I missed Kingdom Hearts when it first came out, despite really wanting to play the game. I was a Final Fantasy fan, and Disney characters were fine enough that I thought it would be really cool to play an RPG that was a mix between worlds. But I never got around to the game, and the next time it appeared on my radar, number 2 was out. Again I missed my chances.
Anyway by the time I had the means to play KH, the series had gotten a stupid number of spin-offs and such that all made this huge web of what was a crazy ass plot. So I didn't want to jump into the series at a random point and be completely lost. Luckily the HD-updates came to PS4 and I went out and bought both KH collections, giving me all the console and handheld games all in an easy collection on a single system.
Of course I dove right into the first game and man.....I don't think I should have bothered.
Kingdom Hearts tells a fairly bog standard story of a child becoming the "chosen" one, or Keymaster, who's destiny is to rid all of the small but numerous worlds in the universe of a plague of evil creatures called the Heartless. To do this, the Keymaster must find the key to the world and seal with with his Keyblade. It's a tropey premise, but not inherently a bad one. But as I played through the game, I kept wondering who the fuck this game was meant for. On the surface it feels a lot like a kids game, simple platforming, simple and easy combat, very mundane and nothing that would stress anyone above 12. The Disney characters further refine this childish appearance, along with a story I'm pretty sure I've seen in Disney movies before.
Yet the game is also litered with Final Fantasy characters. Characters that no kid in the target age group would be familiar with, and certainly not have the same feelings as somebody who loved and knew these characters. So is the game for older gamers? It strikes weird feelings in me, because as I am playing through the game, solving the world's puzzle and fighting the basic hack'n slash combat, I feel guilty for playing a kids game. Then Cloud Strife rolls up and hits me in my nostalgia and I think that this can't possibly be a kids game, Final Fantasy 7 came out 5 years earlier. So a twelve year old would have had to play and understand FF7 as a seven year old.
So there is a real contrast of tone here. On one hand you have a very childish appearance, with all around simplistic game-play. On the other hand you have characters sprinkled all over the game designed to play at the heart strings of someone 5-10 years older.
Also if the story gets convoluted, it certainly doesn't happen in Kingdom Hearts 1. The plot is as straight-foreward as you can get. The gameplay is simple, mash X to win. You can cast magic spells, but the menu navigation is annoying and by the time you get a spell selected your AI friends have already probably beaten the enemy you were trying to hit, if it wasn't a boss. I only ever used the cure spell, and the elemental spells were limited to use for interacting with puzzles in the environment.
The game definitely feels old too. Even in this HD remaster, the control feels floaty and the game is full of an old-game design mentality. Having your camera directly behind Sora at a decent distance, makes it hard to judge how close you need to be for your weapon swings. This leads to you missing a lot. Flying enemies are terrible because they'll often be hard to tell if they are in front of Sora or behind him because it is possible for them to be just barely behind Sora and still in front of the camera.
For a title that requires jumping puzzles, you would think the jumping would be tighter. Instead jumping is floaty as balls filled with helium. You can't jump mid-step, so timing a jump so that you leap from the edge of a platform at the last possible moment is basically impossible as Sora will walk right off the edge of said platform due to being uninterruptible mid-step. You have to jump with a little space left on the platform you are on, making the distance you need to jump to reach the next thing hard to gauge. A jump that you fail and looks impossible is actually possible if you just get Sora's steps to land a few pixals closer before the jump. The puzzles are to simple for them to be this frustrating goddamn it.
Bosses are laughably easy most of the time. Giant over sized baddies that telegraph every attack by singing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody in it's entirety before taking a swing at you. Most of the fights are made annoying this way because the only place you can hit a boss is in a single weak spot that they keep hidden for far too long, and remain vulnerable for way to short of a time. Meaning you spend a lot of the big climatic fights, waiting around, getting a little damage in, and waiting around again.
Perhaps I'm just too used to games designed in the post Ps3-360 era. Faster combats, tighter design, and better controls. Because despite these complaints, I still find myself unable to stop playing. And I genuinely do want to see how crazy the story gets in later entries. Under all of this, I do see a good game here, it just is very glaring in showing it's age. I understand that, but I have to review it based on the experience I had with it today, not how I might have judged it 15 years ago.
So on that note Kingdom Hearts gets a 5/10 from me. Boring gameplay, mundane story, and poor controls, all come together to somehow not be a terrible experience. There were a lot of flashes of fun, that were to quick to leave any lasting impression on me, except for the desire to see where they take the series. And maybe that's enough. KH1 is a foundation, a jumping off point where the other games will show me where the real meat of the story and gameplay lie.
Anyway by the time I had the means to play KH, the series had gotten a stupid number of spin-offs and such that all made this huge web of what was a crazy ass plot. So I didn't want to jump into the series at a random point and be completely lost. Luckily the HD-updates came to PS4 and I went out and bought both KH collections, giving me all the console and handheld games all in an easy collection on a single system.
Of course I dove right into the first game and man.....I don't think I should have bothered.
Kingdom Hearts tells a fairly bog standard story of a child becoming the "chosen" one, or Keymaster, who's destiny is to rid all of the small but numerous worlds in the universe of a plague of evil creatures called the Heartless. To do this, the Keymaster must find the key to the world and seal with with his Keyblade. It's a tropey premise, but not inherently a bad one. But as I played through the game, I kept wondering who the fuck this game was meant for. On the surface it feels a lot like a kids game, simple platforming, simple and easy combat, very mundane and nothing that would stress anyone above 12. The Disney characters further refine this childish appearance, along with a story I'm pretty sure I've seen in Disney movies before.
Yet the game is also litered with Final Fantasy characters. Characters that no kid in the target age group would be familiar with, and certainly not have the same feelings as somebody who loved and knew these characters. So is the game for older gamers? It strikes weird feelings in me, because as I am playing through the game, solving the world's puzzle and fighting the basic hack'n slash combat, I feel guilty for playing a kids game. Then Cloud Strife rolls up and hits me in my nostalgia and I think that this can't possibly be a kids game, Final Fantasy 7 came out 5 years earlier. So a twelve year old would have had to play and understand FF7 as a seven year old.
So there is a real contrast of tone here. On one hand you have a very childish appearance, with all around simplistic game-play. On the other hand you have characters sprinkled all over the game designed to play at the heart strings of someone 5-10 years older.
Also if the story gets convoluted, it certainly doesn't happen in Kingdom Hearts 1. The plot is as straight-foreward as you can get. The gameplay is simple, mash X to win. You can cast magic spells, but the menu navigation is annoying and by the time you get a spell selected your AI friends have already probably beaten the enemy you were trying to hit, if it wasn't a boss. I only ever used the cure spell, and the elemental spells were limited to use for interacting with puzzles in the environment.
The game definitely feels old too. Even in this HD remaster, the control feels floaty and the game is full of an old-game design mentality. Having your camera directly behind Sora at a decent distance, makes it hard to judge how close you need to be for your weapon swings. This leads to you missing a lot. Flying enemies are terrible because they'll often be hard to tell if they are in front of Sora or behind him because it is possible for them to be just barely behind Sora and still in front of the camera.
For a title that requires jumping puzzles, you would think the jumping would be tighter. Instead jumping is floaty as balls filled with helium. You can't jump mid-step, so timing a jump so that you leap from the edge of a platform at the last possible moment is basically impossible as Sora will walk right off the edge of said platform due to being uninterruptible mid-step. You have to jump with a little space left on the platform you are on, making the distance you need to jump to reach the next thing hard to gauge. A jump that you fail and looks impossible is actually possible if you just get Sora's steps to land a few pixals closer before the jump. The puzzles are to simple for them to be this frustrating goddamn it.
Bosses are laughably easy most of the time. Giant over sized baddies that telegraph every attack by singing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody in it's entirety before taking a swing at you. Most of the fights are made annoying this way because the only place you can hit a boss is in a single weak spot that they keep hidden for far too long, and remain vulnerable for way to short of a time. Meaning you spend a lot of the big climatic fights, waiting around, getting a little damage in, and waiting around again.
Perhaps I'm just too used to games designed in the post Ps3-360 era. Faster combats, tighter design, and better controls. Because despite these complaints, I still find myself unable to stop playing. And I genuinely do want to see how crazy the story gets in later entries. Under all of this, I do see a good game here, it just is very glaring in showing it's age. I understand that, but I have to review it based on the experience I had with it today, not how I might have judged it 15 years ago.
So on that note Kingdom Hearts gets a 5/10 from me. Boring gameplay, mundane story, and poor controls, all come together to somehow not be a terrible experience. There were a lot of flashes of fun, that were to quick to leave any lasting impression on me, except for the desire to see where they take the series. And maybe that's enough. KH1 is a foundation, a jumping off point where the other games will show me where the real meat of the story and gameplay lie.
