In defense of King's Field
In a recent article on Kotaku announcing the shut down of the Demon’s Soul servers next year, the writer had this to say about the classic PS1 title King’s Field:
“FromSoftware initially entered into the fantasy RPG genre with 1994’s King’s Field, a clumsy game of dungeon crawling that suffered from clumsy gameplay and a first person perspective that made the world feel small.”
You see what she did there? She called Kings Field “clumsy” twice, in one sentence. She is certainly a fine writer (and I’m teasing her a bit here), but her opinions on King’s Field fall right in line with what is now the common public perception of the series. These days, King’s Field is generally considered to be a joke, an early stab at first person dungeon crawling that failed in its attempt to try something new. King’s Field is only mentioned anymore as a precursor to the Souls series a footnote on the path to greatness. This hurts my feelings a little bit. It is also fairly far from the truth.
It is true that upon release, King’s Field was a polarizing game. When it came out, some players were confused by it’s first-person control scheme, implemented (clumsily?) on the d-pad. This was well before the first analog controllers appeared for PS1, so FromSoftware was forced to work with what they had available, which meant a unique control scheme that became quickly outdated once analog sticks showed up on the scene. Players were also not used to such an open world experience. Right from the start of King’s Field, players were able to wander in any direction, with no destinations or goals immediately clear. Only through exploration and conversation with NPC’s did the story gradually unfold.
Hmm…a first-person fantasy game, in an open world, with emergent story-telling, in 1994. While some players found this combination confusing, other players found the game to be groundbreaking. And a serious argument could be made that King’s Field laid much of the groundwork for modern games outside of the Souls series, namely Elder Scrolls-style RPGs.
When King’s Field released among the first wave of PS1 games, I had never played anything like it before. You’ve got to remember, gaming had just made the leap from 16-bit, so outside of Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC, there were not a lot of first-person games in the world. And there were certainly not many that used polygon based worlds, streaming from the disc with minimal load times. At the time, King’s Field felt nothing short of revolutionary.
Yes, the combat was extremely difficult. It still is. Going back to King’s Field is not easy. The player-character is very slow moving by modern standards, and swinging a sword felt like your arm was swinging through Jell-O at first. But if players gave the game a chance, they soon discovered a rhythm to the combat which allowed them to succeed. Taking on monsters that could kill you with one hit became thrilling instead of tedious. And as you leveled up and your skills improved, those early monsters ceased being such a threat, and that slow arm got quicker and quicker until you could one-hit those dangerous beasts.
The game world was stark, bleak, and moody, and in it’s way, beautiful. Dungeons were crawling with monsters and traps, and secrets were hidden in extremely out of the way places, rewarding exploration. Atmospheric music played at all times, and King’s Field used sound in ways that were revolutionary for the time. Sounds grew louder the closer you got to the source, and faded as you moved away. While this seems like standard procedure these days, it was very unique at the time and lent a feeling of authenticity to the world.
King’s Field games were enormous, taking many hours of exploration and puzzle solving to complete. Some enemies took ages to defeat. I remember one battle where I stood firing arrows though a crack in a wall at a hive of bugs for what seemed like hours before I finally destroyed them all. This dynamic would repeat itself years later in Demon’s Souls, when I stood on an overpass, shooting arrows at a seemingly undefeatable dragon. So yes, much of the basis for Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne was hammered out in King’s Field, but the series should not be simply a footnote in video game history.
In the end, the King’s Field Series inspired three games on PS1 (only two released in the US, our “King’s Field” was actually the second game in the series), an awesome sequel on PS2, a couple of Japanese PSP titles, and three Japanese mobile titles. There is still a small but dedicated King’s Field community online, making games for each other using “Sword of Moonlight: King’s Field Making Tool”, which was an official FromSoftware release in Japan.
King’s Field was groundbreaking, entrancing, fun and popular. Yes, it is outdated now and looks rough by the standards of today, but so do most games of the early PS1 era. King’s Field laid the foundation for many of the features that modern gamers take for granted. Can King’s Field get a little respect?
