YMMV / King's Field

• Americans Hate Tingle: The three games released stateside weren't exactly lauded by critics, barring the "original" (as in Kingsfield II), receiving generally mixed reviews. Even so, they have a cult following.
• Breather Level: While floors 10 and 11 in Additional I are some of the roughest in the game, floor 12 has a simple layout and no random battles or environmental hazards of any kind. All you fight is one optional battle against a simple Gargoyle and a mid-boss at the end, otherwise traversing the floor consists of picking up items and solving a pair of simple puzzles.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Triple Fang in the first game can be found early on the third floor (out of five). In addition to being one of the better swords in the game, it provides gradual MP regeneration. The latter might seem too slow to be practical, until you realize how incredibly cheap the basic healing spell is. This results in healing faster than enemies can damage you, with the spell's 3MP cost being restored almost between casts. This was nerfed in the sequels, where healing spells have a long cooldown between casts.
  • The Clarity Bracelet from The Ancient City, a missable accessory acquired early in the game that quintuples your maximum MP. Your base MP in the game is so utterly miserable (at the time you acquire it, your basic Fire spell will use about 80% of your maximum MP) that magic is practically unusable with it, so many gamers consider it less a game-breaker than something needed to reach the intended experience, and playing without to be a Self-Imposed Challenge.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The runaway success of Demon's Souls and especially Dark Souls resulted in a surge of players outside Japan revisiting the games, seeing how they laid the foundation for the design paradigm of FromSoftware.
  • Tsukasa Saitoh's soundtrack for The Ancient City gained more popularity and appreciation within FromSoftware's fanbase in light of his contributions to Bloodborne.
• Sequel Displacement: Because the first game was never released in the west (with the English versions of the second and third games having their titles pushed down a number and the fourth being given a non-numerical subtitle), it was almost completely unknown in the west for years.
• Spiritual Successor: Several, many of the initial ones made by From Software.
  • Shadow Tower for PlayStation. From Software even incorporated aspects of its equipment system into King's Field IV.
    • The Japan-only sequel for the PS2, Shadow Tower: Abyss, which abandons the fantasy setting of the original for a more modern one.
  • Eternal Ring for the PlayStation 2, which is superficially similar insofar as being a first-person RPG but in a lot of ways plays more like a stock JRPG.
  • Demon's Souls for PlayStation 3. The gameplay has changed quite a bit, but it has very similar atmosphere and quite a few Shout Outs to King's Field.
    • Demon's Souls has its own spiritual successor by the name of Dark Souls, which continues with the shout-outs, including Seath the Scaleless and Black Dragon Kalameet. Probably not the same entities, but knowing From...
  • Bloodborne for the PlayStation 4, which made the combat to be much faster and shifted the genre from Dark Fantasy to Gothic Horror.
  • In 2023 or so "King's Field clone" became something of a trend in indie game development, with titles like Lunacid and Monomyth playing up their similarities. Also there are fans who use the Sword of Moonlight game creation software to this day.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • While King's Field I only lets you sell consumables and equipment and gives you unlimited inventory, King's Field II lets you sell anything, including one-off key items required to complete the game.
  • It's possible to enter a room using a Rhombus Key, without a spare to exit the room again. Worse yet, if there's a save point nearby you may overwrite your previous save and have to restart the game.