Author's Note: This Community Article was in a working draft form for months prior to its publication. Between the time in which I drafted the outline, edited it and then published the article itself, Knights In The Nightmare got an Android/mobile release. This version of the game even has Google Play Games support which allows you to stream it to you Windows PC. I cannot attest to whether or not this release is any good as I have yet to play it. Nonetheless, as I wasn't about to rewrite this whole article in response to this development, this article and a section in which it discusses the limited ways in which you can play it are presented as is.

What Is Knights In The Nightmare?

Many moons ago, during one of my multi-part Final Fantasy-related closed readings, I posited the following: there are good games, there are bad games, and there are mediocre games; the only games that are challenging to discuss and write about are the mediocre ones. I mean, writing about a game that's okey dokey? It's a torturous endeavor if you ask me, and I genuinely don't know how the remaining seven game reviewers these days survive besides the three that use ChatGPT to meet their quotas. That said, I'm facing what I can safely call "a weird one," and I feel like my skills as an amateur hack writer will be pushed to their breaking point. I've made a few minor errors here and there with my previous entries about Sting's more interesting works, but this time there's bound to be something I either forget to relay entirely or misremember even after consulting my notes and sources. Even its most ardent defenders still debate whole parts of Knights In The Nightmare because of how mechanically dense the game is and how obtuse and esoteric its design is. Knights In The Nightmare is less a video game and more an aberration; it departs from what is normal, expected, or traditional in game design and lacks a long-standing lineage or legacy. Alongside venerable weirdo works like King of Dragon Pass or Katamari Damacy, it sits in a category or sub-genre of its own creation. No games before it ever considered fusing the disparate parts it ended up blending into a single tactics experience, and that remains the case today.

Now we're really getting into the Sting rabbit hole this series has been building towards.

At its heart, Knights In The Nightmare is a tactical, turn-based role-playing game, like most of Sting's most notable games on portable systems. The game initially launched on the Nintendo DS before being ported to the PSP. If you forced me to pick between the two, I'd take the DS version, but only because sometimes having the bottom screen was helpful and the bullet hell sequences, WHICH WE WILL DISCUSS SHORTLY, DO NOT WORRY, MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD, are quite easier on the DS than on the PSP. Unlike some of the other Sting titles I have discussed in this series, there hasn't been a pronounced effort to remaster or remake Knights In The Nightmare for modern systems. The game got a Switch port in 2022, but it was a Japan-only release, which is a bit odd given that, despite everything I'm about to say about how inscrutable it is, it reviewed shockingly well outside Japan. It didn't have the longest print run, because its publisher outside of Japan was Atlus USA, and that was kind of their modus operandi pre-Persona 5. Like, to the three of you that remember the Trauma Center games, you remember how goddamn impossible it was to find stray copies of any of those games or even OG Persona 4 two or three months after its release. It was a different era.

Nonetheless, while you might think the issue with bringing Knights In The Nightmare back into the fold is that the game relied on the DS' dual-screen setup, I again remind you that it had a perfectly serviceable PSP port. Sure, it was handy to have a map of the dungeon you were on right below your action screen. Still, while DS nostalgia is a real thing, and an understandable phenomenon considering the DS' ridiculous lifespan, I think people really forget how tacked on and useless that bottom screen became in 90% of all third-party DS games two years after its launch. So, this game could make a comeback, but it's almost as if Sting knows they went too far and too hard with this particular title, and they haven't taken any enthusiastic bites at this apple. It remains vexingly there on the third or fourth branch from the top of the tree; certainly not on the top but definitely not low-hanging fruit. And to give you a sense of how even Sting began to realize they maybe should have hired an editor to rein things in, consider why they delayed the game in Japan from July, 2008 to September of that year. The game's lead designer, Shinichi Ito, said the game was altogether finished, had passed certification, and wasn't delayed to address game-breaking bugs or add cut content. Instead, they delayed the game because preview builds and focus testing showed players flat-out didn't understand how to play it after its first act, and Sting needed to improve the game's tutorial.

This is, without a doubt, one of the most bonkers dense tutorials I have ever seen.

Now, stop and think about that for one moment. Can you think of a game getting delayed months entirely, and not secondarily, to make its tutorial longer and more in-depth? I've been following games for almost my entire life, and that's a first for me. Almost as if Sting and its Dept. Heaven team took the criticism directed at Knights In The Nightmare to heart, the next, and unfortunately final, entry in Sting's anthology series, Gungnir, made massive strides to include players of all skill types. Gungnir not only features a by-the-numbers and linear storyline, but it also has quality-of-life, or "support modes," that provide variable buffs and assists when you're struggling with its combat. You can enable these on the fly, and doing so does not lock you out of any of its endings, even if you play the game on Easy. If I'm still writing on Giant Bomb this time next year, that game is definitely at the top of my list of works to discuss during "Summer of Sting: Season 2" alongside Treasure Hunter G, Evolution: The World of Sacred Device, and Dokapon. The latter of which represents what I consider the true death knell of Sting as a stalwart of experimental RPG design.

No, Seriously, What Is Knights In The Nightmare?

So, as I warned you, discussing the mechanics of Knights In The Nightmare is both a herculean task and one where I cannot promise you, as I have done in the past, to leave "no stone unturned." This game has twenty goddamn stones to turn, and I only have so much mental bandwidth to talk about a DS game from almost twenty years ago before I lose my fucking mind. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, the default "state" of Knights In The Nightmare is that of a turn-based tactical RPG, and that's really the best way to describe the confusing mess this game becomes. When it isn't doing weird esoteric or out-of-pocket shit, assume it's a tactical RPG. What's easy to explain is how the game is divided into distinct phases of action, as Knights In The Nightmare follows a template we've seen too often in prior tactics games from Sting. The first phase is the "Setup" phase, where you use downtime to interact with your surroundings and supporting NPCs or party members. What is incredibly annoying is that there's only one exact screen or moment during this phase when you can level up your characters, and that's when you are preparing for a battle and have access to the equipment and stats pages for your units. Any other time, be it during combat or while you ponder loot immediately after beating a boss, there's a good chance you don't actually have access to spend your character's experience points.

Good lord, where do I even begin when it comes to discussing how this game works?

Which leads us to the first example of Knights In The Nightmare's weirdness: its leveling system. So, someone at Sting felt like dealing with a classic problem in tactics games: story-required or important characters join your party, but right out of the gate, they suck shit and are a pain to keep alive because they start with shitty stats or are at level 1 at inopportune phases of the game. What does Knights In The Nightmare do to solve that problem? Well, it encourages you to keep them safe or out of combat, as your skill points are SHARED across all your characters. So if you have an Ike or Hector-like character in your party doing the heavy lifting to win battles, you don't need to worry about them being the only character getting experience and level-ups. In this game, when you can open the stats screen, you can assign points to give characters extra levels and access to better equipment, as you see fit and as freely as you want. Now, keep in mind, the game literally has over two hundred characters, and beyond your main character, everyone is treated as entirely disposable. This leads to the game's "Transoul" mechanic, where you can transfer a knight's soul to another knight; if the transfer is allowed, the donating character disappears. The recipient recovers Vitality, the game's most important stat, and gains levels, along with an increased level cap. However, there are a lot of conditions you need to meet before being able to pull off a Transoul maneuver, like the loyalty the two characters have for one another, elemental affinities, race, and a few other parameters that the game does a piss poor job of surfacing to you coherently. Nonetheless, the mechanic exists to give new fledgling units a purpose or value to the player, as they can be the quickest way to level up elite units on the fly.

This is the screen for equipping weapons onto a character. Look at. No, seriously. Look at it.

Regardless, it's time to talk about the "tactics" part of this game. Before the game even lets you take your first turn, it has a separate bespoke Tactics Screen where you select Knights, Items, and Equipment for an upcoming battle. This part of the game is one of the few that follows tactics game design orthodoxy. Battles often demand you exploit elemental weaknesses to burn through them efficiently, which leads us to the first example of how this game is part Ikaruga. One way to greatly change your character's damage output is by changing the battle's "Phase" during a character's turn. You can either wait for these phases to transition naturally while you take your turn, or you can tap a switch on your screen to swap between black and white, much like Ikaruga. The colors connect to CHAOS or LAW labels that grace much of your equipment, and depending on your character, their affinities, and their gear, they'll do extra or less damage to the enemies they are attacking, depending on the phase their attack takes place in. That point leads me to a major issue I have with this game. You're either doing a shit ton of damage or not even making a dent; there's very little in between. Given that the game throws hundreds of characters at you and all of their stat screens are dense and difficult to parse, I cannot even begin to list the number of times when I biffed it with a character's turn, only to realize I forgot about changing the phase of the battle to one advantageous to that specific character. It's the first of many examples of how Knights In The Nightmare puts way too much on your plate.

Hmmm... maybe I do need to check out the Android port of this game.
Then there are the actual battles! Placing and preparing your units is turn-based, but once you hit start, the game throws everything out the window and becomes an isometric real-time strategy game with pseudo-programmable movement. It's like what if Final Fantasy Tactics had a one-night stand with RoboRally! As characters move and attack, you scroll around the screen and give orders using a "Wisp" that represents your cursor. However, when you tap a unit as it draws near an enemy, you don't get a menu of possible attacks. Instead, you have to aim and then flick the stylus toward an enemy in one of the four Cardinal Directions. But here's the kicker: the Wisp is vulnerable on the screen as you move it to enable any character's attack, which leads me to the most notorious aspect of Knights In The Nightmare: the bullet-hell mechanic. Ask JRPG aficionados to name something about this game and what people will inevitably say, if anything, is "Oh, isn't that the JRPG where your movement is a bullet-hell minigame every time you want to do something?" And to be clear, when you move from one unit to the next, you have to jerk your cursor around to avoid enemy projectiles, or risk taking damage and getting KO'd. The tougher the enemy, the more bullshit is on your screen to bump into and damage your Wisp. To make things even more complicated, the attacks you can use depend largely on how often you've been able to attack; you can't just pick more powerful moves from a menu willy-nilly. Normal attacks generate Gems, the battle currency you use to fill a Magic Point Meter. Weapon- and wand-based attacks can pop off "Skill Attacks," which you can use to kill enemies quickly or destroy battlefield debris.

This is the roulette machine that spawns new enemies on the battle until I kill them on those squares you can see on the top screen.

And you'll usually want to kill enemies in as few attacks as possible. Unlike most RPGs, each time you land an attack on the enemy, you trigger a special event on a punch card that either rewards you with a positive effect or a negative one. Often, the first time you attack an enemy, you'll get a potion or a temporary buff, but if all you've been doing is chip damage and you reach the fourth attack, the enemy could possibly fully restore its health without burning an action or turn, or hard-counter your attack to kill a unit instantly. But where Knights In The Nightmare really decides to play with the RPG formula in the most unnecessary way possible is how you're meant to defeat enemies to finish a battle or mission. Instead of pitting you against an army of goons and asking you to kill them all within several turns or to reach a specific body count before you trigger a boss, you instead have to align your enemy kills across an "Enemy Matrix," as if you're playing the most convoluted game of Picross or tic-tac-toe. If an enemy kill isn't correctly aligned horizontally, vertically, or diagonally on that matrix, which is displayed on the bottom screen on the DS version, then that death doesn't "count" towards ending the battle. Worse, you select which enemies spawn on the map by spinning a roulette wheel until you complete this matrix correctly, and you can really screw yourself over if you get unlucky and land on an especially difficult enemy, which, AGAIN, is determined by PURE RNG and is entirely out of your control!

Did I "Enjoy" Or "Hate" Playing Knights In The Nightmare? Yes.

Knights In The Nightmare is the game with the most. Few games attempt to cram half as many gameplay mechanics as it does and live to tell the tale. Akitoshi Kawazu of SaGa fame would blush at its mishmash of gameplay ideas, and he's the man who gave you Unlimited Saga! As I mentioned earlier, the game has an incredibly guided tutorial sequence which ends up representing a whole act in the game. Good on Sting for covering every moving part in this Frankenstein's Monster of a video game, but the result is a set of tutorial missions that take upwards of one to two hours to complete. And as is tradition in most RPGs, especially tactical ones where you have to worry about a whole bevy of possible commands and strategies to employ, the moment the game takes its training wheels off, a brief burst of panic sets in. However, that panic is so much worse in this game because, while in your Dragon Quests or Final Fantasies, you can always turn around and grind to make the big evil dragon not kill you; if you get a bad spin on the roulette or aren't good at dexterity-based tasks, you're just plain fucked. And before you ask, you control the Wisp with the analog nub or D-Pad on the PSP version, and that's one of the MANY REASONS why I don't like it as much. Not being able to see the Enemy Matrix without pulling up a separate map is annoying, but I don't know if the kids today remember how fucking awful that nipple analog stick on the PSP was. Because, HOT DAMN, this game is a great reminder of that!  

The PSP version only having one screen sounds like it would be easier to play, but with only one screen this version gets cramped with bullshit, and quick!

The game's sense of time is also highly deceptive. In battle, the screen displays a timer, but it matters far less than the amount of real estate it takes up on your screen might suggest. "Time" only gets deducted from your counter when your cursor takes a hit from projectiles or enemy particles on the screen or when you decide to charge a character's attack. Therefore, it's more of a bespoke health meter and extra MP pool than anything else. When you're mulling over your options or thinking about how long you can take to finish a battle, your time is functionally infinite; just keep that enemy counter system I mentioned earlier in mind, though. And since you are commanding an army of dead spirits with hundreds of units to recruit, almost everyone in your army, besides your main character, is expendable. You can't toggle off permadeath because you'll need to burn the souls of weak characters on strong ones, and some late-game battles demand Ulysses S. Grant-esque strategies rather than Napoleonic ones. Your Vitality stats are incredibly important, as they decrease when you use skills, and if it reaches zero, a character dies. However, you can replenish it by leveling up a character or using the Transoul mechanic. As in almost every other game Sting made, Knights In The Nightmare has weapon durability, but you can work around it by merging equipment of the same type. From tip to toe, this game wants you to see practically everything as a disposable tool, and its brutalist mechanics drive that home almost unrelentingly.

I have read a guide on how the Drive Tech grading system works, and I just don't have the energy to describe it to you right now.

I'm not going to lie. I don't think I ever fully clicked with the gameplay of Knights In The Nightmare, but I don't think that's possible. Yes, the combat has a hypnotic quality, and it is so unique I can't help but respect what Sting attempted. I can honestly say they made a combat system I have never seen before and will never see again, and that's worth something in the world of tactical RPGs. Likewise, I joked about it earlier, but this game does solve a few recurring issues in the tactics sub-genre. The shared pool of experience points means any new character can become a proficient, able-bodied member of your team as long as you have points to spend. When you line up elemental weaknesses with the right Battle Phase, you rip through foes, and it looks and feels fantastic. The logic and programming are muddled to Hell, but it has a cadence, and the game tells you when a strategy you tried isn't working. If your screen isn't filling up or expending one of the four or five meters on the screen, then you can assume you did something wrong and likely need to pivot before things fully go sideways. I also enjoyed the boss battles more than the regular combat despite some of the latter ones feeling incredibly daunting. In a rare act of mercy, all bosses are battles against a single large enemy type and never have surrounding goons to worry about. The bosses fill the screen with way more bullets to dodge, but you don't have to worry about the Enemy Matrix and can instead focus on planning and ordering your moves.

It's weird to say, but this is a rare instance where the down time in a tactics game is the worst part.

All that aside, this game is too much. Even after completing the game's lengthy tutorial, you don't feel ready to handle what's in front of you, even in early baby dungeons. Whether it's fireballs, tornadoes, or astral stars, there's way too much nonsense on your screen, even when you're doing simple tasks or commands during a battle. And as I have already mentioned, it's a real bummer when you plan a move or command, dodge a bunch of crap to get to a character, and then watch it fizzle and not work. That's normally part of the learning process in JRPGs. For example, think of Pokemon or Final Fantasy and the moment you discover a new monster and need to learn its elemental weakness through trial and error. It's a quick process where you don't mind the repetition because the mechanics are transparent, and you usually have tools to consult to remind yourself of prior discoveries. Yet this is a fundamental aspect of the genre that Knights In The Nightmare completely fumbles because when you whiff a move, you have to mull over a half dozen or so variables in your head to figure out what went wrong. Running through all its moving parts to figure out you should have flicked the black-and-white switch from Chaos to Law (or vice versa) or that an enemy is elementally resisting your weapon isn't "fun" or satisfying; it's fiddly and incredibly annoying considering everything you needed to do simply to have your attack appear on the screen in the first place! Last episode I called Yggdra Union Sting's version of "The Cones of Dunshire," and I honestly should have held onto that comparison for this game. There were so many times when I thought I had figured out what I needed to do to take down an enemy, only for the game to say "SIKE!" And if it were not for my own stubbornness, I don't know if I would have gotten past the three-hour mark.

Is The Game's Story As Incoherent As Its Gameplay? Survey Says: YOU BET!

Knights In The Nightmare is a weird narrative effort from Sting. In many ways, it reminds me of Baroque with its bleak setting and dark aesthetical choices. The universe is split between three realms, and as a Dept. Heaven game, the setting draws on Norse mythology, as the realm of the gods and goddesses is called Asgard. There's also a human realm and the Underworld, and the former is clearly in decline as you watch humanity's last remaining forces struggle to fend off foes in the ruins of a society still recovering from a cataclysmic event called the "Before Crisis." The game liberally uses flashbacks to give you more detail about that event, and they also reveal the competing factions' motivations. In fact, the game juxtaposes a whole swath of viewpoints, and, in keeping with a tradition set by Yggdra Union, your enemies aren't always simple goons or acting without reason. And as the screenshots might suggest, this is a thematically dark game with the kingdom you serve under feeling like it's just idling by before the end reaches it, and that's a point several characters even make to you during the first act. The starkness of this setting is genuinely compelling.

Hello person who I promise not to immediately burn to create action currency!

Unfortunately, as with a lot of Sting's games, the pacing isn't great. Knights In The Nightmare is a 25- to 30-hour game, depending on how quickly you can wrap your mind around its many mechanics. The problem is that the game delivers its flashbacks in spurts and segments, and it takes a long while for some of these narrative threads to coagulate into a complete pastiche. Now, I know that might sound like a bog-standard JRPG-ism. Still, when 90% of your party are faceless souls with zero storytelling beyond simple vignettes about how they died, it's frustrating to go dozens of hours before you see the conclusion of any of the many loose threads you have in your hand. The downtime between battles isn't especially compelling until the last few acts, as most of it involves your avatar, the Wisp, describing what life as a corporeal orb is like. On top of that, one of the few named characters you care about, Maria, fucks off at the game's midpoint, leaving your Wisp as the anchor, and until they reveal who they are, it's far from compelling. There's a Valkyrie who's fun to talk to as they discuss the state of affairs in Asgard, but again, it's not enough to keep you interested across twenty-plus hours.

And there's only so much the game can do to make me care about souls that it repeatedly tells me to treat like disposable tools to progress through ratcheting gameplay challenges. In theory, you should feel ripped up when you burn a character to fuel another one, because that's a whole person you've lost, but again, Sting muddies the punch because they filled this game with literally hundreds of characters. And because there are so many possible party members, they can only contribute so much compelling storytelling. Their backgrounds are basic at best, and when you follow one of their plot threads to its conclusion, it's nice. Still, it never feels especially enlightening or even accomplishes the intended goal of leaving an impression on you. In more ways than one, Knights In The Nightmare reminds me of the board game 504. Sure, Friedemann Friese can claim he made a game with 504 possible variants, but they all rely on the same nine mechanics, so they start to blend, and ultimately only about four or five are worth exploring. Sure, Sting made a game you could replay two or three times and still uncover new storylines, but because everything pulls from the same base parts, nothing stands out. What is memorable is the game's ending, where the forces at play finally reveal themselves, and more overt connections emerge between this world and some of the previous Dept. Heaven games. But even then, is that enough to justify a nearly thirty-hour game that twiddles its thumbs for more than half of that time? No, not really!

Anyhow, Knights In The Nightmare and, by extension, Sting, really go for it here. The game and the people that spearheaded it steadfastly reject genre norms in an attempt to do something new, and while the final product is largely incoherent, it's something you're bound not to forget. Sting, I miss this era of yours. I miss when you made games for certified weirdos like myself. I miss when you tempted fate like Icarus and repeatedly came crashing back to reality after pushing the envelope. I hate the fact that, like so many other JRPG studios, you're stuck doing remakes and remasters of your classic works. And the fact that you're essentially a shambling corpse of your former self that now largely keeps the lights on by working as a support studio for Idea Factory is certifiably shitty. You deserve better than that. We all deserve better than that. Please, return to the world of the weird.