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I didn't think the day would come, but here we are: I played a King's Field game. Didn't think I'd ever get around to this series because I already didn't like the first person combat in Skyrim and because King's Field I to III look rather... dated. But various Youtube videos using this games' soundtrack got me wanting to play this one for its great music alone.
King's Field IV, a.k.a. King's Field: The Ancient City, is an action-based first-person dungeon crawler. As the name suggests the game takes place in the ruins of an old capital city where our protagonist is tasked to return a cursed idol to. As is common with FromSoftware's games the details are left for you to find out through talking to various NPCs and reading ingame lore texts. There is little to no handholding and not much more to the story beyond the gameplay you experience. King's Fields' combat may look very crude on video but is surprisingly intricate since it requires precise understanding of timing and spacing in various situations, especially early on when resources are scarce and you really want to avoid taking damage. Additionally there's a variety of ways you can tackle enemies. Sometimes you can go straight in, attack, hit an enemy before they strike or cancel their attack, and move back to regain your stamina. Sometimes it's best to circle strafe and dodge sideways. Various spells that are found in the game also increasingly add variety, from letting you do combos with spells and melee swings to casting area of effect magic to attack many enemies at once. You can also line up enemies in ways that have them body block incoming attacks from others. So even if it's somewhat slow and clunky I found that the combat in King's Field IV requires enough focus and attention to keep me engaged and have fun.
I find it easy to excuse the comparatively awkward combat on the decision to keep the series' first-person perspective — at least I wouldn't know how to improve on it without switching to third person (and thus effectively making a Souls game). Less excusable are various problems with the menus. First, there's no screen that gives you a decent overview of the equipment you carry. You have to iterate lists of your weapons, helmets, armors, etc. individually with the game only showing you one item on screen at the time. Equipment stats sink as durability degrades and the game only shows their current stat values, never their maximum values. Also selling an items throws you out of the menu, which can be tedious when selling many items. But those are all minor issues of course.
On the other side King's Field IV excels where it matters: in level design and atmosphere. It's never too linear, while also not too open. Areas connect to each other in various ways, giving the game a great sense of place. Meaning the ruins and its adjacent locations feel like real places, not just like stages put together as backdrop for a game. Tsukasa Saitoh's compositions are doing real wonders: his moody soundtrack wonderfully highlights the mood and ambience of each individual section of the game. The graphics are stunning. When I played Dragon's Dogma last year it immediately stood out to me that I was playing an old game. That was on the PS3, in a game of the HD era, and I didn't get the same feeling when I played King's Field IV. Textures are all high quality and there's a decent visual variety to the locations. I was surprised that even NPC character models had a unique and almost timeless art style to them. Honestly I'd say that in many aspects King's Field IV looks better than many Fromsoft games on the PS3 and beyond; its texture work blows Dark Souls II's out of the water and it doesn't have the weird lighting and blur issues of the PS4 games that seem to wash out textures.
Overall I had a really good time with this game. Reviewers seem to shy away from recommending FromSoftware's earlier games, but for King's Field IV I think all its strong parts, from the haunting atmosphere to the stellar level design, heavily outweight its (potential) faults. I say potential because I don't agree with people calling the gameplay outdated, I was having fun with both combat and exploration. The PlayStation 2 has a huge library of great games and King's Field IV, despite not exactly innovating, manages to stand out in a good way rather than bad. My gut feeling is that almost everyone who enjoys FromSoftware's Souls games for their atmosphere as much as for any other quality will have a great time with this title.