King's Quest V (NES) Playthrough
205A playthrough of Konami's 1992 point-and-click adventure game for the NES, King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder.
In this video I finish the game with a perfect score of 260 points. I also show quite a few of the death scenes over the course of the playthrough.
Originally released in 1990 by Sierra On-line for PCs, Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! was a landmark of sorts in computer game development. It was the eagerly anticipated follow-up to their bestselling 1988 game King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (the first commercial PC game to support the Adlib soundcard), and KQ5 can lay claim to a few important gaming firsts of its own: it was the first "real" CD game that conformed to MPC standards, the first to be fully voice-acted, the first to use digitized hand-painted backgrounds, and it was the first game to cost more than $1 million to produce. Calling it ambitious would be a quite an understatement, but apparently all of that paid off since it sold in massive numbers for its time.
The story starts out something like this: One day as King Graham of Daventry is taking a stroll through the forest, the evil wizard Mordack appears and summons a whirlwind that whisks away the poor guy's castle with his family still inside.
As Graham flails about in despair, a talking owl named Cedric announces that he saw the whole thing go down and that Mordack is the one responsible. Cedric then throws some glitter on Graham and flies him to the land of Serenia to seek the help of the doddering but well intentioned wizard Crispin. After a bit of a chinwag, Crispin kicks Graham out of his house, thrusting him into the lap of adventure!
Go forth dauntlessly, King Graham! Badger innocent people into giving up their most prized possessions! Pie a wampa! Get eaten by a bear! Awkwardly intimidate an underage slave girl before propositioning her with jewelry and a tender promise! All this and more awaits within this warped and twisted world. (I'm not kidding. Seriously.)
King's Quest V plays like most Sierra games of the early 90s did: you explore the world through an icon-based interface and most of your time is split between chatting with locals and picking up everything that's not nailed down as you attempt to solve a slew of obtuse inventory-driven puzzles. These puzzles often rely on trial-and-error and moon logic, so you're treated to all sorts of classic Sierra death scenes, too. If you're a fan of NES adventures like Princess Tomato, Shadowgate, and Deja Vu, you'll feel right at home with this one.
I remember being amazed when I saw advertisements for an NES version of the game. I played the PC version *a ton* - it was actually the game that got me hooked on the genre - but of all the computer games out there, I couldn't wrap my head around how they'd chosen to adapt the most cutting-edge multimedia showpiece of the era to the NES. How could something like that possibly work?
As dismal a prospect as that sounds, the NES rendition (or demake, if you prefer) of this PC classic does an admirable job at keeping the story and the gameplay intact despite the heavy concessions that had to be made. Novotrade managed to smash a game that originally shipped on ten 3.5" floppy disks down to fit on a 512K cartridge, and they did so without cutting any meaningful content.
All the puzzles, characters, environments, and the lion's share of the game's text made the transition, and the mouse controls have been adapted about as well as possible to the NES pad.
The graphics and sound are clearly the weak links here, but for as harsh as the game tends to be on the senses, the end result is still pretty extraordinary. Small objects can be hard to make out at times, the music sounds awful and the dialogue portraits are comically ugly, but it still feels like King's Quest V, and it still feels like way more than the NES should be capable of.
I really used to love King’s Quest V, and as mangled as the NES version looks, I appreciate how well it managed to capture the heart and spirit of the original. I thoroughly enjoyed making my way through this cart again!
(Random note: the game plays with thick black bars around the screen so I cropped them out. The aspect ratio is still correct.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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