This could have worked. Kingdom, in my opinion, was 90% of the way to being an all time great. The hard work had been done. The graphics are very pretty and all hand drawn and must have taken hours and hours. But as with most 3DO games, for every diamond, there is always a bit of dog pooh. And in almost sickening predictability it is in the game play department of Kingdom - the far reaches.
O.K., it's another interactive 'cartoon' movie. And it is not a good interactive 'cartoon' movie. It did however try something that every other interactive movie - ever - had never even tried. Freedom of choice. Rather than the traditional Interactive Movie approach of wait for the right moment and then press UP (or 'A' or 'Down', etc.,) you were presented with a map and allowed to click freely.
That's right: within Kingdom you could choose a location at random, and this is where Kingdoms developers got it wrong. Once you have chosen a site to visit you are presented with a little hand animated Full Motion Video of your character entering the forest, going to the waterfall or going into town and so-on. But the freedom is too broad. In the really-real world when I want to go to town, I need to go outside, get in my car, drive through several villages and arrive eventually at town. In Kingdom you click on the town you are there immediately. You could then click on the car and then the waterfall and then the mountains across the other side of map. The journeying has little or no cause and effect. No logic. Add to that the opportunity for sudden death by simply clicking on the wrong location and it is all a bit tedious.
The graphics are well drawn and have the look and feel of Phileas Fog's 80 days around the world cartoon from the 1980's or perhaps Cities of Gold from the same era. The graphics make the game.
If they, the developers, had considered the games structure a little more, and after-all an Interactive Movie only has its structure as game-play, then Kingdom -the far reaches could have been an all time classic. As it is, it's an utter failure.
Not rare at all.
3DO Kid.
Ah, this game. I'm surprised you didn't notice the retrofitted manner of implementation. I suspected as much, but didn't find out until years later that this game was cobbled together from the 1984 game Thayer's Quest, which was kind of halfway between Dragon's Lair and what Kingdom became. The story was altered, and the voices were completely redubbed.
Here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thayer's_Quest
Turns out I was wrong, it was originally for the Halcyon console... which I'd never heard of until now. Small wonder, once you read about it.
Anyway, I remember a completely stupid frill they added being the ability to enter your own name before playing, with the machine saying "Welcome, (your name spoken in crappy synth)!" or some similar greeting.
Oh yeah, and the arcade machine had a keyboard layout, as well.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. The arcade game was also incomplete, though the ending was even more lame. The non-3DO sequel, Shadoan, was based on the Kingdom conversion.