This game came free with Final Fantasy XV, a game I have started and will hopefully finish in the next few years – being realistic. A King’s Tale is essentially a side-scrolling beat ‘em up (with swords) so not one of the genres I want to be playing in the future. Final Fantasy XV however, does fit that bill… but King’s Tale is ultimately a short and quick to complete game so I went for it.
You play as Noctis’ (protagonist form the main game) dad as he tells a young Noctis a bedtime story, which recaps his former adventures. This is essentially framing for what is a very basic fighting game akin to either Streets of Rage or Golden Axe.
You fight through a series of chapters against a variety of different enemies, all of which have a specific set of weaknesses for you to exploit with either combo attacks or magic. Along the way, you gain the ability to summon companions in battle and if you score a combo of hits without getting hit in return, you can launch one of their special abilities. If you manage to launch all three companions’ special abilities and then launch your own special attack, you can hit enemies for MASSIVE DAMAGE (insert giant crab meme here).
The combat can get quite frustrating at times as some enemies are unforgiving in what they allow you to hit them with and the game is quite picky with your button presses when chaining combos. The worst example of this is the Classic Cactuar who seems to counter every move and the exploits mentioned during his tutorial simply didn’t work for me. I say this is frustrating because it’s not hard to take them out, just more time consuming.
That said, there are some plus points in terms of balance of game play speed and the shortness of the levels as this helps to draw you in to the battles knowing that nothing you sit down to do is going to take an age to complete. It’s really good as a pick-up-and-play title.
Once you complete the main storyline, you unlock Dream Battles, which are additional challenges where you fight enemies to meet certain conditions like ‘don’t use magic’ or ‘don’t use companions.’
Graphically it’s at home in an 80s arcade cabinet but this is the style they’ve gone for and to be honest, it works. The music is equally as grating for the era though which is totally unnecessary.
Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements
If you are going for all the achievements, this will take around 6 hours depending on how quickly you become accustomed to the control scheme. One achievement will come by playing through the main story but the likelihood is you will unlock more than this as there are a lot of cumulative things to do as well, such as killing certain amounts of enemy types using your special attacks.
Once the story is complete, you will unlock Dream Battles, which are effectively fighting challenges, and there are further achievements attached to these. The achievements boil down to completing all of the challenges with a couple of exceptions.
There are only two relatively challenging achievements. The first is for completing a Dream Battle in under 1 minute however, this can be made easier by doing a specific challenge with a small amount of enemies. The real pain is the achievement for using every move in one combo. A combo means without being hit and this can only really be achieved on certain Dream Battles where the enemies are forgiving in what they do and do not block… and definitely no Cactuars!
The last achievement I unlocked was for completing all the Dream Battles so it’s certainly a doable list without additional game play on top of the content that’s on offer – which is the long winded way of saying ‘no grinding!’
Downloadable Content – N/A
For a game that came with a game, King’s Tale is a nice little addition on the side of a sizeable main course. I don’t think it’s worth buying by itself, though it can be obtained for free from the Xbox store if anyone wished to try it out.
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