Meaningful Video Games #7
For The King
Picture the scene: in a sinister tower, three brave adventurers stand before their final challenge. They have spent weeks chasing quests, earning gold and strengthening their skills. Optimising their weapons and armour to the very best it can be. They steel themselves as the crowd watching hushes, in awe of the seriousness of the moment, before launching into battle.
It is a long and arduous fight. One by one they fall and are revived…until the revives run out. It is left to the herbalist, of all people, to struggle on and defeat the evil wizard.
Taking guidance from the ghostly voices of her fallen comrades, and on the verge of death herself, she comes within one strike of victory. Everyone present — the spectating crowd, the dead adventurers, the herbalist herself — holds their breath and prays to the god RNGsus before she makes her move.
But prayers are not enough. RNGsus decrees that the attack shall miss, and with a smug grin the wizard strikes back.
She dies.
All is lost.
The adventure is over.
I was that herbalist, dear reader. And I can tell you — that defeat still hurts. Those fallen comrades were my two real-life friends at the other end of a voice chat, and that spectating crowd was the people watching us stream on Twitch. There’s nothing like sharing your misery live on the internet for the world to see.
Welcome to the despair that is For The King.
You can witness the defeat here for yourself if you wish. [24 minutes, warning for strong language. Apologies for my general loudness throughout…it was late at night, and we were high on adrenaline and possibly also a splash of alcohol.] If you just want to see the very final utterly tense moments, skip ahead to 21:30.
So what is this game that created so much drama and anguish? For The King (hereafter FTK)’s describes itself as: a strategic RPG (role-playing game) that blends tabletop and roguelike elements in a challenging adventure that spans the realms.
Choose a class of hero and set off across a fantasy world on behalf of the widowed queen, fighting monsters, vanquishing Chaos and generally being all cool and heroic, like. Revel in the stats, skills, buffs, de-buffs and all those other staples of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’-style tabletop games. Sounds fun, right?
I refer you back to the word ‘challenging’ in that earlier description. It is not an over-exaggeration.
But why was it so painful to lose? It’s just a game, have another go!
Sigh. Ordinarily I’d agree, but our hearts were broken that night. To this day, any mention of FTK instantly triggers a melodramatic “too soon!” faux swooning response, and I can’t see us ever getting over it.
One reason the heartbreak was so intense is that aligning three people’s availability is hard. We could only play together once per fortnight, so it took us literal months to adequately prepare for, and get to, the final battle. Not to mention that this was actually our second attempt at it — the first time we’d gone in under-powered and been flattened pretty much straight away.
We had such hope for this second attempt! Genuine belief that we could do it! We’d done all the possible side quests. We’d saved up our gold and bought the best weapons and armour. We’d stocked up on healing items. We’d developed individual skillsets in order to work as a cohesive team. We’d really bonded as a solid fighting unit.
We also had some awesome hats.
But FTK is an unforgiving game. You can’t use the common RPG tactic of ‘level grinding’ till you’re way over-powered and able to crush boss fights, it simply doesn’t let you. And we were prepared to accept that. We wanted to win on skill, after all. But that god I mentioned? RNGsus? It’s a fickle beast…
RNG (random number generation) is a mechanism that determines the outcome of an event, such as whether an attack will hit or miss, whether the subject will dodge or not, and so on. It’s essentially the same as rolling a dice in a traditional tabletop or paper-based ‘D&D’ game.
I was new to this kind of gaming, so didn’t know if it’s common for RNG to work against you, but my more experienced friends’ reactions implied that we were being dealt a Very Bad Hand. Constantly. While conveniently enough, our computer-controlled opponents generally got a good deal. Hmm.
I can’t remember who came up with the concept of ‘RNGsus’ (spell the capital letters out loud if it still isn’t making sense) but I think we all appreciated having ‘someone’ to blame for our misfortune. It added an extra character to the whole affair — not only were we fighting Chaos and Evil as detailed in the game’s story, but just like Jason and the Argonauts we were also subject to the whims of a higher power. It really was us vs the world.
Over the many months, we’d not only bonded as a fighting unit, we’d also bonded more tightly as friends. I’ve known these guys for over two years now and they were already my besties, but we’d never shared an experience like this.
We don’t get to meet up in real life as often as we’d like, but during our adventures we healed each other, shared items and equipment, revived each other from death — we looked out for each other. And that’s what friendship is all about, isn’t it? Though maybe not so much the Lazarus stuff.
Putting the heartbreaking end to one side, we shared a lot of laughs and good times along the road to that battle. And it wasn’t just us, via Twitch we were able to share it with the community of wonderful people we’ve built. Our audience enjoyed tuning in every fortnight to see how the story would progress and listen to us bicker affectionately (mostly), and from all of this sprang a number of daft in-jokes and memes which live on in our little corner of the internet.
I doubt we’ll ever return to For The King. There are too many other games in our backlogs waiting to be played and new ones being released every day. With all that to explore, it’s unlikely we’ll volunteer to inflict the same pain on ourselves again.
All I can really say is “dilly dilly!” and thanks for the memories.
So to wrap up:
- Despite the painful ending, that final fight was a truly exciting experience that I’ll never forget
- It holds special memories of time spent with my best friends
- In-jokes and memes. Is there any better legacy?
And that is why For The King is Meaningful Video Game #7.
This post is part of the #Write52 challenge. Why not join us? See who’s involved on this Trello board!
I’m Toyah and I write. I also proofread and — because I’m hugely curious — spend a lot of my time discovering and learning about new things. If you’re looking for someone to wrangle words, get in touch via any of these methods.
