Knight Arms: The Hyblid Framer
Formed in 1985 by Kotori Yoshimura, creator of Thunder Force and Plazma Line, alongside fellow Technosoft employee Osamu Nagano, Arsys Software was a Japanese computer game dev that specialized in 3D titles.
Their first game, WiBArM, was released in 1986, a rough experiment in blending 2D Action RPG gameplay with 3D dungeon exploration, giving you control of an armored mech capable of shifting between three forms; the airborn Mobile Rider, the armored transport Land Cruiser, and the titular combat mech, Armornoid Wibarm.
WiBArM was impressive, for the time. It couldn’t manage 3D for all aspects of its gameplay, as it shifted to a side-view combat window when encountering enemies and when exploring outside the facilities, but the novelty of navigating 3D interiors in a decade where 3D games were mostly limited to arcades has a simple appeal to it.
It wasn’t without its faults, of course, and ones that are much more glaring now than they were then. The dungeons might be fully 3D, but they’re scrunched into roughly 1/4 of the screen, next to a huge map window. You can hide the map, and the gameplay window will widen to take advantage of the screen space, but that has a noticeable impact on performance.
It’s clear how much of a struggle it was to get playable 3D out of the PC-88, and even easier to see why Arsys didn’t take a crack at making a full 3D game for the system. At least, not until two years later with 1988’s Star Cruiser, a full 3D hybrid of FPS and Action RPG programmed by Kotori Yoshimura, featuring grid-based 3D dungeons and full 3D combat. But of course, even Star Cruiser had to make some of its own concessions to make it work, and the original PC-88 and Sharp X1 versions are still… a bit choppy. And of course, the PC-88’s extremely low resolution along with the action having to again be put in a small corner of the screen, doesn’t help things very much.
In 1987, the Sharp X68000 was released, a home computer with hardware roughly comparable to contemporary arcade systems. Star Cruiser was ported to the powerful new home computer in 1989, and the immediate difference in visuals and performance is ridiculous.
The X68000 version of Star Cruiser was such a hugely significant upgrade, it ran at a higher resolution, with a smoother framerate — even the dungeons ran better! And finally, the game got most of the screen space rather than being stuck in a tiny window in the corner. But, it was still Star Cruiser. It looked nicer. It played better. But this was arcade-level hardware, and the game’s 3D graphics, while definitely polygonal, looked so crude and flat compared to the flashiest arcade hits of the mid 1980s. When you think of those games, you generally think more of Space Harrier or Outrun than the groundbreaking Atari classic I, Robot.
So, now it was time to to make use of the hardware. Create something fit to be one of those big, flashy Sega Super Scaler arcade hits.
Knight Arms: The Hyblid Framer is a shooter that switches between Space Harrier-style rail shooting, and a more traditional side-scrolling shoot em up. Where Knight Arms distinguishes itself from other games is the ability it grants the player to turn and aim in different directions; in the rail-shooter segments, you can spin and aim in front or behind where you’re moving, and in the 2D segments you can aim left, right, or in the background or foreground, where enemies tend to hide.
The game’s controls only use six buttons: four for movement, one for Fire, and one that you hold down to turn. They work well on their own; Knight Arms’ movement feels snappy and responsive at the best of times, which should make it ideal for the kind of bullet and enemy patterns the game asks you to dodge, though there are issues there that we’ll get into later. As for turning, the way it’s handled is very stiff and clunky, but thankfully it never gets in the way quite as much as it could. One of the nicer things that isn’t immediately obvious is that while you slowly hover down in the 2D sections, holding the fire button actually keeps you floating in place, which is useful for a few more precise sections where you need to worry more about moving than shooting.
There isn’t much in the way of upgrades in Knight Arms, but what is there is hugely useful and pretty hard to find, consisting of a timed reflective shield, a few different types of limited ammo weapons that grant things like Homing and a massive devastating blast shot, and two permanent upgrades that function similarly to the Bits from R-Type, attaching to Knight Arms’ shoulders and firing extra shots as well as absorbing bullets and even spiking any enemies you might butt into from below. Since Knight Arms has a health bar, you don’t lose these on taking a hit either, and you even keep them if you continue after death. At the end of the game you get a third upgrade, a red ball that rotates around you, to replace the first two. The most common pickup, thankfully, is Repair, which restores a ton of your health and is usually dropped by specific enemies at different points.
Knight Arms has some odd variation in its levels and bosses. Stage 1 opens with a flight over a moon, shooting down turrets before entering a huge moon base, ultimately culminating in destroying a giant black tank, piece by piece. The first stage is peppered with three different minibosses along the way, including two huge turret walls and… a very ugly stretched-out sprite of a regular enemy. Unfortunately, Knight Arms is the kind of game that utilized some fancy graphical scaling effects in very awkward ways that haven’t stood the test of time all that well. In Stage 2, you fly through several obstacles including an asteroid belt and destroy a giant snakelike machine, it’s easily the briefest level and lacks any kind of 2D segment bridging anything like in the first stage.
Stage 3 is a sudden and bizarre turn, bringing Knight Arms down to the planet surface to shoot down dozens of birds and flying plants, and then diving into the ocean to shoot down jellyfish and fight the most difficult boss in the game, a giant brown one-eyed… thing. Unfortunately, this stage is one of the most difficult ones to visually parse, and has a boss that’s mostly difficult for its bullet pattern being nearly literally impossible to evade, and it highlights Knight Arms’ biggest problem perhaps worse than any other point in the game. But again, that’s something we’ll talk about a bit later.
Stage 4 is a 2D-focused blast through another enemy fortress, with a recurring floating UFO miniboss and dozens of on-foot enemies popping out from all sides, forcing you to keep changing direction to shoot them as you climb up and down the shafts and hallways to reach the end.
And it definitely has… an end.
After fighting the giant Metal Lady, the stage returns to its theme of vertical movement for a boss fight that chases you up a giant exit shaft out into space, attempting to smash you with giant spikes attached to cannons on its sides. It’s one of the better boss designs, since there’s a clear establishment of its attack pattern and the spectacle of the whole thing is just fun to look at.
Stage 5 is the big finale, and home to a lot of the game’s coolest ideas, opening with a fight against a boss in a large space obstacle course similar to the one from Stage 2, moving into rail shooting as you evade fireballs from a giant magma planet, only to have both of your permanent upgrades stolen… by a red Knight Arms?! Just as things are looking desperate, your comrades send in a ship to refill your health, and you’re granted your new, third upgrade to replace the two that were stolen from you, as you have to fly into the distant enemy space station and destroy the mimicry of your own mech, and finally, face the final boss, a huge commander UFO.
The final boss is one of the most frustrating in the game, as its bullet pattern is spammy and unpredictable, and if you don’t keep a close eye on its movement, it can charge into you and deplete your health in seconds. And then it’s all the way back to the beginning of the final level.
All in all, Knight Arms is a game with a ton of cool ideas, and even surprisingly forgiving despite its rough arcade difficulty and lack of invincibility frames, since the game has no scoring and gives you a health bar and even unlimited continues. It’s extremely impressive on a technical level, and almost feels like an odd mix between the earlier Sega Super Scaler games it takes influence from with the more familiar, rising trends in design of later arcade shooters, with deeper variety in design and mechanics and less padding overall. With a bit more polish, it could easily be one of the best games on the X68k.
But it has two big problems. One of them is a clear lack of finesse for designing bullet patterns, mostly papered over by the game’s relatively forgiving health system, but there’s one even bigger, much more noticeable problem that’s much, much harder to swallow.
Knight Arms can manage very impressive speeds on the X68000’s hardware, but it can also make it chug like hell. That might not sound too bad, since they released multiple models of the computer over the years, and systems released at the end of the X68k’s life in 1993 can handle Knight Arms with only a bit of trouble thanks to their faster processing speed. But the problem isn’t how badly it runs. It’s how fast it does.
At 10Mhz, Knight Arms runs playably, but it definitely chugs when things get more hectic. Bump that up to 16Mhz, and things immediately start to go out of control: There’s no framelimiting. So the max the game can run at any given time, is the speed it will be moving in real time. That means that, without any enemies on screen, the game is constantly moving at turbo speed only to jarringly screech to a halt as soon as you run into any bigger enemies, with no real way to get a handle on it.
At 25Mhz, you’ll die more to the game’s unplayable speed in the early levels than you will to the final boss itself. And even at a reasonable speed, the boss of Stage 3 actually requires the buffer of that slowdown to have any hope of beating it. This is the biggest issue across all of Knight Arms, and what really keeps it from being quite as great as the games it’s seeking to be, even more than its awkward, badly designed boss patterns themselves.
The biggest reason I can think of for why Knight Arms exhibits this kind of behavior is, well, the same as with why some old PC games from the 90s have trouble running on modern PCs. I mentioned that models of the X68000 released in 1993 can handle anything the game throws at them with significantly less of a hit to performance, but Knight Arms was released in 1989. Officially, there wouldn’t even be a model of the X68k with a 16Mhz CPU for two more years. Given that, you might honestly be able to say they just didn’t know it would ever be an issue.
Despite that, I still really like Knight Arms, and I think it’s a game worth knowing about. It’s really, really rough, it hasn’t aged great visually, but the kind of passion put into it is still easy to see. 3D in games was still getting off its feet in the late 80s, and wouldn’t really find a comfortable footing until the mid 90s. In spite of its many flaws, the fact that Knight Arms came out in 1989 is, in itself, really impressive. It also has a pretty solid soundtrack composed by Toshiya Yamanaka, who may be more well-known for his role as the composer for Treasure’s Sin & Punishment: Successor of the Earth, but he actually did the music for almost all of Arsys Software’s games. The opening and ending tracks for Knight Arms are genuinely spectacular, as are some of the stage themes.
And again, it really can’t be overstated how monumental Kotori Yoshimura’s work on games like this and Star Cruiser are. It’s simple enough to say that without her, none of these games would exist, and these are some of the most interesting early experiments with 3D in home computer games that nobody really ever talks about. Knight Arms is not one of the must-plays of the X68000, it’s far too unsteady and awkwardly designed for me to easily recommend it, but it is one of the most unique and ambitious games released on the system. To that end, I can honestly say that I’ve never played a game quite like Knight Arms.
