There’s an absolute treasure trove of hidden gems on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. This was the console that most developers supported in the 80s after all, and there are hundreds of classics that are mentioned every day. Many were lost in the mix. Unfortunately Arkista’s Ring by developer Sammy is not one of these. Sure, it had all the makings of a classic. The game looks remarkably like the Legend of Zelda, and being a clone of Nintendo’s major franchise usually has fantastic results. This is one obscure game, and I felt like going off of the well beaten path recently. I wanted to find a game I haven’t already played (and that’s kind of a rarity for this genre) and Arkista’s Ring is where I settled. There are some things that are done very well here, but the action adventure was never meant to be a coin-op experience, and that’s exactly where Arkista’s Ring went wrong. It’s not awful, but it’s definitely not a classic.
The story here is completely nonsensical, but that’s just how I like it. Apparently some ninjas have stolen a ring from the elves, and cast them into darkness. Well at least the instruction manual depicts that story, but it’s never mentioned in-game so I would rather just move on. Arkista’s ring is played via an overhead view. You play as an elf maiden armed with only her bow, and each stage is enclosed. You goal is to destroy a specific amount of enemies within any stage which will reveal a key that is needed to open the exit. Rinse, lather and repeat.
Your life bar is displayed via a row of hearts on the bottom of the screen (which is another comparison to the Zelda series) and when it depletes you lose a life. It’s a very basic system with a plethora of obstacles that limit you to a set path. It’s never very well thought out unfortunately. The developers weren’t particularly creative and a lot of the time you’re stuck with just single tile corridors with enemies that shoot projectiles. This ramps up the difficulty significantly, and some obstacles absolutely require you to take damage to reach the exit. This element seems lazy to me, and I don’t like it.
Arkista’s Ring sets itself apart from most arcade style games by featuring an inventory. When certain monsters are destroyed they leave behind bags. Touching these results in a different item being added to your inventory displayed at the bottom of the screen. You can activate these items at any time and they offer a myriad of effects. These range from restoring your life bar to stunning all on-screen enemies, instantly destroying them all, replacing the typical arrow with more powerful fire balls, and more. This element definitely adds some strategy to the game because you need to pay attention to how many free slots you have, but unfortunately you can’t see beforehand what you’re picking up. This means that while you may be making room for additional power-ups, but might get something you don’t particularly need at that time. It would be nice if each of the items were represented by their own icon during gameplay, but as it stands there’s no way to actually see what you’re getting until it’s too late. This system is not intuitive.
The difficulty is a little out of hand here unfortunately. It’s not uncommon to be completely overwhelmed by enemies on virtually any map, and movement uses the classic ’tile’ system wherein you move one full square per button press which limits your mobility a great deal. Most monsters require multiple hits from your trusty bow to destroy, and in the later areas some make use of projectiles which can make it difficult to avoid damage when facing them in narrow corridors. Some areas are nearly impossible without inventive use of the power-ups which is more than a little annoying. Arkista’s Ring is just too difficult in my opinion. As I mentioned earlier the stage design isn’t particularly creative and instead just comes off as being cheap.
There are in fact boss encounters, but these too are lazy. You don’t even have a diverse lineup of different terrain here; it seems like the developers really tried to cut down on costs by recycling content over and over again. The biggest kicker is the fact that Arkista’s Ring is artificially long. You only have thirty two different stages here, and should you manage to complete them you’re simply set back to the first level with faster moving enemies. You have to actually play through the game a total of four times in order to see the credits scene. In some cases an element such as this won’t break the experience, but here it’s just the rotten cherry atop the melted sundae. There was some potential here, but it is wasted.
Arkista’s Ring is a decent looking game. At least you can tell what the various terrain tiles are supposed to represent, and the monsters look pretty good as well. My main problem comes from the way the main character is drawn. Her sprite is reminiscent of most early NES titles in that it lacks an outline. That’s fine for something that came out early in the system’s life span, but this came out at the tail end of the platform’s prevalence. It’s pretty unimpressive.
The game also suffers from a lack of variety in environments. You have your basic outdoor areas with mountains, trees, and volcanos as well as indoor stages that lack any sort of creativity to say the least. It’s all very boring and these repeat over and over again. Another complaint I have is with the fact that certain objects in the terrain (most notably trees) can be removed opening up paths on the field. They feature slight variations in their design from the common obstacles, but I found myself struggling at times to figure out which ones are dynamic. This led to several frustrating moments as enemies continually spawned during the time I spent trying to unlock the way forward. All in all Arkista’s Ring looks sort of like a poor man’s Zelda. The soundtrack is also pretty underwhelming. What’s there is good, but the game features only a few different songs during gameplay. With over one hundred stages this becomes repetitive almost immediately. More diverse music could broken up the monotony.
I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunately Arkista’s Ring isn’t even a poor man’s Zelda. The action adventure genre might be compatible with arcade style gameplay, but this game only sent this sentiment back a long ways. Arkista’s Ring has a cool box art and cover, and might be worth collecting just for that aspect alone, but it’s pretty unspectacular overall and I can’t really recommend playing it.
