yeso interested in anything you’d have to say about KFIII.
KING’S FIELD III REVIEW
a review which focuses on criticisms and hops over the parts of the game I intend to enjoy later today when I have full solar power 😋
I wonder if anyone in the world was able to play all the early FS games and survive. Especially on original hardware without a nice comfy controller, upscaling, and save states. After so much dark fantasy and bleary cyberpunk, I get burnt out. It was a weird choice to play KFIII during “christmas time” as well. But it’s one I really needed to bust out. I’ve beaten the first two, put the most hours into King’s Field II over the years (got the game before Demon’s Souls came out) and played 4/5ths of the way through King’s Field IV. So III has been hanging over my head as “many people’s favorite”… So going into this, I’m already biased against it as the “fan favorite”, “crowd favorite”, whatever you want to call it, I’m less inclined to like the most popular choice… Though I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way. A lot of folks also like King’s Field II for the same reasons. II is the fastest-running and fastest-paced of them all. II can run at a blazing 17 FPS!
I’m in the final stretch, so I pumped the breaks and am switching back from emulator to analog hardware to go through castle verdite and the royal graves, to bring it full circle. This is the part of the game I’ve been looking forward to since I first stepped out of the opening cutscene. I can write my review without finishing this part because I already know I’m gonna love it. My review of Castle Verdite area: awesome.
The trick they pulled with Lynn was also really good, and doesn’t even compare to anything in souls games except for the romantic(?) interest of Dark Souls III.
I’m now able to articulate the main thing I find more tiresome about III compared to the other three games in the series, besides lacking the “verticality” of II and IV.
This is just my personal criticism, and doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad game. Just that in my opinion, to most it may have aged the most gracefully due to its graphics, I feel the dungeon-oriented design of the other three games leads to more succinct gameplay that isn’t stretched thin by large empty plains.
I’m also really annoyed by a lot of takes that “King’s Field III is the only one that has any aCtUaL fields in it”…. There are more abstract definitions of the word Field besides a literal grassy plain, most of which apply to every King’s Field game. My favorite definition would be something like a text input Field. Meaning that From Software named their game in the same accordance as their company name. A more fanciful way of calling their game something like COMPUTER MEDIEVAL DUNGEON.
It’s nice to explore Verdite proper. That’s the experience this game delivers. With King’s Field usually you’re exploring tightly woven dungeons, that, for me, are much easier to keep track of and clear at a brisk enough pace. KFIII has so many open, flat areas. it’s one after the other and feels like there’s more of that than there are dungeons. The exact same issue I have with Elden Ring. From Software’s strength is dungeons, and that’s all I want to be doing– going through the plains feels like a waste of my time. KFII and IV, like Dark Souls, does a much better job at making each area interesting and engaging.
IMHO these grassy plains villages are there for the gamers who need that. I’d be alright with having them all deleted and replaced with a KFII-style village with a footprint one tenth the size. I would have enjoyed it more that way. It feels really out of place, even though it is more realistic and technically impressive. The player character just isn’t built for plains traversal. Another thing Zelda Ocarina of Time shamelessly copied from King’s Field: having your little man walk across a way too big field for the sake of impressing the players of 1998.
So the TLDR of my review of KFIII is it delivers the experience of exploring Verdite, but at the cost of worse pacing IMO. Very similar to how I feel about Elden Ring. I could do without the fields, it makes the Legacy Dungeons feel like a drop in the pond by comparison.
If I had all the time in the world, or it was still 1997, III would be much more appreciated. But with how much open-world burnout I have, III was more like an obstacle to overcome in time to play Christmas NiGHTS.
