King's Knight

The Good
The game, due to the fact it was an early NES release, was quite innovative. The idea to have a "medieval shooter" instead of banal space shooters was good. The idea to have 4 different characters with 4 different worlds to train themselves, with different power-ups that will increase their attack power, defense power, speed and "jump" abilities was very great for a shooter. I also liked a lot the fact that the characters have different abilities such as shooting different kinds of statues.

The graphics, for an early NES release, are far above average. They're pretty much detailed, and very similar to Final Fantasy graphics, and also have detailed characters on the title screen and special scenes like Final Fantasy with detailed characters in battle. I really found the background very nice.

The Bad
Well, even if the game was based on good ideas, it seems to have been realized so horribly that it actually destroyed the whole game. It's hard to explain why on its own, so I'll compare the game to another game of the same genre and the same year that was considered by many people to be good: Gradius by Konami. Also, both games are 64 kilobytes in size, so the comparison is really significant.

Back in the time, there were only two storylines for such games. The aliens have invaded the world and you should kill them to restore the peace, or a princess has been kidnapped by an evil monster and you should rescue her. Gradius picked up the first, King's Knight the second. Nothing special here.

About the sound, Gradius had some great music, and, well, King's Knight music is actually pretty nice, but there are only four tracks, on the world-overview, which was good and long for a such NES tune (however, you'll hardly ever hear the whole loop in the game), the cave one which wasn't very nice to listen to, but does the job to fit you in a dark ambiance. Next the final stage one, which is actually very plain, but as the cave one it does the job to put you in a critical ambiance, and eventually the ending one. Plus mini-song when you press start, die, complete a stage and enter the final stage. There are 4 songs and 4 mini-songs overall, nothing special, but it was still decent. There is no pitch/volume effect, but again it was an early release. The sound effects, however, were annoying, unlike the Gradius one where they were pretty detailed. So, Gradius had good music/sound quality while King's Knight had an average one. This doesn't really ruin the game.

The real problem comes with difficulty. Yeah, King's Knight is absolutely impossible, and there are a thousand things shooting at you at the same time, blah, blah, blah. But Gradius is pretty much the same, and has been positively be considered as "challenging". Actually, "challenging" and "impossible" are pretty much the same, except that "challenging" is positive and "impossible" is negative. That's all. So, this may ruin King's Knight, but, if so, why wasn't Gradius considered terrible?

Well, the actual problem may be because of the gameplay. Everything works pretty fine until the last stage. You just shoot the trees/rocks and see what kind of items you win. Pretty fun. You have to find all 4 hidden items in all 4 stages to be able to cast the "super powers" of each characters necessary to pass through the final stage, or else you'll die. Very annoying. Also, there are only 7 speed and jump upgrades, while there are 3 attack and defense upgrades. If you miss one of them (especially the attack and defense ones), you'll be much weaker and the final stage will become impossible (well, it already is impossible even with all characters with all upgrades). However, the gameplay in Gradius is much simpler, shoot everything that moves, and there is also upgrade, but you choose which one you want, to gain speed, more weapons or more defense. It's more "customized" than King's Knight, but the game didn't have a life bar, and King's Knight had no options, shield and the different weapons can't be swapped, but improved instead. Neither is really better, it's just different.

All these items can degrade the game a bit, but there is nothing horrible until now. None of these elements is really horrible. The actual problem about King's Knight is simply how it was horribly plain lazily programmed. Yeah. First, when the player takes a hit, he's not invincible for a few seconds, and that means if you take more than one shot at the same time, you'll probably die at once. When jumping on something, the player will go to the top of the screen to make a jump effect, but if a projectile or monster is where the player is on the screen, he'll take hit even if the monster is a lot above the player, that's actually just jumping.

Also, WHY are there "low arrows" on the ground that will take some life when you're walking on them? Isn't dodging the monsters' attacks hard enough? And why do the "up arrows" cure so few life bars?

Like I said above, there are many items the player can upgrade, and it's just terrible news. There should be a lot of these items scattered around, and if the player would be at his maximum stats, the upgrade would have no effect. Too bad, there is no status bar or something to show you how well your character has upgraded, but only a life bar instead. You'll only see your results if you complete the stages.

There are caves and you're forced to enter them if you want all upgrades and "special items" (I'll explain the horrible "special item" system later). If you don't find the staircase, you have no chance to get them, and you can't come back since the game always scrolls, by the way much too fast regarding the number of items you need to find. If you have found the staircase, the character will take it, and you'll hear a stupid sound effect meanwhile. Your character won't move for a moment, and during this time he's actually very vulnerable ! If anyone was shooting more than one single projectile at you, yeah, you're dead and can't evade those attacks.

Eventually, if you have found the cave, you have to make yourself a fairly challenging way to reach the end, where a boss lies. If you run in it, you'll instantly die. That "glitch" wasn't even supposed to be here, but, running in an usual monster would cause the player to lose life and the monster to be destroyed. Because the boss can't be destroyed, and because the player isn't invincible after getting a hit, you'll take another hit immediately after the first one at the frame rate of the NES and eventually die. Talk about crap programming. This usually won't happen, because you'll be trying to evade the boss' shots and you won't stay next to him, but this still proves how plainly this game has been programmed.

Also, there are water areas, where the hero swims and is much harder to control because he slips on the water. But he slips really too often. Actually, entering the water at the very left of the screen and just pressing right very quickly will make your character slip quickly on the middle of the screen, and if you press left to counter that... well, it's really crap.

The final stage is horrible. You should have collected all "special elements" of all stages to be able to cast special attack (there is one special attack per character) to pass the final stage. If anything is missing, you probably won't be able to make your path trough the last stage, except for Kaliva's ability to hurt monsters in water which isn't actually needed.

Two of these "special elements" are to be found in the cave of every stage, and two at the end of every stage. So if you didn't find the staircase, you can directly hit reset. Same goes if any of your 4 characters died, you won't be able to pass through the final stage nor be able defeat the final boss. But the game does allow you to go into the final stage, even if it is actually literally impossible to pass trough this one. Talk about a crap programming.

Finally, your 4 guys (admitted you have all 4 of them), are arranged as a square, and you control all 4 at the same time. Only the one in the front will shoot, and you can change their order only by stepping on some arrows on the floor. If any of them gets hurt, you'll loose life and all of them share the same life bar. Horrible.

The Bottom Line
King's Knight was a shooter released by Squaresoft in the early NES ages, before they started making RPGs, and it was one of the first games published by Square. Everything was born from dust and everything will turn to dust, and Square also begun just where I'm afraid they're going now: to make games with awesome graphics and fun ideas but with everything else horrible. If they continue to fall at this rate, this may become true. I still hope they won't get so low, though.

Here you are a list of updates that should really be done to King's Knight:

• The player has to be invincible for about 2 seconds when he takes hit. A capital error for the game.
• There should be a status bar showing you how much attack, defense, speed and jump ability you have, plus other stuff.
• This stupid "super power" system should be deleted or replaced by another one that can be used everywhere and use MP, and without the need to collect the "special items". Making something else there would be significant for the game.
• Make the game still possible if you've not upgraded with all items of a stage (I wouldn't be surprised if the game would glitch if it would be hacked to have more items, so something that would limit their effect if more than the maximum allowed status is reached is also needed)
• Make different weapons that can shoot more than a single shot instead of just an improvement of a basic weapon, and also have some automatic "turbo" shooting or something more about the weapons.
• Remove the stupid arrows that reduce your life (making spikes or something would be more cool, but not so many of them !!)
• Slow down the scrolling speed, so the player has more time to explore the level and their upgrades (yeah, it actually scrolls so fast that you don't have the time to do anything but die).
• Show only one of the four characters on the screen at the same time on the final stage, and swap them with the select button instead of have stupid arrows on the ground. This error is very significant for the game too.
• Make all characters have a different life bar during the last stage.
• Make the water less slippery.
• Make the character invincible while jumping and taking a staircase.
• Make the caves not obligatory, but preferable to explore.
• Input a decent game over system like in any other game out there (yeah, King's Knight is the only game as far I know that have a such crap game over system)
• Don't allow the player to enter in the final stage if all of his characters haven't completed the previous stages.
• Make the stages a bit longer (this wouldn't be really needed, but the game is damn short)

If anyone would apply all or even some of these modifications, King's King would become one of the best shooter in the world. Really. Now, if you're a Squaresoft fan, play the game because it's interesting and it shows that anyone can do errors. Else, don't bother.