King’s Field

King’s Field is a 1994 first-person action role-playing game developed and published by FromSoftware for the PlayStation, the studio’s debut video game and the first entry in the King’s Field series.¹¹³ The game unfolds entirely in the first person with full 3D movement through the underground tomb of the kingdom of Verdite, where the player, controlling the knight Jean Alfred Forrester, descends alone into a vast labyrinth armed only with sword and magic.¹³¹⁰ It was released in Japan on December 16, 1994, and never received a release outside Japan, which led to the renumbering of its sequels for the West.³⁸ Priced at ¥1,890, it supported one to two players and was later reissued in the PS one Books line on November 15, 2001.³

FromSoftware, a Shibuya-based company, had formed in 1986 as a developer of practical office software and stayed in that business for years before turning to games.¹⁸ By 1994 the industry had shifted: the CD had displaced cartridges as a cheaper medium, and Sony’s new PlayStation appealed to software developers.¹ The console had no role-playing games at its early December launch in Japan, and FromSoftware supplied one just a few weeks later.⁸ According to the account gathered in a later retrospective, company founder Naotoshi Jin — bedridden after a motorcycle crash and holding a sizable insurance payout — steered the struggling firm into games after the collapse of Japan’s 1980s economic bubble left its office-software work unprofitable, and after one of its programmers, Yasoshi Karasawa, built a title on an office PC-98 desktop in his free time.¹⁴ The firm invested in workstations and staff familiar with game development, splitting its workforce so that some continued commercial application work while others built the game.¹⁴ Fewer than ten employees delivered the finished product to Sony in under eight months, drawing on the ambition of Jin, the vision of writer Shinichiro Nishida, and the experience of programmer Eiichi Hagawa.¹⁴

Many of the development team, Jin among them, were fans of the Wizardry series, the pioneering first-person dungeon crawler; because no home console could render the number of polygons the team wanted, a first-person view — which spared the cost of rendering a player character — was chosen.¹⁴²³ The game placed itself in the lineage of first-person dungeon crawlers such as Ultima Underworld, Lands of Lore, Might & Magic, Wizardry, and The Bard’s Tale, a genre built on first-person exploration, single-character or party control, and crucial character leveling and statistics.¹⁰ Combat in that tradition ranged from turn-based, as in the first Lands of Lore, to real-time, as in Ultima Underworld; King’s Field took the real-time approach.¹⁰

Setting and story

A short video and the game’s manual establish the setting: Verdite, a small country ringed by deep forest, fog, and whirling winds, was saved in an ancient war by a savior who vanished into the woods and became known as the Dragon of the Forest.¹³¹⁷ The citizens built a sanctuary in the Dragon’s honor, which over time became the Royal Graveyard, and the legend held that the Dragon would one day return bearing magical artifacts.¹³¹⁷ The player takes the role of Jean Alfred Forrester (rendered John Alfred Forrester in some translations), who enters the graveyard beneath Verdite Castle in search of his father, the swordmaster and commander Hauser Forrester, after the king’s soldiers sent to unearth magical artifacts failed to return and monsters overran the tombs.⁴¹⁷ Deeper in, the player learns of the corrupted King Reinhardt III, who took power from dark forces, and — with help from the spirit of the fire magician Randalf and the fairy Miria — restores the power of the Sword of Moonlight, defeats the king, and is ultimately crowned.¹⁷

Gameplay

King’s Field is a first-person 3D real-time RPG whose polygonal animation was novel for its time, its corridors, walls, and stone monuments rendered in a dry, cold texture that conveyed the chill air of the dungeon.⁵ The game gives the player almost no direction; the objective itself is not stated, so the player wanders the dungeon to discover what to do.⁵¹⁰ The occasional sound of the character’s own breathing heightens the sense of presence within the tomb.⁵ The heads-up display carries gauges for health points and magic points along with a compass at all times, augmented by separate strength meters.¹⁰ Attacking depletes a strength meter that must refill before another blow can land; casting magic requires a fully charged magic meter, and a melee blow struck while the meter is less than full does reduced damage.¹⁰ Combat is deliberately awkward: attacks are the melee swing of a sword and ranged magic, the swing is slow and lands only when pressed against the enemy’s body, and early foes can kill in one or two hits.⁵ Movement is limited to turning left and right and stepping forward or back, so a player retreating can become pinned against a wall, and some enemies inflict staple RPG afflictions such as poison and paralysis.⁵ The player has no party and travels entirely alone, with a single weapon slot, several armor slots, and no dual-wielding.¹⁰ Progress depends on collecting hidden weapons and armor, grinding gold to buy costly items, leveling up, and finding cross-shaped save points scattered through the dungeon.⁵ The first three games appeared on the original PlayStation without analog controller support, encouraging L1/R1 strafing and circling of adversaries.¹⁰¹⁹

Sequels, offshoots, and legacy

The original sold well enough in Japan to put FromSoftware to work on a sequel; the second King’s Field arrived on the PlayStation in 1995, running as a continuous adventure without loading screens.⁸¹⁶ Because the first game never reached North America, the sequels were renumbered for the West in a manner similar to the Final Fantasy treatment: Japan’s King’s Field II became King’s Field in North America — released there on February 15, 1996 — while Japan’s King’s Field III became King’s Field II.⁸¹⁵ The North American King’s Field moved the setting to the island of Melanant, casting the player as the knight Alexander sent by King Forester to recover the stolen Moonlight Sword.¹⁵ FromSoftware drifted away from the series after the third installment, with a fourth appearing on the PlayStation 2, but kept the design in spirit through the first-person crawler Shadow Tower (1998) and the PS2 launch RPG Eternal Ring.⁸ The studio also produced a handful of promotional and mobile spin-offs, including King’s Field III Pilot Style, a short trade-show giveaway, and King’s Field Mobile, the first of three mobile-phone entries.⁴

In 2000 the studio released the Sword of Moonlight: King’s Field Making Tool in Japan, the software it had used to create the series, sold as boutique rather than everyday software.²¹⁶ A fan translated it into English, and a small community continues to use it to build King’s Field–like games; one such project, Moonlit Corpse, applied the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” technique to level design, its maps described as still feeling “dreamy and King’s Fieldy”.²⁹ The original game itself received a fan translation into English by John David Osborne in 2007, and later Spanish and Russian translations.⁴¹³

King’s Field has been credited as an origin point for FromSoftware’s later dark-fantasy action RPGs Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, the games often described as the spiritual successors to the series.⁵¹⁵ Japanese coverage identified the game’s “abandoned” feeling — being thrown into a world with trial-and-error growth and no guidance — as the very quality that would become the wellspring of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.⁵ FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has said the first King’s Field was one of his favorite games as a player, considers King’s Field and Dark Souls separate entities guided by different design concepts, and holds that any revival would be contingent on Jin, the series’ creator, serving as director.⁶²¹

Kings Field TrailerWaluarigio