Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

---

Knights of the Round is an early beat 'em up from Capcom, originally released in arcades back in 1991. Prior to this, Capcom had only made Final Fight, The King of Dragons, and Captain Commando, but they already started to experiment with the standard beat 'em up format with this game. Even to this day, there's nothing else that really plays like this. It's fairly unorthodox, so a certain amount of people will bounce off it, but it's worth learning and playing on its own terms. I wasn't a big fan at first myself, but now, maybe I'd put it in my top 5 for Capcom beat 'em ups. It's a fantastic game.

Rather than walking up to enemies and hitting them with a punch combo like usual, this game gives you a shield and a block mechanic. If you hold the attack button and quickly press back, you'll start blocking. It only lasts for a few seconds, and if you hold it for too long, you'll drop your guard and become vulnerable for a moment. But if you bait an enemy attack and successfully block it, you'll become totally invincible, and you'll have the opportunity to throw out a slow, heavy strike that does a big chunk of damage (by holding the attack button and pressing forward). The enemies are designed around you being able to predict and block their attacks, so they behave a little differently than your standard beat 'em up mooks. Sometimes it's much safer to line yourself up with an enemy and bait an attack from them, rather than approaching from above or below like in most other games. That's practically the complete opposite of standard beat 'em up logic, and it shows that Capcom wasn't going to sit back and churn out formulaic games. They were always trying out new ideas, and that's why they're the GOATs.

I didn't even intend to no miss this at first, I just wanted to learn the game enough to play it in the arcades when I'm in Japan. But I ended up spending a couple hours practicing the Musashi boss, I got hooked, and I started grinding credits over the last couple days. Musashi is absolutely the most dangerous part of the game, but it's easy to screw up and die at several other points too. One nice thing about this game is that the scoring system is fairly interesting (especially for a beat 'em up), so it can make the easy parts more fun to play through as you make your way through each major chokepoint. So to maximize your score, you want to kill the same type of enemy consecutively, and each one you kill increases your (hidden) multiplier. For example, a Sword Man is worth 800 points. If you kill two in a row, the second will be worth 1600, then the next will be worth 2400, and then it'll max out (and reset, I think) with the fourth one at 3200. But that's not all. Using your megacrash (A+B) will normally reset your multiplier, but if you kill an enemy with it, it'll apply your multiplier to them, regardless if they're part of your current 'chain'. So you can optimize things here and there by killing a few low value enemies like the Soldiers, then finishing a high value one with your megacrash. With all that said, I didn't put much effort into scoring or really learning the minutiae of it, but it's fun to play around with when you're going through the easy stuff.

I played this on the Capcom Beat 'em Up Bundle, which you can regularly get for $5-$10 on Steam, and it comes with 6 other great games. You can also play it in the Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, which you can also regularly find for $10 or so as a complete bundle with a bunch of other Capcom arcade games. I haven't tried that version, so I'm not sure which one is better, but I'm sure you can't go wrong either way. No matter what bundle you buy, you'll end up with a bunch of the best games ever made, so pick one up!

0:00 Intro
0:29 Stage 1
2:15 Stage 2
5:39 Stage 3
12:38 Stage 4
14:22 Stage 5
17:53 Stage 6
24:16 Final Stage
34:10 Ending & Credits

-----
Beat 'em Ups (e.g. Final Fight): youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfI6IYca_kvMhpG1GR9sk8OYiWQMZZTgl
2D Action (e.g. Metal Slug): youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfI6IYca_kvNFjpnJ59Th6N0IU1PSpD3d
STG/Shmups (e.g. Dodonpachi): youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFE6B3779BE759F71