Has Anyone Else Played King's Field?

Lately I've been obsessed with replaying all of the games from my childhood and re-experiencing them as a dad. King's Field was one of the shittier games that I loved as a kid, and it's always fun to plug them in decades later and laugh at the idea that you were ever impressed by such a bad game. I found out this morning that the King's Field series is considered by many to be the original Dark Souls. I'm now a little more impressed with this uncommon piece of gaming history.

My mother bought this game for me, she always got me random games whenever she was feeling guilty for the shitty parenting job that she was doing. Since the games she always provided were completely impulsive and random, I got to enter these experiences blind, having no knowledge whatsoever of the game's premise. King's Field certainly supported that, because the game's story takes forever to discover. You start the game by getting dropped in a vast network of underground tunnels and cave towns with no explanation. You explore the tunnels with literally no clue what to expect, "Are there dragons in this game?", "Will I ever meet another human?", and the entire map is available right from the start. The best sword in the game just has to be stumbled upon, but the same is true for the strongest creature in the game too.

It was first person sword combat, it was man-eating plants and cryptic clues found on mysterious dead adventurers. It was pure exploration. I loved King's Field despite all of it's flaws, (I was much less critical at that age mind you) but reading the internets you'd think that this game was Zelda with all the praise it receives. I suppose I can see the similarity between King's Field  and Demon Souls, but I refuse to recommend these old FPS (that's first-person-swordyfights) games to anyone today. The nostalgia is there, but the games are hard to play again, they look like shit, the confusion is monumental, and the save points are the rarest treasure in the game. But hey, 12 year old me put 50+ hours into it.