Arkitsa’s Ring (1990) NES Game Review

Arkista’s Ring
Developed by: NMK
Published by: American Sammy (NA)
Release date: June 1990 (NA)

The evil Shogun got his army of ninjas to steal Arkista’s Ring! This ring brings peace and prosperity to the Elves, somehow, so they’ll be needing it back. Thing is, most of the elves are too chicken to try and throw hands with Shogun-chan themselves. That’s where Christina the Elf (that’s YOU!) comes in. Armed with nothing but a flimsy bow, lil’ Chris has to storm the Ninja stronghold and get that ring back, or else something presumably bad will happen. Not on her watch!

Arkista’s Ring is a top-down action game that feels like some guy played the original Legend of Zelda, and decided that he loved killing bad guys on the world map, but hated the exploration and dungeons and everything else that made Link’s first game memorable. So he got rid of all that pesky adventure filler and left nothing but the action on the table. Except that same guy decided he hated using Link’s sword, and gave Chris the energy beam Link can shoot when he’s got full hearts as her only means of attack. And then they made it a bow.

If you look up Arkista’s Ring online, you will not find a single article that does not mention Zelda. I will continue to reinforce the stereotype, and I’m sorry for that. But my intentions were good! I wanted to come into this review fighting in Arkista‘s corner a bit; wanting to claim that it’s unfair to pit the two games next to each other because the genres differ enough to make them totally distinct from one another. While I do think the point about genres still holds water, the truth of the matter is that Zelda is the easiest title one could point to in this instance to try and illustrate how Arkista plays, especially to someone who has never played it before. That’s because a lot of subtle things about the way it controls – like the starting rate of fire on the bow, and the walking speed of the character – feel like they copied Zelda‘s homework as closely as they could. The visual of the little elf in a green tunic killing blue moblins doesn’t help matters, either. Oh well. If you’re gonna steal the control scheme from another game, it may as well be a good one.

Okay, enough about Zelda for now. How do you play Arkista’s Ring, I hear you cry with burning curiosity? The gameplay loop is simple: beat the required amount of enemies, grab the key that spawns once they’re dead, and find the exit to move onto the next stage. Most levels are less than a minute long, on the small side in terms of scale, and are low on difficulty, so the little dopamine hits your brain gets drip-fed throughout can make this experience feel pretty good. Maybe even pretty…fun. Yeah, Arkista’s Ring can be fun! Those controls aped from Zelda are nice and responsive, and it’s satisfying to make progress through the levels at such a fast pace.

Christina’s weapon of choice is a bow that can be upgraded over the course of the game, but even at max strength it’s a piddly thing that can’t kill most enemies in one hit. Instead of an arsenal of weapons, Arkista’s Ring has a big focus on item drops. Some upgrade your attack for one level, or stop pesky ninjas dead in their tracks, while others offer permanent health upgrades and extra item slots. By the way, you get ten continues and you actually get to keep all of your items between them! Most games of this era were not kind when it came to game overs, so this is a big sigh of relief. But we’ll get more in-depth about the difficulty in just a bit.

There’s an entertaining little arcade game to be found here, and if that’s where the story ended, Arkista’s Ring would be one of those games frequently relegated to “hidden gem” status in online NES circles. After all, there are a hell of a lot of worse things you could say about a game than “it sort of plays like Zelda but also sort of not.”

But there’s always a but. And it’s a big but. You need to finish four loops of Arkista’s Ring to see the ending, totalling 124 levels in all. No passwords or saves, either; 124 levels in one sitting.

Now at a minute (or less) a stage, you might think that 124 levels doesn’t sound so bad. But as is retro game tradition, each subsequent loop is more obnoxious harder than the last. The first couple are doable, but Arkista’s Ring goes from a fun little romp to a trip to the dentist’s real quick. I wholeheartedly recommend playing this game until the end of the second loop, and don’t recommend much after that. Let’s get into why.

The worst, worst, WORST thing about those later loops is the way enemies start to dogpile you. See, Christina moves at a fixed speed that can never be upgraded, but the enemies start to move faster with every loop. The difference in speed means multiple bad guys will bum rush you and bounce on your head until you’re out of health, while you can’t put any distance between you and them to shoot them in the face. In other words, if enemies get on top of you, for any reason, you’ll likely die in a matter of seconds.

Christina could have benefited from a close-range weapon for these pinch moments, and frustratingly enough, cut files in the game’s code indicate there were plans for a sword item at one point during development. So it’s likely the devs were well aware of this problem, had something implemented to fix the problem, and…decided against it somewhere along the line? It’s both baffling and irritating that there’s concrete proof they likely took steps towards making this a better game, and simply didn’t. They could have made the sword one of the items that drops from enemies if they were worried about making the game too easy by having it available at all times. That way, actually utilizing it is left to the player’s discretion, adding a depth of strategy to a game that has very little. I tell ya, I should’ve been working at American Sammy circa 1989. I would’ve set them right.

I squandered many, many lives thanks to the cheap dogpiling enemies, but it’s something you gradually learn to maneuver around. Sorta. Practice feels like it goes out the window when you’re forced to fight the ninjas beyond the second loop. They knew how tough those guys were, because there’s a single-use item you can collect that stops them in place for a fixed amount of time. They can throw projectiles through walls, climb over the goddamn walls, and pull a sword on you if they’re close enough to take massive chunks of your health away in one strike. Which Christina should have been able to do too!!! Anyway, when you pair that ninja sword technique with the dogpiling problem, you can see how this becomes a major pain in the ass very quickly.

But you know the oddest thing? Outside of the three levels per loop where enemies aggressively dogpile you, this game is not hard. Like, even remotely. I promise you that 112 of the 124 levels could easily be beat by players of any skill level, especially with those super forgiving continues I mentioned earlier. So statistically, roughly 90% of Arkista’s Ring is a brain-dead cakewalk, and the remaining 10% exists solely to get on your nerves. Approximately eighteen seconds of this game’s development time must have been spent addressing the wacky balancing. And by “addressing,” I mean playtesters shrugging and making fart sounds with their mouths when asked for their opinions.

I had a lot to say about Arkista, and I think it’s because I can see there was a lot of potential hidden away here. It makes me frustrated, and a bit sad, to run into these old games that just missed the mark like this. I had a similar parental “not mad, just disappointed” reaction about Ghost Lion. Totally different genre, but oddly enough, has a lot of the same problems. With some balance tweaking and maybe implementing that sword I kept harping on about earlier, this could’ve been a genuinely good game. Maybe even a great game! But as it stands, running the full gamut of Arkista’s Ring drops a fun little arcade game into the awkward no man’s land of being a passable, if not forgettable experience. It’s way too easy until it’s too hard, and then it goes back to being way too easy again on a dime. I know I was harsh on it, but there is some enjoyment to be gleaned from Arkista’s Ring if you have low expectations of the overall experience. And don’t let the ninjas get on your tits.

Final Rating: