Great Games that Aren't that Great In Retrospect - Kingdom Hearts

You ever had that game series you used to love as a kid? Played the fuck out of it, went to midnight release for that shit, rocked out to the soundtrack, bought shittons of memorabilia...then one day you grew up and realized it really wasn't that great to begin with. You were just a punk with bad taste. It might have even been terribad. You then proceed to move on to much more heterosexual and not shitty games.

Well this segment is all about that.

Today's specimen:

Yeah I went there. Suck it up and read, bitches.

Nobody thought Kingdom Hearts was going to work (and eventually it didn't, but we'll get to that later). Why would it? Mixing the light hearted Disney (although to be honest disney isn't as kiddy as some people make it out to be)icons with the melodramatic and gritty Final Fantasy elements and imagery seemed like something out of an obscure fanfiction. But Square-Enix decided to go through with it anyway and made a sleeper hit. Kingdom Hearts eventually became a franchise, with 6 games and one remake under its belt, and one more remake and new game coming in the near future. Not bad for what seemed like a freak experiment, right?

I'm a pretty odd case because KH1 was not my introduction to the series. Chain of Memories was my first Kingdom Hearts game. I remember stumbling into it, seeing Cloud Strife interacting with Donald Duck and some animu kid and was like "what the fuck am i playing". I decided to keep playing. To my surprise I found it pretty enjoyable. After getting filled in on what exactly was going on, I got into the story and found the characters and plot intriguing and the dialogue well written. Plus the music was cool.

I got into the series pretty late, around the time KH2 was scheduled for an NA release. I spoiled the whole game sadly, and played it and kind of enjoyed it anyway, although not as much as CoM. Got the first game eventually and beat that too. Still haven't beaten Days.

Probably because of this, my opinion of the series is a bit different than most people's.

The general consensus amongst the fanbase seems to be that KH1 was god tier, CoM had bad gameplay but a good plot and writing (best character development in the series), while KH2 was either terribad in comparison or just not as good at the first game. Opinions on Days seem mixed at best.

To be honest, I don't find KH1 to be that good. I can certainly understand why some people like it so much, but that's really my whole point as to why a lot of my affection for the series has faded away: Kingdom Hearts mixed two things a lot of people really liked and managed to throw in a generic but serviceable RPG story and characters, with some fairly decent music for good measure. The result ends up being an awkward and deeply flawed game (terrible camera, bad platforming/level design, button mashy gameplay, etc), but one which evokes a magical charm that makes it likable in spite of its flaws, when it's really not that great of a game in reality. That's really all there is to it.

Unfortunately, with each game the charm from the first game wears off more and more.

While I liked CoM when I played it, it's really just a rehash of KH1's worlds except with alterations to the Disney plots to fit in the game's theme of memories. The problem is that the game doesn't even try to hide how filler the Disney worlds are. In Re:CoM the Disney worlds don't even have voice acting, Square KNOWS nobody cares about them anyway. Sure the plot in Castle Oblivion is interesting enough, but you have to get through a lot of shit to get to it.

CoM's gameplay was supposed to give a more strategic edge to the battle system other than MASH MASH MASH X, but given how you basically just put the highest level cards in your deck with some 0's to card break sleights, and win, it doesn't really work. It's also not really that fun.

KH2 didn't have the rehashing problem, but many new ones ended up rearing their ugly heads Part of the issue is, funnily enough, that SE listened to what fans and critics said. Terrible camera? Ok no problem, fixed. Terrible level design? Fair enough, let's streamline the worlds. Gameplay is too shallow? Alright, let's add some Drive Forms and Reaction Commands to spice things up a bit.

The thing is they didn't realize is that doing all of those things without making a few other tweaks accordingly makes for a much more polished game than its predecessor, but a much more shallow and underwhelming experience in general since the initial innovation of the first game isn't there anymore.

The worlds don't have awkward platforming anymore, but in compensation...there's not much at all, really. I would have liked good exploration rather than none at all. It's watch a cutscene, go to the next area, beat up some heartless along the way, watch another cutscene, rinse repeat until you get to the boss, for every world. This wouldn't be as much of a problem except

1) The plot is shit.

The series' writing has never been particularly stellar, but it became unbearable in KH2. A lot of the dialogue sounds awkward or just plain retarded. I don't know if it was a bad localization or just plain bad writing. The plot itself has some interesting ideas, but the execution is godawful. Outside of the aforementioned dialogue, the pacing is awful.

In a sense, the worlds aren't as filler as CoM's, but even then the memory worlds had lessons and writing that paralleled the problems Sora was facing in Castle Oblivion so they had SOME worth, however little it was.

In KH2, you're basically doing the same thing as the first game: fighting Heartless and stopping Disney villains from causing havoc.

...except the plot isn't supposed to be about that. The main threat are the nobodies and Organization XIII, they're clearly supposed to be the big bads of the game. But the game focuses on them very little to the point where they don't really feel like that much of a threat at all.

The Organization doesn't even really show up in most of the Disney worlds. Most of them just have Pete and his antics which don't really amount to much, and aren't particularly interesting. It doesn't really help that you have to revisit most worlds at least twice, and the second time you go there isn't usually that much better than the first.

Oh yeah, they also turned Maleficent into a joke. Isn't that great? She and Pete become the game's comic relief villain.

Maleficent. A comic relief villain. That is just....not right on so many levels.

A shining example of shitty writing. The final confrontation with the Organization doesn't feel epic (for lack of a better term) at all because there's practically no build up, it doesn't feel like you're stopping the game's main villains finally after all the shit you went through because YOU DIDN'T FUCKING SEE THEM AT ALL. Some games pull the enigmatic villain thing well, but kh2 isn't one of them.

2) The gameplay can be somewhat fun and overall it's all flash and no substance. You don't have to do much other than just mash X and mash triangle when the reaction commands pop up. Good games don't necessarily need deep combat systems to be good, but in KH2's case it's just kind of too easy. It's not a problem that they gave you too many options, rather that most of the enemies are negligible punching bags.

The nostalgia filter is undoubtedly involved somewhat in this whole issue for some people, as KH1 wasn't that great either (and as someone who's played KH2 before KH1, I can attest to that), but at least it was kinda cute when it came out.

As for Days?

Well I don't really fully know what I think of it yet, to be honest. It doesn't really feel like it was necessary, I didn't even think there would have been anything too important during Roxas' days at the Organization to warrant a full game at all. So they made up some shit about a girl nobody remembers (which incidentally, is a plot device they seem to be using a lot, more on that below) so they could avoid the issue of why nobody talks about her in KH2. The gameplay is kind of fun and seems to actually be kind of hard at first, but once you realize magic is overpowered, it kind of balances itself out. The panel system is pretty cool so I'll give it props for that. Haven't been able to finish Days, and the reason for that is one of the flaws that's becoming apparent for the series as a whole, which I will get to in a moment.

Birth By Sleep is coming out in September. I haven't really had the chance to play this outside of a few minutes, so I've no opinion on the gameplay so far. I have spoiled a lot of the plot for myself though, so I can talk about that a little bit.

Honestly it sounds like they're not trying anymore. I don't mind the fact that some of the twists are pretty predictable, but the plot in general seems kind of silly. Recycled character designs are getting annoying. I won't say anything in particular, but if you've seen the english trailer and listened to Vanitas' voice you've probably already guessed at what I'm getting at.

Also, X-Blade is a really stupid name.

Music for BBS is stellar, the synth for the strings is fantastic. For the record, Takeharu Ishimoto (world ends with you, crisis core, dissidia) composed the vanitas themes, not Shimomura.

That's about it.

Re:coded? coded gets on my nerves and I don't feel glad about the fact we're getting it remade. Why? Because it's the third rehash of kh1 they've done so far. Going to the same areas of the same worlds over and over and over again is getting really boring, and it's just lazy and insulting of SE to assume people won't mind if they just keep rehashing the best game in the series over and over again....except they're right because people keep buying the games anyway.

"but but but they're going to memory worlds it has to be worlds they visited-"

No, shut up. There are many ways around that. Just because it's the same world doesn't mean it has to be the exact same areas to visit. And bugs could also interfere with the memories and create new worlds or some shit. I don't know. I'd just be glad never to go to Agrabah ever again. THAT'S why I haven't finished Days.

The series' plot is getting more and more convoluted. it's not for the better. At first it was just a simple little Disney animu game, and now it's all ZEAAAAANOOOOOOTOOOO and KIIIIIBURREEEEEEEDO MASUTAAAAAAAA and shit and it's just really sophomoric.

The trailer for KH:3D makes me lol because it's KH opening kind of shit. Apparently it's not representative of the actual game, we get to play as Riku, AND go to new worlds, so this might not be as bad as it could have been.

Regardless of that, while I still somewhat like the series and plan to check out (see:pirate, because spending money on this shit would be silly when I could put that money towards more important things like MOTHERFUCKING SKYWARD SWORD AAAAAW YEAAAAAAH) Birth By Sleep and re:coded, I definitely don't like it as much as I did 4-5 years ago. It was an odd idea that ended up working surprisingly well at first, but then went to shit fast. Square-Enix is milking the fuck out of it because that's how capitalism works. Not gonna blame them completely, since the fanbase is stupid enough to put up with that shit.

But on the whole I like better games now.

-Paolo