"the FIRST Souls game" — King's Field... 25 years later

as a member of the souls community i've probably seen this conversation like a hundred times man dark souls what a great game it's just crazy to think it all started here objection actually uh demon souls is where it really started and then every time there's a third guy and he metaphorically pushes up his glasses like an anime villain and says actually the real first souls game is fromsoft's kingsfield back in the 90s is it though is it really i guess we gotta play it but you know 25 years ago that's a pretty long time i only know one way to go back that far yeah so [Music] now first i have to point out this logo animation at the start [Music] miyazaki if you're watching this is kind of rad as hell so please bring this back thank you but anyway kingsfield or technically kingsfield 2. pause real quick if you're curious why that's the case so you immediately just gained control of your character on this beach and yeah from there you're free to explore and yeah you're free to go around and explore okay kingsfield i see you i see you [Music] you know what kingsfield you have my attention i should probably mention the graphics before we get any further they look pretty rough right but guess what they actually look considerably worse but i'm just playing on an emulator with some settings adjusted with how it actually looks on the ps1 this game is crunchy as hell it certainly looks its age and then some so for the sake of you as the audience i thought it'd be nicer to de-crunchify it with a high resolution more stable frame rate and no texture dithering i totally understand this is a grave sin to the kingsfield purists out there but i really think it's for the best and keeps the style and tone of the game intact but yeah even with this upgrade the visuals are still pretty aged but you know what they actually grow on me especially the models for the enemies and npcs there's just this sort of old-school charm to them that i can't help but be into maybe it's just my runescape nostalgia showing but i think it kind of works actually it doesn't always work so when i finally stopped dying to giant squid attacks i spent the next 15 or so minutes just running around and grabbing items and gear and while i was running around i very quickly had to adapt to the control scheme because golly g this game has one so this is a first person game and the control scheme for these types of games has been standard for like 20 years at this point you move with this stick you look around with this stick but in 1995 this wasn't the case yet here's the ps1 controller i hope you can see the problem so let's go over how kingsfield decided to handle this because it's sort of interesting and probably the hardest part to get used to while playing in 2020. go forward go back turn left turn right okay so far strafe left strafe right look up look down this definitely was uncomfortable but i did eventually get used to it on the topic of this being a first person game i want to mention one more thing for those of you that know your video game history you'll know that the original doom actually came out just a year and a half before kingsfield this is notable because essentially every first person game that came out around then was compared to doom and if you look at some reviews that were written at the time about kingsfield you'll see that they mentioned doom now this is funny to me because kingsfield being compared to doom sort of mirrors how everything is compared to dark souls these days and there's something kind of poetic about that the combat is unavoidably a big part of a game like this so what's it like now i don't want to miss words here the combat is pretty rough and absurdly clunky this is how the majority of combat experiences play out you attack back up wait for your meter to fill up again attack back up attack back up and yeah later on it does get a bit more varied with multiple enemies and having to maneuver yourself around but this is the core also you do get magic which is actually pretty cool early on it's just your standard fireball or whatever but by the end of the game you get some really neat stuff like an ice dragon that homes in and traps enemies in a crystal genuinely cool stuff if nothing else the combat does do a good job of making you feel powerful by the end of the game when you're one-shotting all the old enemies now all that being said i can actually accept the combat for what it is but the pause menu ui i don't know man you need to pause the game constantly this is because you need to heal constantly so here's what the process looks like you pause select items slowly scroll down your big list of items then use the item this is made worse by the fact that most enemy encounters seem designed so you sort of need to just tank damage to get through them anyway it's just incredibly cumbersome and it got in the way of my fun quite a bit so after a couple hours of playing something dawned on me yes the combat can be pretty awful but that's not the emphasis is it exploration is where the emphasis is placed and then i realized this game is a first person metroidvania now before we start writing an essay about how i'm wrong hear me out yes when we think of metroidvanias it's usually a 2d game with platforming but look at what kingsfield has it's got an interconnected world as well as obstacles and locked doors that you can only pass after getting the necessary items and abilities once i made that connection of yeah this is actually metrovania things started to click the navigating the backtracking the secret finding that's what this game is about oh this door is locked oh i got a key now for it nice bow now i can fight that giant bug sick i have a flute now i can use it to summon bridges of light to go over gaps metroidvania while this is pretty cool it unfortunately doesn't pair super well with the extremely samey looking areas and wall textures with often no environmental details to help you tell which area is which it's pretty easy to get lost like on one hand yes figuring out where to go is a key part of the experience of metroidvanias but when you can't even tell where you are because half of the rooms look identical the experience of navigation becomes a lot more tedious by the way if you want to have your mind blown real quick most of the souls born games are actually metroidvanias too yes you have to stretch the definition a bit but the world structure pretty much matches think about it the interconnected world the backtracking the locked doors the progression via key items it's all there and i think a lot of that inspiration to some extent came from kingsfield and that's pretty neat speaking of exploration i do have to mention one big aspect of it that i did find pretty irritating in this game fake walls now if you played any of the souls games you should be pretty familiar with fake or illusory balls right the way they typically work is you find a suspicious looking wall you attack it and there's a secret behind it the real key with why i think this works is that there aren't too many of them and there's also often some sort of environmental hint to help suggest to you that hey there might be a secret here kingsfield has neither of these there are so many fake walls and they are often placed seemingly at random now the effect that this has on gameplay is that you end up needing to mash x on every single wall of every single room and hallway in the game and i'm not exaggerating here i mean every room so to be clear i really do like secrets in games like this but when you're required to rub your face against every wall it becomes a lot less fun and a lot more tedious than it ought to be with most games in the soul series it's very possible to beat them and have no idea what happened from a narrative perspective who did i just kill wait what happened why am i doing this the reason this can happen is because the story presents itself through little bits and pieces and item descriptions and dialogue from npcs scattered around instead of something with more structure like cutscenes that lay it all out that sort of story presentation may have taken inspiration from kingsfield because it is very much the same with this game just like dark souls you can beat the final boss and say to yourself wait what exactly just happened as for how the story is presented you can come across npcs and they'll explain little things they mostly make sense but there are a few localization gems here and there that are pretty entertaining the way the npcs are spread out and the way in which they say cryptic things to you definitely gives the game a soulsy feel this plus the general atmosphere gives an almost ethereal mood to the game like yeah just take this guy for example he's um wait a minute now i want to give a quick mention to the fact that king's feel will absolutely let you soft lock yourself or just make the game way harder the biggest example of this is how you can sell any item in the game including important keys if you really want to the game will just let it happen this reminded me of how the souls games handle themselves like hey if you want to kill andre and permanently make the game more difficult in the process you're allowed to and with both kingsfield and dark souls i can't help but respect that fromsoft has allowed for these scenarios in my eyes it shows a level of respect for the players by giving them this freedom to screw themselves over you just very rarely see that these days also i want to point out that if you do decide to do something such as sell important keys it's not like the game has tricked you into doing so it simply gives you the choice and lets you suffer the consequences and you know what maybe i'm crazy for liking something like that but i do king's field is also pretty quirky not so much a zoe de chanel quirky but more mora hey the developers had some neat ideas quirky so i want to highlight a couple the first is this teleporting system the way it works is you insert this key onto a pedestal found at save points and then you can teleport back to this location using the corresponding gate in your inventory since you only have one key and one gate for most of your playthrough this creates an interesting risk reward dynamic whenever you want to move the key since you physically have to pick up the key and move it to a new location you lose your warping ability as a safety net while shifting it somewhere else to add to this dynamic there are quite a few areas in the game where if you fall into them you'll actually be stuck and soft locked unless you have a warp point set up so overall this adds an extra layer of decision making when exploring that i haven't quite seen in other games the second cool idea i want to talk about involves the rhombus keys so there are quite a few doors that require these rhombus keys to get through think of them as like your generic dungeon key now what's interesting is that the doors you use them on are one-way doors both ways what i mean by that is that they require a key for each direction you enter through and what's also interesting is that you can pick up these keys and reuse them this creates scenarios where if you're clever with how you use and reuse keys you can gain access to more areas so yeah i just thought this was pretty neat and i'm honestly surprised i haven't seen something similar in a zelda game unless i'm just forgetting maybe right so there are a lot of gameplay mechanics central to the soul series bonfires and estus flask dodge rolls making your character look like shrek but there's one that i feel gets overlooked sometimes backstabs at their core backstabs reward the player for getting behind an enemy by letting you do a lot of damage or even outright killing an enemy now why am i talking about backstabs in a king's field video because king's field certainly doesn't have them or does it with kingsfield if you can manage to maneuver yourself behind certain enemies you can basically just win because the enemies handle like tanks and can't turn fast enough as you can see here i get behind this guy and i just go at it this is backstabbing in 1995. now i'm not claiming that kingsfield inspired backstabs in the souls games but i couldn't help but notice the parallels here and thought it'd be fun to point out now fair warning i'm going to talk about the final boss in this section so feel free to skip ahead if you don't want to be spoiled all right we good okay so you go into this arena and it's necron himself the guy that all the npcs have been mentioning constantly naturally necron starts doing some street fighter shuriyukins that launch magic missiles of you at this point i was sort of under leveled and undergeared but i had fully accepted and embraced the jank of this game so i did the natural thing and i ran into this little hole in the wall on the edge of the arena that protected me from the missiles while i shot 100 arrows into him for about five minutes this actually worked and naturally i was pumped as hell but this actually wasn't the end inexplicably i wound up in the god damn cyber zone for one more boss and guess who it was calamite yes calamite from dark souls 1. granted he's not called that in this game but just look at the model it's nearly the same design not only that but the famous moonlight greatsword from every souls game is here too as for the fight itself it was ten straight minutes of slapping him with my sword spamming magic and healing every five seconds because there were lasers and fire everywhere gameplay wise this is pretty awful but whatever and eventually i got him and he blasted off like team rocket the world is now safe you're welcome everyone so guess what i didn't find out until after i beat the game and looked up some things that i missed this game has unique magic sword attacks for all the special swords in the game now i'm not surprised i didn't stumble across this because it requires some precise button inputs with finicky timing and as far as i can tell the game never hints at this even existing to do one of them it's tap x tap square hold triangle very quickly so first off this is really cool but then it got me thinking about secrets and games that are easy to miss specifically in fromsoft's other games in demon souls an example this would be world tendency if you're playing blind it's extremely easy to miss everything connected to this in dark souls an example would be something like ash lake it's a genuinely breathtaking secret area but it's again incredibly easy to miss if you're a game developer one of the most terrifying things you can do is work on something for hours or days or weeks or months and then have it never be seen by someone who plays your game so it takes a lot of courage to hide big things like this for the player but the payoff is that the secrets they can uncover are really really cool and actually worthwhile so yeah i'm a huge fan of this design sensibility when it comes to big secrets it takes courage and shows respect for the players and i'm happy that fromsoft is still doing it with all their games to this day so that's kingsfield it definitely shows its age in a lot of ways and i'd honestly have a hard time recommending it to most people but despite it all there are some great nuggets of inspiration in terms of atmosphere and design that are worth looking at especially within the context of fromsoft's more recent games and like i said before there's a lot of jank but there's an undeniable charm and uniqueness that shines through also i still think it's really interesting as a piece of from software's history and it's fun to try and connect the dots between where they were in 1995 and where they are now in 2020 so yeah that's it i hope you found my thoughts interesting or entertaining i feel like this game very rarely gets discussed and i hope i did it justice oh hey didn't see you there i was just staring at the sponsored by raycon text in the sky it's me swoller i used to be a jump but then i got serious with my body how's that by using the everyday e25 earbuds while i worked out my routine is pretty intense and not for everyone but it does work these bad boys are half the price of other premium wireless earbuds but they still sound great now if i'm getting earbuds you already know what i need i'm talking bluetooth pairing compact design noise isolating fit six hours of play time because i don't have time to recharge and most importantly it needs to come in blue luckily raycon has me covered with all of these so i'm set if you want to get something for yourself so you can get guns like these sorry i mean guns like these click the link in the description buy raycon.com ironpineapple and get 15 off now if you'll excuse me i have important things to do hold on hold on hold on one last thing why is it called kingsfield there's not even a dang field in this game zero l10

Channel: Iron Pineapple

Views: 944,391

Rating: 4.9596481 out of 5

Keywords: dark souls, iron pineapple, king's field, souls like, soulslike, review, guide, funny, gameplay, video essay

Id: eQ7BEo-oeng

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DragonBornKing]

If you want to get into the King's Field series a good place to start is Shadow Tower Abyss on the PS2. it was the last King's Field style game they made. It's also the easiest one IMO and has a more modern control scheme option.

It was only released in Japan but has a fan translation patch that can easily be installed.

[u/ADifferentMachine]

Neat bit of video game history. And it does actually looks like a fun game if you can get over the 90's weirdness.

[u/basketofseals]

Maybe this isn't an important part of the video, but I highly disagree with his definition of Metroidvania. By that definition, Doom/Final Fantasy/Neoquest would be Metroidvanias.

Key items are not the same thing as unlocking new abilities.

Souls games are NOT Metroidvanias.

[u/boobers3]

After having watched the video I still feel like Blade of Darkness (or Severance depending on where in the world you are) is the true "first Souls game".

[u/Nickoten]

The video points this out, but this is actually King's Field 2. I bring this up because while King's Field 2 did a lot of cool things that were pretty novel for their time (in the context of a console game), I think it's aged pretty poorly. I would suggest instead playing King's Field 1 with a translation patch. It's a much better paced game and conveys a lot of what makes King's Field special without having you aimlessly wander as much as the second game does.

King's Field 2 is definitely worth talking about, but it's a lot of investment compared to the first one. If you don't want to play either of those games, play King's Field: The Ancient City instead.

[u/X-the-Komujin]

The end of this game is cute. Final bosses are Necron and a Black Dragon, which is also the name of the Nine Breaker in Armored Core: Project Phantasma. Moonlight is a sword in Dark Souls, but is also famous for being the strongest laser blade in Armored Core. From Software loves doing these references in Armored Core too, but they rarely get noticed.

[u/Potatolantern]

He gets way too stuck on his personal Metroidvania definition, and crouching disagreements in the form of angry rants against his composed calmness is petty and stupid.

Aside from that, intentionally calling the game by the wrong title just seems weird. People don't refer to FF6 by saying "I'm just gonna call it FF3!" same with any of the other similar games that suffered from those old localisation effects.

[u/Friendlydogtshirt]

This is such a great game. I just finished it a month ago and I think it's aged well. Really good video too, although I would disagree on the combat being bad. It's clunky, sure, but it gives it a strange thickness that gives a sense of satisfaction similar to the souls combat.

The back tracking in this, as well as kings field 4, is very metroidvania-esque, but also weirdly reminded me of system shock 2, in that I felt like I was physically navigating a real space, like a strange sense of VR without a helmet. The controls play a big part of the immersion of these games, and I don't have anything against rebinding the controls, this is not a game that could ever work with something like mouse look.

[u/Mudcaker]

I'm glad he played it since I never would've and it was interesting to see. As someone who grew up in those janky times it brought back a lot of memories of other games.

If you haven't yet his "steam dumpster diving" series where he checks out "souls-like" games is pretty enjoyable. A lot are as good as you'd expect but there are some diamonds in the rough and interesting ideas also.