219 · King's Knight

• Four brave warriors have set out into the Kingdom of Izander to rescue Princess Claire from the grip of a fiendish Dragon
• NES Longplay
• Introductions
  • They are really trying to fool us with these shmups. Never did I imagine this game called King’s Knight was gonna be a multi-character story based SHMUP
• Overview
  • In this shmup you play as A knight, a wizard, a monster, and a thief, you must train them individually before they come together to save the kidnapped Princess.
• Gameplay
  • You can only shoot (no matter the character)
    • Subtle gameplay differences:
      • Knight “Ray Jack” - change into a winged horse
      • Wizard “Kaliva” - cast Naizath to defeat enemies in the water.
      • Monster "Barusa" - change into a dragon
      • Thief "Toby" - destroys monoliths
  • Destroy enemies and terrain (the terrain reveals symbols which help/hurt your character) - WHY HURT? Isn’t that what the enemies are for? I feel like that feature hurts the game and my enjoyment more than anything
  • So these individual stages act as the training stages where you level up your characters based on what you find and collect within their level.
  • The weird experience of playing this blind
    • Speaking of weird experiences, at the end of a level the scrolling just stops and you’re stuck there for a minute before the game takes control of your character and they walk off screen. Well if the game takes control and autowalks your character off screen towards any health depleting icons, they count, and you die.
  • Completing
  • The Final level (all the characters coming together)
    • The back of the box actually explains this concept
    • Finally a use for the B button
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • King's Knight: Wrath of the Dark Dragon
    • Developed as a mobile spin-off associated with Final Fantasy XV, the game borrows the original version's scrolling, action role-playing game style
• EGL
• NEStalgia Byte - Dig Dug

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 King's Knight, four brave warriors have set out into the kingdom of Isander to rescue Princess Claire from the grip of a fiendish dragon.

00:25 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Guys, the algorithms are really trying to fool us now. They really wanted us to believe this was some kind of like RPG or maybe a puzzle platformer, but instead it is once again a shmup, just like the adventures of Dino Ricky was a caveman shmup. This is now a choose your RPG character shmup. Never did I imagine that this game called King's Knight was going to be a multi-character story based level progression shmup. It's also the subcategory terraforming shmup. I'm sure we'll get into. Yeah. The famous category of terraforming in video games.

01:20 Yeah. I think that Square, 1989 Square had been listening to the podcast and they know that we often have negative things to say about shmups. They're like, well, maybe we can pull a fast one on them.

01:31 And this does kind of hit, you know, you mentioned Square there. This hits their notes of what they're about to do with Final Fantasy or what they've already done with Final Fantasy over in Japan. But we haven't gotten it yet. The point being that this does have a lot of familiar RPG tropes like your character leveling up or, you know, the kinds of characters you are, the quest that you're on to rescue the princess from a dragon. All the elements are there. It's just not an RPG at all, actually. Yeah. Like the tile set looks like if you look at a screenshot of this game and maybe there weren't any projectiles on the screen, I would have thought that this was just a standard four direction top down RPG.

02:17 And maybe it's just like an RPG maker hack where they just made the screen scroll. And but no, it's the weirdest thing, the way it looks, the way it feels. Yeah. Even if there were projectiles on the screen, I mean, I would just think it was like an action RPG sort of thing or like a Legend of Zelda type style thing. It looks the screenshot really led me to believe, like, wow, this is going to be an awesome RPG experience. And I said multi character and I mean it because in this shmup you play as a knight, a wizard, a monster and a thief and individually like they're not like a party or anything until the very end of the game.

02:53 You just kind of start with the knight, either complete his level or he dies, and then you just get the next screen with the wizard and then you do his whole thing. And, you know, each one just kind of is its own separate gameplay thing that's removed from one another. I think it's a really weird experience if you play this blind, like if you don't read the back of the box or you don't read the manual. The idea that you just press start are greeted with what you think is your character in a shmup as you're going to go like level to level similar to how every other shmup like Gradius has handled it.

03:30 Instead, if you die or if you move on, it just then teleports you to the next character, to the next character, to the next character. It's almost like. And now for something entirely different. Right. What is happening there? And what did you guys think of that idea to have, you know, four different characters that you take control of? On paper, I really like the concept of it, of the like, all right, you did your do. And, you know, failing doesn't fail the game at this point. Like it's wow. OK, maybe this game is harder than I thought. And you're not even expected to complete it. So, of course, you're going to move on to the next guy and see how you do with that guy. And then later you find out that you you play as all the surviving characters.

04:17 So, again, on paper and with that simple of a description of it, it's a pretty neat idea. Yeah, I kind of agree there. I think conceptually the idea of the idea. I'm not going to speak necessarily to the fact that when you die, you switch to the other character. I mean, that fine. That's a little weird to me. But but but just conceptually, the fact that you have to play as each of these four characters in their own separate level, earning that like making them powerful enough to then take on the final level together. It's like, OK, now you got all your characters together. They're all leveled up the way you you got them to like you wanted them to be.

04:56 And now they work together like that's a cool idea conceptually. So you guys are both talking about how cool of an idea this is, both that you control four different characters in the same shmup and that they eventually team up to be the final level of this shmup. However, I can't help but feel like you're saying that it also in practice when you actually played this game, it didn't work out.

05:21 Now, I have my suspicions for why that is, mostly because every character is exactly the same and the levels are exactly the same, minus some sprite changes and color palette stuff. The knight, the wizard, the monster and the thief all shoot the same kind of projectile. Obviously, like I you know, you could say the monsters is fire breath instead of whatever the knight would theoretically be shooting instead of hacking away with a sword.

05:49 There's a lot of obvious things here. Instead, it doesn't feel like there's much gameplay difference at all between the four of them. Yeah, you collect these like you collect these specific spells that only work for each character, but they don't work in these levels anyway. They only work in the levels where you're together. So it feels like other than like an immersion reason, there is no reason to have these be four different characters. Just have it be four different levels where you collect different power ups each time.

06:17 They could have easily fixed that by making these characters unique. Yeah, it's all just it's all just palette swap. I mean, that said, it it does have a little bit of an effect. Like, I think I would have been bored a lot more easily if they didn't do this, even though it's the same thing.

06:36 But yeah, this is just a little bit of foreshadowing of of of the what will what will run into later. Right. OK, so if you were to think about the particular traits of those four characters, the knight, the wizard, the monster and the thief. I don't know when it was just the night and I was shooting projectiles. It didn't feel that weird because we had just come off a game where you were playing as a caveman throwing rocks and then eventually like fire and stuff like that. However, once I got on to the wizard, then all of a sudden I'm like, wait, why was the knight shooting any kind of projectiles?

07:09 He could have been the hack and slash character and the monster could have been more of like a, you know, terrain destruction character. And the thief could have like stole stuff or, you know, moved around, you know, like had more speed or something like there's not enough really to make these four characters. They just feel like the same character over and over again. And I know that was kind of my last point, but I don't want to let that die just because there was an opportunity here. No doubt to make this follow some kind of RPG tropes. But it seems like the RPG tropes are just there in the manual and in spirit. No, no, they've got levels. You can you get levels at the end. That's very RPG.

07:51 Even the levels, though, it's like it's not there's no experience bar. Oh, I know. Check your progress. No, I know. I know. You know, I'm just saying like for the listeners, it's just something that is revealed to you after the fact of like, congratulations, you're level 12. It's what well, how much how many people did I kill? Like what caused me to be level 12?

08:11 Were there other levels I could have been? Did I actually do something to to cause that? There needed to be some kind of, you know, UI or a pause screen that showed you what kind of progress you were making. I don't know how that would have actually worked out. I can just say, yeah, go ahead. That only would have worked out if there was any actual gameplay mechanic to ground it. Like otherwise, it may as well just show you like a progress bar. It's like this. You're this far through the level. And then there's like you've you've collected these two of the secret items. And that's all it would have been. Because, again, you're right. It is not an RPG. It's just it's got a lot of RPG flavor thrown onto it.

09:02 Joe, now that we've established it's not an RPG, how does it play as a shmup compared to what we've been, you know, the numerous games we have played recently that were shmups? Well, my initial thought when I when I was looking at when I was looking up this game before I played it. So, you know, I mentioned that originally similar to Sean, I thought this is an RPG. It's not. When I saw what it was, I was like, you know what it kind of reminds me of? It kind of reminds me of Gunsmoke or Gun.Smoke, as we like to call it.

09:31 But and I was and I love Gunsmoke. And just the idea that like you're walking through this land, you're you're leveling up in some way or powering up your character in some way to get to the bosses. So I was like, well, this could still be like a really interesting and cool idea for a shmup, like something that'll get me to like a shmup.

09:53 I think, again, that in in practice, like there are just so many weird decisions, even for just a regular shmup that it made. Like there's the element where you have to break through your environment. There's always a lot of obstacles in your way and you actually have to shoot through them. I mean, be like a whole forest you have to shoot through.

10:10 But this leads to like weird dead ends. And it leads to like these power ups that you absolutely need to beat the game, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, that you can just miss because they're buried under the terrain. And you have no idea that you're passing by it. You couldn't possibly check everything because the screen is scrolling. So you don't have time. And just the fact that like if you get if you run into a dead end, the scrolling screen will kill you. So there are a lot of times that through no fault of your own, other than the fact that you just don't have the stage memorized.

10:44 You run into a dead dead end that you couldn't have seen coming. Your game is over. And that that doesn't just mean your level is over. I mean, you could keep going, but it means that you can't win. And I think that shmup or not, that is that is a that is unforgiveness. Unforgivable. Yeah.

11:03 So this is this is I mean, like, like it or not, this is one of the most unique shmups that we played because like Joe alluded to it. It's it's also a screen painter. And to that to that effect, it is actually sort of satisfying to just level an entire like city block in one of the levels are just completely mowed down an entire forest. There's something very visceral about that that I like. But that is not the point of the game.

11:34 Like like Joe said, the point of the game is to collect these items that you need for the final dungeon, if you want to call it that. And yeah, it's it's kind of arbitrary because it's described in the manual. But really, all you're doing is like aside from all of the standard pickups that you'll find buried behind these stone houses slash forest slash sheer cliffs.

12:08 You will most of which are just like health up and down. And you want to obviously avoid the health downs that there's going to be like just these very strange looking tiles that you have to pick up. And like that's that's the thing that you need to use later. Like remember that like you better paint the entire screen because you might not you might not catch it all. And you also need to go down into these little dungeon things below the ground and make sure you go through those because if you miss that that staircase, you have to start over because you need that later.

12:45 I don't know what the intention was aside from making the game longer to to tie like the overall like completion of the game to just these little things that you can miss.

13:03 I got away from my point here, but that's sort of the bottom line. Well, Sean, how much of that terrain destruction design do you think was intended like on the original design doc versus, you know, Joe brought up a great point that as the screen continues to scroll, if you're stuck behind this terrain, you're just squashed. And we've seen other shmups where you can blow up terrain, but you're in a spaceship. So you're obviously like above them.

13:33 You can blow up terrain that then you can collect whatever tiles are underneath them or items or power ups and continue to move on without having to worry about, you know, your position because you're in the air and they're on the ground here because you're on the ground. The areas on the ground, it felt like if you couldn't have the terrain destruction, this game would almost be as much of a, you know, it'd be a shmup just as much as it is a maze solver where you have to think about what's my path through this without getting crushed.

14:04 So I feel like the terrain idea of like blow that stuff up to find these power ups. Isn't there like strongest isn't the strongest place to start? And it makes me feel like it's something that came later in the design development of this game.

14:18 Yeah. I mean, I, we, I, unless you have some developer commentary, we'll never know for sure, but it does seem like an odd place to start. You're right. Um, I, I, I'd say that it may have been something that they leaned on once like maybe one of the developers is like, Hey, look at this. This is cool. Right. Isn't this cool? It's like, you know what? This is going to save the entire project.

14:43 Right. And you could even on certain terrains, you can hop over them. Right. Like you, you can get a specific power up. I think it's one that looks like stairs. I don't know. Yes. It does look like stairs. There are even times where, uh, where you, you know, you might be going through like a forest or what we keep saying forest.

15:02 Cause the one like he's popping in my head, but whatever it is that's blocking you and you start shooting through your way through in a straight line. And that looks like at the time you start a good route and assuming you don't run into a dead end there, you should be fine. But I had a couple of times where I'm doing that, where like then a projectile comes in behind me afterwards that I couldn't have known about beforehand.

15:22 And you can't shoot sideways. So I can't turn or anything. So it just, I'm just stuck watching the projectile kill me. Like I just got to watch it slowly come up on me and I have nowhere to go because I can't go left or right. Like the game traps you a lot like that. And you can say like, oh, maybe that, you know, you got to be more strategic about where you go. But I think there were some times where it was just total, just complete randomly unlucky. I was here, a bullet came in and I had nowhere to go. How often was this happening to you? Because I'd say like 80% of obstacles are destructible. Oh yeah. It's that it's destructible. But if you go in a straight line into something and then a bullet comes in behind you.

16:03 Yeah. I can keep going forward, but I can, but it doesn't matter. The bullet's faster than me. I guess I was, I meant more so the getting crushed by the bottom of the screen. The crushed by the bottom of the screen. Maybe I'm misremembering. It wasn't necessarily when I'm just destroying objects. It's those walls that grow out of things. Yeah. Those will randomly lead to just total dead ends that like you couldn't have seen coming because the walls weren't there when you started walking that way. But no, what I'm talking about now is like just getting yourself somewhere and like you don't have time to get out of it before the, before some projectile hits you.

16:36 Joe, I will say that if you are finding yourself in those straight line paths though, where they're, you know, you're stuck there and the projectiles are behind you. I'm actually, I'm going to throw the strategy card at you there because knowing that the terrain is destructible. Now that actually does feel like something you would want to avoid. Like now that's a game design component where, yeah, you can get a, a long further by just shooting in a straight line and getting through this obstacle, but you're cornering yourself in. And in that kind of way, it costs wider swath. Right. Exactly. Like that, that actually adds an element to this game in its favor, whether it intended to or not.

17:11 Whereas if it was, you could just quickly get out of that kind of situation, then it's, there's not enough punishment. Yeah. I mean, I suppose that's, that's true. I won't say that, um, that it definitely like, there were definitely times where I had no choice, but to do that. I feel like maybe there were, but maybe I'm also just wasn't, you know, wasn't looking hard enough for alternative routes.

17:53 And we were talking about power-ups that are inside this terrain. I mean, there's also enemies that are, that pop out of this terrain if you shoot them. And I feel like that is very annoying because there's already enough enemies spawning and all these different patterns. And, and, you know, whether they come on the screen and zigzags or they, uh, you know, they circle around you. There's more than enough there to satisfy the shmup element of this game. Cause keep in mind, you do have to still shoot all the terrain, see what's behind it and, and, uh, look for the specific power-ups plus deal with the enemies on screen. To have these, uh, you know, in the monster level, it's snakes. To have these snakes that just rush out at you in a straight line.

18:35 I, I just feel like that's an extra element of, um, difficulty in this game that it didn't necessarily need. I wouldn't even say, I mean, like, yeah, you're right. It is, it is tough, but I, I'd say the biggest problem with this is just the lack of variety in enemy behavior. Like, yeah, there are some that, that swirl around in a circle and there are some that, uh, will, uh, go straight at you. But I'm sorry, there's, it's 90% enemies that go straight at you.

19:04 And yeah, their projectiles will track you, but that's not very fun to play against. I don't know. So, uh, the, the shmup part of this game, uh, is, is pretty bland. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Uh, especially because as I was just trying to list off the different patterns, I could only come up with two in my head.

19:22 So, you know, there's that. But also in terms of things that will hurt you in this game, it's really strange that the game seems to be littered with both up arrows and down arrows. Now the up arrows bring your life back just a little bit, but the down arrows crush your life. More than any enemy in this game really can, other than some bigger projectile fireballs and, and the, the mini bosses of each stage. Otherwise, these down arrows are the biggest thing. Like, I, I honestly think two or three are enough to kill you.

19:55 It's crazy to me. Why would you, on top of having enemies on the screen, enemies that can spawn from you breaking up terrain, why do you feel the need to also have, uh, power-ups that can hurt your character? Isn't that what the enemies are for?

20:10 I feel like the feature of that hurts the game and my enjoyment, like my replayability, because now I have to dodge these down arrows. And yeah, it's kind of cute that they put an up arrow around a bunch of down arrows, so you have to kind of figure out your way to maneuver into it. But they really should have either abandoned that concept altogether, or they should have made it so that the down arrows and the up arrows both just ever so slightly raise and decrease health.

20:38 Because there's something that pop up so frequently that you're not really ever going to find yourself without need of them. Yeah, when I was reading about them in the manual, I, like, just, in the description, I thought, okay, these are just going to sometimes be around and not be the dominant feature of a freshly mowed lawn. On our mode, uh, level. Um, I, I thought it was going to be, like, any other don't pick this up, which is be, like, occasionally.

21:04 Yeah, I think we wouldn't even, we wouldn't even notice how stupid this is if they just simply took that down arrow sprite and replaced it with, like, a spike sprite. Then it's like, okay, yeah, that's just, like, that makes sense. This just almost feels like they just didn't, they just, I don't know, like, couldn't be bothered to just come up with, like, an interesting thing. Yeah, it's not a pickup, it's just a, it's just a hazard in the environment.

21:27 Right. Yeah, I was waiting for the left and right arrows. I wanted to see what they would do. But they do, they do kind of show up, uh, in the final level. Oh, that's, that's right.

21:42 These individual stages act as the training stages for each character, where you level up your character, and then it's based on whatever you collect within their particular level. So, once you finish the knight stage, that's, like, it. Now you moved on to the wizard, then the monster, then the thief. Assuming that you get through all four of those stages, you do go to the final stage. But before we talk about that final stage, I guess I just want to talk about the resetting factor of going from knight to wizard to monster to thief. This is a game that all the levels are pretty short, given the, like, maybe they're a little longer than the typical shmup level, but considering there's only one for each of them, it's not terribly long.

22:29 However, when you first start, you're very weak. And, you know, it doesn't take too long to get powerful, but that's something that no matter what you did with the knight, now you are going back to basically being the knight again, only now disguised as a wizard when you go to his stage, you know?

22:50 It's, there's no actual, like, oh, because I did so well in the knight stage, now I have this. It's like, no, you'll just really have something at the end of the game, which I don't think pays off well, but what did you guys think about that? This could have been fixed, like, whether you were playing as, like, you know, the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover, whether it's one or the other, you would, this wouldn't be a problem if you were playing a different kind of character.

23:16 Like, yeah, if the knight was melee somehow, and if the wizard was the ranged one and the monster had maybe more of an area of effect sort of thing, and I don't know what the thief would do. I don't think that makes sense at all. But if that was any different, that would be fine. I wouldn't care that you sort of get brought back down to level one because it's a different experience, but it's all the same thing. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, it's just like any other game, yeah, where you take on one character's storyline and then move on to the next.

23:54 That works, yeah, when they're different, when there's some difference in either the gameplay or even, like, story or something. Yeah, this doesn't have much in that department either, so it's just, yeah, you're just doing this, you're starting over. Was there any particular character that you guys felt was better for you? It's a silly question, but I have it here in the show notes, so I figured I'd ask it.

24:19 The game, I guess, even asking a question like that, you could tell that, like, I had an idea. What's your favorite color? No, just I had an idea of, like, how this game would play before I played it, and then I played it and I realized, like, oh, these things aren't really applicable because it doesn't work like how they pretend it works. I mean, I'm always, I always, I always gear towards, like, the magic user and wanting this kind of game, so yeah, so Wizard Khalifa or whatever his name is.

24:47 Wizard Khalifa, I think, is his name, but, yeah, I guess he was my favorite. That's fun. I didn't have one. And Sean's like, I have no favorite. No, the knight. Great. Now let's talk about that final level.

25:05 All the characters coming together, you get a nice little screen that says, help the princess, and you see your four characters, and then they are arranged, basically, as, like, a compass, north, south, east, and west, and you're still only playing as one of them. But this was probably the opportunity to do something cool where, you know, like, you could actually, like, swap freely between the characters and stuff like that.

25:31 However, they've decided to embrace the directional pads even more, and now you are forced to think about which direction you're going to change into. Not that it matters, really, because they're all just the same character. I guess, you know, if levels do matter, maybe you leveled up the monster better than the knight or something, and so you would want to have him as your frontrunner.

25:51 The only other, like, noticeable change here is that, finally, we have a use for the B button. The whole game, the B button is obsolete, and the A button is just what you use to attack, and it's the only thing you can use to do anything. The B button finally comes into play, but I didn't care. Well, so, okay. So, when you start this final level, you're not just shown, like, if you did this game correctly, you're shown all four of your guys, and you're sort of arranged in that cross pattern. But it really is just showing all of the surviving characters. Like, you may have failed with one or two of them, and so now you're starting this level with whoever's left. And then, yeah, there's these pickups for rotating.

26:37 That's how you select. Like, you don't have to, you know, select means nothing. Like, you could press select to rotate. But no, this is something that you have to do pickups for.

26:50 There is a difference between them. Only in a few situations, you have to have certain characters at the head of the party for them to trigger some of the pickups that you picked up in previous levels. If you picked them up.

27:05 And if you did not pick them up, you get crushed by the bottom of the screen. So, at the end of the day, if you missed one of these, if you picked up all of them, but the one at the beginning of the first level, you have failed the game. And the last however many minutes or hours you've played has been futile. You did not. You were not supposed to continue. You should have just restarted. And that is such a disrespect of your time as a player. I cannot forgive it. Yeah, absolutely ridiculous. And you know what? Like, I'm going to go onto an equally, like, annoyed tangent about something totally different about this last level.

27:48 Because the other thing that was really annoying about this last level is that you think that, like, okay, I'm really trying to get all four of my characters there. Because I want the benefit of having all four of my characters there. So, it's like, at least I have, you know, at least I have four chances and I have the firepower of four people. It doesn't matter that you have four people. In fact, it's a handicap to have four people. Other than the fact that you need them to get past those things that Sean talked about. You're just a bigger hitbox now.

28:21 And you can still only shoot one thing at a time and you still only have one health bar. What was the whole thing about, like, what could have not even, maybe not even redeemed this game, but, like, been a little bit of, like, a silver lining to this game. It's like, oh, this is cool that at least I, like, I built up this, like, this army or this party of people that make the gameplay, like, that much easier. Make my experience, you know, not that much more, like, I have more ammo in my arsenal here. It doesn't matter. It actually makes the game harder to have done better.

28:58 Yeah. It's like, look, what I thought it would be when I got there is just sort of a built-in, like, difficulty modulator. Like, it's really hard to get all four of these guys there. So the final level will be a little bit easier because you have them all, like you're saying.

29:20 And that would mean that, yeah, you've got all this firepower. You've got four life bars instead of one. Like, that whole thing that we just see as an intuitive thing because we've played games that have used that concept before in a way or something like it. But, no, it's like that's the default mode of the game. And I just want to come back to, like, this whole futility thing. Even if you picked up all the power-ups, even if all four characters survived, which you need them to, even if you've done everything up to this point correctly, the only way sometimes to get the correct character to the front of the pack is to pick up a random rotation.

30:10 Which just means that everything you just did, you did everything right. If your random selection is wrong, you just get really unlucky and you keep selecting these, you keep picking up these random rotation pickups, you still won't have the correct guy at the front, and now you get crushed by the bottom of the screen again.

30:27 It's so arbitrary. Everything is so arbitrary here. The whole game feels like that at the very end you find out all the side quests in the RPG you were playing weren't optional. Like, you actually can't beat the final boss unless you've collected all the armor and the ultimate weapon and stuff. That never happens, of course, but yet this game manages to go through with it. It's just funny that on the back of the box for the game, the whole selling point is, like, it actually shows you in map format, that stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four, and all of them point to this thing in the center of stage five. And it says in big text,

31:06 find out what happens when four warriors join forces. And for that to be what you find out, I don't know about you guys, but I felt like I couldn't actually review the game unless I got to this final stage. I couldn't just, like, watch a video of it. I had to make sure that I got my characters to live on and go see stage five.

31:27 As soon as I got to stage five and saw what it was, with the four of them, with all the complaints you guys are talking about, I didn't even bother thinking about, like, what I was going to do next. I shut the game off and I said I've had enough of this. The trials of getting to stage five were, for me, enough of a headache to not worry about what I had to do next. I saw it, in my opinion. It's rare when we get this fired up, I think. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, when I started this, I was like, everyone hates this game. This game looks awesome. I'm going to love this game. And now I think that's why I'm even more fired up. I was like, it tricked me.

32:11 On the sequels and spinoff side here, there would never be another King's Night game. And in some people's opinion, there still isn't a King's Night game. However, Square being, uh, being square and saying like, hey, we can always like make obscure references to weird things we did long ago and just tie them into successful franchises. King's Night Wrath of the Dark Dragon was released as a mobile spinoff game that was associated with Final Fantasy XV.

32:42 The game borrows all of the like same ideas of the, you know, uh, the shmup original, uh, scrolling action. And I guess if, you know, they're describing it as an ARPG, but it's, it's a shmup. It has all of those same things just updated for mobile with nicer graphics theoretically. But the fact that they found another way to tie in Final Fantasy XV outside of like a movie and, uh, you know, like, um, there was,

33:09 the movie is funny because the movie had like plot elements that you needed to know in order to play the start of the game. Like things have, things were referenced in cut scenes to what happened in the movie. Is that why I didn't really get it? It's terrible. But I wonder, did King's Night Wrath of the Dark Dragon also have some important plot stuff that I missed?

33:29 Because I'm not playing it, but I think it's funny that Square could remember, you know, 20 years later, we, we have this old property and we could definitely like riff on someone's nostalgia for it and, uh, just make it a Final Fantasy game instead. So crass. Especially, I mean, I assume this, this game wasn't well received at the time, right? Because I know it's not well loved now.

33:57 It's like, what would make them think like, that that's a good one to go back to? They have so many other games that people like. Old is good. It's true. It is surprising when you think about how Square operates with just pretty much Final Fantasy and, um, Dragon, uh, Dragon Quest as like its big franchises. It's pretty surprising that they remember these older games. I guess it is nice, but surely nobody was looking for it, let alone the Final Fantasy XV fans hoping that their game would get, uh, a spinoff where you play, uh, this game instead.

34:32 Anyway, I know we've been harsh, but we still have to get one very important thing done and I'm sure no matter what we've said, we're gonna take it, uh, seriously and we are gonna vote for King's Knight on the Essential Games list.

34:49 Sean, your vote. Alright, yeah, we've, we've, we've been pretty brutal to this game and I, I don't even think we did a, like a, a full takedown. Like we, I didn't even mention how, uh, you know, the, the mini bosses slash bosses are, are boring and there's no feedback when you hit them so you have no idea, like if you're doing damage, uh, same with, same with some of the stuff that I didn't know was destructible and it turns out it was.

35:18 Um, we didn't even, I didn't really go into that. But after seeing this game, after playing this game, I, I guess I get, you know, why they thought Final Fantasy would be the last one. Like, I, I just don't see where Square thought they were at the time. Um, don't, yeah. Bad game. Bad, bad game. Not essential. Joe. I mean, come on.

35:44 This, I don't even know what else to say that I didn't say already. But like, I, I'll say this. I mean, obviously I'm voting this not essential. I think the idea of having these characters, like I said, go on their, their separate missions and come together and then have that mean something and have them each bring something to the table in this sort of genre bending thing is a really cool idea. But man, are there a lot of things that are really annoying about this game. Uh, I'm going to say despite its intricate and complex pause sound, this is not essential. Love it. And you know, it's funny, the concept thing gets to me too. I think the fact that we played this in 2022,

36:27 it, you know, we just knew so many other things that they could have baked into this game and maybe you didn't know better in 1989, but I'd argue even then you could still think of a lot of improvements back then just based on other shmups that you might own or if you own Dragon Warrior, just thinking about like RPG-like elements. Heck, we were talking about it kind of looks like Legend of Zelda. I'm not saying that they had to remove the scrolling thing, but just even the way that the game plays. The, the knight shooting a projectile is just never going to get

36:58 solved for me. I have no idea how, how that happened. I will say I'm not going to, um, I'm not going to make that my reason for voting this essential or not. I have a story. At the end of every single level in this game, there just comes a point where you've reached the end. The, the screen stops scrolling and you're stuck there for like a minute before the game takes control of your character and forces you to walk off the screen.

37:26 Now, during that time, there might still be enemies on the screen. There might be, um, terrain that you can destroy. There, there's all sorts of potential scenarios here because only the scrolling has stopped. The game has yet to decide that it is going to take control of your character. Well, in one particular instance of this game when I was playing as the, uh, the monster, uh, Barusa, the game took control of me in a moment where I had only the down arrows in front of me and they still count. Oh my God. So I watched the game take my character,

38:02 lead him to certain death and he died on screen right there. Oh my God. Nothing I could, that was possible. Nothing I could do about it and for me, that was enough. That was the moment that I realized that, uh, yeah, sure, the game was never going to be essential but this is not a good game. When things like that can happen to you, this is a bad game and, uh, we don't say that often on the podcast but I really feel like this one deserves it. I kid you not, literally as you're saying that right now,

38:33 I'm, I'm, you know, I'm always watching footage. That happened to the player that I'm watching the footage on YouTube of. That exact thing, the game took control and he walked into a down arrow. He didn't die though. Incredible. Yeah, I mean like, they do a considerable amount of damage so I'm sure I was already like almost dead and then, and then just happened to walk into them. I just thought like, that wasn't even something I was testing. I didn't want to see, like, oh, what would they do? It's just something that happened to me on accident that pissed me off so much. Yeah, that's frustrating. I said I have to, yeah, I have to kill this game.

39:03 So it's dead and, um, we will, um, dig its grave but we will also record a Nostalgia Bites episode of Dig Doug. Oh gosh. And that is, uh, for those of you that don't know, Nostalgia Bites is our Patreon only, um, podcast where we do the Famicom library. So I know what you're thinking. Dig Doug. That definitely came to the NES. You'd be wrong. Um, the first one did not come to the NES. So we are playing it on the Famicom and you can join us for just five bucks a month on patreon.com slash nostalgia

39:38 or you don't have to join anything. You can go to the website, uh, www.nostalgiacast.com and check out a bunch of cool articles and information there or you can just let us know where else you want to find us on the only place where you can really talk to us twitter.com slash NostalgiaCast. Now that's interesting. You didn't expect the cast at the end but it's there. We don't own the license to Nostalgia but we are NostalgiaCast and you can find us there. Joe, did I wrap everything up nicely? It seems pretty pretty well wrapped up although I'll say you can talk to us one other place if you're a patron. Exactly. Patron. Oh, what is that place? That place is on our Discord.

40:23 Which is invite only so that's pretty cool. I mean, if you just want to like tell people like, hey, I'm in Nostalgia's Discord and they would be like, what's Nostalgia's Discord and you could tell them that they wouldn't know about it because it's invite only. Say that at your next dinner party. Maybe one day we'll get jackets that say members only. But not of Nostalgia or anything. Yeah, it just says members only. Of Discord. I don't have to I don't have to I don't have to