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What is Sword of Moonlight?

A game you build games with: in 2000 FromSoftware sold its own King’s Field construction kit for Windows, and packed a full remake of the first game inside it.

Sword of Moonlight: King’s Field Making Tool was released in Japan on 16 March 2000, FromSoftware’s first release for PC. It is an editor for building standalone first-person role-playing games in the King’s Field mold: games made with it run on their own, without the kit. As its sample project, the package includes a complete remake of King’s Field (1994), the Japan-only original, rebuilt in the tool it is meant to teach.

The fans did the rest. The tool itself received a fan-made English translation, and the bundled remake received one too, credited to the translator JDO. Original games followed: Dark Destiny, released on 24 December 2009 and written to bridge the Japanese original and the American King’s Field, and JC Bailey’s Heir of Granatyki, a prequel to the first game, alongside his later Dark Legacy project, a would-be King’s Field V modeled on the fourth game. The community that maintains all of it, the Sword of Moonlight site, wiki, and forums, also keeps the release records this archive cites.

WHY IT MATTERS

The folk tradition

Ahead of the kit era

A major studio handing players its own development tools, with the flagship game included as a modifiable sample, was a decade ahead of the game-making kits that later became an industry. The barrier was language, not generosity: the tool was never sold in English.

The fifth game that fans wrote

King’s Field never received a numbered fifth entry. The kit is the reason the series has sequels anyway, unofficial, free, and still catalogued by their makers.

The keepers

The community archive at swordofmoonlight.com preserves the tool, the fan games, the translations, and the variant-by-variant release documentation for every game in this cluster. It is the closest thing the series has to an official museum.

The name

The tool is named for the sword, which began in the 1994 game as its strongest hidden weapon. Its biography, from Guyra’s forge to Elden Ring, has its own page here.

The game it remakes The kit’s own box More from the Library

What is Sword of Moonlight?

WHY IT MATTERS

THE FIRST WORD