Originally posted by: Gaia Gensouki

I managed to beat King's Knight!

This game has some good things going for it, like combining a shoot 'em up with an RPG or having four playable characters with a few differentiating characteristics and nice, fluent action. But this game is overall very rough around the edges and has several serious flaws. One of them being that this game is too cryptic about what to do and what the many different power-ups are even good for. This is one of those games, for which you definitely want to have a manual or guide to help you out.

But even after I looked for a manual online, I still wasn't prepared for some of the curve balls that this game threw at me as soon as I made it to level 5. Because level 5 is when all surviving characters band together to fight an evil dragon and save the princess. But what neither manual nor game tell you, is that you absolutely need to have all four characters in your party or you will 100% not be able to beat this game. Why? Well, there are two instances in this level where I was confronted with a dead end. No matter what I tried, which way I went or which character I used, I could not get past that dead end. This is because you have to have every character in your party and you must have certain power-ups, that the game calls elements. In each of the first four stages there is one of every type of element hidden somewhere. And only if every character survived and you have found all the elements across those four stages can you cast a spell. But only certain characters can cast a specific spell and only in one specific place in the fifth level. This is way too cryptic and almost impossible to figure out by yourself. The designers could have made it a bit more obvious, maybe by foreshadowing the circumstances under which a certain character can cast a spell in that character's level. Maybe the sorcerer should have had the water level due to his spell only killing enemies in water. Or the thief could have had a section with those invisible mazes and not the knight! Instead the developers throw all of these random hazards at you, that you have never encountered before and your only option is to learn by repeatedly dying and trying over and over again.

What is even worse, is that they have the audacity to let you play the fifth level, even if it is technically impossible to beat it! And the game never tells you this! And to top all of that, when you have a full party, they form a rhombus, which makes them much easier to be hit. Yet only one of them attacks at the same time! At first this made me try the final level with only one character as this is much easier. But since you need a specific character at specific parts in this level, you must have them in your party swap them in at the right time by stepping on swapping tiles. While you are on one of those swapping tiles, the characters stop and slowly change formation. Meanwhile you still get attacked by enemies and can easily die. Imagine my anger, when I finally made it to the final boss after a few hours and then dying, because I accidentally stepped on a swapping tile and couldn't move while he barraged me with projectiles. There is not even any form of post-hit invincibility in this game. So a swarm of projectiles can kill you in one go. Great! But not only that: there are tiles that swap your characters randomly. So you might need the thief or the monster to progress, but no matter on how many swapping tiles you step, you do not get them due to bad RNG thus ruining your current attempt. This is absolutely ludicrous! They should warn you in advance or not even let you play the fifth level unless you meet the minimum criteria for success. Also, there should only be one of those four characters on screen and you should be able to swap them out freely like in Castlevania III. This alone would have made the fifth level much fairer and more fun.

Anyway, this game made me quite mad, even though there are some good qualities buried there. If only they had given the game a bit more polish. Then it might have been really good for a game from 1986, if only a bit short. But at least I have beaten another game from my backlog.