#tolfidan

So as you may have heard, the spin-off game "King's Knight: Wrath of the Dark Dragon" or to most of us just "King's Knight" is being officially terminated by Square-Enix. This is saddening to hear as many of us really enjoyed the game, even if it did have a tendency to crash or straight up not work for some, it seemed that the development team behind it were genuinely passionate about the project and wanted everyone to enjoy the work they put out to its fullest. Below I've decided to put together a bit of write-up of relevant information alongside some personal thoughts in regards to this service termination.

Official Date & Time of Service Termination

All Prime Regalite (Premium Currency) sales have been removed from the game, and the official date and time of service termination will be 26th June 01:00 (GMT) and 25th June 18:00 (PST) respectively. As some of you may know, this was also the fate of another FFXV spin-off game "Justice Monsters V" which was released on 30th August 2016 and officially ended services on 27th March 2017 meaning it only lasted just shy of 7 months before termination (Although the app itself is still available to download on both iOS and Android, cannot say how the compatability with current OS versions is however). King's Knight was officially released 13th September 2017, and with the final day of service being 26th June 2018, it lasted a bit over 9 months.

Free stamps (basically the game's emotes) have been added to all player's stamp collections to farewell the game and its players. You do not have to do anything to actually obtain these, they've been automatically added to the list of stamps and all you have to do it equip them into your active stamps list (max of 5) to use them.

FFXV Collaboration Event Exchange Available Again!

If you played the game during the FFXV Collaboration Event, but forgot to exchange your points for your rewards before the deadline, then the exchange is back and will be up until the service for King's Knight officially ends! Note: This is only a return of the exchange and not the points being rewarded again, you can only use the exchange if you already had points you attained during the run of the event. Prizes have also not been reset, so that means if you already got all your codes then you won't be eligible for anymore. It's really only a noteworthy thing if you picked up the game for those particular prizes, but completely forgot to exchange them in the allotted time- you have 3 months to get your codes from now pretty much. If you completely missed the event and have no fellowship points, then it looks like you're out of luck unfortunately.

The wording in this particular sentence:

Furthermore, BBS updates will continue to be made for Event Accessory Exchanges

Might confuse some people, so just in case any of you were under the perception that this means we're getting more BBS banter, then let me inform you that: this is not the case. It just means that anyone who had not previously unlocked the banter will be able to unlock it if they trade their fellowship points in for any of the FFXV Collaboration Event accessories. There is no new banter or DMs from the bros (sad times) and there probably never will be, at least not in King's Knight.

Primer For Rest of This Post

They tended to do events in a pattern, 1 that started in the middle of the month which spanned a fortnight (14 days) that would reward players with 1 free 5-Star character (unique to the event) and a matching signature weapon which you could get from the relevant event exchange (also unique to the event) that both required event-specific drops to upgrade, there were always 3 tiers of these event-specific drops and they were essentially "Common, Uncommon, Rare" with each succeeding tier dropping in smaller amounts than the last. If you didn't farm all the drops to fully upgrade your free character and weapons before the event ended and the missions were removed, then you were basically stuck with a character that can't be fully upgraded, ever. These events also tended to come with time-limited characters and weapons which you could have a chance at obtaining via the "spin" feature using Regalite (basically gacha pulls).

The second event in the pattern was the end-of-month events which ran for a month (28 days), these events basically told the story of a batch of new characters that would be permanently added to the summoning pool, however you did not get a free character or weapon from participating in the event. These events had 1 event-specific drop, which could be traded in for accessories and resources to help you in other areas of the game.

Both types of events rewarded large amounts of free regalite (usually up to 300 regalite per event) and on top of that there were also event dailies you could run to get some extra regalite, as well as additional event-specific goals which you could also achieve for additional free regalite. For reference: 1 Character Summon Cost 25 Regalite, 10+1 Character Summons Costs 250 Regalite (You get 1 free if you do the 10 at once pull), 1 Weapon Summon Cost 15 Regalite, 10 Weapon Summons Cost 150 Regalite (Unlike with characters, you didn't get a free one from doing the 10 at once pull). There were also once-daily Prime Regalite (Regalite bought with real money) spins: 10 Prime Regalite for 1 Character, 100 Prime Regalite for 11 Characters (+1 for the 10 at a time pull once again), 5 Prime Regalite for 1 Weapon, 50 Prime Regalite for 10 Weapons (Again no extra for pulling 10) there were varying bonuses to Prime Regalite spins (it varied between events and particular pull banners), the bonuses inlcuded: 4-Star pulls guaranteed to be from newest batch or 4-Star guaranteed in 10-pulls, there may well be some other bonuses that I never saw (I didn't play the game for like a month) but those are the 2 I'm familiar with.

Each individual mission in an event gave at least 4 regalite each (if each respective goal was achieved) upon your first completion, the same applied to multiplayer variants of events (which came in 2 difficulties: Veteran and Master), the goals tended to be very easy stuff like "Open All Treasure Chests" or "Complete Mission with a [Character Class] in your Party"

Content Map - March

Labyrinth of Chaos

So, it looks like this will be the last character debut event before they start winding things down. Which saddens me, greatly, as I really liked the events where you got free characters, not only because "Hooray, free shit!" but because it gave me an actual goal in the game, and being really into grindy games, I really enjoyed grinding those events into the wee hours of the morning when I was totally meant to be asleep but was instead trying to farm enough resources to max out that new event weapon...

As mentioned previously, the 28-day long events came with new characters and weapons that were permanently added to the summoning pool

Final Boss Challenge

Boss Challenges (or "Weekend Boss Challenge") were boss-fight-only missions released every weekend to challenge the player-base to see who could get the best score, you could get rewards based on your overall rank on the scoreboards, you typically got some exchangeable items and some event-specific items from whatever event was running at the time.

It looks like the final one is going to be against Tolfidan himself (the infamous "Dark Dragon", who isn't really that dark considering he's fire-aspected...and bright red in colour.), which I'm quite sure is one they actually already did, but there isn't a whole lot of detail given here, so we'll see how different it actually is when it comes around

Aedin's Workshop

This was basically a place where you could got to exchange boss challenge rewards for better rewards...which were then used to exchange for weapons of your choice! Event accessories are also amongst the list of things you can exchange for, as well as experience tomes, and globus/crystals for character/weapon upgrading!

8-Bit Quest Redux

They've had this previously, but they removed it (I'm not sure if it was time limited or they just removed it for other reasons), not entirely sure if this is going to be a 1 mission type dealy or a series of missions, I think the original mission was only 1 really easy mission with classic sprites and chiptune music.

Past Event Redux

You know how I mentioned those even-specific and unique characters before, the ones that you could only upgrade via event-specific items otherwise you were stuck with a unupgradable character forever? Well, this is basically your last chance to remedy that before the service for the game ends, if you didn't finish farming and upgrading your event-unique characters, then you'll have one last chance at it before service ends!

Not sure if this also means you can get the characters again if you missed out on them, I'm going to guess you will be able to because they're also resetting the exchanges for the respective events so we'll be able to exchange for event-unique weapons and stuff again. Pretty much: get ALL THE THINGS before this shit shuts down.

The Story Finale

Not much to say about this, as not much is given, but it sounds like there will be a conclusions to the game's story!

Mega-Spins!

You know those time-limited characters/weapons I mentioned before? They're bringing them all back in the mega-spin!..at least that's what I'm kind of assuming, because otherwise it's just a regular spin with all characters that were permanently put into the pool...Either way: OBTAIN ALL THE THINGS.

Finale Bonus

Sweet jeebus, 125 regalite every day until service ends...that means you'll be able to do a 10+1 character pull every other day, that's a lot of regalite.

All Daily Quests Available

These were basically rotating quests (each tied to a specific day of the week) where you could farm for a specific aspect of drops that you needed to upgrade characters and weapons, there was also one of Zell (the in-game world's currency), all of the quests being available at once means you won't have to wait for the right day to farm that one resource you need!

In Conclusion

I said it at the start, and I'll say it again at the end here: This is sad news. I'm currently wondering whether or not anything can be done to save this game, mayhaps crowdfunding or something to help the devs buy all the games rights Hitman-style? That being said, King's Knight was a Square-Enix property much older than Hitman was, it was originally an NES title released in Japan in 1986 and North America in 1989 back when Square was still its own separate company. From what I've heard it was a decently popular title in Japan, but not so much in North America, so acquiring all the rights would not be quite the same as it was for the Hitman series. That all being said, I'm not even sure there would be enough interest, especially enough monetary interest to successfully crowdfund such a thing.

The studio who worked on the game "Fire Flame Hearts" (would help if I remembered the name properly) is not a company I've been able to find any further information on I take that back, if I'd actually looked for the ACTUAL company name then I would have found this: Flame Hearts is a Subsidiary of DIGITAL Hearts Co., Ltd., also their website (in Japanese) the only reason I even know that name is because it's in the pre-roll credits when you load up the game. By the sounds of it, they're a bit of an indie studio though, a pretty small team of developers who had been chosen for this project. They did some livestreams, although I never caught any of them, and they actual devs behind the game seem like genuinely passionate people who just want to make games and content for people to enjoy. I wonder what they'll do after the game officially closes down. Either way, it seems that they've taken this news of their game being cut as a signal to "GIVE EVERYONE ALL THE THINGS FOR FREEEEE!", which is exactly what they're doing with the 125 free regalite a day and all this other content before services end. They had plans for a "hardmode" for the campaign, but that never came to fruition, the last we heard of it was in the New Years "Update Map" they posted back in January.

Well...Whatever happens next, I wish the team at "Flame Hearts" and anyone else who were involved in the development and support of this game the best, and hope that they can move on to bigger and better things. I hope to hear of games from some of these people a few years down the line, because they seem like some pretty swell people.

I have no idea why I decided I needed to basically write an article for this bloody game...but I guess I just kinda realized how attached I actually am to it, it kinda became a small part of my life, and now I have to bid farewell to it...So childish part of me really hopes that we can possibly save it, but the fan-base it probably not nearly big enough for it.

If you've never heard of this game, or have heard of it but never got around to trying it then: DO IT NOW you have 3 months before you won't be able to play anymore because they'll take the servers down, at the very least pick it up to see what could have been (if it doesn't horribly crash for you, I've heard that happens with some people, I've been lucky) and maybe feel compelled enough by what you experience to go write to Square-Enix about it, or if you have a negative experience, then...idk maybe you can still write to Square-Enix about it, or make some kind of rant post like I would :P But in my opinion: The game is still worth checking out, even if services are going to be ending, don't you at least want to know what the gameplay was like for yourself?

Anywho, I'll finish off with some links to stuff: King's Knight has it's own Official Twitter Page that's separate from Square-Enix's and FFXV's, if you have or use Twitter then hop over there and send them your best wishes. On the flipside there's the Official FFXV Twitter where this news was first broken, and of course the Offical Square-Enix Twitter if you want to go and ask them "Y U DO DIS?!"