and a Sentinel as playables with Juggernaut and Magneto acting as bosses. Now, those first three are original crew x-people and make perfect sense. The next two seem like kinda second tier x-men but it isn't weird to include them. Psylocke seems like an odd choice; I know she has enthusiasts in the readership but that character has never really broken mainstream. Then we get to the playable villains. I know who Silver Samurai is, though he doesn't seem like an A-tier x-men villain, and I guess it makes sense to put a sentinel in there even if it is generic. Omega Red's inclusion is hilarious and works as well as carbon dating to pinpoint when this thing was made. Then there's Spiral. I had no clue who that was, so I looked her up. Remember when I said the 90's were best left in the past?
So, uh, yeah
About half of these characters and the bosses seem to be included because of their roles in a comic storyline that ran in the back half of 1993, and I imagine the licensing discussions would have taken place shortly afterwards. For the rest: the comics seem to have recently come off a sentinel centric storyline from a few years prior, Silver Samurai was probably the most prominent Japanese mutant at the time, and Marvel was pushing Omega Red as a Very Important Character™ every chance they got. Then there's Psylocke and Spiral. I looked up what the reason could have been for those two, and I wish I didn't. Turns out Psylocke was originally Captain Britain's sister who could pull out a cool laser knife. In 1989 there was a bizarre storyline where she gets kidnapped by ninjas, brainwashed, and physically altered to look like a Japanese woman. That's problematic, and I personally think DC handled it better when they turned Dr. Light into a Japanese woman…don't ask. Anyway, in '93 some writer at Marvel came around and tried to fix that obviously iffy character development by retconning it as a body swap between the original Psylocke and some Japanese ninja assassin lady, with both ending up back in their original bodies…kinda, I think. The upshot is that this was the other major X-Men storyline going on in late '93, and that's why Psylocke is here. Oh, and Spiral was a minor villain in that arc so she's here to give Psylocke someone to fight, I guess. This probably wasn't the best way to fill out the roster. If they had just taken the main cast of the recent animated show, it might have done better in North America. Regardless, I learned more than I wanted from this game and now so have you.
I'm going to jump straight to the conclusion just to get it out of the way, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei is the best game that I have yet played for the Saturn. Being an improvement over its predecessor, which was the previous best game on the system, this is the crowning achievement of Team Andromeda's doomed effort to single-handedly drag the Saturn into relevancy. Some would say that the next Panzer Dragoon game, Saga, would be their pinnacle, but as we will eventually see, that game was too little and too late. Instead, we're left with Zwei, easily the best Rail Shooter of that genre's heyday.
Describing the game is a relatively straightforward matter. Zwei reuses the game engine, structure, and basic gameplay loop of the original. This consists of seven levels, called Episodes in the game, where you play as a guy riding around on a young dragon that generally knows where it's going. There's some freedom to move the dragon around the screen in a few sections, but for the most part you're relegated standing in place and shooting everything that moves. To do that you use either a semi-auto free aiming laser gun or the series standard lock-on shots. This is supplemented with a meter-defined super ability which acts as a screen clearing move. This also describes the first one's gameplay, but here there's the added benefit of improved camera turns and a minimap. The big gimmick are the on-foot sections, where the dragon will run around on the ground for certain parts of an Episode. While the shooting works the same, the mobility and dodge opportunities are hampered, giving a greater emphasis on shooting enemies before they can hit you. Without using continues, a playthrough takes around 30-40 minutes.
Foreshadowing
If that sounds basic and dull, know that the encounter and boss design and better thought-out than any other game in the genre and the difficulty settings are precisely dialed in. Even still, the gameplay serves as something to do while experiencing the artistic and technical showcase infused into every section of every episode. That same sentence could also apply to the first Panzer Dragoon, but the swings taken here are bigger and go further, as you would hope from a sequel. The overall plot is still based on enigmatic vibes more than anything else, though there is more narration than before and a coherent throughline to hold the structure together. This relies on voiceover from the player character, a rustic boy who sheltered and raised a mutated herd animal which grows into the aforementioned dragon. In essence, a mysterious ancient airship destroys the boy's village for unknown reasons, and he chases it seeking revenge while contending with the forces of some evil empire that is also out for that airship. In the end, he and his dragon blow everything up before said dragon leaves him behind with a prophetic vision of the events from the first game. So, this is a prequel origin story for the dragon, who I guess is the actual series protagonist.
That limited story and its hints at worldbuilding through the fake language and captivating visual design are mysterious enough to be intriguing, but still don't leave much to latch onto in its own right. What you're here for is the audio/visual experience of it all. The visuals are not only improved from the previous entry but would have been the best available for 32-bit consoles at the time. This is the most graphically stable Saturn title I have yet seen, with enough polygonal density and a long enough rendering distance to pull off the grand set pieces demanded by the visual design. Everything looks otherworldly and alien, while also being explicable in functionality. A lot of mileage is gotten from the juxtaposition of various visual styles present here. You have the tribal aesthetic of the player character and his home village, the vaguely disconcerting creature designs, the technological sophistication of the unknowable ancient devices, and the aquiline, post-steampunk nature of the imperial forces all kind of mashed together in a way that shouldn't work as well as it does.
See? Foreshadowing
That otherworldly feeling is bolstered by the audio design. While the sound effects are entirely serviceable, the soundtrack is what does the heavy lifting. Even though Zwei lacks the orchestral arrangements of the first game, the composer, Yayoi Wachi, makes use of the Saturn's sound chip in ways that could have been matched by only a handful of contemporary video game composers. I have a difficult time trying to ascribe a musical style to this soundtrack; the closest I get is that it at times evokes some of the later and more esoteric Shin Megami Tensei games. I personally consider that a complement. Of special note for me is the track in the first half of the second episode, The Great Ravine, which you can listen to below, though I would recommend listening to overall OST.
That combination of tight design with audio and visual creative mastery leads to some of the most impressive set pieces I have yet seen from this console generation. Of special note are the first major boss fight and the environment of the sixtth episode. That first boss fight is against an airship, which is on the surface a callback to the first boss in the original game. This time, however, the dragon is running along the ground while the airship flies along all four sides. Most of the pieces of the boss are destructible and will fall off after taking enough damage, including weapons and cargo containers, so I guess this is a heavily armed cargo ship of some kind. As pieces fall off, they will bounce along the ground and potentially hit you, so they will need to be shot or avoided. The amount of stuff that can semi-dynamically bounce around while the airship smokes overhead create an epic feeling spectacle that would have been ahead of its time.
The sixth episode has the player flying along, through, around, and under the antagonistic ancient airship blowing up various parts while dealing with its defenses. The sense of size and physical consistency of the level is complemented by the overall design of the ship and the open sky floored by a far-off sea of clouds. The ship appears on the outside to be bleached white from centuries left out in the sun while also being obviously more advanced than anything else seen in the game, with the interior looking like the dilapidated ruins flown through in the fourth episode. The way it all looks and sounds, combined with the immediate danger of the combat creates a strange, ethereal mood hard to find in console games of the 90's.
It blows up real good
I'm not accustomed to giving out effusive praise, but I feel the need to eulogize Zwei as I would one tragically cut down in the prime of life. See, the Panzer Dragoon series never sold particularly well. The sales data is sketchy/non-existent, but my best guesstimate has these first two games selling well under 1 million units worldwide. We all know how things went for Saga and Orta doesn't seem to have even breached 300k. Funny part is that all four games reviewed well. If this was some middle budget series from a B-tier developer, those number would have been plenty sustainable. Sadly, these games wound up in the unlikely position as the flagship IP for the Saturn. They probably weren't supposed to be, which would explain Sega's late movements to do anything with this franchise. I mean, Bug! was intended to be the next big thing right up until they realized that game was dogshit. The Clockwork Knight games were too old-school in their sensibilities for consumers to care about and, as we will soon see, Nights into Dreams wasn't going to be the new Sonic. Sega stumbled upon the coolest new series of the mid 90's and completely whiffed at using it.
Panzer Dragoon II Zwei might end up being the best, or near-best, game on the Saturn, but it's also the most emblematic example of how Sega destroyed their own console business in the 90's.
While we're on the subject of critically acclaimed flops, let's talk about Treasure. Or that would be what I would say if I was in any way equipped to talk about them. Turns out I know basically nothing about them, and I have no attachment to their games. I've heard of Gunstar Heroes, Mischief Makers, and Radient Silvergun but other than maybe 10 minutes of messing around with Ikaruga twenty years ago I can't say that I've ever played their games. I know they tended to review well and are fondly remembered as masters of the 2D action genre, but I don't have a clear understanding as to why. So, lacking context, let's look at Guardian Heroes on its own merits.
At its most basic, this game is a 2.5D side-scrolling Beat 'Em Up in the classic style. You have a sprite-based character that you walk back and forth along a stage that is three lanes deep. You can jump between those lanes using the shoulder buttons, and usually you can only attack enemies in your lane. You have a standard character selection, with each offering a different balance for combat. That's not too helpful playing alone, but can probably get interesting in coop. That combat works off of a two-button melee and one button magic system, with limited room for combos and specials. The gameplay works exactly as you expect, no more and no less. All the interesting stuff is around the edges.
There's a decent amount of visual chaos
As I hinted above, this is likely meant to be a multiplayer game. It actually reminds me of the much later and likely unrelated Castle Crashers to some extent. The story can be played by, I think, up to four players and there's a kind of proto-Platform Fighter competitive multiplayer mode which supports the six-player controller splitter doohickey that no one bought. That's already relatively full featured for the time, but the story mode has a lot more going on than contemporary arcade Beat 'Em Ups. First, the characters level up between stages, and you can assign basic attribute points. That isn't much but Beat 'Em Ups are generally improved with RPG elements. Second, for most of the game you have an undead knight buddy to whom you can issue basic orders. But most importantly, this thing features multiple branching paths and a simple karma system that work together to create a shocking variety of outcomes in a choose your own adventure kind of way. There are several very different endings and maybe around a dozen ways to get to them. Considering that a playthrough lasts about an hour, players at the time would have been looking at a better content/price ratio than they would have been used to from Action games.
That's not to say the story is any good or well written, however, because of course it isn't. Guardian Heroes has a very basic fantasy JRPG plot with an evil empire, scheming wizards, dethroned royals, and malicious gods that need killing. The only plot element that spices things up a little is the cursed sword which resurrects the undead buddy, though that never really goes anywhere worth going. On top of that, the thing is poorly told through bad, overlong dialogue that went through a, let's say, questionable translation. In fact, the funky English combined with the jokey tone provides a certain camp value which gives the story more charm than it deserves. It balances out somehow to be an ironically positive aspect of the experience.
Oh, word?
That brings us to the look and feel. The visual design of the various characters evokes butt-tier 90's anime, at least for me. The art style isn't of the same level of quality as something like Astal or any of the Capcom Fighting games, but it's still better than the various attempts we've seen at rotoscoped sprites. Almost despite the questionable aesthetic, the thing animates very well throughout, so again somehow the visuals wrap back around to being good. What is unquestionably the strongest aspect of the experience is the music. I really dig what Treasure was putting down with the audio, and I would say it benefits from not having voice acting that would ruin the vibe. As a reviewer, I'm easily swayed by cheesy vocals and/or random saxophones in game soundtracks. As such, I give the music here 10/10. The least you can do is spend two minutes of your life listening to Shuffler in the Dark through to the end:
The only issue I have is the weird difficulty curve where things become completely unreasonable in the latter part of the game. I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a persistent levelling thing for the characters or what, but I got literally stomped out on what seems like either the second or third to last level after having a very reasonable time up to that point. Still, it's not an insurmountable issue and the totality of the experience is still top notch for the mid 90's. It seems that contemporary reviewers largely agreed with me, though it seems to have sold about as poorly as any other Saturn game. That was enough for it to gain a cult following among Treasure fans (who, again, I do not understand) and it received a release on Xbox Live in 2011 with the online multiplayer you would want from it. I think that version might still work on modern systems, which is neat. I'm not going to recommend every Xbox owner go drop, let's see…five dollars? Huh? Nothing's $5 anymore. Well shit, I guess I do recommend everyone go buy the Xbox version, why not.
This was more of a quality over quantity month for the Saturn, which is a refrain made to make losers feel better about themselves. I might be feeling generous after purging all of that negativity last week, which could explain my sanguine ordering in this week's update to the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
Like everyone, there are games I don't enjoy, there are genres that don't appeal to me, and developers whose games I can't stand. This usually doesn't matter too much. I've never enjoyed a single Naughty Game I've played, but there are plenty of other things I can do with my time. I've never jibed with the dungeon design in the Zelda series, but games use a variety of styles for level design. It's normal to dislike some things and like others, everyone has their own idiosyncratic preferences. But then there's FromSoftware.
When Demon's Souls came out, it was easy to write it off as a game for weirdo freaks without begrudging them their niche. Dark Souls was released two years later to universal acclaim, with assurances that it was a much more playable game than its predecessor. That media environment rope-a-doped a young and easily influenced version of me into buying a copy out of FOMO. It turned out it was still a game for weird freaks and video game reviewers had all caught some kind of memetic virus. Even though I was out $60 on unplayable ragebait, I came away knowing which media voices were untrustworthy and the consolation that FromSoft's particular nonsense was unique, and no other studio would replicate it. The weird freaks would over time get the Dark Souls sequels they deserved, and there's nothing wrong with that. Four years later, the world would be burdened with the existence of Bloodborne. There was a similar reaction to it by the game press, but as I was by now once bitten, twice shy, I waited until the accursed thing was on deep discount before trying it out. It was the same result, but that time I was only out $20 for the knowledge.
[REDACTED: Picture of me doing the Youtuber thumbnail face and pointing at Elden Ring box art]
I didn't fall for Sekiro, as the public FOMO pressures were subdued for that one. Then there's Elden Ring. There was the universal acclaim we all have come to expect, but it seemed like everyone who owned a current gen console bought the thing and the word-of-mouth pressures were ratcheted to the highest level possible. Suffice to say it was a Charlie Brown trying to kick the football kind of situation. Looking at this story on its own, you could conclude that I'm just a schmuck who needs to git gud. But here's the rub, these pieces of crap make so much money and have such social media exposure that the tide of copycats has been rising steadily since 2011. It's to the point that Action RPGs have almost completely been subsumed into the "Soulslike" sub-genre. That is the true problem.
I would love nothing more than to rip the various genre conventions of "Soulslikes" which originated as copycats to FromSoft's Soulsborne games to shreds and incinerate the pieces. Yet, I don't want to fight a last stand against the internet without being sufficiently armed. I'm not going to feel prepared without a full understanding of the background behind the development of Soulsborne game design. That requires research, and the first step in that research is to look at the origins of the developer. Where did the studio come from? What is the source of their design philosophy? How did things come to this? The thread of any aspect of history can be followed all the way back into irrelevance, so I'll confine my initial effort to the works of FromSoft. All of this means that I will endeavor to play every one of their games in the order that they were released. I'll keep an eye on design traditions and how they change or stagnate over time. Most of the people who undertake this kind of thing have already fully drunk the modern Soulsborne Kool-Aid, and I've never seen satisfactory analysis from those sources. I will approach this topic with a more critical eye than it is accustomed.
First things first. FromSoftware existed for a while before, unfortunately, getting into game development. We will need to start there before we get to the virtual masochism.
From what I could tell, a man named Naotoshi Zin got into a motorcycle crash somewhere in Tokyo in 1984 or 1986. He apparently received a large cash payout from his insurance provider and spent his medical recuperation putting together a business idea. The fog of time and the language barrier prevents us from knowing more details than that, but he eventually registered a new business on November 10, 1986, under the name FromSoftware, inc. If anyone knows why the company was founded under that name, they haven't recorded it in English. Zin's company would spend the next several years producing business software. I've seen references to agricultural management and accounting software that I have not been able to confirm.
Naotoshi Zin
Regardless of what actually happened in the 80's, by the early 90's Zin was looking to diversify FromSoft's products. Supposedly, the idea to move into video games came from one of the company's software developers, Yasuyoshi Karasawa, who had been messing around with early polygonal rendering programs. Zin was a big Wizardry fan because of course he was and set aside a small team of three or so guys to prototype out some ideas for a PC-98 game. That project fell through, but with the announcement of the Sony Playstation, Zin and his enthusiastic game team decided to roll the dice with that upcoming console. They had apparently spent a lot of time going back and forth on whether to create a mecha or fantasy dungeon crawler, with fantasy winning out fairly late in production. As the story goes, King's Field began serious development in March 1994 and was showcased two months later under the name Crystal Dragon at what was probably the Tokyo Toy Show, which was a predecessor to the Tokyo Game Show.
I don't know how much to trust the few details I have about this time period, so I'm keeping this narrative at a high level. The game was a complete mess for most of its development, with maybe 10 people on the production team who had never made a game before. Yet, the fact that they were trying to make a fully polygonal dungeon crawler was weird enough to catch a little bit of Sony's attention and get them a license to publish on the upcoming console. Sony also seems to have sold some necessary 3D rendering equipment to Zin for 2 million yen during the game's development. Even then it can't be overstated how little the guys at FromSoft knew about what they were doing, and Eiichi Hasegawa was hired as lead programmer partway through development specifically because he had worked on games before. Hasegawa likely had a large hand in making the thing playable at all in time for the PS1 launch.
Eiichi Hasegawa
Even then, the combination of the team's outdated tastes in games, ignorance of design best practices, and a ton of corner-cutting led to the end product being a weird, janky, and barely playable game. King's Field released in Japan on December 16, 1994, exclusively for the PS1. It had no marketing budget, and since FromSoft needed Sony's assistance to physically publish the game, only around 13,000 copies were initially printed. The game bombed with Japanese reviewers and wasn't expected to receive any player interest. It didn't at first, for reasons we will discuss shortly, but it gradually garnered a cult following on early internet message boards. Its popularity gradually increased in the months after release, and it sold somewhere around 200,000 copies by the middle of 1995. This was encouraging enough that Zin and co. immediately began work on a sequel, but that's a story for the future because first we need to grapple with the reality of what King's Field even is or is trying to be.
The game which made its way onto store shelves is a fantasy first-person Dungeon Crawler with free movement. That's a lot of descriptors, so let's start with what that means. Hopefully anyone reading this knows what a Dungeon Crawler is; the old genre was popularized by the Wizardry series and most computer RPGs from the 80's were in this style. The basic idea is to take the spelunking parts of a typical D&D campaign and use the computer as a dungeon master. I spent most of my post on Hydlide talking about the history of RPGs, so read that for context. The first-person viewpoint was a common angle for Dungeon Crawlers, so that's very normal, and when I say fantasy, I mean there's magic and dragons. The interesting part is the whole free-movement thing. What I mean by that is the player can move around however they want, not aligned to any kind of grid or preset viewpoints. This technical innovation was popularized by 1992's Ultima Underworld, which was also notable as being the immediate inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D. Once developers all over the world realized this technique had become feasible, everyone started iterating on it. I've gone into all these minutiae because this specific kind of game had not been executed particularly well on consoles up to this point, and it still wouldn't be for some time, if I'm being honest. For some context, King's Field came out the same month as AD&D Slayer on the 3DO.
Now that we've defined the thing, what actually happens in King's Field? A translated scan of the game manual lays out a very straightforward premise: there's an ancient underground temple turned cemetery which the king of this fantasy kingdom has had guys digging around in looking for magic stuff. One day, monsters appeared in that cemetery and the king keeps sending guys in to clear it out. You play as some dude named John whose father led some soldiers into the dungeon and didn't return, so of course you go in after him. The game starts much like Ultima Underworld with your character standing right inside of the front doors. Like that game, there are a few friendly NPCs to talk to on the first level and a lot of nonsense beneath. Those NPCs on the first level include the groundskeeper, a priest overseeing the cemetery chapel, the lone remaining garrison soldier, a legitimate shopkeeper who I guess services the soldiers, some grave robbers, and an illegitimate shopkeeper who likes ripping you off. There's also a lot of dead soldiers lying around because things haven't exactly gone well. These literally faceless idiots will give small tidbits of lore as you wander deeper into the dungeon, but it all amounts to very little. The first level is also the only place with shops and a healing fountain, so you'll be going back and forth to the starting area pretty often, as was the fashion of early cRPGs.
Ok, I'll admit that Basque Crize is a good fantasy anime name
Those NPCs are kinda necessary for getting past that first floor. There are a couple of simple item fetch quests you need to do before the game fully gets into gear. One of the guys mentions how the garrison scribe ran off with a shiny chalice for whatever reason, and you can find that guy's corpse in a side tunnel with the big cup and a message scrawled in the wall saying to put the thing back where it came from. Through trial and error, you can slot it into an alcove that activates the one healing fountain in the game, which was previously turned off. Then there's the map, which is not immediately available. You meet a graverobber in a random tunnel who tells you that his son went off somewhere with their map. You can eventually stumble across the son's corpse in a hidden room and acquire that map. Finally, in order to get to the second floor of the dungeon, you need to turn off an arrow trap, and to access the controls you need to get the key that opens most of the locked doors in the game on the first floor. The priest has it, though there's no way for you to know that. What you can learn is that someone stole the priest's cross, and he wants it back. When you eventually come across the second shopkeeper, who's located too far into the level to expect any business, he'll sell the cross to you for way too much gold. You have to thoroughly scrounge every accessible area of the floor for all the loot in order to afford that cross. From there you can exchange the cross for the key, which you don't know the priest has, and move on with life. All this stuff on the first floor took me like two and a half hours to do, and the level isn't that big.
There are a few very good reasons for that. First, the movement speed is glacial. Second, the combat takes a while at the beginning of the game. The thing with old school dungeon crawlers is that they have inverted difficulty curves with a spike at the end for the final boss. That means the hardest parts of these games are the first 30-60 minutes. In fact, it's common to have to restart these things once or twice before you figure out the correct way to play the early game. After you learn how the combat system works, your character or party level up a bit, and you get some decent equipment which makes the game much less difficult, with your power level increasing slightly faster than the encounter difficulty. The exception to this is unreasonable boss fights which serve as level/equipment checks. I cannot stress enough how standard these design sensibilities were in the 1980s. So at the beginning of this game, you're made out of cardboard and do almost no damage to MoBs. This is exacerbated by the particular quirks of the realtime combat inherent to this game engine.
You could say he had a bone to pick with me
Pressing the attack button swings a polygonal representation of your equipped weapon across the screen. The full animation takes a good two or three seconds. The hitbox for the attack is on that polygonal model, meaning your attack won't hit anything for a good second after you press the button. Also, every enemy in the game attacks between 2x and 4x faster than you, and the depth perception is lousy. To hit an enemy, you need to be within its attack range, and it's going to smack you at least once or twice in the amount of time it takes to hit it once. Remember that you're made out of cardboard at the start of the game. you're unlikely to survive even the first combat encounter, which will likely be against a little walking piranha plant guy. The way to do any and all melee combat in this game is to start your swing outside the enemy's attack range, walk while swinging into range just long enough for your attack to connect, and immediately back out. Doing this results in the enemy hitting you either once or not at all. Considering that this game runs at under 30 fps, has narrow environments, and the potential presence of more than one enemy at a time, this technique takes some time to get right. Nothing about it is intuitive or taught by the game, you either look it up or trial and error your way around for who knows how long. There's also magic, but you're not going to have anywhere near enough MP to rely on it for like the first 2/3rds of the game. If you hadn't realized by now, this is a bad combat system, even by the standards of the time.
Anyway, once the arrow trap is off you can get to the next floor and start aimlessly exploring around. This point is early enough that there aren't any good healing options other than walking back to the fountain on the first floor. One of the few oddly compassionate design choices in this game is that the central hallways on the first two floors are devoid of enemies, so if you can get out of whatever side area you're in, you will be relatively safe until you can heal. There are also healing items that can help extend your stints through the second floor, but that takes us to discussing the inventory system. As you can probably guess from the game's vintage, there are no item descriptions whatsoever for anything. That means you either have to look up what they do or use trial and error. That's fine for the basic items, like the healing herb or antidote herb which are cheap and plentiful. But as you make your way deeper into the game, you'll come across increasingly rare consumables and other items whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious. The best example is the Phantom Rod, which is a single-use item that will reveal false walls and invisible walkways. You won't know what it does until you use it, and even then, it's not immediately apparent, and you also won't know it's a consumable until you use one. There's also like five or six of them in the whole game. They might as well not exist for all the good they do. Then there's the cursed equipment, which you don't find out about until you try it on. Either you've played a cRPG before and know to save before trying on weird high-level gear, or you screw yourself. The entirety of item and equipment management comes across as half-baked. When a modern game pulls this kind of crap, it's intentional and the game is designed around it; when you see it in old games it's because of time or memory constraints and thus usually not adequately accounted for in the design.
I swear to God this game is just a shitpost
Back to the dungeon crawling, the second floor has a handful more NPCs to deal with. There's a soldier hiding out in a safe room who'll let you know that things went bad on the lower levels and he's the only one who made it out. He can apparently show up in different rooms throughout the game, but I only saw him here. There's a hermit wizard just kinda hanging out in a side cave who'll teach you new magic if you can show him THE TRUTH. There's an item you can find called a Truth Mirror, which explains whatever is in front of you when you use it, that you need to give him. While it is an otherwise necessary item, the magic you learn is the only healing spell in the game, which is vital. Also, you don't know what the magic is before you learn it. Finally, there's a minstrel sitting around at the end of a different side cave who has the item you need to get to the next floor. See, you're cut off from the level exit by a gaping chasm that you can't cross. The minstrel has a harp that will raise a bridge across that chasm when played. While the game indicates that you should find the minstrel, it doesn't point you to the actual utility of the harp. The minstrel wants one of the highest tier healing items in exchange for it, and if you've been poking into every single nook and cranny like I had then you'll have one to hand over. To finish with this level, new and tougher monsters are introduced as you would expect, and traps become more prevalent.
Things become more serious on the third floor. There are enemies who spawn in the central hallway and more of them are capable of throwing ranged attacks around. There's enough of a difficulty bump that it acts as a minor level/equipment check. You're either going to be running back and forth to the healing spring a lot or do what I did and grind infinite spiders on the first floor for like twenty minutes. Even then, your character level is only half the issue, with the other being equipment. That brings us to our next important gameplay feature: hidden rooms. You see, all of the good equipment in the game can only be found in areas beyond false walls. You would know that a wall is false by walking into it and passing right through. There is no other way to find them besides using the aforementioned Phantom Rod. To FromSoft's credit, they wanted the players to be aware of the fact that secret areas exist. The manual directly tells you that false walls exist and on the first two floors there are some areas where the monster AI will patrol back-and-forth through a wall. It would be hard to never realize these things are around, which is good because the critical path requires going through a false wall, though we'll get to that. Besides those, there are like two invisible bridges in the game, one of which is on the critical path. Nothing informs you that these exist, and you're supposed to just know to take a leap of faith. There's a little bit of signposting for the one on the critical path, which is literally two rooms from the final boss, but the other one is only found by throwing yourself into the void. JRPGs had featured invisible walkways before, so maybe Japanese game nerds would have known it as a testable possibility, though the price of experimentation is steep. The game can only be saved at specific save points found in the levels, with only a handful on each floor.
This signposting is like a ten second walk away from the guy
The reason why that description of this game's secrets is important is because the second-best sword in the game is found in a double-secret room on the third floor. If you find it in your first run through the level, it makes the fourth floor so much more reasonable to deal with, if you don't, well…yeah. The thing about that sword, Triple Fang, is that it gradually regens your health and MP, and magic only becomes a viable combat option after equipping it. That's vital as even a low-level attack spell can be important against high level monsters. This is because of how the stamina system works. There are two stamina bars, one for physical attacks and one for magic. Every time you swing your weapon, the physical stamina bar, which is more of a power meter I guess, empties and takes anywhere from one to 3 seconds to refill. You can swing again before it refills, but with a steep damage penalty. The same works for the magic meter, but it tends to refill faster and more consistently. I'll get to a description of the endgame enemies in a bit but suffice to say that the only decent way to deal with them is to stun-lock the jerks by alternating physical and magic attacks. Every time a monster takes damage it has a very short, and usually subtle, stun animation. Because of how long it takes between you being able to land physical attacks, that creates an opening for the monster to use one of their ranged attacks, which you very much do not want the endgame MoBs to use. Firing off magic while the attack meter recharges is the only way to prevent that. But, in order to use magic, you need MP, and the only way to refill MP is either to go to the healing fountain, use the highest tier healing item, or have a weapon with MP regen. Only the two best swords in the game can do that, and you don't get the second one until right before the final boss.
All that is to say you either find the Triple Fang or spend an extra five to ten more hours with the game than you should. Any player who knows anything will make a beeline to that sword first thing after getting to the third floor, after which combat stops being a problem for a while. That's good, because the level design becomes increasingly hostile at this point. Aside from decreasing the number of safe areas and increasing the traps, you start to see more big enemies in confined spaces that you can't run past and more groups of monsters who can gang up on you. Then there's this floor's gimmick. The critical path is blocked by a big stone pillar, and there are four pedestals in side rooms next to it corresponding to the four elements. If you've been thorough you'd have found at least one elemental stone and it shouldn't be hard to figure out what you need to do. If not, then, well…yeah. The thing is that the four stones you need are in four mundane chests scattered across floors two and three with no hint or indication of where to look for them. You could have found one or both of the stones on the previous floor and realized the gimmick, but regardless you're gonna wander around until you find all of them. The only NPC on this floor is the ghost of the king before last who teaches you the fireball spell, which should be the second and most useful attack spell you learn.
Those crosses are save points, which in my (perfectly legal) copy of the game caused a soft crash whenever I tried to use them
So, you wander the big cave loop of the third floor and maybe retrace the second floor until you find the stones. If you aren't using any resource materials or the Triple Fang, this would be exceptionally tedious. Once the pillar is down, though, you can backtrack to loot an annoying false wall maze or go on to the fourth floor. The thing is, once you cross the point where the stone pillar had been, you're not going to have any shortcuts back to the first floor until after you get to the end of the fourth floor. Previously, the exits on the second floor for the first and third were relatively nearby, making it not that much of a hassle to go back and forth to the shops and fountain. Now, going back from the fourth floor will take a significant amount of time and pose increasing danger. That means the only effective way to continue is to be prepared to do a thunder run from one end of the fourth floor to the other and have enough resources left to deal with a miniboss. Of course, you won't know that in a normal playthrough. Having HP and MP regen makes this immediately feasible, so I only partially stocked up before making the run.
A final note about the third floor. The last section is a linear and very long series of OSHA non-compliant bridges with an opportunity to get a replacement Truth Mirror. Doing so requires using the harp from earlier; this is the third and last spot where it comes up, with the second being a small bridge to access a treasure area on the second floor. The game has two methods of crossing chasms, which are used on a combined five occasions with almost no signposting. Anyway, the fourth floor is mostly linear on the first run through, though the various sections have intentionally spider-like layouts. The hallways are also narrow and filled with the largest enemy type, so there's not much running past anything. Another "fun" aspect is that almost every treasure chest or lootable object is blocked off by a bottomless pit trap. This is literally a combat gauntlet. After the first section, you get an antagonistic hallway filled with swinging spikes that hurt quite a lot. Dodging through them in one direction leads to an incredibly dangerous room containing an improved map and a fake shortcut that teleports you to a dead-end back on the third floor. The other direction takes you to an NPC, a dying soldier laying in an alcove who tells you that your father is already dead and buried. Turns out that reunion isn't happening. Regardless, we've already come this far, so on to the next section of the floor. You need to pass through a couple of rooms with the most annoying enemy in the game, which are jumping undead knights who are a hassle to hit. After that is a section that is the same as the first but going in the opposite direction.
I cannot stress enough how annoying these guys are
When you finally get to the big central hallway of the floor, you get to encounter your first endgame enemy, big guys who throw boulders at you. Taking boulders to the face is bad for your health, so the distance with them needs to be closed as quickly as the subdued walk speed allows. The reward at the end of this whole mess is a key that unlocks everything in the game. All of the locked doors and chests that would have been bypassed on previous floors are now accessible, as are the shortcuts on the fourth floor. There are multiple side rooms off that hallway, one of which contains the Feather Boots which you need to cross those bottomless pit traps and access your father's grave, which, RIP, I guess, but also you need to grab his sword or else you aren't finishing the game. You are then funneled into the miniboss' room, who is an evil wizard that transforms into a big gnarly skeleton. He isn't difficult when using the Triple Fang. Now you get to the final hall of the floor and a shortcut back to level one. Sadly, all of the nonsense with the fifth, and last, floor is going to require some explanation.
The first thing to note is that a lot of enemies on the fifth floor like to shoot explosive magic with a large area of effect, and those enemies tend to hang out in groups. This means that while you're whacking away at one the others will constantly try to nuke you. This adds an element of constant danger that the previous floor lacked, so good job on the developers, but it's also incredibly obnoxious. Second, this floor features a dragon and ghost elf lady who you absolutely must talk to if you want to actually finish the game, there is of course no clear signposting about this. To understand why they're absolutely necessary requires explaining the last two gameplay features which I have yet to touch on, character progression and sword magic. Being an RPG, you gain experience points from killing enemies and level up at set XP intervals, with your HP and MP increasing with each level-up. Most of the other granular character stats are determined by your equipment, which is very normal. Though, the special stats are strength and magic. These increase independently of your level based on how many physical and magical attacks you perform and are used to determine your character class and whether you can use sword magic. Using the term "character class" is misleading, as this serves merely as a title determined by specific thresholds for those two stats. You get the highest "class" once both stats go above 60. Note that strength and magic max out at 99. You need to be at that highest "class" and have retrieved your dad's sword in order for the ghost elf lady to use the dragon's magic to turn that sword into the game's ultimate weapon, the Moonlight Sword. Doing this is vital, because the final boss can only be defeated by using that weapon's sword magic. The game of course tells you none of this.
Just kinda vibing in a room next to the end boss
This brings us to sword magic, which is also something the game also doesn't tell you about. There are four magical swords that you can find, with the Triple Fang and Moonlight Sword being two of those. Sword magic is the ability to shoot unique spells using those swords, which is done by pressing the magic button in the middle of a sword swing. This is a bit awkward, but the timing is kinda generous at least. What's less generous are the unwritten requirements for using it. You need to be at the highest "class" in order to use sword magic, and even then, that's only for the two lesser magic swords. To shoot spells from the two best swords you need to have your strength and magic at 80 or above. The information in that last sentence is so obscure that you're unlikely to find it in most online game guides. Yet, the sword magic from the Moonlight Sword is the only thing that can hurt the final boss. This is insane, but also hard to fully appreciate without knowing the deranged nonsense required to even get near the boss.
Getting to the boss room is a convoluted mess. For how dangerous the fifth floor is, it's easily the smallest. Yet, you aren't going to make any progress in it unless you take a very specific and obscure path. Starting in the hallway leading to the dragon room, you need to go through a false wall on one side of the hall. This immediately brings you to a large chasm. The harp doesn't work here, which means you have to use the invisible walkway. If you hadn't found the one other, entirely optional, invisible walkway earlier then you would have no idea that it could even exist. The only hint you have is the presence of torches extending in a double line at the bottom of the chasm, which could potentially mean any number of things. Assuming you do make a leap of faith, going straight will only take you to a dead-end room. You have to stop in the middle of the chasm and turn right to go up some invisible stairs to a teleporter. From there you end up in a room with a bunch of hilariously oversized enemies wandering around. This room has two other teleporters, one of which takes you to a side room that dumps you back into the middle of the fifth floor and the other takes you to the room before the boss. That room contains four of the most powerful enemies in the game, who will kill you even if you have the best equipment. You need to run past those jerks while they throw nukes at you. Getting past that, there's a bridge over another chasm with fireball traps constantly shooting across it. Fireballs shouldn't hurt much at this point, but their presence encourages you to accidentally throw yourself into the void. After that, you finally reach the boss room.
This is the only hint you get to use the Moonlight Sword
This place is a small area with a chasm between you and the boss itself, which is an evil tree. There are also magic shooting traps saturating the half of the room closest to the boss, there's a single pillar in the middle of the back half of the room, with only a narrow space between it and the chasm you would have just crossed. The boss itself shoots nukes, fireballs, and monsters at you when you aren't standing in the middle of the magic traps and will whack at you when you are. Existing anywhere in the room that isn't behind the pillar involves taking constant and significant damage. You can't attack the boss directly with your weapon, which encourages you to use magic, but none of the normal magic spells do any damage to the boss. You only figure this out after firing magic at it for too long. The Moonlight Sword's magic is the only way to damage the thing, which you have no way of knowing. I went through almost all of my healing items trying to throw magic at it for at least ten minutes. The thing is, I knew about the 60 stat requirement for sword magic, but I didn't know about the 80 requirement. Because of this, I thought the sword magic was just busted in my copy of the game. Turns out I had my magic stat at 81 and my strength at 79, which put me right below the threshold. I didn't realize this until people watching my stream found an old forum post explaining the 80 stat requirement. I went back to the giant enemy room to grind for like three minutes to get myself above the threshold, made my way back to the boss, and killed it in less than a minute. This is unforgiveable boss design. It would be just to the left of impossible to beat this game without access to online resources or a like-minded peer group. Yet, before I get into the total quality of this experience, we need to make one last digression.
Fun Fun Level Design Corner
It'll be useful to stop every now and then to examine the evolution of FromSoft's level design philosophy. As this is their first game, there isn't a ton of personality beyond standard dungeon design concepts. Though, that makes this the ideal baseline from which we can judge later titles. Also, there's only five levels in this thing and looking at each of them won't take that long.
Before getting into it, the specific maps we'll be referencing were apparently published back in 2004 by someone named Martin Ramirez, and they were drawn by his then 9-year-old daughter, Sam, as they played through an old, imported copy of the game and using the opportunity to practice Japanese reading comprehension. It's a surprisingly heartwarming little story, and since these are still the best maps available most people who have played this thing in the last 20 years owe them a debt of gratitude. Wherever Martin or Sam are, I salute them.
Floor 1:
The first floor is divided into roughly six zones. First, there's the starting area in the bottom left corner, which is mostly devoid of enemies and also contains most of the NPCs in the game. The main shop and healing fountain are located directly across a hall from each other, and the church area is in its own room off on the left. The first place a new player will likely encounter combat is either the cave system in the bottom right or the two room areas in the center of the map. Two of the zones are initially locked off behind Star Key doors and need to be accessed the long way through the upper right cave system. We can see the spot where you get the chalice at the far end of the bottom caves and its receptacle at the end of the top cave. Also, the fountain is on the opposite part of the map from the chalice receptacle, and there's little-to-no in-game indication that any of it is related to each other. We can also see that second shop at the other extreme end of the upper caves, and that's where you need to fork over way too much cash to buy the cross for the priest in the far-left room. Finally, the switch to turn off the trap blocking the centrally located level exit is all the way at the end of the upper zone, which is the first major graveyard area and also the location of the infinite spider spawner.
Putting the item and delivery locations so far apart is supposed to encourage the player to wander around the level multiple times in confusion. The idea might be that this wandering would give the player more opportunity to notice the false walls, grab treasure in all the various nooks and crannies, and accrue enough levels to survive the second floor. You're probably supposed to figure out what you're doing by the time you exit this floor, even if it takes several hours. I have to imagine that most people wouldn't get past the awkward combat, maddening obscurity, or slow pace of this floor, unless they had to for weird reasons like me. Regardless, this is the least hostile layout in the game, with the fewest traps and false walls. That gets ramped up on the next floor.
Floor 2:
As with the previous floor, the central T-shaped hallway is devoid of violence, giving easy access to the level exits and save room. There's much more of a hub-and-spoke layout here than you typically see in FromSoft games. We have another six zones branching off from the central hall, with all but two being disconnected from each other, and even then, that one connection between the upper and lefthand sections is barely worth consideration for how involved it is to unlock. This floor also features the first magic upgrade and three out of the five invisible/harp bridges in the game. You're supposed to have figured out all the quirks and hostile inclinations in the game design by the time you get through this floor.
At first blush, it looks like all you need to do is go through the bridge maze and caves in the upper right to get the harp and then across the central chasm to the level exit. Each of the other zones are important to either get the two elemental stones (at the far end of the upper middle graveyard maze and in a random offshoot of the lower right cave system) and two optional but actually necessary power-ups. First, the wizard at the far end of the lower right caves is the one we discussed earlier who wants THE TRUTH. Second, you need to get a key from the right-center series of rooms to access the large lefthand area, the bottom of which features an item that lets you teleport to the current floor entrance, making backtracking so much more feasible. Getting everything that you either need or need will require full and thorough exploration. This was likely an assumed skill for players of those early cRPGs that this game spiritually references. Finally, note the reduction in save points (crosses) to three from four on the previous level. Part of the difficulty curve here is going to be the throttling of save locations.
Floor 3:
This is the first floor with no significant safe areas. There are also only five zones here compared to the six in the previous floors. Those zones are the entrance area in the bottom left, the shrine gate area in the upper left, the main loop of the level comprising the middle and lower right zones, and a false wall maze in the upper right that is unlocked after slotting those elemental stones. That area is optional because the main reason to go there is that wavy sword you see in the picture; this sword is superseded by the super-duper-secret Triple Fang that you can see hidden beyond three consecutive false walls sticking out of a random hallway in the shrine. If you don't see it, the Triple Fang is the dumb looking sword that literally has three blades sticking out of the hilt. The inclusion and placement of that sword is the kind of thing you usually see done by novice dungeon designers, since having it breaks the back third of the game and it's almost impossible to find naturally.
Going back to that main loop, the middle-right zone is where you learn the second piece of offensive magic, which has no other prerequisites than wandering into the room. Also, the final two elemental stones are found in this loop, making thorough exploration of these areas a requirement. You can see another Truth Mirror hanging out in the middle of nothing in the upper bridge area. This is the final place in the game where you can use the harp, so I guess that item's utility doesn't last long. Make note again of the scarcity and distance between save points, and the tedious distance between the level entrance in the lower left and the exit in the upper center. The game really wants you to take the next floor in one go.
Floor 4:
That brings us to this mess. There are really only four zones on this level, and they form a straightforward progression going from the upper-left counterclockwise to the upper-right and then down the central hallway, which is at the end of the level instead of the beginning. This is an incredibly linear level with copy-pasted rooms designed to disorient and turn around the player. Notice in the upper-left zone that south-to-north hallway with dropdowns that act as an early noob reset for anyone trying to explore around. Remember that the previous floors train the player to explore around. The bottom zone is filled with traps and high-level monsters, making it the most tedious slog in the entire game. Your reward for getting through that is to do the upper right zone, which is identical to the upper left. Keep in mind that all the treasures you see in those two upper zones are blocked off with instant death traps, which can only be overcome by the boots you see on the right side of the central hallway. Also, notice that the three save rooms are positioned at the end of the three linear zones, creating an intended run-based progression through each zone. All of this would be an enormous hassle and difficulty spike without the Triple Fang.
At the end of this Maze of Death, you get to the central hallway, which is filled with endgame enemies. The north end has the extremely necessary final key, the side rooms have those boots and your dad's sword, and the south has the unassuming miniboss room. The floor ends in that left-of-center hallway connecting a shortcut to the first floor with the level exit. That last bit is surprisingly humane, giving you a direct path from the shops and fountain to the endgame. That's why this level seems so schizophrenic. The initial trip through the floor is the most mean-spirited and unsubtle section of the game, but you get a nice little quality of life shortcut at the end. It's all painfully amateurish. Even though this is the most hateful layout, that doesn't mean it's a shittiest. That takes us to the endgame.
Floor 5:
The last floor is significantly smaller than the previous ones and can be divided into three zones. The first zone in the upper part of the floor is the last exploration area of the game, but it's also filled with miniboss enemies that are eager to kill you, and most of the items aren't really worth the trouble. There's also a save point in an alcove, but since it's largely unprotected from the combat area it's more of a good place to get caught in a death loop. The next zone directly below that is a series of hallways filled with those previously mentioned enemies and nuke spells. You can't really catch a breath until you make it to the far-right side with the only viable save point and the dragon room. Receiving the Moonlight Sword from the dragon is, as stated earlier, necessary to beat the game. At this point there is a subtle implication that you should go back through the previous floors unlocking all of the previously inaccessible chests and doors to get the endgame equipment. While you could go straight from the dragon to the boss room, you can't beat that boss without 80 Strength and Magic, so you're likely gonna have to grind regardless. Not that you would know any of this, or likely even make it this far, playing it casually.
This at last brings us to the inexplicable design of the section leading to the boss. From that final save point, you're supposed to go to the previous room, walk north through a false wall, with no indication that it's there, and cross an invisible bridge over the chasm you find on the other side. To reiterate, anyone doing an unresearched playthrough wouldn't have been given any indication that invisible walkways are even a thing, unless you had stumbled on that optional bridge earlier. Since the harp doesn't do anything here the only way to figure it out naturally would be to yeet yourself into the void or burn a phantom rod, if you even have any left. For as harebrained as this is, it gets worse. You see that there are two destinations across the chasm, in front and on the right. You need to use the righthand exit, which involves lining yourself up in the middle of the invisible walkway and going up some invisible stairs. This is the second leap of faith in a row, because why not. That teleporter takes you to the room with hilariously oversized enemies, which is the last grinding spot of the game. There are two exit teleporters in corners that look identical, and with the limited draw distance and the need to dodge around those enormous idiots, it's very easy to get turned around and go through the wrong exit. Fortunately, you can immediately reenter a teleporter after going through it, but you're likely to drop down the noob reset on the left side of the floor at least once.
Going through the correct teleporter takes you to a hall with four of the highest-level enemies in the game who like to throw around nuke spells like it's going out of style. This gauntlet of everything constantly exploding is harrowing for the player and the game's framerate, with the real kicker being that you have to run through it every time you retry the boss. Then there's the final bridge with the fireballs and the tiny boss arena at the very bottom. Considering the previously described boss design, this entire final sequence is deranged in a way that I can't parse. The sensibilities here seem to be on the same level as masocore Mario Maker levels. More than anything else, this final floor lays bare the rushed and amateurish nature of this game. If someone pulled this kind of design while DMing a D&D dungeon, they probably wouldn't be encouraged to DM again. That brings us to the final question.
Reference Material
This game would be unplayable without outside resources, and for full transparency here are the guides and other information I used to play this game:
After that exhaustive description, and in context of how the Japanese game market reacted to it, I have no idea what to make of this thing. It makes perfect sense why Sony and game reviewers would have seen this and been unenthused. It's janky, runs badly, has miserable combat, and is too obscure for its own good. Most of the technical and gameplay problems can likely be attributed to the purely polygonal nature of the game. No one had made one of these with polygonal monsters and NPCs, likely because of how resource intensive it is. That gimmick would have hogged development time, disc space, and compute cycles to an extent that would require sacrificing additional depth in game mechanics, storytelling, and level sophistication. This is clearly a work by enthusiastic amateurs who loved bad old 80's RPGs, and smart money would have bet on it being a failure. In this day and age, a game like this would be self-published on Steam and die in mediocre obscurity.
So, why did it resonate with a profitable niche of Japanese gamers? If we're to accept the 200,000 sales number of this thing by the release of King's Field II, then the back-of-napkin estimate for gross revenue would be somewhere around $10 million, give or take. Fromsoft would have seen some percentage of this after everyone else took their cuts, but they still would have come into possession of several hundred million yen over those six months. Being a small company, that might have been more revenue than Zin would have seen over any six months in the company's eight-year history. From their point of view, investing further into video games would have been the obvious move, and hoo-boy did they do exactly that. But what were those 200,000 customers thinking? There's evidence of a disproportionate amount of talk going on in internet chat rooms, and that word of mouth is credited for the game's success. That brings us back to what people would have seen in this wretched little dungeon crawler.
I've put too much time and effort into trying to come up with an answer. At this moment, I think it has to do with the psychological strings tugged by abstruse games. Hidden content was the normal design philosophy in the early NES days. You know how Super Mario Bros had secret warp rooms and inconspicuous power-up blocks? How about the hidden cave/dungeon entrances in The Legend of Zelda? This goes all the way back to the mystery conditions needed to collect items and power-ups in Tower of Druaga. Game companies worked under the assumption that their target audience would obsessively replay games if they thought there were hidden goodies to find. That audience was overwhelmingly made up of boys in late pre-pubescence and early adolescence. Not being a child psychologist, I can't dig into that any further. That's not saying these games couldn't appeal to other demographics if they were well-made or popular enough to enter the mainstream. However, that psychological mechanism works, and it wouldn't have gone away just because game design had started drifting towards appeal to wider audiences.
King's Field is, if anything, a love letter to bad 80's game design. I think the kinds of boys and young men that those design standards were meant to appeal to discovered and latched onto this game. Mind you, that's only a couple hundred thousand people, which would have been a respectably sized fanbase in 1985 but not as much in 1995. As a spoiler for the next entry in this series, the King's Field series didn't exactly increase in popularity from game to game, so maybe the actual fanbase was closer to 100,000 people with the rest being suckers like me who fell for word-of-mouth.
I couldn't find any promotional materials, so here's the funniest take imaginable
Another factor to consider would have been the paucity of dungeon crawlers available on consoles. The only other game even close to this which would have been contemporaneously available on next gen consoles is Crime Crackers, which barely counts. The next dungeon crawler, Space Griffon VF-9, came out a month later but was also a very different thing. Really, you don't see another one of these until Virtual Hydlide and King's Field II in mid-1995. This is an extremely cursed line-up, so I can see how anyone wanting a dungeon crawler would have landed on this game in the early months of the generation. I know I'm reusing my theory for the success of the original Hydlide, but timing makes and breaks all kinds of media products. Speaking of Hydlide, and I apologize for not including a content warning, even though this game is less janky, mechanically deeper, and overall plays better than Virtual Hydlide, I think I would prefer that tire fire of a game over this. With that game, there's about 30 minutes of misery and then two or three hours of messing around, whereas here there are multiple hours of misery at the beginning and end of a 8-9 hour experience. Mind you that both cases involve referencing guides. The appeal of both also makes use of the same kind of mind virus, you become From-pilled in a similar mechanism as becoming Hydlide-pilled. It's the same itch in the back of my brain. Once you figure out what's going on in a bad game, and know how to solve for those problems, you can have a good time given a tedious enough personality.
I'm not going to touch on the hot buzzwords surrounding modern FromSoft games, such as difficulty, fairness, or 'git gud'. There will be plenty of opportunities to wallow in the intellectual muck of those topics, and I plan on doing so repeatedly as we look at the FromSoft catalog. For now, there are more games to suffer through and only so many hours in the day. The next entry in this series will either be on King's Field II on its own or with the addition King's Field III, depending on how much I have to say. I'm not going to make any promises on a set schedule for these things, so it'll happen when it happens. No matter how long it takes, by the time I catch up with the present day, I will be able to tell the world in minute detail why, in fact, all FromSoft games are bad.
Sources
Background info was cobbled together from the following sources:
I'm streaming myself as I play through all these FromSoft games and other antiquated garbage, which can be found on my Twitch channel. Stream archives can be found on my YouTube channel. The first part of my King's Field playthrough (overlaid with inane chatter) can be watched below.
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