Shadow Tower is done. 12h35m roughly, though IGT was 9 hours and something weird. 341/630 creatures...?
Once I got to "The Void" door, I feared the worst with what I saw before me:
Yep, I missed some early bosses. I didn't love Shadow Tower enough to pull my hair out with backtracking a map-less game like this, so I finally just looked things up.
The Fire World boss... I had the "Flame Key" in my inventory, but never would have guessed you're supposed to just use the key anywhere in the last fire area and it'll teleport you to the boss. Item descriptions or something would have been nice.
The Dream World boss, I had a hunch I knew I missed something big since I had a 0% in the last Illusion World. There was some throne door with a voice that would tell me "I won't appear until you defeat the three Illusionists". Apparently I only missed one in the previous area. So that was easy clean up at least. It would have helped, a dozen hours ago, if I realized how good the Ball of Light items were. I figured they'd just barely light up your surroundings like the Torch/Lamps, but no... it's almost like you're playing another game with how much more is visible. I kind of figured the dense shadows and fog was hardware limitations, but it was rather intentional game design. I guess that's not surprising thinking about it now, since King's Field III had some good draw distance.
It wasn't too bad honestly. There is a late game save next to the most important shop of them all, the item repair one, and then a warp to the Water World. You have to go through the acid area a few times to back track, but taking off your boots will stop them from breaking immediately. But thankfully the Water World, kind of the midpoint of the game, spiraled out into the other areas nearby. And I had Silver Feathers or whatever to warp back to the end game save point I was using.
Last bosses were PATHETIC! But I think the final one is kind of like, intentionally bad for story reasons... like Abyss and Demon's Souls. But oh well. This game had several tough bosses and was overall harder than the KF's to me for sure. I think both this and ST:A get a lot easier the moment you get some HP regen equipment. And after a point, all your spent Soul Points add up eventually and you'll have a pretty big pool of HP, with a lot of equipment to cycle through.
Auriel, the demon chick... I wonder if I supposed to challenge her at some point. She kind of tried to provoke me, but then I saw her again and she was nice. She didn't draw any weapons, so nor did I. But I wonder if you can fight her and get some really good gear, like in Abyss.
Overall, I'll probably still land on a 7/10 for this one. But it is absolutely only for fans of KF/ST:A. This is a pretty unconventional game. It does get more and more fun the further you get in. Anyone who hates survival horror item management, would have a nightmare with Shadow Tower's systems of constantly having to micromanage your HP/MP and cycling out equipment/weapons quickly. It's pretty taxing and intense, but that's part of it getting a little easier the more you play, since you'll have a lot more items to work with. I don't think maps "ruined" KF at all and appreciated them there, if anything it just made me even more obsessive to chart out every corner of the dungeons. I don't know if maps would benefit ST, but this ultra up claustrophobic FOV does make it hard to navigate and map things out in my head. So I don't know. It's a little bizarre how the first half of the game is far more mazey. The later worlds get a lot more straightforward and smaller pretty often. ST is weird, I'd tinker and refine some stuff to make it better myself...
My FromSoft first person RPG rankings:
A: Still not sure which I like the most between these two. Still have to let them settle for a bit.
- KF2
- KF3
B: No real complaints here at all. Super fun.
- KF1
- ST:A
C: Didn't love it, but as a fan of the other games like it, it was cool to play.
- ST
I predict KF4 will be A tier.
The loving world of Shadow Tower (and Souls really).