King's Field: The Ancient City

"Bad Presentation,Bad Controls-If you get over that, you'll find a nice game."

King's Field was one of my favorite series on the Playstation. It was genre defining as it was the first first person perspective role playing game. Back then, I looked past the bad controls, and horribly slow pace the game was set at and found a good game. With the coming of the Playstation 2, I'd expect they'd jazz it up a bit and fix the problems in the first two. Obviously, the developers were incompetent and went ahead and did the same thing thinking the originals were perfect. If you've played King's Field 1, you've played all the first person perspective role playing hybrids ever created- Neocron, Endless Ages, and Eternal Ring which is why this genre is suffering. This genre would be extremely popular if only developers used some common sense.

Gameplay[1]
You can't use the analog controls to move. The right stick makes you look up and down while the left analog moves you forward and back. You're forced to use the D-Pad. It feels weird at first, but you'll get used to it after awhile, but the fact that they didn't think to utilize the analog sticks better hurts the controls greatly though you can change them in the menu. Second strike against this game is that it moves extremely slowly. You'll have to wait a full 4 seconds to look behind you. That's ridiculous. By me just saying that you can imagine how slowly this game moves, and how slowly the enemies move. Most people will be turned off from just the slow pace of the game, and the awkward controls. If you are designing a first person perspective game, it needs to be fast paced. Every time someone attempts a hybrid game of this type they poorly design the first person perspective interface, or completely fudge on the game entirely. Thankfully, you'll find a good role-playing game that's somewhat complex if you get past the bad controls and how slow everything moves.

Sound[5]
The weapon swing sounds are awesome, but there's not much sound effects in this game other than monster screams. No voice overs either. Also the dialog from the npc's won't display all the way. What I mean is you'll have to keep pressing X to find out all of what an npc's message is.

Graphics[4]
This is PSone graphics with a slight improvement. Nothing special here.

Overall[2]
If they could actually get this genre right, there would be more games like this that are actually designed correctly. This is just sloppy. There's no excuse for it. Players should not have to dig deep to find a game that is actually worth playing, but for a majority of the titles out there people are being forced to do that. 90 percent of a game starts in the design phase plotting out controls and innovative ideas. Agetec, the company that picked this franchise up, consistently produces bad games, but they're on the right track. If companies would be bold enough to try different things and different genres, there wouldn't be a slump in the quality of games like there is now with a parade of sequels and rehashes. If you don't think so just read theSeptember 2004 PSM article.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/05/04