King's Field (Japan, 1994)

Name in the sources

Wikipedia uses Jean Alfred Forester for the protagonist; Fandom uses John Alfred Forester. Both refer to the 1994 hero. This guide preserves those spellings rather than treating them as two characters.

FromSoftware's first game, and only in Japan

King's Field shipped on 16 December 1994, serial SLPS-00017, thirteen days after the PlayStation launched in Japan. It is the company's first game. Wikipedia's development note says the team was about ten people and had less than six months, after an earlier idea for a PC robot maze was dropped when Sony announced the console. The title itself comes from a golf course the developers saw in Britain. There is no North American or European box for this disc. The US game called King's Field is the 1995 sequel.

You play Jean Alfred Forester, son of Hauser, inside a royal cemetery under Verdite. The dungeon is five floors: a commoners' level with a shop, a knights' and nobles' level, a royal level, a fourth floor that players describe as the easiest to get lost in because the walls and floor share a texture, and a small fifth floor where Reinhardt III waits. HowLongToBeat's player displayed estimate is 9.5 hours for the main path, 11 hours with extras, and 12 hours for completion, from 23 reports. That is one site's sample, not an official clock.

Reprints, the English patch, and the dead store page

A PS one Books budget reprint is dated 15 November 2001. A Japanese PlayStation Network listing is dated 26 July 2007. When this page was checked, that store URL answered 404, so availability is unconfirmed. The English script is a patch, version 1.0, dated 12 December 2006, credited to John Osborne, and it applies only to SLPS-00017. A later fix addresses a save freeze. I link the archive record and the patcher notes from the English-patch page rather than hosting any disc image.

The Moonlight Sword on this disc is a sealed weapon on the fifth floor, listed with a total attack of 87 in the cross-game weapon notes. It is not the same acquisition as the later games, where the sword is a quest that runs through a whole kingdom. Combat is the early King's Field feel: you walk, you turn slowly, and a gold-framed cluster of bars tracks your body and your magic. If you want the island of Melanat or the open Verdite map, you are in a later game. The 1994 walkthrough follows the five floors, and the floor maps are schematic, not copied scans.

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