King Arthur & the Knights of Justice (video game)

Last updated
King Arthur & the Knights of Justice
King Arthur and the Knights of Justice cover art.jpg
Cover art
Developer(s) Manley & Associates
Publisher(s) Enix
Director(s) Robert L. Jerauld
Producer(s) Khanh Le
Tsuneo Morita
Yasuhiro Fukushima
Designer(s) Philip Holt
Michael Breault
Mark Rose
Programmer(s) Sam Deasy
Kent Peterson
James Hague
Artist(s) Kevin Pun
John Baron
Hans Piwenitzky
Composer(s) Robert Ridihalgh
Platform(s) Super NES
Release
  • NA: May 1995
Genre(s) Action-adventure
Mode(s) Single-player

King Arthur & the Knights of Justice is an action-adventure game developed by Manley & Associates and published by Enix for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in May 1995. Based on the cartoon series of the same title, which was loosely inspired by the Arthurian legend, the game was released in North America exclusively.

Contents

The player takes on the role of a team of American football players who are transported to Medieval England and given the mission to save King Arthur and destroy the evil sorceress Morgana and her army. The game was the first Enix title developed by an American company, and was inspired in-part by The Legend of Zelda . It was received with reviews ranging from mediocre to extremely poor.

Gameplay

The characters' meters are shown at the top of the screen. Here, Arthur and the Knights are at the center and bottom of the screen. King Arthur and the Knights of Justice screenshot.gif
The characters' meters are shown at the top of the screen. Here, Arthur and the Knights are at the center and bottom of the screen.

The game is an action-adventure game, played from a top-down perspective. The player takes on the role of Arthur King and is accompanied by two Knights of Justice controlled by the game console. The player battles enemies using a regular sword swing or a special attack, and can block high and low attacks. [1]

Twelve Knights are available from the start (including Arthur King), each with his own weapon, personality and statistics for life force, defense, strength and speed. Each boss of the game has a specific weakness against one of the Knights. [2] Changing party members is done by visiting the Round Table room in Camelot. [3] [4] Each character has a life meter, and Arthur also has a power meter. [4] Various items must be collected to complete quests and objectives, while some can be used to restore a character's life meter. [5]

An overworld map feature allows the player to directly access locations already visited once. [4] The game has no saving feature but allows accessing various points of the storyline with a system of passwords. [3] [1]

Plot

The events of the game are set in a fictional version of Britain in the 5th century. [6] The evil sorceress Morgana has magically imprisoned King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Cave of Glass beneath her castle, past Hadrian's Wall. At Camelot, the King's wizard Merlin uses a crystal ball and locates a brave team of "warriors" in the future, led by Arthur King and dubbed "The Knights". They are actually American football players, though Merlin interprets their names as a sign of fate. He summons them back in time, and the Lady of the Table transforms them into "Knights of Justice". Merlin asks them to break the seal on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round by gathering the twelve Keys of Truth. [1]

The party retrieves the Excalibur sword from the Lady of the Lake, proving their worth by claiming the Pendragon Shield from a young dragon at Shield Heights. They assist Erek, the deposed ruler of Tintagel Castle, and recover the first Key of Truth in the castle. They make their way into the village of Welton, which is under a mind control spell, and recover the second Key of Truth at Gruesome Keep. After breaking the spell on Welton and crossing the Blinder's Way, they claim the third Key of Truth at Castle Sanguine. [7]

During the event, a Warlord infiltrates Camelot and poisons Squire Everett. The party collects an antidote in the Swamp of Zagar and saves the Squire. They then claim the fourth Key of Truth in Stone Keep. They rescue the son of the Gnome King to obtain the fifth Key of Truth, and collects four Elemental Keys to unlock access to Castle Vilor and the sixth Key of Truth. The party finds the seventh and eighth Keys of Truth in Crownhorn village and the Cape of Death, respectively. The ninth and tenth Keys are found in Blackroot Keep and the Dark Citadel while searching for the missing pieces of the Staff of Rhiothamus, which can break open a path in Hadrian's Wall. [8]

Using the Staff, the party goes past Hadrian's Wall and into the Dark Forest, where the eleventh Key of Truth is found. In a cemetery, they stumble upon a statue of Morgana, which fires a magic beam that kills the two Knights in the party. Arthur travels to the Town of the Dead by himself then to the Plain of the Dead and retrieves his two dead Knights. They reach Morgana's castle, Stone Gardens, and defeat Morgana in her dragon form, [note 1] thus obtaining the last Key of Truth. In the game's ending sequence, the party members are congratulated by the real, freed King Arthur, and Merlin uses Stonehenge to send them back to their era. [8]

Development

King Arthur & the Knights of Justice was the first Enix game developed by an American company: Manley & Associates in Issaquah, Washington. Roughly two dozen people worked on the game, though not all at the same time. It was initially planned for a 16-megabit cartridge, but four additional megabits were eventually added to expand the game. Development spanned about two years. [9]

In addition to the original cartoon series, the developers gathered ideas from several sources for inspiration, including The Legend of Zelda action-adventure game series, and books such as T. H. White's The Book of Merlyn and fables from Medieval poet Marie de France. They noted that the hardest part of development was coming up with puzzles for each of the regions, as they had to be "fun and challenging, but not repetitive". While they tried to maintain a balance between action and puzzles, they noted that they focused more on the puzzle aspect of the game. Favorite parts of the game for the developers include the dragon battles, the boss Blackwing and Morgana's Warlords. [9]

Reception

The title received generally negative reviews. Freelance critic Robert Schmitz gave the title a score of 0.5 out of 11, calling it "awful" and saying he "hated" it. Schmitz also criticised Enix's decision to base the game on a little-known cartoon series. [13] While Nintendo Power gave the game an eight-page walkthrough, its review score was quite low for its usual scoring standards, writing that the game was largely puzzle-solving, but that the "puzzles" were merely finding hidden items which the game tells you where they are. [12] The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly were divided. Ed Semrad and Danyon Carpenter said it was "okay", with the strong music, immersive sound effects, and epic quest balanced against the below-average graphics, while Al Manuel and Sushi-X said it was an all-around mediocre clone of Secret of Mana . Both Carpenter and Sushi-X remarked that the game would have a hard time getting noticed due to it being released in the same month as Chrono Trigger . [11] Allan Milligan, in a review for the Gaming Intelligence Agency, judged the graphics and audio both mediocre, the character designs as bad, the plot generic and the puzzles not challenging. He noted that it is impossible for the player to know in advance which Knight is best suited for which boss. [2] Milligan called the game "staggeringly ill-conceived" and likened it to a succession of fetch quests. He criticized the fact that all enemies on a screen must be defeated to progress through some passages, and the possibility for characters and enemies to be hidden from the player's view behind large objects. The Knights' weak artificial intelligence was denounced, as was the lack of animation when a character or enemy is hit. [2]

Notes

  1. ↑ The game's ROM contains unused dialogue line "You have been lucky enough to defeat my dragon, but I'll be back, and I'll have my revenge!" which suggests that Morgana was originally supposed to not turn into but just summon the dragon and then escape after it is killed.

Related Research Articles

<i>Excalibur</i> (film) 1981 film by John Boorman

Excalibur is a 1981 epic medieval fantasy film directed, cowritten and produced by John Boorman, that retells the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, based loosely on the 15th-century Arthurian romance Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. It stars Nigel Terry as Arthur, Nicol Williamson as Merlin, Nicholas Clay as Lancelot, Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere, Helen Mirren as Morgana, Liam Neeson as Gawain, Gabriel Byrne as Uther and Patrick Stewart as Leondegrance. The film is named after the legendary sword of King Arthur that features prominently in Arthurian literature. The film's soundtrack features the music of Richard Wagner and Carl Orff, along with an original score by Trevor Jones.

<i>Dragon Quest</i> (video game) 1986 video game

Dragon Quest, titled Dragon Warrior when initially localized to North America, is a role-playing video game developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was originally released in Japan in 1986 and by Nintendo in North America in 1989. It is the first game in the Dragon Quest video game series. Dragon Quest has been ported and remade for several video game platforms, including the MSX, MSX2, PC-9801, Super Famicom, Game Boy Color, mobile phones, and Nintendo Switch as of 2019. The player controls the hero character who is charged with saving the Kingdom of Alefgard and rescuing its princess from the evil Dragonlord. Dragon Warrior's story became the second part in a trilogy, with several spinoff anime and manga series.

<i>Dragon Quest VI</i> 1995 video game

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation, known in Europe & Australia as Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Reverie, is a role-playing video game developed by Heartbeat and published by Enix for the Super Famicom as a part of the Dragon Quest series and as the last Dragon Quest game in the Zenithian Trilogy. It was released in Japan in December 1995, developed by Heartbeat; whereas the previous Dragon Quest games were developed by Chunsoft. In 2011, a remake of the game, along with Dragon Quest IV and Dragon Quest V, was released worldwide for the Nintendo DS, making this the first time the game was released in English. Another version of the game for Android and iOS devices was released in Japan in June 2015.

<i>Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail</i> 1990 video game

Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail is a graphic adventure game released in 1990 by Sierra On-Line. It was the first game in the Conquests series designed by Christy Marx and her husband Peter Ledger. The only other game in the series was 1991's Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood. Marx did the majority of the design work while Ledger created the game and package art.

<i>King Arthur and the Knights of Justice</i> US 1992–1993 animated TV series

King Arthur and the Knights of Justice is an animated series produced by Golden Films, C&D, and Bohbot Entertainment and created by Diane Eskenazi and Avi Arad, who also served as executive producers. The series aired from September 13, 1992, to December 12, 1993, with two seasons and twenty-six episodes. It aired as part of Bohbot's Amazin' Adventures programming block.

The Legend of Prince Valiant is an animated television series based on the Prince Valiant comic strip created by Hal Foster. Set in the time of King Arthur, it is a family-oriented adventure show about an exiled prince who goes on a quest to become one of the Knights of the Round Table. He begins his quest after having a dream about Camelot and its idealistic New Order. This television series originally aired on The Family Channel for a total run of 65 episodes.

<i>Chronicles of the Sword</i> 1996 video game

Chronicles of the Sword is an adventure game developed by Synthetic Dimensions and released by Psygnosis in 1996 for MS-DOS and Sony PlayStation platforms. The game, originally titled as King Arthur: The Quest of The Fair Unknown, is based on Arthurian legends and uses a point-and-click interface. Chronicles of the Sword tells the story of the young knight Gawain on a quest to save Camelot from the scheming witch queen Morgana. It has received largely negative reviews.

Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge is a first-person shooter video game developed by ExcaliburWorld Software. The game's development has been closely tied to the Marathon and later Aleph One engines, on which it is based. Most recently, the game was expanded and re-released in 2007 for OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux using the open-source Aleph One engine.

<i>Merlin</i> (2008 TV series) British fantasy-adventure television series (2008–2012)

Merlin is a British fantasy-adventure drama television programme, loosely based on the Arthurian legends regarding the close relations of Merlin and King Arthur. Created by Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy for the BBC, it was broadcast for five series on BBC One between 20 September 2008 and 24 December 2012. The programme starred Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Katie McGrath, Angel Coulby, Richard Wilson, Anthony Head, and John Hurt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Dragon's Call</span> 1st episode of the 1st series of Merlin

"The Dragon's Call" is the first episode of the first series of the British fantasy-adventure family television series Merlin. Written by Julian Jones and directed by James Hawes, the episode was first broadcast on BBC One on 20 September 2008.

Stories involving the mythical wizard Merlin have been popular since the Renaissance, especially with the renewed interest in the legend of King Arthur in modern times. As noted by Arthurian scholar Alan Lupack, "numerous novels, poems and plays center around Merlin. In American literature and popular culture, Merlin is perhaps the most frequently portrayed Arthurian character."

<i>Merlin</i> series 3 Season of television series

The third series of Merlin began on 11 September 2010. Series three regular cast members include Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Katie McGrath, Angel Coulby, Anthony Head, and Richard Wilson, as well as Emilia Fox joining the regular cast. John Hurt took his previous role as the voice of the Great Dragon but was no longer one of the regular cast. Series three consists of 13 episodes. The series three premiere was watched by 6.49 million viewers.

<i>Merlin</i> series 5 Season of television series

The fifth and final series of the British fantasy drama series Merlin began broadcasting on 6 October 2012 with the episode "Arthur's Bane – Part 1" and ended on 24 December 2012 in the UK, with "The Diamond of the Day – Part 2". It consists of 13 episodes shown on Saturday evenings on BBC One and BBC One HD. Series producer is Sara Hamill and executive producers are Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy. Directors include Justin Molotnikov, Ashley Way, Alice Troughton and Declan O'Dwyer. Writers include Julian Jones, Howard Overman, Jake Michie and Richard McBrien.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morgan le Fay in modern culture</span> Morgana le Fay is a character portrayed as a sorceress in Arthurian legend.

The Matter of Britain character Morgan le Fay has been featured many times in various works of modern culture, often but not always appearing in villainous roles. Some modern stories merge Morgana's character with her sister Morgause or with aspects of Nimue. Her manifestations and the roles given to her by modern authors vary greatly, but typically she is being portrayed as a villainess associated with Mordred.

<i>Artus-Excalibur</i> Musical

Artus - Excalibur is a musical loosely based on the legends of the 5th/6th-century British monarch King Arthur and his fabled sword, Excalibur. The score is by Frank Wildhorn, with lyrics by Robin Lerner, book by Ivan Menchell, and arrangements and orchestrations by Koen Schoots. The musical had its world premiere at the Theater St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland on March 15, 2014.

<i>Wizards: Tales of Arcadia</i> 2020 animated television series

Wizards: Tales of Arcadia is an American animated fantasy television limited series created by Guillermo del Toro, and produced by DreamWorks Animation Television and Double Dare You Productions. The award-winning series is the third and final installment of the Tales of Arcadia trilogy, following Trollhunters (2016–2018) and 3Below (2018–2019), and was released on August 7, 2020, on Netflix.

<i>King Arthurs Quest</i> 1984 video game

King Arthur's Quest is a first-person perspective graphic adventure interactive fiction video game developed by Five Ways Software and published by Hill MacGibbon for the ZX Spectrum in 1984. There was also a canceled Commodore 64 version.

<i>Unholy Grail</i> Comic book series

Unholy Grail is a horror comic book series written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Mirko Colak, published by American company AfterShock Comics. The colorist is Maria Santaolalla, and the letterer is Simon Bowland.

References

  1. 1 2 3 King Arthur & the Knights of Justice Instruction Booklet, Enix, May 1995, pp. 3–5.
  2. 1 2 3 Milligan, Allan. "King Arthur and the Knights of Justice". Gaming Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 2008-06-30.[ dead link ] Alternate site's archive
  3. 1 2 "King Arthur & the Knights of Justice". Electronic Gaming Monthly . No. 73. Sendai Publishing. August 1995. p. 124.
  4. 1 2 3 King Arthur & the Knights of Justice Instruction Booklet, Enix, May 1995, pp. 6–8.
  5. ↑ King Arthur & the Knights of Justice Instruction Booklet, Enix, May 1995, p. 10.
  6. ↑ King Arthur & the Knights of Justice Instruction Booklet, Enix, May 1995, p. 13.
  7. ↑ Averill, Alan (May 1995), "King Arthur & the Knights of Justice", Nintendo Power, Epic Center, vol. 72, Nintendo, pp. 39–43.
  8. 1 2 Manley & Associates (May 1995). King Arthur & the Knights of Justice (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Enix.
  9. 1 2 Averill, Alan (March 1995), "King Arthur & the Knights of Justice", Nintendo Power, Epic Center, vol. 70, Nintendo, pp. 36–37.
  10. ↑ "King Arthur & the Knights of Justice Review Score". GameRankings . Archived from the original on 2017-09-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  11. 1 2 "Review Crew: King Arthur and the Knights of Justice". Electronic Gaming Monthly . No. 73. Sendai Publishing. August 1995. p. 35.
  12. 1 2 "King Arthur & the Knights of Justice review". Nintendo Power . No. 72. May 1995. pp. 103, 107.
  13. ↑ Schmitz, Robert. "RPG Critic - King Arthur & The Knights Of Justice". Working Designs. Archived from the original on 1999-10-08. Retrieved 2008-06-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
    While Schmitz is not directly credited, see this for the identity of the author:
    GhaleonOne (1998-12-04). "Working Designs Press Release!". RPGFan. Archived from the original on 2008-07-13. Retrieved 2008-06-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.