Skorm034 said:
I'm a big fan of Kingdom Hearts, and so are most of my friends. After talking to them I've come to the realization that the ones that played Kingdom Hearts 1 first liked it more but those who played 2 think it's a better game. So out of curiosity I turn to you members of the Escapist.
Being a Kingdom Hearts fan as well, I have a pretty strong opinion on this, lol. Kingdom Hearts 2 has a more diverse style of gameplay, and more ways to customize your build and figure out exactly how you want to play (melee focused, magic focused, etc), and the drives are more or less fun (if a bit hard to count on in big battles, considering how arbitrary and tedious building your drive gauge can be).
But the one HUGE flaw that mad me absolutely seething from the first time it happened in the intro to the final boss battle was the "reaction commands," which is a big fancy word for "quick-time events." In that first battle against the huge Nobody at the very start, you constantly press triangle to dodge and weave around the giant Nobody. And at first it's cool and all, but after a while I felt like I was trapped in an endless cycle. I found myself grumbling at the screen, "Come on you idiot, stop dodging and just hit the thing!" And it pissed me off even more in the final fight against Xemnas because there's one particular part of the battle where he puts out a bunch of laser beams around you and you have to mash triangle to block them. You're cornered, so you have no choice but to mash triangle as fast as you can until it stops. I ended up losing the fight there the first time around because my hand wasn't in the correct position on the controller to efficiently mash triangle.
That is the stupidest thing to have in a final boss fight. The final boss is supposed to be a test of the player's skills and strategies--the time when everything the player has learned and gained throughout the rest of the game comes out in full force. And rather than making the fight rely upon the player's skills and build...it all comes down to how fast you can mash triangle. That's just insulting, and says to me Square was really digging around for gimmicks, and didn't understand that the battle system itself in Kingdom Hearts is its own reward. You don't need a bunch of flashy, pre-animated gimmicks in the middle of fights to keep them interesting. Just let the player do what they love to do best--swing that keyblade.
I also felt a little less emotionally connected to KH2 then I felt to KH. In KH2, I really felt at the beginning in Twilight Town they were just rubbing Hayner, Pence and Olette in my face as hard as they could saying "HERE, HERE. LOOK AT THEM. DO YOU LIKE THEM YET? LIKE THEM, DAMN IT." They weren't necessarily
bad characters, they didn't annoy me anyway. But they had no charm to them, there wasn't anything that made them stand out or matter to me. Then the story just went everywhere and it was hard to keep connected to what was going on. And then there's...Atlantica.
But I feel like Birth By Sleep recaptured that magic that KH1 had. The battle system was balanced back out, the reaction commands were kept at a minimum (or if they were there, they were to control other game mechanics or to just add a bonus to the battle--it wasn't a "mash triangle to win" challenge). And watching the end I felt like I was watching the end to KH1 again for the first time. I have Dream Drop Distance, but I haven't finished it yet because there's a battle against somebody that is five different kinds of UNFAIR...but I'll finish it eventually. I actually like DDS, I like the concept behind the story and it fits canonically. Coded/Re: Coded also technically fit, but it still had that filler feeling to it. I don't feel like I'm playing filler when I'm playing DDS. And I've never played 358/2 Days, though I plan to as soon as I can get it used at GameStop.
So in summary, KH2 definitely had a more diverse range of ideas, but there were too many and it just felt overcrowded and some of them felt half-baked. KH1 may have been simpler, but I feel like it executed everything it set out to do better than KH2 executed its ideas, thus leading to a more overall satisfying experience.
