GOTD 5/2/2016: King's Knight (NES)
I bought King's Knight as a teenager expecting an RPG. It had cool medieval anime cover art, it was by Square, and a glance at the screenshots on the back of the box looked like an RPG. I slapped it in my NES only to immediately have my ass handed to me in a vertically scrolling shooter. Amused, I played on until reaching the final level, where I found myself killed over and over by a maze dead end. I was pissed, and I put it away for some time. I didn't realize what I was getting into. I needed an instruction manual.
King's Knight gives you control of four different characters, whose stages must be cleared before taking on the final stage. Along the way you find that you can destroy pretty much everything, and enemies and icons abound once scenery has been obliterated. These icons are where the mystery of King's Knight comes in. Up and down arrows raise or lower your health, shoes up your speed, springs up your jumping ability (you can hop onto most barriers), shield for defense, spheres for attack... and then there are other weird icons. These are elemental symbols, and four different ones are hidden in each stage along with a cave. Finding all four in each character's stage will allow you to use a different magic ability for each warrior, which as you may have guessed, was the key to my maze.
If you didn't have a manual, the game would seem cruel. As long as at least one character survives, you are allowed to attempt the last stage... which is impossible without all four characters AND the elemental symbols for all of them. This is a daunting scavenger hunt, made easier with an unintuitive continue system. Once you've died, you can hit select on the main menu. Here, you can choose which characters to retain at their current level and which to replay stages. Doing so allows the breathing room for trial and error to locate all of the symbols and caves, and makes the game way more doable for someone who hasn't just memorized the whole damned game.
Make no mistake, though, it is cruel. In the final stage, all four characters are grouped together on screen, sharing one life bar with a quadrupled hit box in the toughest stage of the game. You must rotate party leader to use the specific ability of each character to pass certain hazards, which is done by picking up arrow icons. Some just point left or right, but others look like U-turns, which RANDOMLY rotate your party 1-3 people. This means that there are times when it is impossible to go on if the game doesn't give you the right character to lead at the right time. It's infuriating.
King's Knight is just one of those games that has my number, and I suck at it. I watched Under Siege TWICE while forcing my way through this bitch again tonight. That is WAY too much Seagal for one sitting. I can't say that I hate the stupid game, though. It's a shooter that looks like an RPG, and it has some nifty concepts going for it that kept me interested enough to stick with it again. If you're a masochist with an NES shooter bent, there is some fun to be had here, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't cussing at it all night tonight, and no, that's not normal for me.
Played it?
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. I'm a big fan of non-traditional old school shooters like this and Elemental Master, though.
