Kingdom Hearts
Ah, Kindom Hearts. It is a beautiful, beautiful game that
took the epicentre of imagination and made it into something truly special. It
never quite achieved the mainstream success of the triple-A titles of the time,
nor did it manage to compete with the leading games that came after. However,
after twelve years it retains a relatively small but immensely loyal fan base.
And rightly so.
I played through the game up until more or less the end back
in 2003, and had a few false starts later on, but I’ve never beaten it. And
with No Game New Year still in full swing, and my sister’s PS2 still plugged
in, I felt compelled to give it one more shot.
Anybody who knows about Kingdom Hearts knows the score: It
is an amalgamation of the Disney and Squaresoft intellectual property in a
somewhat linear but very enjoyable role playing game. That, to me, sealed the
deal while I was still reading magazines running the preview versions of the
game in Japanese – I’m a big Disney fan, and I loved the Final Fantasy games.
What was not to love about this?
As with all games that take more than a day to finish, I’ll
probably be some time with this one, so I’m going to give you the highlights
here:
There was a certain amount of innocence to Squaresoft before
it became Square Enix. Final Fantasy VII was a huge success, had some
incredibly memorable characters and had a great storyline. Final Fantasy VIII
was a good game but fell short of the mark in terms of character, and Final
Fantasy X was very good indeed.[1] So taking
some of the characters from their games and putting them into Kingdom Hearts
was a fantastic idea. With a completely new hero, Sora, you actually got to
interact with some of the characters who appeared in the aforementioned Final
Fantasy games – Cloud, Tidus and Squall (Leon
Similarly, teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck, characters
I have been watching on TV and film my ENTIRE LIFE, was magic. They both have
video games of their own but having their characters interact with yours – Sora
– was an incredible experience that made me somehow feel that they were talking
to you – with their quirks and
personalities intact. Takes me right back to ‘pretend’ games you played as a
kid, which I won’t go in to but don’t tell me you didn’t do the same at some
point.
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| Of course, kicking their asses was fun too... |
I equally enjoyed teaming up with the Disney characters you
find on the various worlds you visit, though I have done less of it this time
due to team balancing (I’ll tell you later.) At the time of writing I’ve only
got to Tarzan in this playthrough, but later on you get to team up with
Aladdin, Ariel from the Little Mermaid, and The Beast to name but a few. Plus
the characters you can get through Summons (Simba, Bambi, the Genie) are a
pleasure to have alongside you.
I set the difficulty on this one to Expert. As far as I
know, it only affects the combat, and I found myself breezing through most of
the combat on Normal difficulty. I wanted a
challenge, so I set it to expert. However, I found a different challenge in one
of the few negative aspects of this game: The controls.
Sadly, both the controls and the interface don’t work quite
as well as they should. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the character action games
I’ve been playing on the Xbox360, but it took me a while to get my head around
the idea that you can’t change the direction of your attack during a combo. Usually
you can do this in games by pointing the analogue stick in the direction you
want to go, but it doesn’t work like that in Kingdom Hearts. Some of the moves
take a surprisingly long time to do, and more than once I’ve been injured or
killed simply because I’ve been interrupted during the first attack of the
combo. Similarly the jumping is a little off, in that once you land, there is a
delay of about a third of a second before you can move again. I imagine I will
appreciate it a lot more during some of the platforming sections I know are
coming up, but I’ve been caught out by it a few times in combat.
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| Well I'm very pleased to hear it... |
The other major is that as far as I can see, there is no
quick way to access your items. You have to ‘equip’ items to each character in
order for them to be able to use it in combat, which is fine, because otherwise
Goofy and Donald would use all your potions in five minutes. But once you get
in to combat, you have to use the directional buttons – which takes your thumb
off the left analogue stick and stops you moving – and cycle down two menus to
do something as simple as using a potion. I’ve lost count of the amount of
times I’ve died because I was faffing about trying to use my potions, and while
I’m getting a little more used to it now, it’s still a design flaw in my
opinion.
But as I said in my coverage of Fallout: Brotherhood of
Steel, which was from about the same time, this game was developed before a lot
of these things were standardised. There wasn’t a precedent for a ‘good’
system, so the developers just did whatever came to their heads, though I still
find it hard to believe that anyone thought a menu in a real-time combat system
was a good idea. My sister actually told me that it gets a lot better in
Kingdom Hearts 2, which I haven’t played yet due to wanting to complete the
first game, er, first.
To end on a high
point Traverse
Town
I probably will shed a tear or two when I get to Agrabah –
Aladdin’s stage – and the Genie makes his appearance. As I write this, Robin
Williams, who voice-acted the Genie in the film Aladdin, died earlier in the
week. I found myself as moved by the terrible circumstances of his death as I
am by the huge legacy of work he leaves behind, and will be reminded of it only
too well when his character appears in the game.[2]
I’ll most likely be away next week but hopefully I’ll have a
little more to say about it when I come back. See you all then!
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