King's Field II

 (Note: King's Field has a whole (much simpler) Final Fantasy numbers thing going on where the first game didn't get released in the west. Hence, the game of this review was released as simply King's Field in America)

King's Field II is a first person action dungeon crawler released in 1995 for the PlayStation. Its main claim to fame is that it has no loading screens (outside of death/fast travel), a technical feat that wouldn't really become fashionable until much later (and even today a whole lot of open world games still have load screens between exteriors and interiors). Though I suppose its much bigger claim to fame these days is simply that its spiritual successor Demon's Souls ended up sparking a minor game design revolution and finally launched its developer to mainstream success in the west.

That's a good looking skeleton.

I'm not especially familiar with this particular transitional period of dungeon crawler where action combat was inserted into the labyrinthian worlds of the genre (now free to actually be 3d), until around the 2000's where those massive maze-like worlds largely turned into straight forward corridors with arenas for combat. That makes it a little tough for me to evaluate King's Field II's combat, in that I suspect its contemporaries range between being similarly awkward or basically just bad Doom. You have tank controls and a very slow strafe with the L1/R1 buttons. Your melee and magic attacks have separate stamina bars- your melee allowing attacks with a partial charge while your magic simply cannot be done until fully charged (with stronger spells requiring more downtime). In practice there are about 3 approaches to combat: 

• Rhythmically going forward/backwards (or strafing left/right for ranged enemies) with melee attacks hoping to beat out the monster's attack spin-up which is random enough that this mostly feels like a crapshoot of trading blows, but is still way better than standing in front of them since their attack speed will quickly overwhelm you. 
• Awkwardly strafing your way to a monster's behind (since they also have tank controls) which while very wonky (it honestly never would have occurred to me to play like this if the manual didn't tell me to), does basically let you demolish enemies without taking any hits. The caveat is that it's not really viable in tight corridors (you're more likely to get stuck on a wall and have your behind stabbed).
• Or just playing a very awkward first person shooter with bows/magic. The resources are scarce enough that you don't always get to do this.

 I don't think my words can really convey how awkward and slow it all is (even for someone that loves awkward and slow combat far more than button mashing trash). I would basically compare it to Hydlide or early Ys games: primordial Action RPG combat where the rules hadn't really been written yet, just in 3D this time. I also kind of loved it. The awkwardness allows the RPG elements to shine, making your progression feel compelling instead of overshadowed by skill. Its magic stamina system is a huge improvement over spiritual predecessors like Secret of Mana that fell prey to magic spam dominating its systems. And while the game actively tells you that just running past enemies is an option, I kind of love how running also makes you take more damage making it a slightly riskier maneuver compared to the borderline consequence free running strategies of the Souls games. It does still fall into the classic Action RPG pitfall of letting the player haul around 99 healing herbs (that are pretty cheap too) and use them with zero delay. But since the action is pretty underplayed anyway, that doesn't feel like as much of a mistake here.

Yes, you unlock shortcuts- just like Dark Souls! I think it really gets lost over time how many Souls elements are probably just bog standard dungeon crawler design that everyone forgot because the genre fell off the planet for awhile.

Of course the real star of the show is the aforementioned "open world". It's kind of really great. Dungeon crawlers tend to skew towards maze-ish self-contained-ish dungeon floors (which yes often weave together as well). But the connected world here ends up coming off more like a really well designed Metroid map. There's a sort of "spine" to the world where all the major zones connect that you end up learning to navigate like the back of your hand, while most of the "dungeons" are somewhat self-contained areas. The genius of it is that when you're first exploring the world, it's often not clear what areas even are the "spine" since it also has tons of extraneous dead ends and dungeons and loops and other such junk on it that makes it blend in with the dungeons. Yet once you have learned it, you rarely get lost while traversing it because the game is very strategic with the placement of its limited set of landmarks. While it doesn't have a whole lot of unique statues or whatever to work with, it's very particular about where it uses its textures and signs to guide the player before they even consciously realize it.

Quite a few key areas are denoted by signs or distinct textures compared to the dead end hallways nearby. Not the one pictured though, I just.. I forgot to take a screenshot of any of them ok.

 

It goes beyond just the design of the "spine", too. The way the game designed its mainline path progression is also kind of beautiful. You tend to find keys or new areas in the middle of dungeons, before you've cleared the entire dungeon. This creates a sort of unease in the player where they have somewhere new to go while also being aware they haven't necessarily cleared out the previous location. It's not uncommon for that new area to actually end up being required to continue with the place where you left off, but sometimes it's just a new optional thing instead. This creates a sense of... I often felt like I was skipping ahead in the main progression, but ended up doing exactly what the main progression actually wanted. It's an exquisite sense of exploration that makes you feel like you're getting away with something when you actually aren't. It really highlights why backtracking is actually cool you losers stop whining about it.

Why did I take so many pictures of skeletons there are other types of enemies in the game.

I should really emphasize here that the game does a hell of a job managing the complexity of the world with all this going on. It's even fairly generous with limiting monster respawns in a lot of rooms. Yes, since the world is seamless you get a real claustrophobic sense of knowing how far back you started was and a dizzying sense of having no idea where you are anymore. But I never needed to pull out a piece of graph paper and map everything out (you do eventually get in-game maps, but they're only really useful for thoroughly cleaning out dungeons than for actual cross-world navigation). The central spine structure combined with the level designer's supreme restraint with making individual "dungeon" areas small-ish and tending to only be comprised of several dead end hallways and a looping core makes it all mostly manageable while still feeling overwhelming in size. It ain't perfect since I often found myself lost in the tiny-but-maze-like towns that are lacking in distinct landmarking, but it could be way worse.

Golden trees- just like Elden Ring! Also if you sit and wait in front of it for several minutes it gives you an item. No, really. That's the mechanic.

 

That said, the cost of having really cool stuff to find in exploration also means the game is capable of being a total dick. In my case, I spent the entire game until the final bosses without any free way to restore my MP. Early on the game gives you a choice of fountain to unlock without giving you any information. Naturally, I blindly picked the fountain that recovers status effects instead of MP. You can eventually unlock the other fountain, but since it's an optional hidden thing, I managed to completely miss it until finally asking a guide towards the end of the game when realizing something had to be up. This pretty much changed my entire experience with the game, only using magic when absolutely necessary (as the game is designed with this in mind- there are alternate finite items you can find to restore your MP and I ultimately had a slight excess of them). Meanwhile, lucky players who picked the right fountain could semi-freely use magic for most of the game. That's kind of neat, especially when considering the "playground rumor" social space of the game. It's also kind of terrible. But kind of neat. (similarly, I didn't use the (semi-limited) fast travel system until significantly later in the game than most players could because the error message for using the portal item without enough MP is "nothing happens" rather than "you don't have enough MP, dummy" and explicit descriptions about items is something you have to earn with a hidden NPC or reading the manual, but even the manual/npc don't tell you about the MP requirement).

The squeaky rocking chair is the only noise you hear.

Over the years games have tried to inject a little more realism into their economies with trash vendor items dropped by monsters (ie, wolf pelts) creating gold rather than direct gold drops. King's Field II's economy however is a little more interesting than that: for the majority of the game monsters only really drop 10-40 gold (100 gold at the very late end game). This is only really useful for covering the price of very cheap ~14 gold healing herbs. Tons of useful items cost 6000-8000 gold, upwards to even 22,000. If you want any hope of affording them, you're going to have to sell some items. But almost every item in the game has some use for you: crystals (rare random drop and semi-plentiful static item) can be used to make reusable potion bottles, other crystals that permanently boost magic power, MP recovery items (real important when you're a doofus who doesn't have MP potions), status effect clearing crystals, equipment, etc. At the end of the day duplicate/old equipment and the magic-boosting items end up being your money makers, but the game is dangerously close to having an economy where everything feels like a trade off (doubly so since like 80% of shop items can be found in the dungeon, but you can obtain them way earlier by buying them). It's pretty neat, and also thematic since the game revolves around people being trapped on a poison island being forced to mine said crystals. (the game also seems perfectly happy to let you sell some pretty major key items. No, the NPCs don't seem to sell them back to you either. So if you want to sell your ability to fast travel for some quick cash.. the game is ok with that).

I love that most the NPCs all have unique activity animations like eating or digging.

QUICK COMMENTS: 

• The music is ok. But the relatively small number of tracks means that the low key ambient melodies end up getting worn into the ground and lose all sense of mood.
• There's more story here than you would expect at first. Both with the history of the island, and the interpersonal relationships of the NPCs. They actually change their text/positions somewhat regularly with the flow of the game, and I ended up confused by a lot of it since I think I missed a lot of out-of-the-way NPCs that I never went back to talk to. I found it mostly to be pretty bland fantasy, but some parts do hit. I particularly dug the optional mirror that told you more explicit backstory about every character/monster.
  
• There's also one puzzle that is basically asking you to find a needle in a haystack given the size of the world. Now, the needle is actually in one of the areas you revisit frequently. But even so.. c'mon.
• One of the plot elements is that the big bad has made the island permanently night. This is almost certainly to deal with draw distance in the game's hand full of outdoors areas, but the game really leans into it by making the parts of town that are allied with the main villain still have daylight. It's a really cool piece of in-world storytelling that lets you know who is and isn't on his good side at a glance.
• One of the shopkeepers is explicitly allied with the Big Bad (when using the magic mirror on him) while also giving you the best sell prices for goods. I was really hoping all the magic boosting items I was unloading would end up making the final boss harder or something, but I don't think it did. But I appreciate that the game made me think it might.

I often found myself mashing the "Eat Herb" button through traps rather than finding where the off button was hidden. Game design blunder, or multiple viable routes?

So should you play King's Field II? If you have a high tolerance for backtracking and don't need great RPG combat then.. sure, maybe? I had a great time. I don't know that most people will. It actually makes me sad that as game technology has gotten better at big worlds, we aren't really making truly intricate ones like this anymore, instead doing big open empty fields (yes, Souls games make areas visible in the distance.. but that's just visual fluff rather than a navigational nightmare. And while dungeons are intricate, they're self-contained). Although the level design isn't necessarily as great as something like Thief, where the intricate levels were also believable places in addition to being functional levels- this is still ultimately a bunch of dank dungeon corridors. Just really well made ones.

Tunic

I've had a hard time getting into indie games that are trying to be Zelda or Metroid, as even when they're well-made and pretty they tend to be missing a certain something (level design I suspect, they all come off like first draft levels). I can at least say that Tunic did not fall into the pit of me sighing and stopping after a few hours- I played it to the end. It evokes Zelda with the titular outfit of its protagonist, and I suppose it's not a completely inaccurate comparison. Just, like, replace Zelda's combat with something a bit slower (it's trying to be Souls given the in-game references to Dark Souls, but in practice you mostly just mash after seeing an opening- the enemy design is about as mundane as an Ubisoft game) and replace Zelda's eclectic variety of puzzles with one primary puzzle revolving around hiding things behind perspective (you know how old RPGs had you rubbing against walls to find secret doors? It's like that, but actually cool because there are visual cues). 

It also uses the experience of playing a video game in a language you can't read as an intentional mechanic. You see, there's an in-game manual that unlocks as you play. But it's made up of a mix of about 10% English and 90% fictional language. Most the the text in the game itself is also in this language that you can't read. As someone who has dabbled in Japanese-exclusive games it's, uh, pretty authentic (as they also feature confounding random instances of English). This aspect was the main thing that sold me on the game. And while it takes way longer to utilize it than I wanted, it does end up leveraging it to a satisfying degree.

(Minor spoilers for the rest of the review. Though personally I would have been happier with the game if someone told me about it ahead of time so. There's that.)

Like every other indie game on the planet, it does end up taking a bit of a genre shift to something akin to an adventure game. This part is in a lot of ways the best part of the game, but also kind of the worst. Without saying too much, the primary mechanic involved makes it hard to tell whether you executed the solution wrong or straight up had entirely the wrong solution. The execution is also lengthy enough that retrying it is quite annoying. I ended up basically referring to guides to see whether my answer was wrong or my input was wrong, and most of the time it was the input. It smoothed over the experience a lot, but also resulted in me spoiling things for myself at times. I... would probably still recommend doing so, as it's maddening otherwise. 

I somewhat question the shift itself too, since separating it from the rest of the game ends up leaving you with just one flavor of game at a time rather than how genuine Zelda mixes genres to create a balance. It also left me with a very strong longing for the game to do more with the manual gimmick for most of the game, only for it to suddenly become a lot more useful than just "where to go next" at the last moment. To  be fair, the split also allows the game to be way more convenient about traversal once it hits full-on adventure game time so I can't totally fault the structure.

So should you play Tunic? I dunno. I guess if you want an indie action adventure that's just pretty good. It has a some stand out moments, but also has quite a few average elements. Fact of the matter is that we've seen these ideas explored several times by now: Ni No Kuni 1 and Retro Game Challenge among others have explored the game manual renaissance, Fez explored deep secrets inside games, and genre shifting is practically its own genre at this point. Tunic takes some of these further than its peers, and one of the puzzles in it is probably one of the best times I've ever had taking notes in a game. But the good bits have flaws, and it's a tad average on the whole. So I'm left unsure of it, but I guess I'm glad I played it.

Elden Ring

In a few years when you look up Elden Ring in a dictionary it's just going to say "too much of a good thing". It's not even like Dark Souls where you can simply say the last chunk of the game is blatantly unfinished and that's why it's bad. Elden Ring's final dozens of hours are about as well made as the first. But they're also not particularly distinct from the rest of the game, either. So you simply end up tired and exhausted of the formula.

I wanted the introduction to be about how the long wait for a game that actually paid attention to 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was finally over (as every open world game since has simply ignored it- even games like Horizon: Forbidden West that doesn't even have the excuse of being in development before seeing it- its preceding game literally released along side Zelda. Most developers straight up don't seem to give a shit for whatever reason, or they get confused and think the climbing around was the rad part of Zelda). As sick of it as I am, it's still true. Elden Ring does a pretty good job cleaning up the open world genre's obsession with not letting the player discover anything for themselves by having fairly minimal information. While most landmarks can be identified by visually looking at the map (some of which you only learn to identify with time making even reading the map a bit of an adventure), the game still hides a plethora of secret items, dungeons, and world bosses. Heck, the original release didn't even put NPCs on your map (which I liked but also made the limit of 100 map markers far too harsh for me) and even the size of the world is hidden from you for most of the game. To find them you have to actually look at the actual world. Surprisingly closely at times, often only barely identifying a cave by a flame masked behind tree branches. It's pretty cool, though it dries up a bit near the end as areas start to feel more like palette swaps with few secrets.

The game more or less copies the systems of previous Souls games into an open world (even outside the systems, it also copies a lot of level concepts and monsters almost directly from them as well. There are downsides to this, but it's also really smart in terms of letting them have a higher amount of variety than most open world games by virtue of gluing together several old games. They do a passable job of covering it up with minor tweaks, too. The only problem is the game is still so long that even with gluing multiple games together it ends up with an excessive number of repeat bosses and other monsters). But these systems were built for 40-60 hour long dungeon crawlers. When you try copy them into a 200 hour open world behemoth, they start to crack. While getting a lot of equipment and spells that aren't relevant to your build is annoying in a traditional Souls, it becomes more deflating in Elden Ring when that's your reward for tackling an entire micro dungeon (as opposed to finding a hidden corner). Worse, they carry over the upgrade systems from those games which require using limited items to upgrade equipment. This makes it really hard to even try the new things you're finding. While systems do exist to eventually get infinite amounts of most upgrades, they lag behind in a way that disincentivizes you from ever breaking from what you already have. They mitigate it somewhat by also letting you find things to change your existing weapon's properties, but it still makes all the other stuff you're finding underwhelming. 

Then there are the game's quests. I was initially pretty excited about them, keeping a notepad and screenshot button handy, as warned by the Internet. They more or less directly copy the structure of other Souls game quests: find an NPC at a point and do what's required, then they move on to another point in the world (sometimes with dialog clues as to where), and so on until the end, with no map hints as to where they went. This works well enough in the other games because they have a relatively linear, tight structure (though even then I'd tend to miss some of them, but not so many that I felt like I was missing much). When you transport this into Elden Ring's massive world, with a structure that allows quite a few different orders, with almost no changes it doesn't go so well (to be fair- some quests have optional steps and they do have NPCs shout at you when near a step). They're even worse if you miss a quest step because you end up with a needle in a haystack situation for deriving where the next quest step is in the miles and miles of areas you've already cleared out.

I screwed up almost every quest in the game despite my best attempts at being meticulous. At the end of the game I did end up looking them up out of curiosity. Generally speaking, the bigger side quests were mostly just my own fault for missing hidden areas or not spending enough time roaming around gigantic, empty boss arenas. Some of the smaller side quests involve such a specific order in areas with numerous possible orders of visiting that uh. Yeah good luck with those. I dunno how I feel about it. I still think the quest pointers that dominate games are horrible for games about exploration. And I have friends who missed similar things as me, and I know friends who managed to complete quite a few quests without help, so I can't say they're outright impossible. All I know is that in a game that is so much more about exploration than others in the series, I found it so much more distressing to be missing them than I did in the other games. I don't know the solution to the problem, though. I'm glad they took a swing at doing things the hard way and I hope they find the solution in the future.

There's a lot more that could be talked about such as the nuanced differences in combat (I have forgotten them), boss design / spirit summoning system (bosses are hyper aggressive with a lot of variations in attack patterns such that they feel built to force you to use summons. I found the summon system pretty fun in figuring out the best ones to use against different types of bosses. Then you find the Broken Summon and almost never care again- I was lucky in that I didn't find it until the end of the game, but most people aren't. It's a real shame. The upgrade system also hurts the system by limiting viable ones to experiment with), and how introducing a guest writer for the background story changes the things (more than you might expect at first, but also not that much). I'm just exhausted of it.

So should you play Elden Ring? Yeah probably, it's still one of the best open world games ever made (despite the dour tone of this review, the first 80 hours were incredible and I could not stop playing, and it's basically the RPG I've been yearning for all my life but never got because things like The Elder Scrolls have garbage combat I can't get into or The Witcher 3's non-existence balancing), but also in doing so you're cursing yourself with a game that outlives its welcome without giving you much reason to kick it out. It basically made me hate all video games for a month. I can't even say "oh just skip half the side content" (which is my typical strategy for open world games), because the game mixes in really cool stuff in secret places. That's its greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness.

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story

 The murder mystery game genre is one of those weird things that has been incredibly prolific in Japan starting with early PC games and the NES (even launching the creator of Dragon Quest's career), but ended up a virtually unknown, untranslated phenomenon in the west (though we certainly had our own equivalent PC adventure games involving murder). It's a tradition that persists to this day and finally came overseas with less serious, more anime flavored stuff like Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright. But those original games, introduced to me by watching Game Center CX (it's.. a Japanese let's play television show that's been running for 20 years...uh, just watch it, it rules), were deathly serious in nature. And it's that tradition that The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, a full motion video murder mystery released in 2022, comes from. You play as a mystery writer tasked with figuring out why an unknown skeleton was buried in the Shijima family's estate, quickly spiraling into solving multiple murders spanning one hundred years- including the present day.

My main expectation for this game was mostly just to see some goofy low budget FMV game shenanigans, possibly with a good mystery jammed in there too. That's really most people's expectations for the genre, which exists in the beautifully awkward space of having game developers deal with a low-budget film production (which likely only some of the team has any experience with) while also having to slice things apart to make sense inside a game where dynamic things normally happen like objects moving around. Sometimes you hit a goldmine with games like Contradiction - Spot The Liar!, where the goofiness just enhances an enjoyable little adventure game. Most of the time you just get the goofs. The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is light on goofs, but surprisingly gave me an actual appreciation for the advantages of the FMV format inside a game for the first time (more on that later).

The game is roughly split into 3 phases for each chapter/mystery. First you watch a lengthy video of the case, leading up to and the immediate aftermath of a murder (occasionally pressing a button to collect clues). The second phase is the hypothesis phase where you place those clues into matching edges on a straight line hex grid. Once matched, the game plays a short 3d scene outlining a possible piece of logic (ie, the murderer had to be a man because of x, the murder weapon had to be y, the motive had to be z, etc). Since the game uses image patterns to match where these go, this phase is more about mulling over the clues and doing a matching minigame than anything else. Some of the pieces are so out of left field that it often adds more noise to solving the case than anything else, but I kind of enjoyed how stupid it was willing to go. The final phase goes back to playing video, but this time interrupted by having to pick the right answer to numerous questions about the mystery. Pick the wrong answer and you get a short scene explaining why you're wrong and also very dumb and get whisked back to the question to try again. A minor stroke of brilliance is that the game also gives you a rating at the end of the case, incentivizing the player to actually think about choices rather than bumbling your way through (though the ratings are purely fluff and easily cheated by replaying, they did end up making me care).

If you've ever watched a mystery show or movie, odds are you've found yourself commenting on who done it with those around you (something so common that tons of shows actively stop and prompt the viewers to pick). The brilliant part of The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, which I don't know how to feel about since I'm not sure the developers even intended it, is that it taps into that same energy. The majority of mystery games just aren't great for playing with other people, since they're heavily text based and varying reading speeds makes that all kinds of awkward. Even newer stuff with heavy voice acting and cutscenes still tend to be structured as classic inventory puzzles (yeah you can throw around "uhh try using the bone on the dog", but it's kind of weak), roaming between rooms, and conversation trees that are optimized for immersing a single person. But this game is perfectly made for playing with other people: everyone can watch a movie together, and the questions are streamlined so you can debate among yourselves, arguing for specific lines of logic as to which one is correct. You see I didn't actually play this game myself, I just watched it with a group of friends. Even so, arguing and coming to agreement about each piece of evidence basically made me feel like I was playing it. I don't feel like I missed anything, and I think the game was actually a far better experience for it.

The mysteries vary in quality (with one of the early ones going too hard on goofy lateral thinking), but are overall pretty good. Some feature so many gaps in knowledge that solving them tends to feel like taking the test without ever having went to class, but this ends up paying off in the epilogue chapter that hits you with a barrage of reveals, recontextualizations, and fills in every question we had in a satisfying manner. Yeah, there was no way you could have pieced together most of those clues, but they were present just enough to make you feel like you should have.

There's only really two big negatives with the game. One chapter features a hard genre shift into playing more like an adventure game with dopey traditional puzzles. It's awful. And the other issue is that some of the wrong answers have really unsatisfying explanations for why they're wrong (the worst being a character just flat out telling you "no I already checked, there aren't any." despite the hypothesis phase presenting 4 possibilities, some of them plausible, it doesn't go to the effort of explaining why they're wrong). And I suppose a bonus complaint is that I think mystery narratives should generally be entertaining to watch even outside of the mystery, but this thing is so dry that it was primarily just the mystery that I was there for (though some chapters have investigations prior to the main mystery of the chapter that lean into making this work, and the late game has enough stuff layered together that it also works).

So should you play The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story? If you have at least one other person to play it with, can get into murder mysteries, and are a giant weeb then yes absolutely.  I would highly recommend it so long as you know what you're getting into. (I'm deathly serious about playing it with someone else. I'm.. not sure it works otherwise.)