Thursday, August 23, 2012

King's Field IV: A Treaty Bird, revisited

at 3:25 PM
No I don't have any clue what King's Field is. Did he run out of Quests and start assigning farming duties instead? Apparently it's a series that runs far longer than the brain existed. Game has weird controls. We're talking pre-dual-analog FPS. I don't know why they opted for pre-dual-analog controls when dual-analog controls were right there in front of them and had been established for like, I don't know. Since Turok at least. You have to use the shoulder buttons to strafe and the right analog to look up and down, it's like Goldeneye or something.

Apparently this was what From Software was up to before the reign of Demon's/Dark Souls, since the PSX era at least. Slow-paced first-person exploratory adventure RPGs. Hrmph. Not exactly my cuppa tea. I tend to like action-heavy or adventure-heavy games, making a game about exploration really hard sometimes kills my spirit. I do it for Dark Souls because it's damn fun, even if an emotional roller-coaster. The games... well they have their audience. I'm giving it a try, reluctant though I may be, because niche games often click with me. It's also appealing to the eyes and ears, which keeps you moving.

I'll say that so far I've only played like a half hour and I've successfully: missed the first weapon they give you, and died three times without yet finding a save point. I uh don't think I'm doing it right. And you thought Dark Souls was unwelcoming. Yes you did. Fucking idiot. Not gonna have time to delve much deeper for a few days at least, so we'll have to return to this later. Suffice for now to say, yeah it has a LOT of elements in common with their now popular games.
This is kinda stimulating though because now I know what From Software is. Before, I was all, "where are these guys From? Software?" They're one of those companies that makes the same game over and over and over again, making a tiny little tweak here, a midget little tweak there, releasing it year after year. And the fans take adamant, unflinching stances on which is OBJECTIVELY the best. It's a formula most prominently associated with Capcom and their iterative series: Mega Man, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, so on. That's not the same incarnation we're dealing with here though - this is something specific to the niche market, catering to an exact person's tastes (and not costing too much on the development end). I'm talking Koei, Nippon Ichi, Natsume; Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Disgaea, Harvest Moon. Add From Software and games about exploring a cursed and barren land to that list.

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