 S-N-S drunk! Ever play one of those Koei strategy games for PC or one of the ports on Super Nintendo? I'm talking about games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Genghis Khan, Nobunaga's ambition, you know, those super long and complicated turn-based strategy games. They usually had incredible cover art, which always got my attention as a kid, but when it came time to play one of those games, uh, they weren't exactly intuitive. They're extremely slow-paced with a really clunky interface. You have confusing scenarios to complete with these big complicated maps, and to me, these games were pretty boring, and they definitely weren't what I was expecting, based on the badass cover art I kept seeing. And that brings me to Knights of Valor, a weapon-based beat-em-up made for arcades in 1999 by IGS, or International Games System, based out of Taiwan. And this is more what I was expecting. This game is loosely based on the romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, so if you've played through one of those old Ko-A games, you'll recognize some of the names and characters here, only instead of turn-based strategy, you're kicking the crap out of anyone and everyone in settings and environments that are similar to another beat-em-up from the 90s, Capcom's Warriors of Fate, with the main difference being that this game has an experience system that allows you to level up your character. Knights of Valor is the first game in a series that received an installment as recently as 2015 with Knights of Valor 3D, and there's a total of ten Knights of Valor games, with only Knights of Valor 3D being briefly available on PlayStation Plus, and Knights of Valor the Seven Spirits eventually getting a homebrew release on Sega Dreamcast, but otherwise, these games all stayed in the arcades. You start with five different characters to choose from, representing the five Tiger Generals, and you gotta get through ten long levels with your typical beat-em-up controls. There's four main buttons, a regular attack, a jump, a block, and a special weapon button you can hold down to select one of eight different items that you can collect throughout the game. Everything from daggers, arrows, darts, poison gas, saw blades... Oh man, that's brutal. That's some cum laude stuff right there. There's also a secondary meter you can power up three times, and that unleashes a huge special attack, and this game does not skimp on the visual and sound department. One reason I wanted to keep playing this game is to see each character's most powerful attack, and they do not disappoint. This game gets all the usual beat-em-up stuff correct. There's good hit detection, although you can't grab enemies, but each character has a few different moves you can do using typical fighting game inputs, and the game cuts a pretty good pace as well. You deal with big fat guys launching fire bombs at you while a guy on an armored horse comes after you with a spiked baseball bat. You carefully navigate a series of barriers as enemies toss grenades at you, with the occasional crazy guy pushing a battering ram through the middle of the action. Then you face a boss named Dunn. What, like Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle? Then you fight through a burning jungle. What are those polar bears? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I should warn you, there is plenty of arcade jeepness here, especially in this section before the level 3 boss, which has stuff randomly falling down from the ceiling. Ugh. What's cool though is that the game lets you juggle enemies. Once you get a guy in mid-air, you can just keep hitting him, so long as you time it right, and that helps curb the difficulty quite a bit. Occasionally, you'll run into this guy, who's getting hammered in the middle of a battle. If you leave him alone, he can actually help you. You defeat all the bad guys, you go talk to him, and he gives you three options. Whiskey, Brandy, or Small Potato Kill You. What, does he just, like, choke on a small potato as part of a vegetable stir fry or something? If you kill him at any point, you just keep going forward. But if you give him Whiskey, or Brandy, he opens up this door, which has lots of extra points as well as plenty of extra weapons. But first, you gotta get by these giant panthers and these dudes with wheelbarrows, with crossbows mounted on them, I guess. But yeah, you run into that guy every once in a while, sometimes you have to answer a question, sometimes you have to defeat a number of enemies within a certain time limit, and since this game has a leveling system, points are everything, so you're always gonna want to go along with what this guy wants to do to help your character get stronger. There is one negative I have to point out, however. Knights of Valor has so many boss fights. I like a good boss fight as much as anyone, but she's Louise. Some of these fights are incredibly cheap, and every one of them takes forever. This game is already long, beat-em-ups aren't usually 90-minute playthroughs, but it felt like at least a third of that time was one-on-one fights against a boss, with a comically large health bar that looks like it'd stretch off your screen and into the next room. Also, I gotta point out the music, which is good for the most part, but sometimes you run into some weirdness, like this section here. What, am I playing Goof Troop all of a sudden? But anyway, it's kinda cool that some folks out there were still cranking out Final Fight-style beat-em-ups for the arcade, even as late as 1999, and while Knights of Valor isn't perfect, it's still a fun playthrough with a second player, and it's a good introduction into a huge series of beat-em-ups. So if you dig this game, there's lots more for you to check out, and since most of those games were only released in arcades, that means that if you want to play them, then you gotta check them out any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.