(aka KING'S FIELD in the states)
would you believe that, despite being obsessed with the "FromSoft Dark Fantasy" lineage of games since i first got a copy of King's Field: The Ancient City from a Gamestop clearance bin in 2008, it took me until yesterday to play this one to completion?
i picked it up many times over the years, but there was always something that kept me from sticking with it. the early FromSoft games start with a period of intense acclimation that can't just be attributed to their age; even by the standards of the time, they drop you into their world with almost no instruction, and force you to contend with idiosyncratic, seemingly-inconsistent hit detection, controls and penalties for failure. get so close to this poison slime that you're practically stepping in it if you want to hit it with your dagger -- but not too close, because poison is a veritable death sentence when you're level 2. roll around the contact surface of enemy collision boxes, making careful adjustments to your yaw and bearing, if you want your attacks to connect without exposing yourself to theirs. Adjust to sudden and surprising changes in the framerate (even on the original hardware, though the issue is exacerbated on modern emulators).
i was able to tough out that reverse-honeymoon period with the later, more modern entries in the series (even KFIII, which surprises me. KFIII kind of sucks!) but never had the patience to get through it in KFII. some combination of impatience, distraction or business meant i always tapped out around the termite nest. i'm glad i stuck with it this time.
there is a tacitly-agreed-upon model of game difficulty in the modern mind, where the experience starts easy, then get more and more challenging along a linear trajectory; a perversion of the "rising and falling action" model of storytelling where the denouement doesn't arrive until the credits roll. but Wizardry was made before that Super Mario model of ludogogy was almost universally accepted, and Wizardry inverts it: the player is brutalized until they scrape together enough numerical, mechanical and knowledge-based advantages, at which point they steamroll the second act.
King's Field was FromSoft setting out to make a real-time Wizardry game, so every KF game follows the Wizardry model of difficulty. the first hour of these games is always the hardest. you have one, maybe two tools at your disposal; death comes quickly and with almost no recourse, even when you can see it coming. but then you start gathering a stockpile of curatives and status-removing items large enough to stop being precious with them. then you start finding a wide enough array of spells and weapons to reliably stunlock any enemy you encounter. then you have HP and defenses to tank ten hits, where you used to go down in two. then you unlock the fountain that provides an ever-increasing, infinitely-renewable reserve of HP & MP potions -- and items that revive you at said fountain when you die, with no loss of progress, effectively acting as a reserve of extra lives. and so on. and if you survived those careful, disproportionately-punishing dances you had to do with poisonous slimes and venus flytraps in the first cave, you're fluent enough in the game's real-time, non-numerical mechanics to handle basically any enemy encounter, up to and including the final boss.
i can't speak as much to the mecha side of Fromsoft's library, but with a few recent exceptions, the dark-fantasy catalogue consists of games that create a mystique of being extremely difficult, but are actually fairly easy -- and are not afraid to get even easier as the player approaches the ending. it is very clever artifice. nothing survives in the imagination like the first few hours of a game, especially since that's all the average reviewer, let alone player, is going to touch. even if you tough it out to the point in the playthrough where the screws loosen, it still informs your experience; you don't feel like the game is "going easy on you*," you feel like King Shit Badass for dogwalking the final act of an experience that initially felt insurmountable. the way we play games isn't just informed by actual mechanical consequence; a player also finds herself playing by completely imaginary rules inspired by the game's tone, filling in the gaps left by the vagaries of the game's communicated consequences.**
*a noteworthy exception, to prove that it's possible to break this illusion: Shadow Tower: Abyss turns into a damn Monty Haul by the end, rendering the player character so powerful relative to the dungeon's denizens that it approaches comedic anticlimax
**an example of this phenomena: the number of people who had to put down or even refused to touch Sekiro because of the Dragon Rot mechanic, even when they knew it had almost no mechanical consequences. feeling like you're stepping over the chalk-marks in the magic circle is all it takes for the circle to become real!
that's not to say that King's Field II ever becomes trivial. this is a game that starts to feel like a shooter in the DooM/Quake tradition as both you and your enemies become more reliant on rapid volleys of ranged attacks. you will find yourself ducking in and out of cover to avoid catching a salvo of healthbar-decimating fireballs, or sprinting across a room full of dangerous enemies at DooMguy-esque speeds to grab a few pickups you need without starting a costly fight. it was a pleasant surprise, coming from the deliberate, almost sedate pace of combat in KF4 and ST:Abyss. death still comes fast, so you never feel invincible -- you just have more preventative & reactive measures to stave it off. a player who can recover from the brink of death 20 times still feels mortal if the game makes her do so 19 times.
here are the paragraphs where i talk about the Souls games, including the ones that do not have the word "Souls" in their title. a lot of retrospectives on King's Field II focus on its similarities to those games, to better relate it to modern audiences; talking about it as a "dry run" for the formula the Souls games would later "perfect..." they use a lot of language like that. i am more focused on what these games do that the Souls games grew increasingly disinterested in, before abandoning entirely. i think Demons, Dark Souls and to a lesser extent Dark Souls II are admirable translations of the King's Field games into a third-person perspective with higher visual fidelity, and that includes the "start very hard, then ease up towards the end" difficulty curve i discussed. Dark Souls 1 in particular is a mechanically easy game that does a fantastic job of maintaining the illusion of insurmountable challenge; it is a game trivialized by foreknowledge that the player is encouraged to play multiple times, to memorize, to obsess over -- all things that accumulate foreknowledge. it boggled my mind back in 2011 to see people who had clocked dozens of hours in DDR, Devil May Cry 3 or COD: Modern Warfare 2 -- games i find almost mechanically impossible, due to poor reflexes & rhythm -- talk about Dark Souls like it was a nightmare game for lunatics. the only challenges in that game that couldn't be trivialized with adequate preparation and foresight were a small handful of encounters that demanded precise, split-second reflexes: Ornstein & Smough, Artorias, and Manus.
from 2015 onward, FromSoft would make games that consisted almost entirely of encounters with reskins of Ornstein & Smough, Artorias and Manus. in keeping with their games' reputation for punishing difficulty, and what "punishing difficulty" looks like in the popular imaginary, these games would pit you against Ornsteins, Smoughs, Artorii and Manii that had increasingly elaborate movesets, combo strings and subsequent phases; the difficulty would escalate exponentially over the course of a given playthrough, as well as over the course of the franchise itself. the idea of a difficult level that culminated in an intentionally-easy boss, like Demon Souls' 5-2 leading into the Dirty Colossus, became unheard of -- let alone an area with no boss at all. "real" difficulty, in that imaginary, meant a rapid combo of sword-swings that you had to survive with a precisely-inputted series of dodgerolls; anything else became "cheese," and any outlier from that constant upward escalation of reflex-based challenge (including denouement encounters like True King Allant, Gwyn, the Moon Presence or the Elden Beast) were regarded as abnormalities or flukes.
i have spent the last ten years thinking, reading and talking about the Souls games and i am so god damn tired of them and what people apparently want them to be. anyway. Anyway,
King's Field II is early enough in this company's catalogue that it is entirely unburdened by the mechanical & tonal expectations that would come to dominate their work and the discussion around it. late in the game, you open a door to find rows of demons growing in giant, bubbling test-tubes, surrounded by wires feeding into modern-looking fuse boxes. like, why not? nothing in the rule book says you have to constantly adhere to a tone of po-faced, crumbling medieval fantasy. nothing says you can't challenge the player until they're sufficiently scared and respectful of danger, then ease off the throttle so they can enjoy the rest of the game. if you have the patience to learn how to steer the camera with the shoulder-buttons, properly attack slimes, and differentiate hallways with the same three stone textures, this is an expansive and rewarding experience.
