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prfsnl_gmr wrote:

Exhuminator wrote:King's Field: The Ancient City

This game is so rad. I' five hours in, and I love it despite its flaws.

Very glad you are playing it.

According to my HLTB, I put 33 hours into finishing it. However, I spent a lot of time just wandering around looking for hidden secrets, and that surely padded the playtime a bit. Also I refused to use a walkthrough when I played it, so I got stuck here and there from time to time.

The controls are a bit clunky at first yes, but they become second nature after a while.

Enemy AI never gets much better. But far stronger, much faster, and way more dangerous enemies later on will challenge you, despite being dumb as they are.

Exhuminator wrote:Enemy AI never gets much better. But far stronger, much faster, and way more dangerous enemies later on will challenge you, despite being dumb as they are.

I hope so. I killed a verifiable army of skeletons last night without taking a hit. (They were no match for my morning star of doom!) I also took down the first boss pretty swiftly. (He was no match for my extreme strafing powers!)

prfsnl_gmr wrote:

Exhuminator wrote:Enemy AI never gets much better. But far stronger, much faster, and way more dangerous enemies later on will challenge you, despite being dumb as they are.

I hope so. I killed a verifiable army of skeletons last night without taking a hit. (They were no match for my morning star of doom!) I also took down the first boss pretty swiftly. (He was no match for my extreme strafing powers!)

Most of the time, the challenge in King's Field does not come from enemy encounters. That's one big difference between the KF series and the Souls series. Rather, challenge in King's Field comes from figuring out where to go, what to do, and when to do it. It's more exploratory-puzzle style like that.

I can think of a few tricky enemies in King's Field IV all the same, but I don't want to ruin anything for you. Looking forward to your review after you finish it.

prfsnl_gmr wrote:The pacing on Dark Alliance II is a bit off, but it is considerably lengthier than the original. I also thought that the environments in Dark Alliance II were more varied, and I thought that the boss battles were more exciting. After we played through it together a few years ago, my wife ended up preferring it. (I still prefer the original, but only slightly.)

I didn't played through a whole lot of it (I bought it when I was in college, so I was a lot more quick to judge a game given my limited free time), so I didn't get to see the varied environments or more than the first boss. The pacing is EXACTLY what my problem with it was. I ADORED the first one, so I'll revisit it at some point, but it really turned me off fast when I first played it.

The difference is that Dark Alliance was developed by Snowblind Studios, and Dark Alliance II was developed by Black Isle Studios. That's why the games feel so different from one another, despite sharing the same engine.

The original Dark Alliance is the gold standard of its genre.