It's new to me: Arkista's Ring

The rare NES game that didn't get a Japanese release. Or any other since its initial one

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

We’re used to the idea of Japan getting video games that North America does not. So many video games are made in Japan, for consoles released by companies based there, that it’s just become something of a norm to eventually end up going, “aw, I wish that’d release here, too.” It’s not quite as prevalent nowadays, with more niche releases being embraced and digital game distribution allowing for some risk taking with titles that would maybe not have received a localization and worldwide release in the past, but it still happens even now.

The real rarity was when the opposite would occur on one of these Japanese consoles: an NES-exclusive game that never made it out of North America and onto Japan’s Famicom, for instance. StarTropics is probably the most famous example on the NES, given it was a first-party Nintendo title that they didn’t bother releasing back at home, but there were others. Arkista’s Ring, published by American Sammy in 1990, was one such game. Despite American Sammy’s parent company, Sammy, being a Japanese corporation, despite the developer, NMK, also being from Japan, Arkista’s Ring was only released in North America on the NES.

The why of all of that is also a bit difficult to figure out, probably because Arkista’s Ring is the kind of game where you don’t need to scroll to be able to see the entirety of its Wikipedia page. There aren’t exactly years of detective work and critical analysis of it to pull from. The best guess I’ve got, though, is that the game just didn’t turn out how it was initially envisioned, and so it was released and then everyone involved moved on to something else instead.

The title screen for Arkista’s Ring, which is a black background that has the game’s logo and game start information contained within a frame of columns. American Sammy Corp.’s name and the Sammy logo are also visible.

There are a couple of reasons to suspect as much. For one, the Arkista’s Ring entry on The Cutting Room Floor is full of all kinds of unused sprites. As TCRF put it, “Yes, NPCs, things which don't exist at all in the actual game... of course, they could have also been just really nonthreatening enemies. The game's misused JRPG-style superficial assets and wealth of unused graphics suggest something more ambitious was planned than what we received.” Was there a plan for this to be a bit more action-adventure than it ended up being, with dialogue and conversational signposting and maybe even quests? To feel more like a console-based title instead of an action game you’d find in an arcade? The developer, NMK, made a bunch of arcade games and arcade-style titles in their day, including a bunch of shoot ‘em ups. An action-adventure game from a shooting game developer certainly wasn’t unheard of, but Arkista’s Ring definitely feels more arcade-y than games like Golvellius or The Guardian Legend or the progenitors of what the genre became, like The Legend of Zelda. Maybe that wasn’t always going to be the case; maybe, at the least, it was going to be akin to Namco’s 1989 arcade classic The Legend of Valkyrie, but in the end, all the NPCs and possibility beyond what it ended up being were scrapped.

There are some other ways that the game doesn’t feel completely finished like it was maybe first envisioned, maybe even a little rushed. When you pick up an item, it makes a specific sound for that item: none of them ever tell you what they do, though. You can only see the names of them at all by pressing the select button in between stages, which brings up a menu screen, but even then it’s just names. There’s no announcement of a weapon upgrade besides noticing that it’s happening (and it’s a little subtle on the visual side since there are so many upgrades for your bow), no explanation of how the game’s armor items work, or what them being blue sometimes and golden other times means. You can figure it all out on your own over time, and the manual does explain it all, so I’m not suggesting players in 1990 were left entirely in the dark or anything. It’s more just that every item besides the key that opens the locked door to the exit is represented by a bag you pick up, with no notification of what it is or ability to see what you picked up by its name until after the level is already over. Even being able to see an item’s name when you hover over it in the pause menu, while perusing your bag for an item to use, would have been useful, and is the kind of thing that existed in the original Zelda four years earlier. In 1990, not having that feature makes Arkista’s Ring feel just a tad unpolished. The Tower of Druaga’s vagueness was intentional and central to the design. This is something different than that.

The result is that Arkista’s Ring is a decent way to spend a couple of hours, but not entirely memorable. Maybe it’s no wonder, then, that it stayed in North America instead of getting some minor localization work for Japan. Arkista’s Ring isn’t outright bad or anything: it just kind of is. You’ll probably be done with it before it’s done with you, which makes its current PriceCharting journey a bit depressing. In January of 2009, Arkista’s Ring sold as a loose cartridge for an average price of $3.39, but by May of 2021, it peaked at $59.13. That’s come down ever so slightly to just under $54, with a couple of cartridges being sold per week, but it’s still the kind of title where the manual goes for more than digital and enhanced re-releases of games from 1990 do in the present.

The reason you might be done with Arkista’s Ring before it’s done with you, and part of what makes it feel so arcade-like despite being a game developed for a home console, is that it gets the bulk of its runtime from looping. Arkista’s Ring boasts 125 stages, but it doesn’t have that many, not really. It has 31, which loop four times. That also doesn’t equal 125, but don’t let that bother you: the manual also says you start with four hearts even though you have five, so you don’t want to get too hung up on “but the packaging says…” here. Each stage is a small-ish, maze-like area set in a forest, dungeon, the mountains, and so on, where you must defeat the enemies that appear in order to spawn the enemy whose existence hides the key to unlock the maze’s exit. You don’t have to worry too much about which foe is the special one: just wipe them all out and you’ll get there eventually, it’s not like they have any kind of flag letting you know it’s them.

The key only appears once a specific enemy is defeated, and that enemy will only show up after a certain number of foes have been killed. Here you can also see one of the item bags, and an arrow that was shot but ended up being unnecessary, since the enemy died from the previous one.

Easy enough, for the most part. Now, the loops are more difficult than the preceding set of stages, so it’s not like you just play the same exact thing over and over again. And the hidden exits do move around the map, so you’ll once again have to actually search for the way out in those stages once more instead of making a beeline right to the same staircase you did before. You do, however, keep the items and upgrades that you collected on your previous run, so even as the game becomes more difficult, it also doesn’t. You might eventually pick up an item that protects you from taking any damage from projectiles, including the only attack the last boss of the game does: that sort of thing might feel good for a bit, but can also kill your interest before you clear 125 124 stages, since you’re an elf with a bow attacking from range in the first place, and the challenge of every boss in the game is how to defeat them without taking damage from their powerful ranged attacks.

Before you get to the first loop, though, you’ll need an understanding of how the game works. The first loop is the toughest one, since you're picking up gear and items and acclimating yourself to it all for the first time. I mentioned armor pieces earlier: there are five different kinds, and they each add one heart to your total health. They show up on your HUD as the armor item in question instead of as a heart, but they work the same way, and can also be refilled by the cure potions you find, as well as the tombstones and coffins and sarcophagi you find scattered throughout the game’s stages. There’s leather armor, a shield, a gauntlet, a helmet, and a mantle, and you always acquire them in the same order. You also find upgrades to add storage space for more consumable items, and to your bow, which goes from “short” to “ultimate” over the course of seven pickups. All of those upgrades are permanent once you find them, even persisting after you run out of lives and use a continue — you begin with two extra lives and the ability to, on rare occasions, pick up another, and with 10 continues. That oftentimes seems like a lot of continues, but remember, you’re trying to get through four loops of the game here, and those 10 are for the entire thing.

The only time you can see the screen detailing the items in your inventory and the status or your weapons is by pressing the Select button in between stages. There is also a character portrait of the elf you play as, named Christine, and information on her “type” (Elf), sex (Female), and where she’s from (Arkista) even though no other characters or places appear to exist in the game. Maybe other genders were also left on the cutting room floor.

You’ll spend more time thinking about consumable items, since those rotate in and out of your inventory. There’s the cure potion, which refills your health to full, and, if you’re fast enough, can also save you from dying: there’s a brief delay in between the moment you run out of hearts and when you actually die from it, and if you pause and use a cure potion before the death sequence completes, you’ll be revived and avoid using up a life. Extra lives are much rarer than cure potions, so, pay attention for the sound effect that marks you running out of hearts, which can happen in a hurry sometimes if your ranged elf is cornered by, say, a pack of ninjas.

The rest of the consumables are attack items. The fire wand changes your attack from arrows to fireballs, and those fireballs go through walls while also continuing on through multiple enemies. Your bow has a short range that can lengthen, sure, but it isn’t going through walls, and takes care of just the enemy they hit first. The thunder wand damages all on-screen enemies that can be defeated by arrows and fireballs, but it’s less effective the further into the game you get: you’re not even going to want to bother saving them when you’re on later loops, as that’s inventory space that could be used for a fire wand or cure potion instead. There’s the magic stick, which damages the enemies arrows and fireballs do not injure, and then there’s the ninja stunner, which does what it says on the box. Ninjas can jump over walls and move faster than you do, so being able to stun them to then attack them or walk right through them will prove especially useful in later stages. Especially in stage 30 and its later iterations, where ninjas seem to spawn again and again faster than you can take them out without some help.

When you defeat the shogun boss of stage 31, you receive the titular Arkista’s Ring as a prize. This will recover health every 10 steps, which will be useful as you start a more dangerous loop. The other two rare items are the wealth amulet — which grants you 100 points every step — and the elf mirror, which is the aforementioned item that gives you immunity to projectiles. You might never even find those other two, given they’re as random as everything else but with a much lower appearance rate, and the wealth amulet doesn’t actually do anything. Yes, it increases your score, but what is a score in a game without score-based extends or leaderboards, that doesn’t erase your score when you need to use a continue? Number go up, but for what?

Kill a vampire, raid his coffin to recover your health. This image also shows Christine’s upgraded inventory, with every armor item, three of the four consumables, and the full seven-space item slots. Note that there’s a cross on that coffin, by the way: Nintendo of America let that slide here for some reason even though they were notorious for having them taken out of Japanese games with them.

Sometimes you’ll pick up items when your inventory is already full, and this will end up recovering a small amount of health. It’s worth keeping your inventory full for this, at least until you pick up Arkista’s Ring, but also be sure not to just hold onto any old item to get there, since you don’t want to miss out on picking up new, better ones. This is less of a problem on loops given you have the ring recovering some health and the thunder wand is less useful so there’s little reason to hold onto it, but in the first 31 stages, you have to think carefully about inventory management.

The enemies of Arkista’s Ring are actually pretty well-designed, in terms of their behaviors. They very intentionally work to stay out of your line of fire, even if it means they’ll just pace back and forth over a small stretch of map. The various bosses you face along the way — you’ll know it’s a boss because there’s a specific song that plays in those levels — have stronger and faster projectile attacks than you do, and will wipe you out in a hurry if you try to take them head on. So, don’t: figure out how to come at them from the side. But only in a cardinal direction firing range, as Arkista’s Ring doesn’t let you fire in eight directions. The boss fights would be a lot easier if they did, but probably not in an enjoyable way. You’d lose some of the strategy and tension that comes from “I have to attack fast but only when I’m briefly out of range and can escape” or “I found a little hidey hole I can fire off shots from where the boss can’t get to me” if that were the case.

This probably all sounds better than the tepid introduction of the game suggested, but the problem with Arkista’s Ring is mostly that it’s fine, but not compelling enough to actually want to go through all 124 stages. It’s a bit too repetitive for that entire run to be enjoyable, and while the later loops are more difficult in some ways, in others, they’re easier, which means the game doesn’t succeed in the way that, say, an actual arcade game with looping would. Still, there’s something here that would be interesting to re-release or revisit with a remake. Preferably just one that’s priced appropriately and available digitally, instead of as a near-$60 secondhand purchase nearly three-and-a-half decades later. And maybe even builds on the game we did get with the one that was originally intended.

A note: Alt text was breaking images and captions for some unknown reason, so the usual alt text was included with the image captions in this feature. It’s not a new editorial style decision, merely a way to ensure the alt text still made its way into the article somehow.

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