What is Shadow Tower?

King’s Field’s harder sibling: one tower, no experience points, no music, no map, and equipment that breaks.

Between King’s Field III and IV, FromSoftware built a sterner variant of its own formula. Shadow Tower was released in Japan on 25 June 1998 and in North America on 23 November 1999 by Agetec; IGN would later describe it, plainly, as effectively a King’s Field follow-up. Mercenary Ruus Hardy returns to the city of Zeptar to find the city and its tower pulled into the underworld, and an old man presses the Dark One’s sword into his hands, the only weapon that can wound what waits inside.

Every comfort the trilogy had added, this game removes. There are no experience points: killing a given kind of creature raises fixed statistics, and soul pods let you raise a stat by hand. Every sword, shield, and armor piece has durability and must be repaired or replaced; shields are raised actively to block. There is no automap, by choice, and no music at all, only the tower’s own sounds. What it adds instead is a two-player battle mode, the only multiplayer anywhere in the King’s Field family.

THE SEQUEL THAT STAYED HOME

Shadow Tower Abyss, 2003

The sequel

Shadow Tower Abyss reached the PlayStation 2 on 23 October 2003, Japan only. It sold about 12,900 copies in its first tracked week at home, and an official Japanese complete guide was published for it.

The cancelled West

Agetec’s English localization was, in producer Mark Johnson’s words, for the most part completed aside from package and manual when Sony Computer Entertainment America cancelled the release. The finished translation existed; the game never shipped.

The fans finished it

A fan translation of Abyss was released on 29 November 2011, eight years after the Japanese launch, through the same community forums that preserve the whole King’s Field family.

The cover

Shadow Tower’s box art is not pictured in this archive’s gallery: it could not be verified from an open source in this pass, and the gap is logged rather than filled with a guess.

The design it hardens Back to the main line More from the Library

What is Shadow Tower?

THE SEQUEL THAT STAYED HOME

THE FIRST WORD