King's Field (Japan) Review

When I think back to games I enjoyed in 1994, I fondly recall such releases as Super Metroid, Heretic, and Sonic The Hedgehog 3.  What I do not recall is King's Field.  And I'm not talking about the King's Field released in 1995 in the USA either.  In truth that game was King's Field II renamed, as publishers were so malevolently keen on doing at the time.  Nope, I'm talking about From Software's very first game, from whence eventually their beloved Souls series evolved.  And if you go way back in time to 1994's King's Field you can certainly suss out the initial DNA.  All the same in 1994 as a 15 year old gamer, I had no idea this game even existed.  Perhaps back then I saw it in a brief passing mention in an EGM side article, quickly overlooked as I sought more information on Donkey Kong Country.

Even if I had known about King's Field in 1994, I couldn't have played it back then.  That would have required a Japanese Playstation, importing the game, and knowing how to read Japanese as well.  Those aspects meant I had absolutely no chance of experiencing King's Field during its release year.  Such impediments are nullified nowadays thanks to excellent emulators and fan translation patches.  And thus as it stands twenty years later I was able to play King's Field without hindrance.  But why would someone want to play a two decade old geriatric polygon showcase?  I admit it seems a strange endeavor on the surface.  But with this review I shall explain why King's Field is indeed a kingly game.

I'd love to know what drove From Software to create their very first game as a 3D first person dungeon crawler launch title on an unproven new gaming platform. Especially considering Japan's general dislike of real time first person views. The cards were stacked against From Software, but from what I've read King's Field actually sold quite well upon release.  Enough that From Software eventually created three more sequels to it, along with related offshoots as well.  I think the most impressive aspect for its time, is that as far as I know King's Field was the initial fully polygonal first person dungeon crawler.  As in, it used polygons for every object within the game world.  Other games in this genre before used sprites for enemies or items or furniture, even if the environments were polygonal.  (If someone knows of a preceding fully polygonal dungeon crawler let me know in the comments please.)  I'll be honest and say it was scholarly interest that lead me to trying the original King's Field on a late night whim.  Yet what began as a mere curiosity ended up becoming a wonderful game experience in the end.

King's Field begins with you stepping through a portal and warping into an underground graveyard sanctuary.  The plot involves you being the son of a slain king, a king who was trying to stop an evil sorcerer from resurrecting a great evil locked within said sanctuary.  Now you're out for revenge to kill the sorcerer and purge his curse from the subterranean ossuary before it overtakes the kingdom of Verdite.  There's a helpful earth dragon and a fairy and blah blah.  I'll be straight up with you, the plot is not the point of playing this game.  The inherit tale is laughable and is badly told (to no fault of the excellent fan translation mind).  No, the point of this King's Field is the experience itself, the immersion and gameplay.  You'll find no grandiose prerendered melodramatic CG cutscenes here.  The only notable aspect of King's Field's story is that it shows the creation of the Moonlight Sword, which some may remember from Dark Souls.

It may be an RPG with a plot, but gameplay is king in King's Field.  The primary reason is that this game never holds your hand.  You are given no guidance, no direction, no quarter.  King's Field is entirely ambivalent to whether you live or die, it only offers you its world to explore at will.  I absolutely love a game that respects my intelligence, and judging by the massive sales of the Souls series, so do a lot of other gamers.  In that regard, King's Field is only as difficult as you make it on yourself.  Most of the time this game will be clear with you about your chances of success.  I could understand someone thinking this game is tremendously hard if they tried to rush.  But I only died once while playing it, due to being accidentally knocked off a perilous walkway by a rather rude ghost.  King's Field is a game meant to be played methodically and carefully.  This is a tactical action RPG.  I finished this game in 13 hours with no walkthrough or strategy guide, because I understood how to play slow and smart.  I made good use of maps and a compass.  I got by without the need of nanny hand holding and way points guiding your every move.  I'm sure Ardent's readers could do the same, and I bet we all wish more modern games treated us like the capable players we are.

So what is the basic gameplay like then?  You explore a vast underground graveyard dungeon divided into five levels.  The five levels have recursive paths that intertwine one another via portals.  As you unlock these portals the world becomes ever easier to backtrack, and that's good, because you will do a ton of backtracking in this game.  That's not to say King's Field is just a walking simulator.  No, oh no, you will do a tremendous amount of fighting monsters in this game.  Whether it's with steel or magic, you must kill to survive.  You gain levels as you fight, you collect gold to buy things.  You will find all sorts of magical items to aid your quest.  And the more you use one type of weapon, or one type of magic, the stronger your skills in them become.  You'll meet interesting people.  You will solve puzzles, find keys, tip toe pit traps, and avoid deadly machinations.  You will be poisoned, cursed, blinded, and if you're really unlucky you will fall in a bottomless pit and hear your avatar die with a blood curdling agonized scream.  (That's okay if you have prayed at the golden crosses to save your game.)  And if you are like me, you'll love all of this.  But I haven't even got to the best parts yet.

Exploration.  Pure unbridled exploration into the dark unknown, that's my favorite aspect of King's Field.  The environments are huge with no loading times, helping tremendously with maintaining the atmosphere.  I absolutely adored exploring this game's twisty dark paths never knowing what I was going to find.  The only hint at what's ahead sometimes was the growls of beasts in the dark.  Or you might find yourself stepping into a serene area with only a hint of melancholy to provide solace.  The amount of atmosphere From Software managed to pull off with this 1994 launch title is truly laudable.  Just as Silent Hill found a way to use load buffering fog to its advantage, so did King's Field beforehand by turning that fog into an ever present ominous darkness.  Adding ever more to this exploration are copious amounts of hidden doors, sometimes hidden doors within hidden doors. Indeed the five floors of King's Field are vast, and even the most powerful maps in the game don't show all the secrets.  There are plenty of lively tunes to listen to as you traipse about, many with totally killer bass lines and even harpsichord arpeggios.  Lastly, the sound effects in this game are totally 90's IN YO FACE brashness.  This is mostly a good thing.

So what might someone not like about King's Field? Oh, plenty of things.  Howabout the fact that it takes six seconds to do a full 360 turn in this game?  When you hit enemies, there's not necessarily any kind of feedback to let you know you did.  If you're lucky the enemy will howl in pain.  They don't have life bars because in real life creatures don't have life bars I suppose.  It's worth mentioning that doors that aren't even hidden still don't have a door texture.  I guess that means even normal doors are somewhat hidden.  One might be perturbed to realize that weapons and armor do not have any stats whatsoever.  Is that mace stronger than that sword?  Only field testing will prove it, but keep in mind some enemies are weaker to certain types of weapons or spells than others.  You also swing your weapon like a drunken sloth, so tactical combat is the only way to win.  And if you can't keep track of where you are on a map, you will be hopelessly lost.  And since the game starts you off with a toothpick sword and no map, you'll be near death and utterly confused for the first hour guaranteed.  It's a hazing for sure, but it's From Software's way of filtering the men from the boys (King's Field IV did the same thing).  This game is a grower, it starts wonky but gets more and more amazing the longer you play it.

As you can tell, I enjoyed my time with King's Field.  I did not expect this game to offer anything outside of scholarly insight concerning From Software's origins.  To my surprise though, the original King's Field is actually a solid dungeon crawl experience to this day.  It just goes to prove once again that even though technologically impressive graphics dwindle with age, good game design remains eternal.  Is King's Field one of the best games I've ever played?  No, it's not that good.  But it is too good to be as disregarded and under appreciated as it is.  There are plenty of factors as to why King's Field languished in obscurity in the past in the west.  However, these days anyone with a computer and an emulator can get this game going in English.  I can only hope that by writing this review I've encouraged at least a few folks to give this experience a shot.  I'll admit, King's Field is an acquired taste.  But once you acquire it, you'll feast upon a meal fit for a king.

Ardent's Score: 8 hidden doors out of 10

For more information on the King's Field series, check out Chris Wigman's excellent article on HG101.

Barely Marvelous (Review)

In 1996, Nintendo released a Super Famicom game entitled Marvelous: Mōhitotsu no Takarajima, which translates into English as Marvelous: Another Treasure Island.  This game harbors a lot of idiosyncrasies, not the least of which being it was the first game directed by Eiji Aonuma.  Also, this game runs on a modified The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past engine, and it shows.  Well if you've played any of Aonuma's Zelda titles, you can certainly recognize his influence here as well.  (There's time travel, sailing, even boats with dragon heads.)  Sadly at the time of this writing, Marvelous has not yet been released in English officially in the last 18 years.  However, there's a "mostly complete" English fan translation available.  I was able to play and complete Marvelous via SNES9X thanks to this, without needing a walkthrough.  Before I get on with the review let me tell you a few things concerning the translation all the same.

The translator/hacker "Tashi" did a great job, all things considered.  Unfortunately he wasn't able to complete the game's translation 100%, more like 90%.  The most significant issue is that graphics utilizing the Japanese language have not been altered, and remain in Japanese.  The above screenshot is an example of this, here's another one.  The good news is, almost all of the spoken dialogue in the game has been translated.  Unfortunately I ran into a few instances where this wasn't the case, such as:

However this was a very rare occurrence.  I have to commend Tashi for doing an overall bang-up job for a one man army approach.  I was able to finish the game and enjoyed a translation that felt mostly like something Nintendo would have localized themselves.  (Outside the occasional instance that is.)  Now let's get back to the actual game review.

Marvelous has a simple premise.  The game stars three young boys; Deon, Max, and Jack.  They along with their class and teacher Ms. Gina, have taken a field trip to visit a tropical island.  It just so happens that some pirates have visited this same island as well.  The pirates are there seeking out a fabled treasure called "Marvelous", supposedly hidden there long ago by one Captain Maverick.  This treasure is rumored to be guarded by unsolvable puzzles and vicious traps.  It doesn't take long before the boys and the pirates inadvertently cross paths, and Ms. Gina ends up being kidnapped by the ruffians.  The three boys decide to seek out and rescue their teacher, uncovering more and more of the mysteries surrounding "Marvelous" as they do.

Let's talk about the game design.  I've read a lot of people on the internet contrasting Marvelous with Zelda, claiming it has the same kind of gameplay.  No.  I do not believe that is an accurate description at all.  Marvelous does not play like Zelda, by and large it plays like an adventure game.  As in the oldschool Lucas Arts or Sierra sort of adventure games.  While it's true you move with a d-pad and use objects in real time, the puzzles are more akin to The Secret Of Monkey Island than the kind of stuff you'd see in Wind Waker.  You do in fact occasionally have real time combat, that's true.  There are even boss fights in the game.  You have life bars and can "die", but it's just not the focus.  These combat situations are very rare.  The truth is most of the time you are running around solving crazy puzzles or talking to NPCs for clues. 

As the boys you will find yourself exploring not one, but four different islands.  This is made possible by the acquisition of a ship, which you sail as the linear plot dictates.  Every island has its own themes, populace, and variety of puzzles.  The key word there is VARIETY.  Marvelous does a tremendously good job at continuously throwing new situations and puzzles at you.  It's a very rare occurrence to come across a puzzle that utilizes the same solution you've done before.  Typically these puzzles are solved using items the boys collect.  See the picture below for an example.

You probably noticed the 48 crystal looking things too.

These are "Luck Rocks", and are the currency of Marvelous.

You find Luck Rocks, and are rewarded them, throughout the game. You can use them to either bribe people or as a source of fuel for your ship. You rarely use Luck Rocks as puzzle solving elements though.  Rather each boy has their own individual items that only they can use for that.  Also each boy has their own inherent ability, such as Deon's small size for squeezing into areas that Max and Jack can't fit.  Sometimes you will need to split the boys up and have them work things out individually.  You can control all three boys independently across an island and swap between them on the fly using a radio.  Or call them back together as a group again using the whistles they carry.  Indeed as a group there's a special command called "Team Work", that causes all three boys to work together simultaneously.  All of these unique items and controls lead to some pretty devious puzzles towards the end.

Before we go any further with this review, I want to point out Marvelous's greatest strength.  Aside from sheer variety, this game has an awesome sense of humor.  It has been a long time since I found myself laughing out loud as often as I did playing Marvelous.  That's partly due to dialogue, but often due to the sheer insanity of the situations the boys often find themselves in.  I'm tempted to talk about a bunch of them, but I'd be doing the player a disservice.  I hate when reviews let loose with spoilers, so I'll just post a few images below instead.  Some of the solutions you come up with for puzzles are hilarious as well.

Taking a moment to talk about aesthetics, as you can see, graphically Marvelous is pretty good.  It's worth noting that at times Marvelous even utilizes the high resolution mode of the SNES/SFC.  But while Marvelous has consistently good art direction, it doesn't do much in the way of snazzy special effects such as Squaresoft was fond of back then.  For what it might lack in advanced graphical effects however, Marvelous does make up for it with a breezy feel good OST.  Here are a few examples of the tunes you'll hear: 1, 2, 3.  (That's not to say Marvelous doesn't have any ominous tunes for ominous moments.)

A puzzle game lives and dies by its puzzles though, and I'm happy to say Marvelous does a great job overall on that aspect.  I've already spoken about inventory items being used as a catalyst.  You might do something as simple as use a hammer to pound a nail.  But plenty of puzzles are based off abstract uses of everyday items.  This being a real time game, many puzzles are also based on your reflexes.  One example would be timing your grab right to steal an egg from some dung beetles. Or even kicking bushes to clear a path.  These action based puzzles start off pretty easy, but eventually get pretty tricky.  (You will hate the spider race, I promise.)  There are also situations that rely on combat alone, that you have to beat to continue. The worst puzzles are the ones that rely on luck to beat, and there's a few of those.  Helpfully there's a Navi-like bird you can summon for tips, at the cost of Luck Rocks.  He's helpful at times, but it doesn't always go so well.  Overall though, the vast majority of Marvelous's puzzles are well thought out and fun to solve.

Well so far Marvelous sounds like a pretty great game I'm sure.  And for the first 4/5ths of it, Marvelous is a GREAT game indeed.  Unfortunately the final part of Marvelous really stunk.  Whereas the first four acts consist of a constant barrage of ingenious puzzles, witty dialogue, and jokes galore... the last act is anything but that.  Instead of taking place on an island, the final area takes place in an ancient temple.  A temple that is designed to do nothing but piss you off big time.  I swear this last part of Marvelous feels like it was designed by a completely different person than the rest of the game.

Whereas before you were solving clever conundrums, suddenly you're relegated to something as rote as a slide puzzle.  You'll find yourself using multiple elevators to navigate a confusing labyrinth of floors.  You'll face pitfalls that do nothing but eat your time.  Treasure chests that don't work like the rest of the game's do.  Boring as can be, you'll be having to locate keys, and not just that, upgrade them.  Yes, you will have to upgrade a set of three keys no less than four times... just to agitate your bile I suppose.

 
The absolute worst thing of all is an invisible pitfall maze that involves a remote controlled robot.  You have to move this robot across an invisible floor, slowly trying to suss out a path.  Every time you hit a pitfall, the robot berates you and falls.  Then you have to go through the same conversation with it again each time you reinitialize it using a special item.  I cannot even begin to describe how utterly maddening and stupid this one "puzzle" was.  It was long enough and bad enough to almost make me quit the game at the very end.  All I can say is this final area of Marvelous felt rushed and halfhearted compared to the rest of the game.  A rotten cherry on top of an otherwise delicious sundae. And it didn't help either that the ending did little to wrap up the mystery surrounding this game's namesake.  You do find out what the "Marvelous" is... but not how Captain Maverick got it, or why he prized it so much.

Don't let my late game griping stop you though.  Overall this is still a fantastic Super Famicom entry that has aged remarkably well.  Truly Marvelous: Another Treasure Island is a totally unique experience with a lot of heart.  I honestly cannot think of any particular game that is a proper analog to this.  The majority of this game is actually quite fun and totally worth your time.  Best of all, you can tell its creators legitimately cared about crafting a game that would bring smiles to the faces of its players.

Ardent's score: 8 some kind of sexy gorillas outta 10

Let us end this review with the video "Marvelous" by my favorite DJ, Towa Tei.

Jack and the Crystal Beanstalk. (Review)

People have their tastes.  Some folks are content to only play modern online FPS shooters on the newest console of their choice.  Some people stick to mobile.  Some people only play 2D games, or MMORPGs, or racers, or only consoles.  It's true, I've met these people on forums throughout the years.  Well there's nothing wrong with that.

However, I like to mix things up.  I might play a PS1 platformer one day, and a Wii adventure game the next, followed by a Vita JRPG.  I like to play games from all eras... I don't consider a video game to be obsolete just because the hardware that runs it is.  And perhaps most fortuitous of all, I enjoy delving into the weird and wacky world of fan translations.  Thanks to the immense efforts of some truly upstanding individuals, there are now legions of Japanese games that never made it to English speaking shores yet all the same are available to play in English.  Of course this isn't a new phenomenon, the practice has been going on since at least the 90's.  So let's segue into the game I'm reviewing today as it's both a fan translated title and from the 90's...

 

 Crystal Beans - From Dungeon Explorer

I'm not going to give you a history lesson on this game, because history lessons are not what Ardent is about.  I'll give you some links for that instead: HG101 | RHDN .  Just know that this is an action-RPG from 1995 by Hudson Soft that got translated into English unofficially.  I started playing Crystal Beans because I was feeling the urge to play some SNES titles.  I picked out four games I had not yet played and this was number 2.  (Number 1 was Brandish, a game with some interesting concepts but terrible execution.  I didn't enjoy Brandish enough to keep playing.)

It's likely the first thing you would wonder is what does the name Cystal Beans even mean?  Well it refers to beans made of crystal, yeah seriously.  If you'll look in the picture above you'll see a crystal beanstalk going up to that castle in the clouds.  The guy with the sword is named Jack.  So now we get the joke.  Anyway during the course of your adventure you end up liberating one of these crystal beans so you can ascend to the castle in the sky where the big bad baddie resides.  There's more to the story, but honestly the plot is so rote it's not worth the effort of my fingers to explain it.  This game is about the action, not the RPG.

The action begins with you choosing a hero from amongst a pool of them.  You would probably choose one based on their stats, or at least I did.  I chose the main hero Jack, because his attack stat was the highest of the group.  (Turns out in the end this was a trap, but we'll get to that in a bit.)  From there you explore the world with Jack, going to pleasant places such as DEMON INTESTINES:

Thus you bandy about liberating towns and castles from evil baddies.

And this being a classic JRPG (of sorts) you of course start out fighting slimes:

Now don't let the picture fool you.  It looks like Jack is swinging a sword, but in reality he just shoots swords out of his sword.  Not entirely unlike Link did in the original The Legend Of Zelda actually.  The challenging part of this game's design is primarily the enemies that respawn at rapid pace.  There are spawn portals everywhere on the maps that continuously spew baddies until you destroy the spawn portals.  Do you get experience for this?  No.  The only way to level up is when you kill a boss.  That's it.  Enemies randomly drop health vials and magic vials, both only barely useful really.  Worse yet about halfway through the game those vials rarely if ever at all drop.  Oh, and if you're not careful, you will destroy the vials with your attack.  This is something that happens all the time of course, because the vials appear right where you're attacking the enemies... genius design.

Now I want to reiterate.  This is an action-RPG where your character has levels, but you get no experience or leveling from fighting hundreds if not thousands of enemies.  You only level up for killing bosses.  Guess what the best thing to do is?  Yes.  Run.  Run all the time.  Avoid the baddies and run like you've just eaten questionable Mexican food to the nearest exit.

Right about now you're probably wondering why one would even bother playing this game?  Two reasons.  Number one, the OST is actually pretty damn good.  At times it even reaches Falcom levels of good.  Here's two tracks for example: 1 | 2 .  The other reason?  Bosses.  For all its lame design, copy-cat towns, and constant CRYSTAL BEANS logo in yo face... this game actually has some wicked bosses.  Here's one:

"YOU SHALL ROT IN HELL LIKE SO MANY OTHERS!"  Admit it, that boss and that line is not something you'd expect from a game with a cover like the one above.  And there are something on the order of 15 bosses in this game.  Plenty of them were fun to fight and interesting to see.

Except one.  The final boss.

Before I go on a tirade about this, I want to say a few things.  I really love Japanese game design.  I actually prefer it in general to Western game design.  But there is one trope in so many Japanese games I truly loathe, and it occurs most often in Japanese RPGs.  Of course I'm talking about the final boss.  If you're a Japanese game designer, it must be a law that your game's final boss meets the following criteria:

Japanese RPG Final Boss Decree

1. The final boss is not the final boss.

2. The final boss upon apparent death turns into the final final boss.

3. The final final boss upon apparent death becomes the final final final boss.

4. The final final final boss shalt be no less than 10 times harder than anything else in the game.

5. When the player dies, the player must start this entire fight sequence all over again, with an unskippable cutscene first for good measure.

Sound familiar?  Crystal Bean's final boss fits most of this criteria.  It has multiple forms and is ridiculously harder than anything else before it.  Here's a picture of me shooting swords in vain at it's final final final form:

I can't even begin to explain how aggravating this fight is.  The boss shoots unavoidable lightning out of its hands constantly.  It summons golden balls that follow you around non-stop causing massive damage every time they touch you.  You're basically being hit constantly without pause, and you die very very quickly.  There's no spells to help you, there's no secret spot to stand in to not be hit.  It's just a big fat "UP YOURS" from the developers to you.

I theorize that this fight would not be so bad if my character's stats were different, have a look:

You'll notice that my agility is through the roof, but my attack is stunted.  Now realize I had no control of this.  I chose Jack because his attack was the highest to begin with.  As I played the game and leveled up, the distribution of that leveling was based on the character I chose and not my own choosing.  And thus the character who starts off with the highest attack in the end is the character with highest agility.  Agility it would seem does jack squat and it certainly doesn't kill final final final bosses:

 GAME OVER SUCKER!  Understand that I do not give up easy in games.  I fought this boss for three hours.  I saw that Game Over screen at least a hundred times.  Yes I have better things to do with my life but once I get pissed off at a game, it takes a LOT to burn through my patience enough to give up.  It also takes a lot for me to cheat.  (I hate cheating in video games but that's a post unto itself.)  Let's just say I can count on one hand how many times I've resorted to cheating just to beat a game.  But congratulations Crystal Beans you jerkface bastard of a game, you got me to that point.  So I finally just put a Pro Action Replay code into SNES9X and killed the final boss... which by the way technically had six forms to deal with.  Yes six.  UP YOURS.

What really made me angry was knowing that if I had chosen a different character than Jack, I might have ended up with one who's attack maxed out instead of his agility.  Then I likely would have been able to beat this game fair and square.  But I was not about to spend another 5 hours playing through the game with a different character to find out.  Up until the final boss I actually had moderately enjoyed Crystal Beans, but that ol' trope had to go and take a big stinker on that.  No I did not sit through the credits for this one.

So should you play Crystal Beans From Dungeon Explorer?  No.  Really, you shouldn't.  I mean if you hate yourself a little perhaps.  Really even if you're nostalgic for classic 16-bit action-RPGs, this is a piss poor way to waste your time.  Just download the OST and find a Youtube boss run or something, those are the only good parts.

Ardent Score: 4 krystly beanz out of 10.

With that behind me, I'm currently playing another fan translated SFC game.  I won't say what it is yet, but let's just say it's marvelous indeed.

EDIT, UPDATE 8/14/14

I have been informed that I was wrong about the leveling system in Crystal Beans.  When you kill a boss it drops a crystal.  I always grabbed the crystal as soon as it appeared.  What I did not know though is if you wait, the crystal starts cycling colors.  Depending on what color the crystal is when you grab it, it will in turn upgrade the corresponding stat.  So it is possible to only upgrade your attack, for example.  I did not know this fact, because that's just incredibly unintuitive bad game design.  However if I had known this, I likely could have beat the last boss fair and square.  All the same Crystal Beans is still not a good game and this is the last moment of my life I'm wasting on it.