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Say it together, Sword of Moonlight: KING’S FIELD Making Tool is a mouthful! Spoken in its native Japanese you can toss in several more syllables and vowels between each pair of consonants. Try it… Sodo ovu Moonorito: Kingusu Fierudo Makingu Tsooru!! Arise Cthulhu arise! Ok, admitted – to the uninitiated this seems pretty nuts, like so many nonsensical gibberish Japanese RPG video game titles. Except in this case, believe it or not, there is a logic to it once the history is made a little bit familiar.
If you have never heard of Sword of Moonlight you are not alone. Spreading the gospel of Sword of Moonlight and its namesake KING’S FIELD is our mission here at Swordofmoonlight.net. It’s what we do and enjoy doing most, officially; shining the limelight on Sword of Moonlight so to speak, and so it was written!! Nowadays “Sword of Moonlight” has come to encompass many things which are all sort of the same thing if you can imagine that. Its destiny, the destiny of this site, the destiny of everyone involved and everything within are all pretty much inseparably intertwined at this point. And if this all seems a little too cosmic. Keep reading.
So like it all began way back in the 90s with an unassuming game rather cryptically dubbed by its creators “King’s Field” (normally rendered in all caps) which mingled full-polygon, free-roaming, real-time, 3D first-person dungeon crawling and RPG elements. In fact the original KING’S FIELD released in Japan as part of the Sony PlayStation 1994 Christmas launch lineup looks like the first “recognizable modern 3D game” in commercial video game history! Whether or not historians will disagree on this point, we will probably never know if and when the creators in question, From Software, were ever availed of the distinction – we do know that Japan is world renowned for being modest to a fault.
1995
And so it was that KF set a new precedent in 3D gaming only to be eclipsed by the younger and dreamier KING’S FIELD II in no time flat. Among its most devoted KF2 has come to represent the epitome of 3D. An unparalleled masterpiece even in an age in which mediocre games were the exception and not the rule. Both timeless and out of time; The best game of all time? Alas the appeal of KF2, the KF trilogy, and the games that followed in its footsteps, was not to be widespread. Fate sealed, KF would have to remain relegated to occult status for a spell…
2000
Enter Sword of Moonlight! In 2000 From Software unleashed SOM upon an unsuspecting populace. Whoa whoa, back up. In 2000 no one outside of Japan had ever heard of Sword of Moonlight. Or so it seemed…
… To be continued.
