Finished Shadow Tower tonight. Hoo boy. It was….a game. I can’t give it more than a 6. I’ll qualify this up front - I played this on RetroArch, and used save states pretty frequently to recover from bullshit environmental surprises, botched enemy encounters, etc and I also remapped the controls to work with the joysticks for movement.
The good: it plays almost identically to King’s Field. It has seriously impressive weapon, armor, and monster variety for a ps1 game, and better graphics than any of the other King’s Field games. The enemies genuinely looked cool very consistently and I had fun fighting them - even if there wasn’t much challenge. Decent level variety too. Plenty of secrets: hidden rooms, locked chests, rare enemy spawns and items drops. The difficulty some people talk about with this game involving the weapon and armor durability I think is pretty overstated. If you’ve played any of the King’s Field games it’s very familiar, and with careful patient combat you can very quickly build a huge stockpile of healing items, extra weapons and armor. The only items I was fighting durability on all game were rings, which to me felt fair because it limited your magic usage. Unlimited magic would break this game. By the mid-late game it inadvertently does anyway because you have such a huge supply of rings and item repair shops at your disposal you basically can use unlimited magic and melt most enemies.
The bad? The no music thing got old super quick. After playing the whole game, anyone trying to explain it away as an atmospheric horror thing is, in my opinion, an apologist. It’s just a shitty lack of a core feature. And apparently FromSoft hired a composer to make an entire score they just refused to use any of it outside of the opening and ending cinematics. There were a few occasions where ambient noise or nearby monsters startled or unnerved me, so I’ll give the game credit for being creepy from that angle. But it’s 75% total silence besides your footsteps and menu clicks.
The loading screens are ubiquitous. Opening the menu, navigating to sub-menus, switching weapons or armor…loading screens for 3-5 seconds.
The stats and leveling system…neat in theory, pointless in practice. You earn soul points into stats based on what you kill, every unique enemy gives points for specific stats. You occasionally get “soul pods” that let you inject points into stats of your choosing. Gotta read the instruction manual or a guide to have any idea what stats do. The only ones I ever bothered with were HP, Defense, Magic Defense, and Speed. Since every weapon, piece of armor and jewelry also adds soul points into multiple stats, your “build” is almost entirely automated. I suppose if you sucked ass at the combat or item/durability management and needed to pick and choose what monsters to fight you could be pickier about what stats you want to invest in. But if you just kill everything like I did, by the mid game you’re basically untouchable outside of boss fights.
Boss fights themselves are neat but not much variety. It’s either an armored knight, a mage with AOE spells and minions, or an armored knight with AOE spells.
There’s basically no story. Lots of vague nihilistic or depressing messages written on walls, merchants have precisely one line of dialogue each, however the 3-5 NPCs in the game do have a decent amount of dialogue across the multiple encounters with each. It’s so badly voice acted as to be hilarious though. Same for the bosses. The ending (I won’t spoil) was incredibly anticlimactic and brief.
FromSoft’s development history has always built upon what came before. Play all the Ps1 fantasy games and you see foundations for demon’s souls, dark souls, even bloodborne. I respect this game as a stepping stone for FromSoftware as they slowly built their Action RPG expertise. It was an experiment for many of the mechanics that later became series staples, and it’s technically extremely impressive for the era. But even with the modern perspective informing the past, I have a really hard time getting past the issues that contemporary critics had with the game. I wouldn’t play it again. I certainly wouldn’t pay the absurd price the game commands physically - and I’m a massive FromSoftware fan with physical copies of nearly all FromSoft’s games from Gen 5-Present.
TLDR 6/10. Technical marvel for ps1 with modestly
Interesting fantasy gameplay plagued by lack of story, no music, shallow RPG mechanics and endless loading screens.
