The Return of the King? Knights in the Nightmare

Okay, like always I can’t come up with an intro.  Doesn’t matter, I’ll just get to the point: Knights in the Nightmare is great.  It’s one of the most interesting and bizarre games I’ve played so far the entire generation, and it’s as inspired as it is kind of insane.  It certainly takes some degree of craziness to mix a boring and formulaic genre like strategy RPGs with an exciting (and usually formulaic) genre like shmups.  But at any rate, I fully support anything that involves not giving battle commands through a standard, listed menu.

While the overall package is solid, from the unusual story to the beautiful art, the thing that fascinates me most about KitN is how much the game is just a game.  For as much good as the current trends of story informing game design tend to do (after all, it’s responsible for things like the more unique elements of Dragon Quarter and the inventive network elements in Demon’s Souls), it’s amazing to see what people can come up with when they take most of their preconceptions off the table.  In most games, many elements of the HUD are frequently useless, but here, it comes directly into the gameplay.  The display of weapons you have selected for the turn doesn’t just show those weapons; you actually pick them up and move them to the unit that’s attacking.  A grid on the bottom of the screen indicates which enemies in the battle have been killed and which are currently active, but you don’t have to kill every one to proceed, just enough to complete a line on that grid, at which point you’ll “Break through!” and win the battle.  It’s a leap of game logic that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense placed next to anything else, but it’s perfectly understandable on its own terms.

There’s still plenty of connections between the game and story, though, but even they stand out as unusual.  The player character is a disembodied soul, capable of moving around the screen to avoid enemy attacks.  The other characters are also souls, but they’re not controlled directly; only by being joined with the player’s soul can they act.  And because (basically) everyone on your side is already dead, the game doesn’t use standard “health” like in RPGs.  The main soul’s actions are based on time, and being hit by bullets decreases the amount of time you get per turn.  The other souls run on a “Vitality” stat, which generally only depletes when they attack.  If it runs out, they’ll really “die,” and you’ll no longer be able to use them for anything.  It’s important to avoid this because even a Knight with .01 Vit left can still be useful out of battle or restored with level-ups.

If anything, the game’s weakness is in its writing itself.  Atlus have, as always, done a lot with the text, but the general style is still rather disjointed and confusing, especially at first.  As the plot begins to come together, it gets easier to understand what’s happening and what the writing is going for, but even then, it can feel kind of weird.  The plot itself features plenty of generic elements, but the “everyone is already dead” angle does a lot for the game’s flavor; like in Valkyrie Profile, seeing characters in some of their final moments is often pretty powerful.

Even that is just symptomatic of the game’s bigger trouble, though.  It’s almost too ambitious, getting caught up on big ideas before trying to draw people in.  Though the tutorials are (rightly) optional, the choice remains to either spend half an hour becoming familiar with the combat before even the first, simplest battle, or to wade right in and become overwhelmed.  I’ve talked to many people who played a bit and then got distracted or put off, and that’s a shame.  The game deserves better, and I really hope I can convince others to give it a chance.  Armed with a bit of knowledge about the planning and general strategy, I feel a lot of people will have an easier time getting into this wonderful Nightmare.

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