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.