King's Field: The Ancient City (2001)
Genres:Role-playing (RPG)
Themes:Action, Fantasy, Horror
Game modes:Single player
Story:King's Field: The Ancient City, known in Japan as King's Field IV, is a medieval-themed first-person role playing video game produced by From Software for the PlayStation 2 in 2001. It is the fourth game in the King's Field series and the last one released for home consoles.
Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.836
The primal ooze of the souls genre, , the forgotten franchise of From Software, foreboding atmosphere, great music, dreamlike NPCS, awkward controls, and little to no hand holding, the King's field saga is like a fever dream, and I love it, I still listen to the "Dark Reality" song (extended version) from time to time, that synthetized organ hits all the dopamine centers in my brain.
As an early zoomer, I didn't play this growing up; but I've been a FromSoft fan since I played Elden Ring (like how Breath of the Wild made me a LoZ fan), & so when I randomly heard about King's Field in a Gameranx video, I was intrigued enough to dig into it; which's how I found out it was FromSofts very 1st IP, & shortly afterwards, about the spinoff series, Shadow Tower, & that they're the IPs that pioneered everything the Souls games & Elden Ring're famous for now, & where many iconic Fromverse elements, like Seath the Scaleless & the Moonlight Greatsword, made their debut. So naturally, when I started emulating retro games on my Steam Deck (because getting the og hardware's prohibitively expensive now), I had to download both the King's Field & Shadow Tower IPs to play; & while they're, as FromSoft games're famous for being, brutally difficult, I've been enjoying them, & I immediately noticed their control scheme was what'd be standard keyboard & mouse controls mapped to a controller, as demonstrated by modern games that, while officially labeled "Soulsborne", or a similar term, actually, whether the developer realized it or not, take more after King's Field &/or Shadow Tower gameplay wise due to being played from a 1st person perspective (surprising the difference it makes); which's why I came up with a new term for such games I even made into a Steam tag; "King's-heir". Games like Monomyth, Dread Delusion, & the upcoming games Dreamspring & Labryinth of the Demon King. So, as you may've guessed, I wanna see both the King's Field & Shadow Tower games made playable on PC for both longtime FromSoft fans, & simply curious newcomers, to enjoy, & discover where many iconic FromSoft elements came from, & where the legendary studio got their start; & if Nightdive Studios doesn't remaster/remake them, I wanna see them added to the GOG preservation program (if you see this reposted on the other King's Field/Shadow Tower games, the story's the same there as it is here).
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