Kingdom Hearts
I just can't tell why, exactly, I consider Kingdom Hearts to be a great game--it's certainly not a good game. It's maddeningly flawed: the level design is awful, the levels themselves are pretty barren, the gummi ship bits are execrable and you've got to do them OVER and OVER and OVER again, the controls are stiff, the whole "you can't view your menu even to change camera settings" thing was a bad idea, the whole mythology--while interesting--is convoluted beyond belief--
--and yet, somehow, it's a compelling experience: this is my third time through the game, and since I rarely replay games that's saying something significant. I think the audacity and outright charm of the premise still hasn't gotten old. It pissed me off, all the "kiddie" comments it got--I'm a red-blooded American boy, and I grew up with Disney characters, with the movies it redoes. It's impossible to play through the game without feeling like some part of your childhood is being validated--turned darker, the sequel especially but also the first game having some relatively disturbing undertones.
Kingdom Hearts ends up feeling like the effort of a team that knew the basics of what they wanted to do but not being quite able to make the end product match their vision--you can see the game they were trying to make, and that game was awesome--and it's the rare case of a sequel which fixes most if not all of the first game's problems. It's been two years almost to the day that I last played Kingdom Hearts 2, so I might be rusty (part of the reason I'm replaying the first is because I want to replay the second and need a brushup on story)--but I know the gummi ship areas were better (if still not *thrilling*.) The battle system felt a bit tighter--fighting a thousand enemies in the first game's battle system would have been a frustrating goddamn mess. Doing that fight in the second game's battle system is almost a pleasure.
The sense of pace, particularly in the first game, is very weak. It's an incredibly common technique--used in film, literature, games, any kind of media--to have an extremely tense series of scenes, a hook to thrill us immediately, and then calming down the pace and introducing the characters. Kingdom Hearts tries to do that--we get a pretty video of Sora's dream, and then we're taken to a black void with floors made of stained-glass portraits of Disney princesses, for a tutorial section. It's decently atmospheric--and it's got a badass orchestral theme which slowly and subtly increases in volume--it sets up a few themes--those princesses are important, the whole darkness/shadow themes are introduced--and it's vaguely more integrated than the average tutorial--but it doesn't come off as particularly tense--it's very obvious that you're playing a section completely separate from the rest of the game. And then, it's off for fun on Destiny Islands, where you see a series of scenes, and...get to have more tutorials. You're given a mission of putzing around the island and finding a few scavenger hunt items for a raft, and since none of the environments across the game are particularly interesting, it doesn't come off as particularly fun. After a cutscene, you're tasked with...finding more scavenger hunt items. Since you've just done that, it's much less fun. After that--almost two hours in--the game becomes properly exciting--your island begins to go to hell, people make strange pronouncements, and then...you find yourself in another town, puttering around.
And as far as I can tell, there's no real aim for you puttering around. The game tries to make some Comedy out of it--you're looking for the next cutscene while Goofy and Donald are looking for you, and they do the thing where you exit a room and they come into the same room looking for you. And you go to the next area, and they come into the area that you just left. Repeat until you get bored, go to the save point, and quit for the night, because leaving the room where the save point is is apparently the trigger for the cutscene. There's no real indication of that--it happened to me almost randomly. The entire game is like that--fight some mooks, wander around, fight some more mooks, wander around, and hope that this is the room with the cutscene. (If I remember correctly, KH2 features a minimap with a flashing red arrow, and I hate anyone who thinks that that cuts down on exploration, because by and large wandering around is not fun.)
It's like I said: the game works in spite of itself, and while it might have made a better movie, a lot of it is great--I love seeing familiar plots get turned around to fit an overarching metaplot. And where the game succeeds, it succeeds brilliantly: the beginning of Wonderland was exactly how I wanted it to be (and I wouldn't have minded if it'd been extended in favor of kicking out the boring Lotus Forest scavenger hunt), and I remember flying around in Neverland to be awesome. (I'll see if my memory is correct.) I'm hoping to knock this one out quickly, although Cerebus is being a bastard--I know I beat it within a rental period the first time around, although I didn't have a job wasting all of my time when it came out. Some, start paying me to write about games: I hate working.
--and yet, somehow, it's a compelling experience: this is my third time through the game, and since I rarely replay games that's saying something significant. I think the audacity and outright charm of the premise still hasn't gotten old. It pissed me off, all the "kiddie" comments it got--I'm a red-blooded American boy, and I grew up with Disney characters, with the movies it redoes. It's impossible to play through the game without feeling like some part of your childhood is being validated--turned darker, the sequel especially but also the first game having some relatively disturbing undertones.
Kingdom Hearts ends up feeling like the effort of a team that knew the basics of what they wanted to do but not being quite able to make the end product match their vision--you can see the game they were trying to make, and that game was awesome--and it's the rare case of a sequel which fixes most if not all of the first game's problems. It's been two years almost to the day that I last played Kingdom Hearts 2, so I might be rusty (part of the reason I'm replaying the first is because I want to replay the second and need a brushup on story)--but I know the gummi ship areas were better (if still not *thrilling*.) The battle system felt a bit tighter--fighting a thousand enemies in the first game's battle system would have been a frustrating goddamn mess. Doing that fight in the second game's battle system is almost a pleasure.
The sense of pace, particularly in the first game, is very weak. It's an incredibly common technique--used in film, literature, games, any kind of media--to have an extremely tense series of scenes, a hook to thrill us immediately, and then calming down the pace and introducing the characters. Kingdom Hearts tries to do that--we get a pretty video of Sora's dream, and then we're taken to a black void with floors made of stained-glass portraits of Disney princesses, for a tutorial section. It's decently atmospheric--and it's got a badass orchestral theme which slowly and subtly increases in volume--it sets up a few themes--those princesses are important, the whole darkness/shadow themes are introduced--and it's vaguely more integrated than the average tutorial--but it doesn't come off as particularly tense--it's very obvious that you're playing a section completely separate from the rest of the game. And then, it's off for fun on Destiny Islands, where you see a series of scenes, and...get to have more tutorials. You're given a mission of putzing around the island and finding a few scavenger hunt items for a raft, and since none of the environments across the game are particularly interesting, it doesn't come off as particularly fun. After a cutscene, you're tasked with...finding more scavenger hunt items. Since you've just done that, it's much less fun. After that--almost two hours in--the game becomes properly exciting--your island begins to go to hell, people make strange pronouncements, and then...you find yourself in another town, puttering around.
And as far as I can tell, there's no real aim for you puttering around. The game tries to make some Comedy out of it--you're looking for the next cutscene while Goofy and Donald are looking for you, and they do the thing where you exit a room and they come into the same room looking for you. And you go to the next area, and they come into the area that you just left. Repeat until you get bored, go to the save point, and quit for the night, because leaving the room where the save point is is apparently the trigger for the cutscene. There's no real indication of that--it happened to me almost randomly. The entire game is like that--fight some mooks, wander around, fight some more mooks, wander around, and hope that this is the room with the cutscene. (If I remember correctly, KH2 features a minimap with a flashing red arrow, and I hate anyone who thinks that that cuts down on exploration, because by and large wandering around is not fun.)
It's like I said: the game works in spite of itself, and while it might have made a better movie, a lot of it is great--I love seeing familiar plots get turned around to fit an overarching metaplot. And where the game succeeds, it succeeds brilliantly: the beginning of Wonderland was exactly how I wanted it to be (and I wouldn't have minded if it'd been extended in favor of kicking out the boring Lotus Forest scavenger hunt), and I remember flying around in Neverland to be awesome. (I'll see if my memory is correct.) I'm hoping to knock this one out quickly, although Cerebus is being a bastard--I know I beat it within a rental period the first time around, although I didn't have a job wasting all of my time when it came out. Some, start paying me to write about games: I hate working.
posted by R. Goodness at 7:06 PM
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