34. King's Knight (Square, Famicom, 1986)

King's Knight is a vertically scrolling shooter from Square, in their days before Final Fantasy was released and they became a JRPG powerhouse. It was actually designed by the creator of Final Fantasy himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi, with music from Nobuo Uematsu (though the music is mostly drowned out by the constant shooting sounds).

The game has a similar medieval flair that it shares with Final Fantasy (and just a ton of other Japanese games of the time); it stars a group of 4 fantasy characters: a knight, a wizard, a dragon, and a "boy thief". You play through 4 levels (one per character) in an attempt to level up each character by completing their level while grabbing as many stat-increasing powerups as possible. Powerups are fairly standard for the time: speed/attack/defense boosters and health pickups. You can also encounter stairways that lead to underground caves (think bonus areas), so there is a little bit of Zelda in here.

This is a welcome adjustment to the Gradius formula, because as long as you complete a level with a character, that character retains their powerups. After you finish the 4 character levels, you move on to a final fifth level where you control all 4 characters at once, including powerups to rotate the cast in order to use other characters. One other small thing that I loved, when your character enters water, there is a loss of friction in the movement control, so you actually feel floaty, which I've never seen before in a scrolling shooter. One of the best uses of floaty controls I've ever seen.

Everything I've described so far combines to make King's Knight feel very ahead of its time, though it is not without its frustrations either. At the end of the day, it is a Famicom scrolling shooter form 1989, so even with a health bar the difficulty can feel daunting. A large player hitbox combined with (at least to start off) weak, slow shots makes the game somewhat of a chore to get through. Much of the game is firing as fast as you can at the terrain both to clear a path and to unearth any potential powerups that are hidden underneath, so the gameplay tires me out pretty quickly.

They actually revamped King's Knight as a game within Final Fantasy XV that the characters played on their phones. Square Enix even released a gross-looking free-to-play mobile remake of the game, which I would love to try, but it was removed for download less than a year after it released. At least we still have the original.

3/5, a bunch of cool ideas for an early Famicom shooter, but a bit too difficult / tedious.