Knights of the Round (Arcade)

While a figure of popular folkloric legend, King Arthur hasn’t made too many notable appearances in video games, his sword Excalibur instead the common sight but usually wielded by all sorts of heroes save for the man famous for drawing it from a stone. Knights of the Round though lets the original wielder have his own adventure, this beat ’em up seeing Arthur joined by Lancelot and Perceval on a quest to unite Britain with the power of the Holy Grail.

 

At first, Knights of the Round commits fairly well to medieval European setting and even keeps the mysticism to a small level. Merlin is the one who tells you of the quest for the grail, but the soldiers you encounter are men in armor with blades and poleaxes. Things do get a little more unusual when falcons fly past you with daggers clutched in their talons and there is a crystal ball item that will defeat all regular enemies on screen magically when you grab it, but it takes until the surprise appearance of a samurai who launches fireballs for Knights of the Round to feel like it’s moving away from its Arthurian legend inspiration a fair bit. A mechanical iron golem also feels like it stretches the concept, but at the same time, these more wild appearances stand out because otherwise the action of this beat ’em up sticks pretty close to what would feel appropriate for the this trio of warriors to face in the old stories they come from. That is, actually, a bit to the game’s detriment though, because while eventually you’ll get some backflipping foes that move about more or the rare enemy that briefly tries to shoot you with a bow, a lot of the enemies in Knights of the Round are men with weapons who you don’t need to approach too differently from each other.

Admittedly, while the enemy variety does feel like it runs dry fairly early even before more impressive sights like attack tigers briefly enter the mix, the creeping repetition in the action might be born from the three lead warriors. In Knights of the Round, you have very few attack options. You have a simple weapon swinging combo as well as a stronger blow if you press forward as you strike, some sort of jump attack, and should you press jump and attack at the same time, you’ll sacrifice some life to do a sweeping attack around your character to knock away nearby targets. Jump attacks aren’t too strong so they’re situational options, but you do technically have one more option that is even more conditional. Most enemies in Knights of the Round play fair and positioning in the game’s tilted plane battlefield is often the key to slashing a foe rather than being the one getting hit, but bosses in particular play rougher and have attacks you might not really be able to dodge if they come your way. However, if you press back and attack with the right timing, you can make your hero defend. Defending gives brief invincibility and provides a perfect chance for a counterattack, but the detection on the block is a bit rough. The Super Nintendo version makes it as simple as a button press and it’s a shame it’s not easier in the original release here, especially since there is a moment of vulnerability after a bad block so it’s not like making it easier undermines the difficulty of the game.

 

There are times when you can leap onto horseback and fight atop your mount for a while, this leaning again into the fighting focusing most of all on gauging safe distances and your weapon’s reach. Enemies will knock you off if they hurt you enough, but horseback fighting, while simplified to just swipes for the most part, does let you strike your opposition from a new angle and in a different way. While there are three playable characters to pick from, Arthur and Lancelot feel fairly similar, the two swordsmen technically having some different moves but not to the degree you must shift up your game plan if you choose to be one or the other. Perceval though has a distinct fighting style, primarily because his axe is much slower to strike so picking moments becomes much more important should you use him. Fighting does seem to favor speed though, but if you have a full group of three Perceval can handle things better than if you attempt a solo run as the bruiser of the group.

In a fun touch, as you progress through the game, the three heroes will level up based on the points you accrue from killing foes or gathering treasure. Their appearance upgrades as they level up, gaining heavier armor and bulking up, Perceval even eventually losing his hair and growing a beard. It’s not just an aesthetic improvement either, as you grow stronger, attack faster, and even spend less health on your special attack. Admittedly, the progression through the seven stages does mean new variants of the same enemies you face before are able to keep pace with your strength better, but also leveling up more quickly can cause stronger soldiers to appear earlier, adding a touch of variety for repeat players. If you do play with friends this will mean you each individually level up less, but you can do things like cut up treasure or even health items into portions so you can split the rewards and better keep pace with each other.

 

Leveling up does give a nicer short term goal than merely beating baddies and thankfully you won’t lose levels if you need to pop in a quarter to keep playing or even change your character. There’s still limited variety in how fights unfold though, and things like limiting dashing and a dash attack to certain characters feels like it hampers the unlucky ones instead of making the ones who have them more interesting. Thankfully, seven levels does feel like it’s just the right amount of time for this adventure, there not enough time for familiar enemy faces to grow overly old and your hacking and slashing carries you through the journey quickly enough. Knights of the Round can have some decent bosses too, even if some of them do feel like more competent knights in armor so they’re not a far cry from what you faced before, but it does lead to more challenging fights and dodging requirements in a game that benefits from any moment that pushes you away from the raw effectiveness of mashing your standard combos.

THE VERDICT: Knights of the Round isn’t really a brawler that sees you fighting your way through Arthurian Legend, the choice of heroes the main recognizable element and not much else familiar present even before the game goes down its own route with samurais and mechanical golems. However, the weapon-based combat that rewards good spacing is lightly interesting albeit not so varied that the adventure remains consistently exciting. Bosses push back against you well, leveling up provides somewhat frequent payoffs to the fighting, and three player action can better compensate for some drawbacks like the block input detection, but Knights of the Round doesn’t have enough going on in its move sets or enemy variety to make it a Capcom beat ’em up classic.

 

And so, I give Knights of the Round for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. When I watched the gameplay demo of Knights of the Round before starting it and saw blocking being used strategically in battle, it felt like it could be the game’s defining element, and it does indeed add more depth to encounters with bosses. The SNES version likely shines better for its ease of use and you can’t play too defensively since you wear your character out if you abuse it and every level has a generous but still present timer, but the detection on guarding feels like an unnecessary barrier in the arcade version born only from the fact that adding another button to the cabinet to do it was probably a cost they didn’t want to incur. It’s not like blocking would have made it a fantastic game should it have been easily done in the original arcade release though, enemy variety still stagnates rather quickly and some more interesting special moves could have added extra spice to the action to make it a more thrilling quest. Moments that do reward blocking are the highlights unsurprisingly, bosses with more techniques to trip up sloppy play moving you more towards the game’s emphasis on managing range and lining up your hero so you can strike and move aside without getting caught. Warriors of Fate, a Capcom brawler that came out a year later and originally used characters from Chinese myth and history, probably shows best where Knights of the Round could have improved, its playable heroes not only having more varied attacks and weapons from each other but enemies also have a wider range of attacks and tools as well. Warriors of Fate does carry over things from Knights of the Round too like how coming back to life after a death will knock all enemies away from you to grant some breathing room, it almost a follow-up in terms of design and taking the right lessons from this earlier brawler.

 

Knights of the Round feels a bit oddly positioned between Final Fight that came earlier and Warriors of Fate that came later, it not having the variety of the older game while it is shown up by Warrior of Fate’s more involved and diverse action. Knights of the Round thankfully isn’t so bland or basic that it should be fully overlooked, but it doesn’t feel like as much thought was put into this Arthurian brawler as there should have been. Perhaps it was a lack of familiarity with the legends it is based on, perhaps Capcom was overdoing it as they tried to ride the beat ’em up trend with quite a few all releasing between 1991 and 1992, but Knights of the Round, while having nice enough pixel art and music and the nice visual touch of leveling up changing your character’s appearance, doesn’t feel like it has too much thought or creativity put into it and it even holds back the potential of blocking when it could have been the cornerstone of a more technical brawler fighting style.