Black Knight’s such a funky game because the core gameplay is exceptionally simple in terms of its mechanics, right. But the levelling system and blacksmith stuff have so many “hidden” (not really hidden, but they’re not the sort you’re necessarily gonna pay attention to) mechanics that add more depth to the whole thing and which have just widely gone underappreciated. Like there’s a whole morality system which can put permanent badges on your file that give you in game benefits and drawbacks and shit, the ranking system and follower counts and how they contribute to levelling and unlocking exclusive style skills, the tons of equippable items you can throw on to impact gameplay a little bit or change the music even!
The thing that was especially coolest to me when I played the game growing up was the weapon crafting system - they went to the effort of modelling 11 extra weapons for each of the non-Sonic characters just for the hell of it! And they’ve all got like unique materials that go into crafting them! And fair enough the majority of them don’t actually offer notable gameplay differences at all and a few of them sorta reuse each other’s models in some way, but isn’t it dope that that’s like a thing anyway? And the final weapons offer huge buffs to every character too so!
Like they absolutely did not have to do this and they just did!
And then I also just wanna mention the multiplayer. Because mechanically, despite offering a fair few game modes they are all fundamentally pretty simple, and I don’t know if anyone playing the game today is gonna have a great time with any of them. But specifically for the multilplayer mode - they added tons of other playable characters just for the hell of it. Regular Shadow, Knuckles and Blaze are available, obviously. But they also brought in Amy and gave her her own animations and shit. Or how about Blacksmith Tails? He doesn’t even have an in-game model in the main game they made that shit just for multiplayer. Or King Arthur himself, the main antagonist for the first half of the game, being playable in there! Most fucking impressively of all, Silver and Jet getting Knight designs as Galahad and Lamorak and being thrown in there, once again with unique weapons and animations and shit! I don’t know if we know enough about Black Knight’s development to know if, say, those two specifically were supposed to be part of the main game and got cut - or if they really are just a bonus for multiplayer. But isn’t it sick as fuck that that’s a thing either way?
Suppose the whole thing is you can comfortably beat Black Knight’s main story in like less than 3 hours tops but despite that fact they absolutely stuffed the game with content, and yo I just think that’s sick lol.
