From Software 'n such

[Necronopticous]

I received Echo Night in the mail earlier this week and decided to start it up last night. I'm only an hour or two in so far, and I'm not quite sure what to think just yet. I'm obviously trying not to let my expectations run too wild after Shadow Tower, but I am a little bit concerned that I can't quite tell exactly what the game wants to be. It's not nearly eerie enough to be horror. It's not nearly serious enough to be poignant. If it turns out to be just a confused mixed bag with nothing but lock & key hunting puzzles to keep it grounded I fear it may end up being a dud for me. I will see it through, though. It's definitely too early to pass judgement.

[JBC]

King's Field 1 down. It's brutal at first but by the third of five floors I was accidentally OP. Found two rooms with infintely spawning spiders & wacked a few until I was lv.15 thinking that would be just right, but suddenly my health & magic were regenerating.

Didn't get semi-challenging again until the lowest floor, but by then I didn't need to bother with fighting/looting & went straight for the boss. I just tanked it because it gives you too many resources. Stood still the entire fight.

It's fun & fine but as vanilla as it gets. A few links to Souls here & there. The real challenge comes from keeping your patience while searching for the next key item or NPC to clue you in. That & retaining your mental map.

Still, I enjoyed the challenge of the first two floors & the bleak atmosphere. Maybe III made a better impression on me because of it's open environments, but before I get back to that I'm gonna play through II.

[Blinge]

Still, I enjoyed the challenge of the first two floors & the bleak atmosphere.

Maybe you shouldn't have grinded then

Tbf most Kf games get significantly easier by the end.
Can't remember if that's true for IV

[Durandal]

mods please delete this

[Sumez]

From From??

[Durandal]

From From??

Shit, wrong thread

[Sumez]

Man, there was a tiny glimmer of hope there. :\

[JBC]

Still, I enjoyed the challenge of the first two floors & the bleak atmosphere.

Maybe you shouldn't have grinded then

I didn't really intend to but it was so fun being in a cramped space with that many spiders just pouring out of the wall. I was already lv. 12 at that point & they would go down in one hit, plus it was on the first floor so I didn't think it would do any harm. Surely the enemies would be tough as nails later on, but alas. Even without I think I would have done alright. There's so many health items scattered about & the enemies are all on such a short leash. You just sit back & time your attacks for everything that doesn't have projectiles.

At any rate I started KFII last night & it's immediately a massive leap over the original. The environments are so much more interesting.

[Necronopticous]

@8BA Happy to see someone else going through the series while I'm at it, myself! I skipped the first game since I wasn't sure how I'd end up feeling about the series and the fact that it never came out in English legitimately added complexity. I have read through a full rundown, though, and watched a lot of gameplay. I'm sure I will go back for it eventually since I'm really into this Fromsoft history project at this point.

Very interested to hear all of your impressions of King's Field II. I still actually have more that I want to say about that game, but it's hard for me to take the time to write a bunch of stuff up when I have so many other games to go through, and I want to be able to really connect my thoughts when I do.

As an update, I completed Echo Night last night. The game gave me an "average" rating at the end, and I see now that there is actually a "good" ending which I didn't get since I didn't get the astral pieces from the three shades in the casino. Frankly I didn't like the game enough to go & do that, so I will be moving on.

Here's what I'll say about Echo Night: It's interesting to see them take their engine/formula and do something so different with it. From that perspective, I can appreciate their effort. All of the worries I expressed in my previous post ultimately never left me, and I came away not really feeling a whole lot in any particular direction. Thankfully, it doesn't overstay its welcome. The end screen told me my playthrough was 5 & 1/2 hours, and I felt every minute of that. Had this game somehow been as long as King's Field or Shadow Tower I would have certainly lost patience with it.

None of the puzzles are particularly challenging or satisfying. One thing generally obviously leads to the next, and the only times I ever got stuck were because I didn't notice something in the environment. Like the time I wondered where the alcohol was to mix the drunkard shade Ed's drink because I didn't notice there were actually two cabinet doors behind the bar, or the time I checked the main cabinet in the doctor's office, but didn't notice there were drawers under it, and spent 10 minutes walking around trying to figure out why the cabinet key wouldn't work on the other cabinets with big fat obvious locks on them in the doctor's past echo. It's not all bad, though. I can recall at least one genuinely creepy moment that occurs at the end of the mine cart vignette which I won't spoil.

At the end I didn't love Echo Night, but it was an intriguing and inoffensive enough aside that I still have curiosity for the other two entries in the series. In fact, as a follow-up I have began watching a playthrough of the sequel which I will finish before moving onto the PS2 era--and I am ready to go on that front!

[BIL]

That's a nice and very well-photographed haul! :O

I've a fondness for year one NTSCU PS2 releases, from before the machine began to hit its stride. Of those I've only played Cookie & Cream, but also stuff like Ridge Racer V and Gradius III & IV. It almost felt like a struggling underdog platform at that point. (yeah DC loyalists, I know what an obscene suggestion that must sound like! I had a DC too! Just talking about the PS2's available software, not its sales figures )

[JBC]

@8BA Happy to see someone else going through the series while I'm at it, myself! I skipped the first game since I wasn't sure how I'd end up feeling about the series and the fact that it never came out in English legitimately added complexity. I have read through a full rundown, though, and watched a lot of gameplay. I'm sure I will go back for it eventually since I'm really into this Fromsoft history project at this point.

Very interested to hear all of your impressions of King's Field II. I still actually have more that I want to say about that game, but it's hard for me to take the time to write a bunch of stuff up when I have so many other games to go through, and I want to be able to really connect my thoughts when I do.

Absolutely, will do. KFII got it's hooks into me almost right away last night. Will def get back with my thoughts once I'm done.

I would say KFI is worth a play through just for the sake of completion. It'll only take two or three plays with breaks, because keeping a mental map can be exhausting in this game. So much of everything looks the same and the last thing you want to do is lose your patience. The way you fight enemies here is to strike and sit back, repeat. I found in III my natural inclination was to dance around stuff like a boxer while timing my strikes, but 1 just doesn't seem to encourage this with it's mostly cramped environments and mostly stationary enemies. By the time you get wind magic it's all over, you can just pop off about 10 shots at a row of beasts and call it a day. Still, in the early game losing your patience in a fight will mean taking unnecessary hits.

I did like the game and found it fairly engaging, but it quickly becomes a relaxing stroll around the time your health and magic start regenerating. I'm not sure what I picked up that caused that, because I kept swapping all of my equipped stuff around and it kept happening. Assuming it's tied to your level. After that you're left with a game about looting, which does nothing for me when I already have more consumables than I'll ever use.

I did look up a list of all the armor and weapons in the game and there seems to be a glaring balance issue with it. In the beginning you'll be elated to find a +10 plate mail or something, but the next minute you may find something that's +40 and never need another piece of armor for that slot ever again. I was super hyped to have found an axe at one point and then almost immediately happened upon a three bladed sword that just mops the floor with anything. Stuck with that the whole game until the end. You may want to self impose challenge for your first play through, but in a game this plain I can't say that it would be worth it.

I don't want to sound like I'm down on KFI, it's cool but such an early early PS1 title and it shows pretty bad. Maybe it needs a 'Brutal' hack like Doom haha. It seems that KFII is where the real experience begins.

[Necronopticous]

Eternal Ring is underway.

What to say about Eternal Ring? It's smooth as silk--appears to be running at consistent 60FPS, and just feels generally amazing coming from the PS1 predecessors. The monsters & environs look good. The music is terrible, or at least it was in the first couple of levels...it was so unfittingly uptempo and repetitive that I just turned it off in the sound menu to go back to the atmospheric silence of Shadow Tower.

I'm a few hours in now and already crafting what appear to be some of the better magic and attribute rings in the game, so I don't expect this to be a very long game, which is probably good. As a first go at the first-person Fromsoft RPG formula of the PS2 gen it's a passable offering with just enough of its own unique flavor to be a good introduction without feeling like an off-IP engine test cash grab (which was my worry going in) but I certainly don't think it's interesting enough to run the length of a King's Field game.

[Austin]

I ran through Eternal Ring a couple of times a few months back. Overall it's sort of a relaxing, relatively stress-free, "turn the mind off" kind of game. Asides from a few split paths here and there, I'd say it's pretty straight forward compared to the King's Field games. I was able to finish it in about eight hours on my second run, so it doesn't overstay its welcome too much either. Fun times, worth the cheap price it goes for.

[Necronopticous]

So, I reached what I could tell was the very end of Eternal Ring which left me with a big decision: beat the game with my scrappy fire-focused character and move on to Evergrace, or stick around with the game a while longer and trek back to the very beginning to explore and power up. It was a tough call because, as I mentioned in my last post, I found the game to be pretty middling. I decided stick with Eternal Ring for a bit longer since, let's be real, I'm in this thing for the long haul. There were two main things I wanted to focus on before moving on: unexplored magic options, and the mysterious door on the starting beach.

Early on when fumbling with the ring crafting system I realized that there are many benefits to sticking with a single element of magic. This is primarily because every ring equipped alters your elemental affinities for better or worse, and mixing & matching results in low affinities across the board. I arbitrarily chose fire as my primary element because fireball was the only direct-dealing damage spell I had after the water shrine. It was fast, used little MP, and seemed to do pretty fair damage to most enemies early on, so I decided to boost my fire affinity as much as possible throughout the game with all 10 ring slots. This served me quite well throughout the playthrough with only a couple of exceptions, especially since I managed to craft a ring that seemed to lower an enemy's fire defense as a status effect. The obvious problem with this approach is that I didn't really get much of a taste of what the other elemental spells had to offer outside of a few I that I either found or created accidentally. Since this game was the most magic-focused of any Fromsoft offering yet, I decided to try & fill out as many of the different spell rings as possible before the end of the game so I could see what I missed out on.

I'm pretty divided on the crafting system in the game. I think it's pretty cool in concept, and there is an inherent joy in collecting a bunch of multicolored rings, all with unique art & effects, but the heavy reliance on an arcane system that is completely down to trial & error experimentation void of explanation/mechanical assistance just feels like filler to artificially extend play time. I sorta want to dissect this further in its own aside, but for now I will just say: this is an area of the game where you're going to have a better experience if you just look up the mechanics of how ring crafting works written by someone who has already gone through the experimentation to figure it out. This shouldn't be the case, and it didn't have to be. They could have removed the bits of randomization and made the system fully discrete to make it easier to draw conclusions from experimentation. They could have made the long crafting animation skippable so it didn't take so long to experiment (I will be hearing "I shall pass down the knowledge of the ancients" echoing in my nightmares for some time to come). They could have given some sort of indication of what the expected result of combination would be before committing to the craft to prevent the inevitable mindless load scumming. The list goes on and on.

I was able to craft & try out most of the spell rings, and I don't feel that I missed out on a whole lot with my fire-focused strategy. I do sort of wish that I had understood the distinction between utility & attack spells, and how to craft one or the other earlier on, since many of the utility spells could have been fun & useful alternatives to the straight offensive spellsword approach. I more or less came away feeling like I'd made a good choice sticking fully to a single element as far as dealing damage is concerned, but if I played the game again I would probably pick & choose utility spells from various other elements to assist, and just use them one at a time to keep my main element affinity high for damage output.

I finally made it back to the door on the starting beach, and I already knew how to open it since I gleaned that while looking up crafting mechanics. My first go at this optional dungeon was absolutely brutal. I took it slow, exploring thoroughly, greedily snatching up all of the tier 5 gems and stat boosting horns over what felt like a good hour or two, only to see my first ever game over screen at the hands of the final enemy (he one-shot me from full health). It took me a bit to muster up the patience to do it all over again, but this time I went straight for revenge against the guy who killed me. This actually turned out to be a good strategy, because the reward for doing so made clearing out the rest of the dungeon so much easier.

This place is like motherfucking Christmas compared to the rest of this game! It's actually really weird, structurally. You find very, very few weapons throughout the game, and there's not a whole lot of difference between the few you find. You similarly don't find a whole lot in the way of useful unique attribute rings, stat-raising consumables, or really anything that boosts your character in any significant way. This place has all of the above. After an hour or two I had increased in overall power & capability many times over. I'm now some kind of multi fire punching/slashing beast who can stunlock and steamroll nearly everything that crosses my path, and it's super enjoyable! I'm equal parts thrilled that I decided to spend the extra time to come back and do this content and bewildered as to why they didn't pepper more of this enjoyable stuff throughout the game.

Anyway, despite scouring all of the previous areas for blank rings I may have missed I'm obviously still missing a few. Finding all of the ones that are just laying on the ground in the environment feels akin to korok seed hunting in Breath of the Wild, and will probably not be something I pursue to 100%. I expect to steamroll the final area tonight and pop in Evergrace later this week.

[Austin]

Good observations on Eternal Ring, and I agree with pretty much all of them. It's definitely a flawed game that could have been better with a lot of tweaks.

I had never visited the locked dungeon in the beginning until my last playthrough, but it was definitely worth going for. Enemies were super high level and the drops were great. Although, there was a floor where I ended up running around in circles seemingly for ages before I managed to find the exit to the next level. At the end I also apparently hit an exit out of the place, which I wasn't intending on doing. I wasn't about to spend all that time working my way back down so I just said "screw it".

As far as the magic goes, some of the wind-based stuff is really good (Tornado, I believe its called, is pretty nice, especially for flying enemies). Outside of that though I generally stick with fire myself.

I'm looking forward to the Evergrace write up. I don't remember enjoying that one too much (not that I made it very far), so I'll be curious to know if I missed out or not.

[Blinge]

It's a shame you didn't like the music, Necron. I liked some of it to be sure.

They could have removed the bits of randomization and made the system fully discrete to make it easier to draw conclusions from experimentation. They could have made the long crafting animation skippable so it didn't take so long to experiment (I will be hearing "I shall pass down the knowledge of the ancients" echoing in my nightmares for some time to come). They could have given some sort of indication of what the expected result of combination would be before committing to the craft to prevent the inevitable mindless load scumming.

I SHALL PASS DOWN THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE ANCIENTS.

fuck that guy.
Yeah I could not be bothered with that shit so I ran around underpowered and suffered for it which is sadly what I often do in these games.
Eventually I had to backtrack from that snowy area with the ruined buildings because i actually could not touch those floating sniper enemies that shoot you through walls. My little ice dagger did nothing.
Went back to matey and got a Dark Bomb spell which one shot nearly everything and carried me throughout the rest of the game.

This place is like motherfucking Christmas compared to the rest of this game! It's actually really weird, structurally. You find very, very few weapons throughout the game, and there's not a whole lot of difference between the few you find. You similarly don't find a whole lot in the way of useful unique attribute rings, stat-raising consumables, or really anything that boosts your character in any significant way. This place has all of the above. After an hour or two I had increased in overall power & capability many times over.

Yeah shame there's nothing to use those powers on now! You certainly don't need them for the final area.
I hated that optional area. Confusing AF, I swear the enemies respawn. Something appeared and destroyed me before I could even turn and face it. I stopped playing.

Eternal Ring's level design was straight trash compared to KF overall. What's with that poison area being so early! The earth cave that follows it is just huge, boring and goes on forever.

Ah well, I got that sense of satisfaction from finishing it - as a FromSoft acolyte.
Cool ending.

[Necronopticous]

It's a shame you didn't like the music, Necron. I liked some of it to be sure.

I probably missed out on the good stuff. I turned off the BGM in the water temple and never turned it back on again. I could not stand that uptempo loop, and my wife gave me a death stare after about 10 minutes of it. Shadow Tower really made me appreciate adventuring in silence.

[Obscura]

Eternal Ring's level design was straight trash compared to KF overall. What's with that poison area being so early! The earth cave that follows it is just huge, boring and goes on forever.

Nothing wrong with the requisite From poison zone being early, From's best game, which you still haven't played, also has an early poison area.

[Blinge]

Yeah, how about F all resources to deal with said poison.

man ST:A is on the list but you're gonna give me shit if i don't love it

[Necronopticous]

I didn't mind Disposal Valley so much in Eternal Ring. At least your movement is not hindered! An NPC in the area just before it actually does give you a utility ring for protecting yourself from the poison, but it doesn't work very well. I just healed through the poison with Earth Heal.

The Limestone Cave you mentioned is definitely worse, because it's where you first learn that enemy projectiles are perfectly aimed and go straight through walls. Those sling ape enemies can go straight to Hell. The experience here would have been greatly improved if they switched the locations of the Branch and Seek rings, because you'd have been able to keep your distance with those assholes and take them out more strategically. It's criminal that you don't get the Seek ring until close to the end of the game. The ability to add tracking to any projectile spell is one of the coolest and most interesting features Eternal Ring has to offer, and by the time you receive it in the Library you're likely deeply settled into your endgame strategy. Also, the Branch power is practically useless without Seek, but incredible when paired with it. The order on those really makes no sense.

[Blinge]

Yep. I do not remember the seek ring at all.

DARK BOMB! DARK BOMB!

[Necronopticous]

Evergrace is rough, you guys.

[Austin]

*grabs popcorn*

[Necronopticous]

Evergrace

Against the will of every impulse my brain could muster I have toppled Evergrace. I even have proof!



Am I the only one to ever see this credit crawl? I hope so.

Where do I even begin with this game? It's a disaster; a mish-mash of concepts and mechanics that were already done with clarity and purpose in previous From Software titles that seem to have lost their way. I struggle to understand what purpose they internally saw this serving, or how the same individuals that designed Shadow Tower looked at the mechanical structure Evergrace is built upon and gave it a pass.

I was very worried from the first moment. Given the choice between generic anime guy and generic anime girl, I chose generic anime girl as the lesser of two evils. At this point I thought, at the very least, I had avoided ever having to bother with generic anime guy. I was very wrong about this, but I wouldn’t know that until later.

The manual presents the story of Evergrace as a history between warring kingdoms as an allegorical struggle between the preservation of nature and the propagation of technology. There is a reference to certain individuals who have been mysteriously “marked” with some enigmatic glyph and left to endure some great prejudice as a result. You play two such individuals.

Scene #1 of the actual video game: Evil wizard man with crazy eyes laughs diabolically and disappears. Generic anime girl puts a cooking pot on her head and walks around nondescript plains kicking lowly RPG enemies with a toddler’s finesse until you have enough RPG currency to afford an actual weapon from some sort of pig man shopkeeper accessed via RPG save crystal.

This is about as close as we ever get to the themes discussed in the manual.

From there the gameplay loop stays largely the same: collect more equipment by farming currency and move on to the next area when you get bored with that. You can run by most enemies, and there aren’t any traditional character levels in the game so you could mostly just walk through the game in mere minutes without doing much of anything. To prevent you from doing this, the designers decided to bar your progress with “puzzles.”

The game is either horribly written, horribly translated, or both, but the hints for solving any progress-gating puzzle are never clear enough that you feel confident you have figured out the answer even though the answer is usually obvious and you have, in fact, figured it out. This results in cumulative hours of menu diving, equipping and unequipping different pieces of colored equipment in a state of angry confusion until some variation of what you always knew to be the right answer works when the other variations didn’t for a probably unknown reason.

Where the Souls series would later pit you against seemingly insurmountable odds, confident in the mechanical precision of its combat system and the player’s ability to overcome those odds through it, Evergrace is about as far as you can go in the opposite direction. The game is practically void of challenge and must be because there are no aspects of its core systems that merit confidence. It doesn’t even really try. There’s no point in switching equipment or strategizing or using the stat-raising items or really anything else. You might have to switch to a different weapon because a boss absorbs the kind of damage of the one you’re using, but that’s literally the only concern ever where gameplay is concerned.

After about 7 hours of this I caught up to the evil wizard man and was promptly asked to start the game all over again with the male character. It was at this moment that I realized I was only half way through the game, and actually completing it would mean suffering the same torture from square 1 all over again. I really considered just quitting here and moving on, but I saw it through and I can now confidently say that nothing of value came from that decision.

How is there a sequel to this game?

[Obscura]

How is there a sequel to this game?

The real question is, are you going to play said sequel and bless us with another rant this awesome?

[Necronopticous]

Already underway, friend. The big innovations this time around appear to be poor AI-controlled allies and input lag, so it ain't looking good.

[Obscura]

Excellent! Scathing rants on games that thoroughly deserve it are one of my favorite genres of literature, and it sounds like Forever Kingdom should provide the material for a great one!

[Sumez]

On a brighter note, I finally got myself to start on King's Field II (aka the first King's Field US), and despite expecting that I had to first overcome its quirkyness and hostile interface, I was actually drawn in immediately, and hard a hard time putting it down.

It's very simple, and feels like a ton of other games from the time, but so far it's done nothing to push me away. The first few enemies are very easy to fight without taking a hit, and though the controls are absurdly clunky, it's kind of expected from a 1995 console game, released before the PlayStation got the idea of adding analog sticks. The fact that those controls persisted into the 4th game on PS2 is less excusable, of course.
At least, I got ahold of circle strafing pretty fast, but I don't think I'll ever get used to looking up and down using shoulder buttons.

[Necronopticous]

At least, I got ahold of circle strafing pretty fast, but I don't think I'll ever get used to looking up and down using shoulder buttons.

Oh god. Trying to do battle with those dragonfly enemies in the first village is maddening.

You know, I think I have actually come somewhat to terms with the shoulder buttons...by the time I got to Eternal Ring I wasn't even thinking about it anymore. So, I guess you do sorta get used to it, but it's certainly up there with the painfully slow turn speed in helping to make the experience nearly impenetrable.

[Sumez]

One thing that confuses me, is that the "strength" menu indicates that I have three attacks that all do different amounts of damage - slash, and.. thrust and stab or something? Either way, I'm not seeing any way to do different kinds of attack, and the manual doesn't mention anything about it either. Is it a thing, or what's the idea of this stat listing?