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King's Knight Impressions: Why Does Square Hate Us?

Mar. 27 5:20 AM by Sardius

King's Knight was the first game to be published in North America by Square Soft. Its music was scored by Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu.

Beyond these two bits of trivia that you can use to impress all the girls at the anime convention, there is nothing else interesting or noteworthy about King's Knight. It's a bad game, and it doesn't even have the decency to be bad in a particularly inept way. It's a historical footnote that is impossible to enjoy in any context, and thanks to the increasing hostility of the Wii's Virtual Console service, you can now buy a license to play it for only five non-refundable American dollars.

Before finding their fortune in ripping off Dragon Quest, Square Soft made a tremendously unprofitable name for itself by publishing a broad spectrum of terrible games for the NES and Japanese home computers. Well, okay, that's being unfair to the company's later games like 3-D Worldrunner and Rad Racer, which are actually pretty decent. But we're not playing Rad Racer or 3-D Worldrunner this week.

Instead, we're blessed with King's Knight, a game so blandly unenjoyable that it's hard to even work up a proper rage about it. It's a vertically scrolling shooter that initially seems more interesting than it is, since you're not controlling a ship in space. Rather, you control one of four characters who travel on foot across a series of stages and blast away whatever monsters and landmasses get in your way.

Enemies fly around and attack in expected shooter patterns, but King's Knight's one stab at originality comes in its destructible environments, which hide power-ups and stairways to hidden areas. Shooting away entire islands and mountains is briefly entertaining in a stupid way, and is necessary for your survival, since you'll lose life quickly from the game's constant barrage of attacking monsters if you don't search for health items.

Unfortunately, these destructible environments also house additional enemies and power-downs, of all things, which often make your efforts seem wasted. You can shoot away hundreds of destroyable blocks to get a few health items, but all it takes is one surprise monster attack to drain away all the life you gained back.

More than that, though, King's Knight comes off as more of an obstacle course than a shooter. The destructible environments get in the way and block your shots more often than they provide useful items, and the experience quickly becomes irritating as a result.

With so many other shooters available on the Virtual Console, you're better off spending your money on pretty much anything else that involves shooting things with lasers. Have you bought Zanac yet? I bet you haven't. All the cool people are playing Zanac. Don't you want to be cool?

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