King Arthur & the Knights of Justice (video game)
Encyclopedia
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 name, which was loosely inspired by the Arthurian legend
, the game was released in North America exclusively.
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
from the sorceress Morgana. The game was the first Enix title developed by an American company, and was inspired by The Legend of Zelda series and various written works. It was received with reviews ranging from mediocre to extremely poor.
for life force, defense, strength and speed. Each boss
of the game has a specific weakness against one of the Knights. Changing party members is done by visiting the Round Table room in Camelot.
Each character has a life meter, and Arthur also has a power meter. Various items
must be collected to complete quests
and objectives, while some can be used to restore a character's life meter. An overworld
map feature allows the player to directly access locations already visited once. The game has no saving
feature but allows accessing various points of the storyline with a system of passwords
.
in the 5th century. The evil sorceress Morgana has magically imprisoned King Arthur and the Knights of the Round 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.
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.
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.
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's dragon form, 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.
cartridge, but 4 additional megabits were eventually added as the developers wanted to expand the game. Development spanned about two years.
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.
and Electronic Gaming Monthly
gave the title a score of 2.68 out of 5 and 5.62 out of 10 respectively, while the website Allgame
rated it 3 out of 5 stars. Freelance
critic Robert Schmitz gave the title a score of 0.5 out of 11, calling it "awful" and explaining the game is almost "better left unsaid". Schmitz blamed Enix's decision to base the game on a little-known cartoon series, a comment echoed by both the Video Game Bible
and Allan Milligan, in a review for the Gaming Intelligence Agency, who noted that the game was released after the cartoon's finale
.
Milligan called the game a "staggeringly ill-conceived game" and likened it to a "succession of fetch quest
s". Electronic Gaming Monthly felt the graphics lack vibrant colors, but that the music was "alright". Milligan, however, judged the graphics and audio both mediocre, the character designs "terrible", the plot generic and the puzzles not challenging. Moreover, he noted that it is impossible for the player to know in advance which Knight is best suited for which boss.
Concerning the gameplay, Milligan 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 unintuitive angle made by Arthur's sword when attacking and the Knights' artificial intelligence
were also denounced as poorly conceived, as were the lack of animation when a character or enemy is hit.
While Milligan noted no major glitch
es or bug
s in the game, Schmitz felt the testers rushed their job. The game seemed "unfinished and underdeveloped" for the Video Game Bible, as well as Milligan, who called the packaging "nice" and the manual readable, wondering why "thinking human beings" would ever agree to make a game "this unambitious and dull". The Video Game Bible gave the title a rarity score of 6 out of 10, meaning that, according to the scale used in the book, the game may have had more than 20,000 copies produced.
Action-adventure game
An action-adventure game is a video game that combines elements of the adventure game genre with various action game elements. It is perhaps the broadest and most diverse genre in gaming, and can include many games which might better be categorized under narrow genres...
developed by Manley & Associates and published by Enix
Enix
The was a Japanese company that produced video games, anime and manga. The company was founded by Yasuhiro Fukushima on September 22, 1975 as and renamed Enix in 1982...
for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is a 16-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America, Europe, Australasia , and South America between 1990 and 1993. In Japan and Southeast Asia, the system is called the , or SFC for short...
in May 1995. Based on the cartoon series of the same name, which was loosely inspired by the Arthurian legend
Matter of Britain
The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the body of literature and legendary material associated with Great Britain and its legendary kings, particularly King Arthur...
, the game was released in North America exclusively.
The player takes on the role of a team of American football
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...
players who are transported to Medieval England and given the mission to save King Arthur
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
from the sorceress Morgana. The game was the first Enix title developed by an American company, and was inspired by The Legend of Zelda series and various written works. It was received with reviews ranging from mediocre to extremely poor.
Gameplay
The game is a standard 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. Twelve Knights are available from the start (including Arthur King), each with his own weapon, personality and statisticsStatistic (role-playing games)
A statistic in role-playing games is a piece of data which represents a particular aspect of a fictional character. That piece of data is usually a integer or, in some cases, a set of dice....
for life force, defense, strength and speed. Each boss
Boss (video games)
A boss is an enemy-based challenge which is found in video games. A fight with a boss character is commonly referred to as a boss battle or boss fight...
of the game has a specific weakness against one of the Knights. Changing party members is done by visiting the Round Table room in Camelot.
Each character has a life meter, and Arthur also has a power meter. Various items
Item (game)
In pencil and paper games and computer and video games, an item is an object within the game world that can be collected by a player or, occasionally, a non-player character...
must be collected to complete quests
Quest (gaming)
A quest in role-playing video games — including massively multiplayer online role-playing games and their predecessors, MUDs — is a task that a player-controlled character or group of characters may complete in order to gain a reward...
and objectives, while some can be used to restore a character's life meter. An overworld
Overworld
An overworld is, in a broad sense, an area within a video game that interconnects all its levels or locations. They are mostly common in role-playing games, though this does not exclude other video game genres....
map feature allows the player to directly access locations already visited once. The game has no saving
Saved game
A saved game is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game. This saved game can be reloaded later, so the player can continue where he or she had stopped...
feature but allows accessing various points of the storyline with a system of passwords
Password (video games)
In many video games of the 8-bit and, to a lesser extent, 16-bit eras , after a level was beaten and/or when all continues were used, the game would display a password, that when entered in the game would allow the player to return to this part in the game...
.
Plot
The events of the game are set in a fictional EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in the 5th century. The evil sorceress Morgana has magically imprisoned King Arthur and the Knights of the Round in the Cave of Glass beneath her castle, past Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall was a defensive fortification in Roman Britain. Begun in AD 122, during the rule of emperor Hadrian, it was the first of two fortifications built across Great Britain, the second being the Antonine Wall, lesser known of the two because its physical remains are less evident today.The...
. At Camelot
Camelot
Camelot is a castle and court associated with the legendary King Arthur. Absent in the early Arthurian material, Camelot first appeared in 12th-century French romances and eventually came to be described as the fantastic capital of Arthur's realm and a symbol of the Arthurian world...
, the King's wizard Merlin
Merlin
Merlin is a legendary figure best known as the wizard featured in the Arthurian legend. The standard depiction of the character first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written c. 1136, and is based on an amalgamation of previous historical and legendary figures...
uses a crystal ball
Crystal ball
A crystal ball is a crystal or glass ball believed by some people to aid in the performance of clairvoyance. It is sometimes known as a shew stone...
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
Time travel in fiction
Time travel is a common theme in science fiction and is depicted in a variety of media. It simply means either going forward in time or backward, to experience the future, or the past.-Literature:...
, 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.
The party retrieves the Excalibur
Excalibur
Excalibur is the legendary sword of King Arthur, sometimes attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Great Britain. Sometimes Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone are said to be the same weapon, but in most versions they are considered separate. The sword was...
sword from the Lady of the Lake
Lady of the Lake
The Lady of the Lake is the name of several related characters who play parts in the Arthurian legend. These characters' roles include giving King Arthur his sword Excalibur, enchanting Merlin, and raising Lancelot after the death of his father...
, proving their worth by claiming the Pendragon Shield from a young dragon
Dragon
A dragon is a legendary creature, typically with serpentine or reptilian traits, that feature in the myths of many cultures. There are two distinct cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, derived from European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern...
at Shield Heights. They assist Erek, the deposed ruler of Tintagel Castle
Tintagel Castle
Tintagel Castle is a medieval fortification located on the peninsula of Tintagel Island, adjacent to the village of Tintagel in Cornwall, United Kingdom. The site was possibly occupied in the Romano-British period, due to an array of artefacts dating to this period which have been found on the...
, 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.
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
Gnome
A gnome is a diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature...
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
Riothamus
Riothamus was a Romano-British military leader, who was active circa AD 470. He fought against the Goths in alliance with the declining Roman Empire. He is called "King of the Britons" by the 6th-Century historian Jordanes, but the extent of his realm is unclear...
, which can break open a path in Hadrian's Wall.
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's dragon form, 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
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...
to send them back to their era.
Development
King Arthur & the Knights of Justice was the first Enix game developed by an American company. The development team of the project was composed of roughly two dozen people. The game was initially planned for a 16-megabitMegabit
The megabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix mega is defined in the International System of Units as a multiplier of 106 , and therefore...
cartridge, but 4 additional megabits were eventually added as the developers wanted to expand the game. Development spanned about two years.
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
T. H. White
Terence Hanbury White was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.-Biography:...
's The Book of Merlyn
The Book of Merlyn
The Book of Merlyn is an Arthurian fantasy book written by T. H. White. It is the conclusion of The Once and Future King, but it was published separately and posthumously.-Plot summary:...
and fables from Medieval
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
poet Marie de France
Marie de France
Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an undisclosed court, but was almost certainly at least known about at the royal court of King Henry II of England...
. 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.
Reception
The title received generally negative reviews. Video game magazines Nintendo PowerNintendo Power
Nintendo Power magazine is a monthly news and strategy magazine formerly published in-house by Nintendo of America, but now run independently. As of issue #222 , Nintendo contracted publishing duties to Future US, the U.S. subsidiary of British publisher Future.The first issue published was...
and Electronic Gaming Monthly
Electronic Gaming Monthly
Electronic Gaming Monthly is a bimonthly American video game magazine. It has been published by EGM Media, LLC. since relaunching in April of 2010. Its previous run, which ended in January 2009, was published by Ziff Davis...
gave the title a score of 2.68 out of 5 and 5.62 out of 10 respectively, while the website Allgame
Allgame
Allgame is a commercial database of information about arcade games, video games and console manufacturers.Allgame is owned by All Media Guide, along with Allmusic and Allmovie....
rated it 3 out of 5 stars. Freelance
Freelancer
A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...
critic Robert Schmitz gave the title a score of 0.5 out of 11, calling it "awful" and explaining the game is almost "better left unsaid". Schmitz blamed Enix's decision to base the game on a little-known cartoon series, a comment echoed by both the Video Game Bible
Video Game Bible
The Video Game Bible was founded in 2001 by Andy Slaven and Michael Collins. It published a game collector's guide, which covered United States-released home consoles from 1985 to 2002....
and Allan Milligan, in a review for the Gaming Intelligence Agency, who noted that the game was released after the cartoon's finale
Series finale
A series finale refers to the last installment of a series with a narrative presented through mediums such as television, film and literature. In many Commonwealth countries, the term final episode is commonly used in regards to a television series...
.
Milligan called the game a "staggeringly ill-conceived game" and likened it to a "succession of fetch quest
Quest (gaming)
A quest in role-playing video games — including massively multiplayer online role-playing games and their predecessors, MUDs — is a task that a player-controlled character or group of characters may complete in order to gain a reward...
s". Electronic Gaming Monthly felt the graphics lack vibrant colors, but that the music was "alright". Milligan, however, judged the graphics and audio both mediocre, the character designs "terrible", the plot generic and the puzzles not challenging. Moreover, he noted that it is impossible for the player to know in advance which Knight is best suited for which boss.
Concerning the gameplay, Milligan 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 unintuitive angle made by Arthur's sword when attacking and the Knights' artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
were also denounced as poorly conceived, as were the lack of animation when a character or enemy is hit.
While Milligan noted no major glitch
Glitch
A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot...
es or bug
Software bug
A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
s in the game, Schmitz felt the testers rushed their job. The game seemed "unfinished and underdeveloped" for the Video Game Bible, as well as Milligan, who called the packaging "nice" and the manual readable, wondering why "thinking human beings" would ever agree to make a game "this unambitious and dull". The Video Game Bible gave the title a rarity score of 6 out of 10, meaning that, according to the scale used in the book, the game may have had more than 20,000 copies produced.
External links
- King Arthur and the Knights of Justice game shrine at Flying Omelette