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I can sum up this game in two words: Demon's Souls.
King's Field was a classic game on PS1. King's Field: The Ancient City is the follow-up on PS2. It maintains the same plodding pace and high difficulty level. It forces you to consider your actions carefully. It punishes hubris and reckless action relentlessly. This should sound familiar if you ever played Demon's Souls.
The downside is that this game is so clearly the foundation for both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls that it is actually hard to recommend playing this game if you have not played the latter two. The newer titles are more refined, deadly, elegant, and include the novel multi-player components not found here. In short, they are substantial improvements.
Two more reasons to play the newer games instead of this are the camera and controls. The first person view brings along some of its baggage, especially obvious in melee-based combat. Depth is hard to gauge, so determining how far away from an enemy you need to be is a challenge. The controls are awkward and cannot be customized to the point of providing a modern FPS control scheme, which is a shame. The two biggest problems are:
- pivot (yaw) controls cannot be mapped to the right analog stick
- the look up/down control is permanently inverted (pull down to look up)
The game world is open, not linear. It is there to explore. However, they use some familiar gating obstacles to ensure you generally progress through the game in the "right" order. This is pretty much the same method as Metroid Prime. One big difference is that in Metroid Prime, a lot of the areas have the same spawns every time you pass through. In King's Field, you will initially encounter more resistance and only find token respawns upon returning later.
I was about to give up on the game to play something different and they dropped a new weapon and regained my interest.
A couple of plot hints have emerged and I definitely want to push the story forward to know more. This hook was conveyed during gameplay, not through any kind of dialog or cut scene, which makes it more immersive and creates a stronger attachment for me.
Despite my complaints, this is still a very good game. I would say it's an excellent game, but knowing where its successors have gone makes this hard to play without thinking that you could be playing basically a newer version.
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