This is admittedly the first time I’d played Kingdom Hearts II. I’d played most of the spinoff games in the past, but given how little I kind of enjoyed playing through Kingdom Hearts in its original form, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to pay for KH2 at its release when I should really have been focused on paying for college. Since then going back to play it just never really happened. In continuing my path to eventually get to KH3, this was then the one real big game I had to get to, and it’s surprising in ways I wasn’t expecting.
The first surprise is in the drastic difficulty change between releases. Where the original Kingdom Hearts was artifically difficult because of bad mechanics, the second game is artificially easy because of good mechanics used too much. There were definitely a couple of times where I died to the usual KH blind damage nuke, but by and large I was able to brute force my way around those points once I knew what to look out for. However, this all came down to the fact that combat was significantly better than the first game in a couple crucial ways.
Combat is definitely better in KH2. This ends up being really nice when literally dozens of enemies are thrown at you.
The first big change to combat is the complete rewrite of how mana works in the game. The original game recharged mana per-attack completed. While this works alright in games like Tales of where there’s a bunch of safety space in absorbing damage, for KH getting up close had to be fairly specifically timed and often resulted in death by accidents. The entire process of using mana in that combat system just ended up feeling like a slow process, so I really leaned into items for healing and straight attack brute force. It’s a style that I enjoy anyway in a typical action RPG, so poor combat mechanics aside it worked out fairly well for me.
For KH2, mana is a fixed bar resource, magic attacks have a fixed cost, and once a mana bar is depleted it is set into a timer-based automatic recharge. This vastly improved the utility of magic as a whole. I knew that I could fairly reliably have a Cure spell if needed. If I was in a section where the enemy was stunned, I could unload a bunch of magic spells and know that I wouldn’t then have to play it safe while waiting for attacks to refill my mana. As a result, my entire combat tendencies went into a much more aggressive offense-first setup which ended up greatly benefiting the overall flow of the game throughout.
At this point in the game I’d already stacked up a 5+ chain combo, which made getting after tiny flying enemies really nice.
The combat flow was also helped by the second biggest surprise for me – just how many damn attacks they let you build into your combo by the end of the game. Additional combo skills were unlocked periodically, usually focused on some specific type of combat (on the ground, in the air, etc). Turning on these skills basically meant that your combo chain would get one longer and let you lean into heavy damage that much longer. By the end of the game I probably had about a 10 combo chain in the air, and at least 6 or 7 on the ground. The end result of this is that I could pretty typically go into a boss and do at least half a bar of damage per-combo, if not more. In any stun situation, I was easily doing 2 full bars of damage against a boss. This solved a lot of the problem of the first game’s bosses, where they mechanically sucked AND took forever, by simply having them die quicker whether or not their mechanics were really that good.
Besides all that, the overall game was definitely a cleaner experience. Boss arenas tended to be pretty simple box or circle affairs, which got rid of the collision problems of the first game. Your sidekick characters tended to be more on the ball with support healing, giving you more opportunity to be in the fight. The general balance curve was a lot less prone to difficulty spikes and flatline segments, giving a much more balanced progression path. Even the worlds themselves were setup in a way that more paths opened up on second or third playthroughs of a world, so going back never felt like it was done as a need to grind or search, but instead to learn more about what was going on. Attacking vaguely in midair did a much better job of homing in on targets around you, so there was a lot less waste in simply trying to get AT something.
It’s also worth noting that the Lion King costumes are the best costumes the series has had to this point.
Is this game without problems? Hardly. The things above all lead up to an experience that is simply way too easy overall, but it ends up being easy in a way that doesn’t detract from the experience. It’s also got some systems like the form-shifting Drive system that I quite frankly didn’t find at all useful beyond gaining some traversal passives. Summons were also technically still there, but again I didn’t end up finding much practical use for them. The story is also completely bonkers, and when combined with the KH 1.5 disc’s lore makes absolutely no sense. However, this game is a much cleaned up experience compared to the first title, and in doing so it goes from something that I play because Disney + Final Fantasy is an interesting quirky idea to something that I play because it’s actually a lot of fun.
Next in line for the KH replay cycle is going to be Dream Drop Distance HD, which actually is one of the games I’ve played through before.
Long story short; I want to play Kingdom Hearts 3, but for the life of me I can’t remember the lore. I could just look the story up on the internet, but frankly I’d rather play the games again and in the process remember why each one had it’s own set of problems. For the time being, we’re starting off with the HD 1.5 ReMIX games of KH1 and Re:Chain of Memories
Genre: Action RPG
Platform: PS4
KH1 Also Available On: PS2, PS3
Chain of Memories Also Available On: GBA, PS2, PS3
This combo of series totally makes sense right?
Kingdom Hearts was always a weird combination love letter to both Final Fantasy and Disney. It mixed the two series in a way that never should have worked, but somehow doesn’t feel weird when in action. Each individual world has its own chance to shine and give focus to a specific set of Disney or FF characters. Despite its gameplay problems, the game did well enough to now be a series of more games and video tie-ins than I can keep track of. However, going back and replaying the original is definitely a weird gameplay experience.
This is an ARPG, so combat is important. Unfortunately it’s also kind of bad.
Even at release, the combat in Kingdom Hearts wasn’t fantastic, but it definitely shows some lumps now. Moment to moment, it has some fundamental problems relative to modern games. The camera isn’t great, so the game really leans into both soft and hard locks for attacks. Attacks can be pretty inconsistent in their ability to hit, but you end up gaining so many variations in ranges that by the end of the game you can really spam attack from anywhere to hit something. Donald as a character more or less just sucks, but you gain a ton of world-specific characters to replace him, and by end game he’s gained so much magic capability that he’s pretty useful.
This is also backed by a wildly inconsistent level of difficulty. What I’d consider the two hardest bosses in the game are the Tarzan world boss (roughly world 3) and the Little Mermaid boss (roughly the mid point of the game). The Tarzan boss is difficult entirely because of poor design. You can take immediate damage coming out of two cutscenes unless you’re spamming dodge. The arena that the fight takes place in has multiple points where dodge rolls can be blocked on bad collision, despite the fact that the fight is incredibly heavy on dodging to avoid fast damage, including instant-trace ranged attacks. Basically it’s a fight where the core mechanics of the game fight against the setup in place in a hugely negative situation. On the other hand the Little Mermaid boss fight is a pure damage nuke situation, and fought straight up is unnecessarily heavy in healing. However, the mechanics of the fight allow you to easily get behind the boss into a place where you take significantly reduced damage while easily hitting the main target point.
This pattern in particular is a common exploit in boss fights. I’d say probably about 50% of boss fights have a “safe” location behind them where the boss can neither hit you or turn to eventually hit you, while allowing you to lay in full damage. The friendly AI is also pretty good at following you into these locations, so you can often have a full party rotation simply unable to take damage. There’s signs that this was attempted to be fixed (fight adds, homing attacks, etc), but the attempts were pretty meaningless, and the fights just weren’t fun when not taking advantage.
Even if combat doesn’t stack up, seeing moments like this makes the experience worth it.
If this all sounds pretty bad, it’s because it is. This game simply hasn’t aged well from a gameplay perspective. Luckily it has aged well from a universe perspective, even if the lore is a bit nonsense. Without spoiling too much, KH1 basically exists to establish how all these Disney and Final Fantasy worlds are connected, but then future games go through and completely ruin any ability to make sense of the overall story. However, seeing moments like your party all dressed in-character for Nightmare Before Christmas or The Little Mermaid, or seeing Cloud fighting in the Olympus Coliseum makes it all worth it. It’s completely batshit crazy, and somehow it just works.
I didn’t get much further than this. If KH1 didn’t age well, then Chain of Memories REALLY lost it.
On the other hand, Chain of Memories really didn’t pass the worth it test. This was a GBA->PS2 remake where ARPG and cards mixed. Movement was in real time, where action selection was out of a card deck. Cards have a score value, playing a card against an enemy card of higher value would cancel their attack, and you go from there. In 2D on the GBA, this worked….alright. The view of the action was limited, so movement wasn’t super important, and you could still see to dodge while focusing on getting your card selection in order. In 3D this just doesn’t really work well at all.
Between manipulating the bad camera, trying to dodge attacks that you can’t really see, and trying to select the right cards, there just is too much going on to really effectively play the game. My best plan of attack ended up being a simple rotation:
Setup my deck specifically in high->low card value, with healing cards at the end.
Spam all my high-value cards to get off some easy attacks.
Spam stack the low value cards and activate some quick combos. This would remove low value cards over time, but I didn’t care.
Spam the healing spell cards at the end of my deck.
Refresh my active deck and repeat.
It was basically an invincible pattern as long as I kept my deck up to date, and in being invincible it wasn’t really fun. I wasn’t playing to effectively run the battle system. I was simply stacking my deck and going through the motions. In practice, this game would be better off being much slower paced, getting rid of movement, and having it be more around deck strategy, but we aren’t likely to see that anytime soon.
So the question then becomes, is it worth replaying these if you’ve really never played a Kingdom Hearts title? Honestly? Probably not. I could make a case for Kingdom Hearts 1, but you definitely want to go in expecting something a bit rough around the edges. I’d definitely skip Chain of Memories, although catching a cutscene movie on Youtube is probably not a bad idea. This is capped by a cutscene retelling of 358/2 Days which can also be found on Youtube to finish the story tie-ins between KH1 and KH2, and that’s where we’ll pick things up at some point in the future.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a curious experience. So much time was clearly spent on the technology of the game, and it is super impressive. Just as impressive is the story, which manages to craft perfect heroes and villains while simultaneously ending with an epilogue that connects to the first game in a way that elevates the original’s story even more. However, the gameplay is the odd ball out. There’s a lot of pieces here to take in, but they don’t fit together in a clean way – the game often feels like a collection of parts with no collective whole. Are the parts that are great enough to recommend playing this one?
It’s nice seeing Marston near the end, and it definitely feels more like the RDR1 landscape than the rest of the game. It really connects the two titles well.
RDR2 is the type of game that I kind of dread playing. I really enjoyed the original title despite its flaws, and that really centered around my enjoyment of the story. However, that game in particular wrote itself into a corner where a direct sequel was impossible. In this case, Rockstar went with the direct prequel approach. You’re generally playing as Arthur Morgan, though RDR1’s John Marston is still around as a member of your gang.
While this game is heavily focused on Arthur, this is still entirely the story of John Marston. Throughout the game, you see the events that shape Marston in the original – why he went after the people he did, why he cared so much to rescue his family, why the FBI had cornered him to begin with. Marston ultimately becomes the best of Arthur, and the care given to the growth of Arthur’s character ultimately has the great payoff of leading into the original game through RDR2‘s fantastic epilogue chapters played through the eyes of Marston. All of the narrative pieces that come together really end up elevating the story of RDR1 while allowing us to have a story that is fantastic as its own standalone experience.
This horse in particular died when a checkpoint reload spawned the horse inside a train that I was on. I couldn’t get back to it in time. That annoying level of missing polish is pretty persistent.
However, the gameplay is a lot less polished, and it’s definitely a big negative to me. Rockstar’s titles in the past decade or so have all had fairly similar issues to me. There’s always 1000 different systems that feel like they were made independent of each other and never tied together in a cohesive manner. In GTA4 and GTA5, the driving functioned but wasn’t great. In RDR1, the horse was there and felt like a chore. In all three of those, the gunplay was quite frankly below average at best and entirely exploitable. Overall their gameplay always seems to take a back seat at a polish level to technology and story. While that has worked great for them, it’s frankly kind of a bummer to see that continue.
I’ll start with some small stuff, because I think it’s indicative of the lack of care shown to allowing the gameplay to iterate to a high polish state:
I lost track of the amount of times I was attempting to hitch my horse up, then it would continue moving forward and run people over by accident, despite me having started the button input to begin hitching. This unfortunately usually results in the police chasing after me. Given a bit of polish, have hitching automatically lock and slow down the horse into the hitch point to reduce errors. If the user lets go of the button early, then allow the horse to resume normal movement.
You can fast travel if you’re at camp, and can do a pseudo fast travel by buying train tickets. Does this mean they technically have fast travel in the game? Sure. Does not being able to arbitrarily fast travel suck? Yes. Should they have done a more modern-style fast travel where unlocking travel points allows it to happen from anywhere? Absolutely. The current system is just encouraging empty gameplay hours to ride between missions.
Skinning animals is a large part of the general upgrade path for a lot of gear in the game. Unfortunately the skin trader only has two locations – one in the far east of the map and one in the far southeast of the map, both of which you don’t really spend much time in until well into the game.
Quite a lot of missions are preceded by a 5+ minute horse ride to the destination while the player follows some NPC. This would be all well and good, but many of these don’t include a checkpoint right afterwards. Nothing is more frustrating than being unable to skip a replay of a bunch of dialog because it isn’t technically a cutscene.
There’s a cover system, but it’s quite frankly not any more advanced than that seen in Gears of War more than a decade ago. You hit a button, hard lock to the nearest thing, have really bad mechanics to unlock from cover, and pretty rough mechanics to transition around or between different covers. Does it work? Sure. Is it good? Not really.
Those are just a few examples, but what it really comes down to is that it feels like realism or feature count constantly won out over fun. Do I get why they stuck to that as a principal of the development of the game? Sure. Does it make the gameplay worse for it? Absolutely.
You end up spending a LOT of time riding back and forth on horseback. Luckily it looks pretty damn good, even with rough spots.
The horse is also entirely frustrating, especially when compared against the horse mechanics introduced by Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey. RDR2 has the autopilot horse that AC does, but requires being in the cinematic camera, meaning it can’t be used for combat. Anything other than a gallop also requires the player to rhythmically tap X in sync with the horse’s gait which becomes entirely entertaining the first time you have to ride ten minutes across the map, let alone 40 hours later when you’re still tap tap tapping away to move fast. Of course, this isn’t necessary if you’re following alongside an NPC. At that point you can just hold X to match their speed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily cleanly match their turning, so you can get way off course if you aren’t actively turning the horse anyway. What this all comes down to is that combat on a horse is needlessly shit, and you spend a lot of time getting into combat on your horse.
You’ve got four entirely different sets of things you want to be doing on a horse – shoulder buttons for weapon firing input, face buttons for speed input, left stick for horse turning, and right stick for camera aiming. Right off the bat, speed vs camera aim are in a fight for a thumb. In a lot of situations, the people you are fighting are chasing you, so you’re trying to steer backwards while also not being able to see where you’re going. It’s all just a bunch of inputs fighting against each other in a way that Ubisoft already solved. The entire setup would be significantly better if you could just lock onto the nearest road at a fast gallop and completely remove the need to steer or manage speed, allowing the combat to shine and the player to focus their energy on taking out enemies. It would also have allowed for much more dynamic combat where enemies are coming from multiple directions since the player wouldn’t be having to manage so many disparate input needs.
It’s even more frustrating because they accidentally have sequences that allow this. There’s enough situations where you’re either the second person on a horse, or in the back of a horse drawn cart where you literally are a road-locked turret, and those all work fantastically better as combat situations than general minute to minute horse riding combat. Between these sequences and Ubisoft’s AC horse, I’m baffled that nobody noticed that there were already solutions that are simply more viable for smooth gameplay.
Some of the best sequences were stealth sequences and I wish they’d leaned more into using them over large scale combat, even if the stereotype of the wild west is large gun fights.
For what it’s worth, it also doesn’t help that the gunplay is down right average in RDR2. There’s a pretty decent range of weapons between multiple types of pistols, revolvers, rifles, and bows. However, they didn’t really separate themselves enough for me to care to use a specific weapon in most situations, unless I wanted the bow for stealth or a sniper weapon for longe range firing. In the most combat, the range of the weapon didn’t matter as I could lock fire snipe just as well with a revolver or rifle simply due to how bad the input setup worked.
Hip firing is effectively useless in RDR2. The game’s general gamepad input is pretty miserably bad. Target adhesion for right analog input is pretty rough, there’s not much in the way of useful magnetism to hone you in on a target close to the reticle, and I didn’t really get much out of turn sensitivity options. What they do have in place of good camera movement is an entirely exploitable hard lock system. Hitting the lock on button anywhere even close in screen space to a target will hard lock you to the target’s center. A simple stick flick upwards will pretty much guarantee a shot on the target’s head or neck area. I’d estimate that I could headshot about a 75% effective rate just doing this alone. The AI playing a lot of sit in a spot and peak out every now and then doesn’t make it any better.
Quite frankly, it trivializes combat in a way that makes the game far worse. The most tense situations end up being ones where the game simply has to throw targets at you because it’s easy to one-shot guys, and their AI isn’t trying to do anything other than move forward from cover to cover towards you. However, you can pick off entire crews of enemies in a matter of seconds because of how easy it is to exploit the targeting system. While I did occasionally die in some of these setups, it never really felt challenging, and death felt more happenstance based on me not paying attention to my health and getting to cover.
Regardless of all my complaints, this is still a damn fun game – entirely because it’s rescued by a story that’s as good as you’ll ever see in games.
I realize that that reads like a lot of complaining, and to some extent it is. However, for me it’s more frustration that a company can spend the amount of time and money it takes to make a game of absolutely mind blowing scope like RDR2, but still come up with something that has gameplay that feels entirely average. There’s a whole lot here that technically works, but spending more time on gameplay polish instead of time on feature creep (do the horses really need to periodically shit everywhere for realism?) could have left us with a game where the gameplay matched the fantastic story and visuals, rather than feeling like an afterthought.
All that aside, is this worth playing anyway? 100%. The story is going to be one of the best wild-west stories that we likely see for a long time in games, and I think it’s worth physically being in the game playing over watching the story on Youtube. Visually I was also constantly floored with each new vista I came up to, or each time I entered the largest city of Saint Denis at night. Those things being so good are what makes it incredibly frustrating that the gameplay simply doesn’t match it. This game is definitely a case where the sheer amount of money spent on it is obvious and raises the game up to something really damn good despite it having a ton of flaws, and for that alone I think it’s worth the spin.
