You find yourself at the foot of a giant fortress armed with nothing but a small blade. Stepping forward, you soon ascertain this land is swarming with sinister monsters ranging from giant skeletons to carnivorous plants, all presented to you in a first-person perspective with fully rendered and texture mapped environments. Welcome to the first epic RPG for the PlayStation in America: King's Field. Crafted by Japanese studio FromSoftware and published by ASCII Entertainment, KF is a landmark achievement and a certain notch in Sony's belt. To finally explore an interconnected world in which you can travel freely, alter the camera angle to look in all 360-degrees, and unearth an intriguing and non-linear story demonstrates the pure enormity of next-generation games.

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King's Field essentially takes the idea of an action-adventure role-player and stuffs it inside of a 32-Bit engine. As you equip your weapons and begin traversing the island of Melanat, you will come across well-animated, polygonal enemies with which to spar. Now, this isn't Doom with its brain-draining carnage. Movement in KF is slow, strategic, and methodical. Dash in to strike, then back away to avoid getting hit yourself. Once you've felled a foe, you gain experience just like any other RPG. The speed does take the game a while to truly get rolling, and the play control is sluggish for our tastes, but the lack of instant gratification may end up getting you hooked. Discovering friendlies and merchants is made even better knowing you worked so hard to get to that point!

Printed in Issue #34, February 1996