King Arthur & the Knights of Justice (video game)

Plot

Set in 5th-century Britain, the evil sorceress Morgana imprisons King Arthur and his knights in the Cave of Glass. Merlin summons a future football team led by Arthur King, interpreting their names as fate. The Lady of the Table transforms them into the Knights of Justice. They must gather the twelve Keys of Truth to break the seal.

The party retrieves Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake and claims the Pendragon Shield from a young dragon. They help Erek at Tintagel Castle and recover the first Key. They break a mind control spell in Welton and obtain the second Key at Gruesome Keep. After crossing the Blinder's Way, they claim the third Key at Castle Sanguine.

A Warlord poisons Squire Everett; the party collects an antidote in the Swamp of Zagar and saves him, then claims the fourth Key in Stone Keep. They rescue the Gnome King's son for the fifth Key and collect four Elemental Keys to reach Castle Vilor for the sixth. The seventh and eighth Keys are found in Crownhorn village and the Cape of Death. The ninth and tenth Keys are in Blackroot Keep and the Dark Citadel, found while searching for pieces of the Staff of Rhiothamus.

The staff opens a path through Hadrian's Wall. In the Dark Forest, they find the eleventh Key. A statue of Morgana kills two knights; Arthur retrieves them from the Town of the Dead and Plain of the Dead. At Morgana's castle, Stone Gardens, they defeat her dragon form and obtain the final Key. The real King Arthur congratulates them, and Merlin sends them back through Stonehenge.

Development

Development spanned about two years at Manley & Associates in Issaquah, Washington, with roughly two dozen people working on the game at various times. Initially planned for a 16-megabit cartridge, four additional megabits were added to expand the game. Inspiration came from the cartoon series, The Legend of Zelda, T. H. White's The Book of Merlyn, and fables by Marie de France.

The developers found creating puzzles for each region the hardest part, aiming for fun and challenging but not repetitive puzzles. They focused more on puzzles than action. Favorite elements included dragon battles, the boss Blackwing, and Morgana's Warlords.

Reception

The game was met with mostly poor reviews. Freelance critic Robert Schmitz scored it 0.5 out of 11, describing it as "awful" and stating he "hated" it. Nintendo Power printed an eight-page guide but gave a low score, pointing out that the so-called puzzles only involved retrieving items the game had already told you where to find. Electronic Gaming Monthly's critics were split: Ed Semrad and Danyon Carpenter thought it was "okay," praising the music and sound effects while faulting the graphics, whereas Al Manuel and Sushi-X dismissed it as a mediocre copy of Secret of Mana.

Both Carpenter and Sushi-X noted its release alongside Chrono Trigger would make it hard to stand out. Allan Milligan of the Gaming Intelligence Agency called the graphics and audio mediocre, the character designs poor, the story generic, and the puzzles unchallenging. He labeled the game "staggeringly ill-conceived," comparing it to a series of fetch quests. He criticized the requirement to defeat every enemy on a screen to proceed, characters and enemies hidden behind large objects, weak artificial intelligence for the knights, and the absence of any animation when a character or enemy was hit.