King’s Bounty

Welcome to a new episode of the Nostalgic Game Review, where each month I muse over an old game I played long ago. Other than indulging my own nostalgia, this column also hopefully shed some light on game design and reflect on how gaming technologies have evolved.

Without further ado…

King’s Bounty (御封戰將)

src: Moby Games

This is another game by New World Computing, Inc.(same as Might and Magic III from last month’s episode) I played the version released in Taiwan, with 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disks that looked like the following…

src: Jack’s blog

A slim, plastic package containing 2 disks and a relatively thin manual, seemingly innocuous, with its richly designed world, well balanced characters, simple story yet addictive gameplay well hidden inside.

What is it?

It’s a turn-based fantasy game, and as simply put by wikipedia, “The player leads the hero and his army across the four continents, acquiring up to 25 pieces of a map revealing the hidden location to the Sceptre of Order before King Maximus dies.”

The player can pick from 4 hero types (Barbarian, Knight, Paladin, and Sorceress):

src: Moby Games

And continue to grow your character

src: Moby Games

You travel the world to look for the King’s sceptre, and defeat enemies

src: Moby Games

At some point in the game you get to travel by boat

src: Moby Games

Here is the map view

src: Moby Games

You get to build your team by gathering up stronger and stronger allies (could be human or some creatures including… the dragon as seen on the cover!)

src: Moby Games

battles are very engaging

src: Moby Games

and the strategies become very critical in the boss battles. There are 17 villains across 4 continents.

Src: Moby Games

My impression

This game later evolved into the Heros of Might and Magic series that’s more well known nowadays. I only remember how much fun I had with the exploring, resource management, and battling for this game. Come to think of it, its gameplay and the battle system became a very common patterns widely used across various strategy/RPG games (specially the Japanese RPG games, I think)

Apparently there was a spin off for this game released in 2008: King’s Bounty: The Legend (and then it spawn off several more titles from that one), and there’s the direct sequel ‘ King’s Bounty II ‘ being released later this year…

I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s gonna be better than the good old original! lol. Don’t believe me? Give it a try since it is playable on the Internet Archive!

King's Bounty : Jon Van Caneghem : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive

or, check out a Youtube video if you don’t have enough time 🙂

That’s it for this episode of Nostalgic Game Review! Thank you for visiting! I appreciate any comments/feedback or if there’s a game you would like me to cover 🙂

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Originally published at https://heta.link on May 29, 2021.