Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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A playthrough of Square's 1989 action game for the NES, King's Knight.

"In the Kingdom of Izander, the fair Princess Claire has been kidnapped by a foul and insidious Dragon and it is the mission of four brave fighters to save her."

So goes the story of King's Knight, the obscure and wildly convoluted NES shoot 'em up that Square served up as their first self-published game in North America.

Playing out like a mishmash of Twinbee and The Tower of Druaga, King's Knight is a five-stage, vertically-scrolling shooter thinly disguised as an action-RPG. Each of the first four stages are dedicated to one of the heroes (Ray Jack the knight, Toby the thief, Barusa the monster, and Kaliva the wizard), and the aim is to prepare them for the coming showdown with the dragon. These stages are covered in terrain tiles that you can shoot to carve out paths and reveal hidden items. Every character has twenty stat-improving items to nab (the number found determines a hero's experience level), as well as four elemental items that are required to cast the spells you'll need to overcome major obstacles in the final area. Once those areas have been cleared, the survivors come together in stage five to save the princess.

King's Knight's gameplay concept is a creative experiment in game design, but the execution falls a bit flat. The fantasy setting and RPG elements are window dressing for what ultimately boils down to a tedious exercise in memorization and button-mashing.

The Famicom version dates back to 1986, and in that context, King's Knight makes complete sense. In its time, it provided a novel twist on the shooter formula and did some noteworthy things with its presentation. There's no flicker or slowdown, and the fully destructable terrain would've been quite the feat to pull off given the technical constraints. It was awfully simple by 1989 standards, though. It's not a bad game, but like youtu.be/lU4fqrYfiHI, it was well past its sell-by date by the time it reached western shores.

I didn't love King's Knight, but I can appreciate it for what it was trying to do. I wouldn't jump into it looking for a light bit of fun, but if you're a gaming history buff who enjoys plumbing the depths of the NES catalog (or Nobuo Uematsu's early works), this Squaresoft relic may be worth a look.
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