The fabled Kingdom Hearts 3 is set to release
sometime this year, and it’s given me pause for reflection. As a 20 year old college student,
I’m in a state of disbelief. I’m a fully-fledged adult, I have taxes to file, jobs to hunt for, a
life to carve out for myself: where did the time go? The days where I would run around Traverse
Town with my rented copy of Kingdom Hearts from Blockbuster… back when it still existed. It’s
hard not to feel melancholic as I watch each year pass me by, vestiges of my youth torn down
one by one, only to be reassured that this dumb, monolithic series is still going strong.
Say what you will about its overall quality, we have an unbreakable bond that formed in the
early years of Elementary school, that stuck with me through my darker, pre-pubescent phase, rode
with me through the best of my high school years, and is currently struggling with me through the
pit of the unknown that is adulthood. Maybe it sounds silly, but I do not know where I would
be today if it weren’t for this goofy keyblade wielder and his eclectic group of friends. Join
me as I figure out why this Final Fantasy Disney crossover about the power of friendship has such a
powerful hold on my very being: you might call it, a Kingdom Hearts Retrospective.
I will be playing the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix on PS4. 1080p, 60fps, every
final mix version: the best kind of remaster, all in one simple to digest package.
Unlike other retrospectives I’ve done, this is pretty clearly the definitive
version of the Kingdom Hearts series, at least for the main games. Kingdom Hearts,
Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts 2, and Birth By Sleep. I’ll be using this collection for all
of these. For Dream Drop Distance I’ll be using the Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue
*sigh* to play the HD remaster also in 1080p and 60 fps. For the rest, I guess I’ll just need to
play the originals. That means for the two DS titles I’ll either be emulating or purchasing off
the black market. In terms of video release order, I’ve opted to stick to the order of release
instead of the order presented in the HD remaster. Not that there’s a huge difference, just
swap Kingdom Hearts 2 and 358: there you go.
We start, with none other than Kingdom Hearts
released originally for the Playstation 2 in 2002, the result of a chance meeting between a
Square and Disney executive in the elevator of the building they worked in. First time
director Tetsuya Nomura helmed the project, with the intentions of “making a game with the
freedom of movement in three dimensions like Super Mario 64.” So we get a command menu, styled after
the menu of the turn-based Final Fantasy series, injected into a 3D action RPG combat
system custom fit with dodge rolls, combos, invincibility frames, and an involved story
fit for a Final Fantasy game, with a simple, clean message to service its Disney roots. We
follow the journey of Sora, Riku, and Kairi as they involuntarily set off from their homeworld,
Destiny Islands, and are thrust into an end of the world incursion of zombie-like beings known as
the heartless. Sora wields the legendary keyblade, the only known weapon capable of defeating
the heartless and closing the opened keyholes in each world. With the caveat being that Sora
travels with Donald and Goofy as party members, who form a series spanning bond searching for
their respective friends and saving the universe several times. Surreal is a pretty tame word to
use when describing the story setup, which is part of the reason it feels so unique and interesting
to me. Using Disney worlds and characters as tools to develop Sora as a character, to have
him experience a hero’s journey, is such a fascinating take on an overdone trope.
This could have just been Sora, Donald, and Goofy sightseeing at various Disney
movie locales, talking to iconic characters, but it’s so much more than that. Tetsuya Nomura
decided to splice the Disney elements into its Final Fantasy DNA. Rather than a bunch of
disconnected romps through Disney worlds, it’s more like the Disney universe of films,
and the Final Fantasy realm of characters, merged together into a cohesive unit. Imagine
a world where venturing into outer space means stumbling onto a Disney world, where characters
respond to universe shattering events in line with their established character motivations, and where
evil figureheads naturally incorporate themselves into the larger narrative. Maleficent could have
just been a one off Disney villain who picked on princess Aurora and prince Phillip, but in line
with the logical direction of her character, she becomes a malevolent force of evil. She forms
a rogues gallery of Disney villains to spread the heartless to more and more worlds, she learns
how to control said heartless, and even woos a young and vulnerable Riku to her side as she
drives a wedge between him and Sora. You could totally buy that Maleficent, “the mistress of all
evil” would respond to the heartless by riding that wave of evil to suit her own desires.
She works with the Final Fantasy villain, the one who created the heartless out of his own
unquenchable sense of curiosity. Ansem, Seeker of Darkness is responsible for the destruction of
so many different worlds, and you could totally buy that it would be the Sephiroth, Kefka stand
in that would ultimately beat out the relatively simple Disney villains in terms of raw power.
On the flipside, it stands to reason that Sora would get along really well with the heroes of
those stories and fight alongside them. Characters still act logically within their own boundaries,
of course: Jack Skellington is a bit aloof, he seems far more concerned with using the
heartless for Halloween than fighting them off; Peter Pan is as standoffish as usual, growing
more comfortable with Sora as time goes on; Tarzan is just interested to meet new people.
You even have genuine conflict between Sora and King Triton in Atlantica about how dangerous it is
for the keybearer to nonchalantly roam around each world, as they’re supposed to be separate.
Characters like King Triton probably would know about keyholes and other worlds, given his
royal status. A kid like Sora probably would be a pretty bad keybearer, meddling in the affairs
of other worlds by virtue of being so excited to do that very thing. His weaknesses are even
highlighted at Hollow Bastion when Riku steals the keyblade from Sora, stealing away Donald and
Goofy in the process, driving home that Sora is powerless without his friends. You run around with
a wooden sword, ineffectual against the heartless, forced to rely on Beast to do the fighting for
you. Maybe it’s a little on the nose, but it is a game designed for children to enjoy, with themes
that are applicable to all audiences. Themes that say you can do anything if you have friends to
rely on, a theme that is still applicable to this day: I’d be nothing without my friends, after
all! That’s how Sora wrenches the keyblade back, he chases after Donald, Goofy, and Riku,
he doesn’t give up on Riku even after he’s crushed by his allegiances: it doesn’t stop Sora
from trudging on to save his lifelong friend. It manages to capture the grandiose, world
ending stakes of a Final Fantasy story, with the universal theming of a Disney movie, which
is probably why it had such a wide appeal.
Simple is not always bad. We may be sick of
“chosen one” stories, but Kingdom Hearts proves that it’s a popular story trope for a reason. It
provides the breathing room necessary for these characters to shine and stick in your hearts
forever, as a kid, as a teen, as an adult. I can tell you that the relationship between Sora
and Kairi is a relationship I’ve been following for my entire life, waiting to see its natural
conclusion. Nomura drops in little hints at their budding romance, with the paopu fruit mythology
introduced in the first few hours becoming a symbol of their developing relationship. Sora
and Kairi form their relationship by drawing their faces on cave walls, Sora attempts to
advance that relationship by drawing a hand extending a paopu fruit before tragedy strikes and
they’re separated. Kairi doesn’t get to see this drawing until after their bittersweet end of game
exchange. To which she responds by extending her own hand, in essence: sharing a paopu fruit.
Having this be the final shot is beautiful; it shows that their destinies will be forever
intertwined, and that they’ll remain a part of each other’s lives forever, even if they’re
separated. Sora sacrifices himself to save Kairi at Hollow Bastion, and Kairi returns
the favor by protecting him moments later, and turning him back into a human. How
could you not root for the two people who are obviously meant to be togeth- okay, I’m
getting into dangerous territory with this pairing discussion, I need to stop before
the Sora X Riku folks get mad at me.
That said, I can clearly see why so many people
get behind that pairing. Sora and Riku have their own little bromance going on throughout the games,
and who’s to say you’re wrong for thinking they might have romantic feelings for each other: it’s
a perfectly valid reading into their relationship, one that I might not personally subscribe to, but
is totally valid when you consider how close they are as people, that they’ve been best friends long
before Kairi ever showed up on Destiny Islands, and that they arguably have more emotional
scenes together. Who am I to say you’re wrong for coming to that conclusion? This is
how lovingly crafted each character is, they manage to tug at your heartstrings and carry
you through a multi-game epic. Why do you think I’ve stuck with the the series through its
highs and lows, its very embarrassing lows: the characters are just raw enough to invest me
in their arcs, and as far as I’m concerned this is a perfect origin story for them. They each
get their moments to shine, they each learn valuable lessons throughout their adventures,
and this is most definitely the game I’d have my child play to learn about the importance
of forming long lasting relationships.
I also don’t think Nomura gets enough credit as
a director, specifically for the way in which he sets up the events of the story. The first act,
if you will, is a brilliant way to introduce the central characters. Show a few days of the kids
daily routine on Destiny Islands, attempting to create what they think will be a robust wooden
raft to whisk them away to faraway worlds, jumping over to Disney Castle intermittently so
that Donald and Goofy can go set off in search of the keybearer at the behest of King Mickey.
Thing is, Donald and Goofy leave for Traverse Town around the same time the heartless invade Destiny
Islands. This happens after Donald reads a letter from King Mickey about the the worlds blinking
out one by one, only to then have Destiny Islands succumb to darkness, show a scene with Donald
and Goofy watching a star blink out of the sky, and immediately pan to Sora unconscious in
an alleyway. This is a wonderful crescendo in and of itself, but Nomura goes on to show several
scenes of Donald and Goofy narrowly missing Sora, all so that they can meet up at the climax of
the world to fight the big armored heartless. Think about how many different ways Nomura could
have painted the opening moments: he could have just followed Sora and told the story of Donald
and Goofy through backstory or an info dump, he could have skipped Destiny Islands entirely, he
could have shown the Donald and Goofy bits in one, uninterrupted block: yet he chose to gradually mix
the two perspectives until they became one.
I even left out the scenes that take place when
Destiny Islands is falling, where Kairi seemingly disappears, but in the direction of Sora. Now,
on your first time viewing, you may interpret this as a creepy way to portray Kairi’s sudden
disappearance, her ghastly visage flying at Sora unexpectedly. Though, it also serves the function
of foreshadowing the plot twist that Kairi’s heart was inside Sora the entire time, which is why no
one could figure out how to restore her heart: at the beginning, she literally went inside Sora,
and the game flat out shows you this. It’s the type of shot framing that would fly over your
head, but you could legitimately figure out on your own after learning more about how heartless
are created and the nature of hearts.
It’s this strong directorial influence that
strings the game together structurally. The worlds that were selected to be in the original
Kingdom Hearts were great picks for visually and mechanically varied gameplay. You’ll go
from the winding labyrinths of Wonderland, to the arena style combat in Olympus Coliseum,
to the uncharted expeditions in the Deep Jungle, to the aquatic wonderland that is Atlantica:
each world sees you doing different things. Sure, you’re always fighting Heartless, that much is
true: it’s how you get around the world and the ways in which you progress that differ. Wonderland
has you running around a labyrinth searching for evidence to satisfy the Queen of Hearts, Olympus
Coliseum has you coming back periodically to participate in incrementally more challenging
tournaments against heartless and specialized boss fights, and Atlantica turns you into a sea
creature to explore the depths of the sea, forcing you to adjust to an entirely new control scheme.
It doesn’t go off the deep end with introducing new gameplay concepts, either; in fact, it even
expands on the Atlantica control scheme against Captain Hook in Neverland, Chernabog in the End
of the World, and the final phase of Ansem at the tail end. Everything you learn is valuable,
every type of boss fight, every movement ability, every twist on the core gameplay is essential.
That doesn’t mean each world has a riveting main quest progression, of course. Deep
Jungle is perhaps my least favorite world, because it constantly bounces you back and forth
between the camp and the treehouse until you’re sick of doing the same platforming challenges over
and over. Halloween Town only has one save point, with only one way to reach Oogie Boogie, and a
one-way shortcut back to the city centre. Deep Jungle does this as well depending on how
you jump off the treehouse, which is great for getting back to the camp or city centre
quickly, but also means that to get back: you need to trek a fairly long distance and
fight the same heartless over and over.
This is a particularly glaring issue when going
after the secret heartless that appear in those two locations, where you’ll be running back and
forth near eternally to get your synthesis drops, wishing you just had a two-way road to take so
you didn’t have to keep activating that swirly moon hill, or spamming triangle on the swinging
vines. Thankfully, the level design somewhat saves that main quest progression by providing suitable
distractions from that mundanity. Going off the beaten path and doing some platforming will net
you gummi pieces, equipment, synthesis items, and a host of other useful extras to reward
you for going out of your way to explore. As much as I dislike running through Deep Jungle,
I do like platforming across these hippos to reach this chest on a tall lillipad, or climbing
Tarzan’s treehouse for the time stopped mushroom heartless. I even like exploring Atlantica because
it’s such a different world design from the rest of the game: you’re forced to think laterally for
secrets, and the progression is more of a ring rather than a linear track. It even has a two way
shortcut from Ariel’s grotto and the sunken ship, which is why I’m so baffled it wasn’t implemented
in every other world. At the very least, none of them are overwhelmingly huge, so it
prevents worlds like Agrabah, which is largely one linear track, from feel as intrusive as it
otherwise could have been. Not to say there aren’t plenty of secrets strung along that hallway,
and I mean a ton of them. They managed to make the Cave of Wonders feel like a Cave of Wonders,
with treasure around every corner, I love it. It is a really simple structure, but Kingdom Hearts
champions simplicity in a really relaxing way.
The combat is underwhelming if you’ve played 2,
but as a first for the series it’s admirable. First few hours are… well, they don’t play out
as masterfully as the story. You only really have access to your basic three hit combo, triggered
by pressing the X button a million times. As you level up and gain new abilities, new magic spells,
new summons, the combat opens up a bit. Special moves like Ars Arcanum or Strike Raid are flashy
limit breaks, and magic allows you to switch up your combat strategies. Different heartless
encourage different methods of play: for instance, the fat heartless can’t be physically attacked
from the front, so you can either struggle your way behind it, or you can cast magic instead.
Aerial enemies play it a bit too fast and loose, so you may want to fall back on your thunder
spell to deal with them. When all else fails, you can add combo finishers onto your basic
combo to make them much more effective. All of a sudden you’ll be doing flips in the air,
shooting light out of your keyblade, and zipping across the room like a keyblade ninja. I’m really
torn on the actual gameplay on offer here because it fluctuates rapidly between incredibly fun
and challenging to mindless hack and slash on a surprisingly frequent basis. Heartless are
visually and mechanically distinct from one another, so it’s not as if you can button mash
and beat the game, there’s at least some thought that goes into every fight; however, the majority
of them can be defeated with simple combos.
A lot of that mechanical satisfaction comes from
dodging the enemy. It’s always visually exciting to flip around the room, but you’ve gotta keep
in mind that all you’re doing is pressing the X button. Look at this room in the End of the World,
the one before Ansem where they throw hordes of high level heartless at you. The challenge here
isn’t in what I’m doing to them, at some point I realized that I couldn’t rip my thumb away
from the X button due to my prolonged, rhythmic tapping. Instead, I was concerned with dodging the
ring of darkness from the swordsmen, the randomly appearing dark balls, these strange angelic tubes
that send balls of light everywhere. I have my mind on my MP, my cure ability, my dodge roll, my
jump, and a precise sense of timing: all while I just mash the X button in between. This room in
particular highlights another issue I have with the overall combat structure: some fights just
take too long. Oogie Boogie has an interesting concept for a boss fight where he rolls a set of
dice to decide which torture devices he’ll throw at you next, and I really like that concept: the
problem is that your only window to attack him is very short and very situational. He’ll decide when
you can jump on the flashing button to trap him, he’ll decide when to push you off and force you
to wait around for the next opportunity to hit him maybe 6 more times. Jafar is a maddening
test of endurance in both phases, one where he constantly teleports around the room as you
reach him, goading you at every turn, prolonging the fight well past where it needed to be; only
to then fight Genie Jafar where the only threat to your health bar is this slow moving flame
ball he throws at you in an effort to distract you from chasing Iago and spamming the X button
a bunch. Unless you can’t reach him, and then you wait some more: super fun boss design.
Unfortunately this sometimes extends to optional bosses, which I was looking forward to fighting
after years of watching scattered clips. The phantom, Kurt Zisa, the Ice Titan: they all looked
really fun. They’re… interesting concepts at least. The one that disappointed me the most
was the Phantom. I tried fighting this thing when I was a kid but I was… let’s just say I was a
pretty dumb kid. It also scared me half to death, seriously nothing else here looks this scary,
at least to a child. Years later I was expecting something challenging, but it is far from that.
Sure, if you don’t know that you can cast stop on the clock to stop the doom counter, you’ll have
a pretty rough time: but not against the boss itself. It can either swipe at you, or shoot a
ball of energy at you that will drain your health for a bit. Except, I learned on a whim that if
you shoot over to the side of the clock tower, you can dodge this burst of energy, every time,
without fail, no matter how long it takes to get over there. He’ll keep charging away, and the
telegraph for this attack is super obvious, he floats in the same position every time, it
won’t prove to be a threat. So really, all this boss amounts to when you know what you’re doing is
to cast magic or physical attacks depending on the color of its core, fly in the other direction
when he doesn’t have a core, wait a sometimes ungodly amount of time for his core to reappear,
and hope that your party members don’t steal your physical attacks from you and delay it even
further. Problem no. 1: this gets old real fast. Problem no. 2: he has a huge health bar. Problem
no. 3: if you run out of ethers or elixers, all you can really do is wait to die because he
only sometimes has a white core you can hit with physical attacks, and the only way to regenerate
MP is to hit the boss with a physical attack. MP is needed to both damage the boss and stop the
doom counter. In other words, no MP, you may as well die. Because he takes so long to defeat, and
because you’ll be casting magic so damn often, if you don’t have the items to survive the endurance
battle, you’re done for. He can hit you, sure, but he’ll never stunlock you. His only damaging
physical attack is one swipe that probably won’t be lethal, and you can heal up on the spot. The
most this does is drain your MP and end the fight a tiny bit quicker if you aren't prepared.
The act of fighting this boss is monotonous, and it’s a damn shame because a fight revolving
around the use of magic is an interesting one.
It isn’t just that you run out of MP easily,
though. Kurt Zisa provides a solution to this problem, sometimes requiring the use of magic
to damage him, but always dropping MP orbs when you physically attack him. The phantom could have
done the same thing, but I don’t really think this would fix the boss itself: only the potentially
frustrating failure state. All this boss boils down to is simon says, and it may take a while to
learn that the colors correspond to magic attacks, but if you’re familiar with this game at all, and
experiment, you’ll figure it out in no time. The clock is a separate issue, I didn’t even know you
could stop it until somebody told me, but again: the doom counter is not necessarily a boss fixer.
If you don’t know that stop is useful here, your party members will die, then you’ll die, one
by one. I have no doubt people have successfully defeated the phantom without altering the doom
counter, but they’re probably much higher level than the game expects, and are familiar with the
game’s mechanics to the point that you could just consider it a “challenge run” anyway. Essentially,
the challenge of the boss is to figure out how to stop the doom counter and damage him, and one of
those is nigh essential for you to achieve victory in the first place. When you boil this fight down,
you struggle to figure out how to defeat the boss, you figure it out eventually, then you’re in
for the long, repetitive, monotonous haul: that isn’t a compelling fight to me. I mentioned Kurt
Zisa, and while I’d take him over the Phantom… he also isn’t what I’d call an impressive boss.
The idea, again an interesting one, is to switch between physical and magic modes. This time you
won’t need items to defeat him, since he drops MP orbs when he’s in his physical defensive state.
While he has his two orbs exposed, you can only use physical attacks: he locks down your party’s
MP bars to force you into physically attacking, a much better telegraph; yet, he falls into
a similar trap. He only switches between two modes of attack, one where he flails his swords
everywhere to prevent you from attacking his orbs, and one where he avoids you and attacks from afar,
prompting you to use magic. He can occasionally pull out a far more deadly set of attacks where
he rolls either horizontally or vertically at you, and I will admit that these attacks are hard
to avoid, but I still wouldn’t consider them deadly if you’re attentive with your Aero
spells and rely on your cure spell to keep you alive. Though, I’ll give this one props:
higher difficulties and challenge runs will do this fight a lot of favors, and that’s
more than I can say about the Phantom.
My favorite fights revolve around the tech
point system. For parrying or performing specific actions, you’ll gain bonus experience
points. This is introduced and taught as early as Destiny Islands, where you can hit Wakka’s
ball back at him, or parry sword swings from Tidus and Riku. Every time you go out of your
way to do something potentially dangerous, you’re rewarded for doing so. Instead of
avoiding the big fireball from Cerberus, how about sending that ball back at him with
a guard. It’s far riskier to do so, but if you manage to pull it off you’ll do more damage to the
boss, avoid taking damage, trigger special stuns, do extra damage to an enemy or boss if they’re
weak to a specific element, all while giving you bonus experience on the spot. This is a lovely
partner to the MP restoration system I mentioned during the Phantom boss fight discussion, where
you recover MP by getting more physical hits in on an enemy or boss, encouraging you to be
more aggressive when you’re more vulnerable, in order to build up that safety net once again.
This is a beautiful set of systems that encourage you to get out of your comfort zone: a perfect
risk-reward system, in other words. Let’s look at the difference between guarding an attack
and rolling out of an attack, for instance.
Your dodge roll will quickly become your best
friend, as it’s easy to pull out, will get you out of most situations, and is highly defensive.
This is a perfectly viable defensive strategy; however, it is only a defensive strategy.
Guarding has a smaller defensive window, therefore requiring more dexterity, but it
is often rewarded by the tech point system. You can block attacks by virtually any enemy
or boss, meaning that you always need to make the decision to be safe or risky based on how
fast you want to level up, or to potentially open up new opportunities to stop the enemy or
boss from attacking you outright. This prevents the dodge roll from becoming an overpowered
defensive strategy, while still allowing it to be an incredibly useful ability. The AP system
is similarly brilliant, forcing you to balance which abilities you have equipped at a time,
as to not become too overpowered. Sometimes, you’ll need to sacrifice a helpful limit break
like Ars Arcanum in order to equip a helpful defensive ability like Leaf Bracer: though you
may decide that you’re skilled enough to not require Leaf Bracer, and choose Ars Arcanum for
its offensive capabilities instead. Abilities are great for customization as well: while you
can’t outright de-level, you can equip or dequip specific, very helpful abilities if you’re looking
for a challenge beyond the difficulty selections. Why do you think they added the “no experience”
ability on higher difficulties: people clearly like to test their mastery, and it’s created a
healthy speedrunning community because of it.
The best, most intense fights take full advantage
of this system: namely the fights between Riku, Ansem, Dragon Maleficent, Hades, Cerberus: all of
these fights have a lot in common, despite their appearances and movesets being quite different.
Riku is a straight up swordfight, mirroring the fight you had on Destiny Islands. You’re both much
more powerful, especially Riku, and you can take so many approaches to the duel. Guarding is still
a viable strategy, especially if you have the counterattack ability equipped, allowing you not
only tech points, but reliable follow-up damage; yet, my strategy was just as reliable and just
as tense: dodge rolling out of everything, only getting hits in when I was confident enough. It
may have taken a tiny bit longer to deal with him, but that’s okay because there was never a lull
in the action. Riku’s attacks are telegraphed really well, but not obnoxiously so. His sword
swings come out fast and fierce, but there’s always a way to react and dodge. The removal
of Donald and Goofy are key to this tension, since you can’t stock them full of healing items
or rely on Donald’s healing to survive: you have to manage it on your own. Sephiroth taps into this
brilliance as well, even if I do think he goes a little overboard sometimes. His flame pillar
attack comes out a little fast easily trapping you, and his omnislash is hectic. I’m not saying
he’s unfair, that’s far from what I’m saying, just a little too intense for me to ever fully
enjoy. There’s a method to his madness, of course, after 4 hits he’ll teleport away, and after 7 hits
he’ll counter with a random attack: it’s just that when that random attack is his flame pillar, I
can’t help but feel a little cheated. That said, there are countless no damage runs of Sephiroth
on YouTube, so I really don’t have much ground to say that he’s outright unfair. He’s certainly
a great example of a difficult boss done right.
However, the final secret boss added in Final
Mix is unfair. The enigmatic man is a fantastic inclusion for his story link to Kingdom Hearts
2, but the design of his fight leaves much to be desired. His attacks are lightning fast,
he throws them out with little to no warning, I haven’t seen a single no damage run on YouTube
that doesn’t abuse the gravity tech point stun trick, meaning that there’s pretty much no
reliable way without stunlocking him to avoid taking damage. That’s not great design in my
book, theoretically you should be able to dodge and react to everything a boss throws at you, even
if each attack is randomly selected. Every swing, energy ball, command menu mini-game should be well
telegraphed and possible to avoid, but that just isn’t the case here. I say this as someone who has
beaten the Enigmatic man, not as a salty jilted lover beaten six ways to sunday. The issue is that
I beat him using the tinkerbell summon along with spamming healing spells and items to make sure she
never went away. She continually heals you until you die, and then revives you as she disappears.
You’re damn right I abused this summon to tank his attacks and come out on top, as far as I’m
concerned the devs knew how horribly broken he was and that’s why Donald and Goofy are there
with you: a pretty huge distinction from the fight with Sephiroth. He’s far better than some of
the ludicrously challenging fights later on in the series, and I guess he is technically supposed
to be the hardest, end all be all boss in the entire game, so I’ll let the frustration slide
a little bit. At least the fight is genuinely terrifying, rather than a grindfest.
Larger bosses can sometimes be just as unique as one-on-one encounters, though they also
have the potential to be the most gimmicky. Dragon Maleficent is a great example: her fire
breath is avoidable, you can reflect some of her projectiles, jump over her shockwave stomps,
and rush for the head when she’s vulnerable. Her attacks are well telegraphed and at this point in
the game you have access to high jump and glide if you’re really struggling to avoid her fire
breath. Even without these abilities, it isn’t impossible to make a larger boss that’s still
interesting. Cerberus is fought much earlier on, but he’s just as compelling. You can get on his
back with well timed jumps, and if you’re clever, you can stay on his back to avoid some of his
most damaging attacks. If you’re on the ground, though, you can hit his fireballs back
at him, the cost being that it isn’t as easy to avoid the stomp attacks or darkness
mines. Either way you choose to go about it, the skill required from you is still substantial
enough for the entire boss to feel engaging, and make use of the tech point system to boot.
If you want an example of a less than stellar use of the tech point system, and a boss fight
in general, look no further than the Ice Titan. Much like Kurt Zisa and the Phantom, it’s an
interesting concept: a fight revolving around the specific tech point system that allows you
to deflect projectiles back at enemies. The Ice Titan is so huge that your only recourse
is to block his ice shards back at his head, until he’s stunned and falls to the ground.
You are dealing continuous damage each time you reflect a projectile, so it isn’t as if your
damage window is too strict like it is with Oogie Boogie; however, it’s much like the Phantom fight
in that once you learn the pattern, it’s far too repetitive. There’s a lot more to avoid, and he
ramps up his speed of attack in the later phases, remains stunned for a shorter amount of time,
and overall feels much more aggressive. This is all great, but since your only method of attack is
through guarding ice shots, no matter how much he throws at you, the fight devolves into a bunch
of running around, jumping, and pressing the square button sometimes. Nothing more to it,
unfortunately, but hey: it’s better than the Rock Titan! I don’t know why the iconic Hercules
monsters got gimped so hard, but it does present some interesting problems with larger enemies.
Larger enemies need to be balanced around your abilities, so that they don’t feel too
overpowered. Imagine if Cerberus was running and jumping around the room, biting
you every step of the way. There’s a reason he’s designed to walk at a gingerly pace, shooting
projectiles at you instead: otherwise it would be far too fast for Sora’s moveset to reasonably
handle. The Rock Titan keeps this in mind, to a fault. His attacks are unbearable slow,
to the point where I unintentionally did a no damage run by aimlessly attacking his feet
until he fell over, then jumping up to his head and doing the exact same thing. The problem here
is that he has no means of recourse against you: and this wouldn’t be a particularly huge issue
if he wasn’t the final fight in the Hades Cup, a cup that has bouts against Yuffie, Cloud, Leon,
and Hades. The Behemoth is also in the Hades Cup, and he’s another boss I’m not particularly fond
of. He can do more than the Rock Titan, so in that sense he’s a step up, but the problem is that the
Behemoth is used far too often near endgame for how simple he is. Imagine the Cerberus fight copy
pasted, with even less strategy around the tech point system. The end all be all strategy against
the Behemoth is to jump on his back, much easier with the high jump ability, attack his horn a lot,
attack his horn a lot, attack his horn a lot.
I guess this disconnect can vary from player to
player based on how much time you spend grinding, especially in the case of the secret bosses.
Though you have a degree of choice as to what worlds you can travel to, each of them have
difficulty stars to let you know which order you should ideally tackle them in. That way, you
have a pretty good idea when you’re over or under leveled, and I never felt like I needed to grind
at any point in the main story. Kingdom Hearts 1 avoids many of the pitfalls of JRPG’s because it
isn’t necessarily a stat clash. As an action RPG, your skill can make any moment of your
adventure, the stats only come into play to decide how quickly you or the boss will fall.
After mastering the mechanics, I don’t feel like there are any glaring difficulty spikes; rather, I
feel the early game is quite cruel to new players in general. Cerberus, if you aren’t familiar
with the tech point system or the dodge roll, is probably a royal pain in the ass: hell,
he was for me once upon a time. Ursula is tougher than she probably should be since you’re
grappling with an entirely new control scheme, and lose access to most of your abilities
in the process. Surely you could iron out a few of the details here and there, but I feel the
entire game is balanced well, if not on the easy, boring side. Thinking about fights like
Oogie Boogie and Jafar when I say that, because the end game is sufficiently challenging
with the Ursula-like Chernabog encounter, and the multiphase final fight with Ansem that
tests everything you’ve learned up to that point. Ansem was so challenging to my younger self that
I hadn’t actually beaten the game until relatively recently, but I was also the kid who didn’t
realize I had abilities in KH1 or 2, because I never bothered to check my ability list. Imagine
a playthrough of any Kingdom Hearts game without abilities. I wasn’t the brightest kid.
My point is that the main game is balanced well enough, but when you start jumping into the
optional content, namely the bosses and synthesis, the lines are blurred quite a lot. Remember when I
dunked on Kurt Zisa? Well, I was somewhere in the early 70’s range when I fought him, which might be
a tad higher than the game expects. Perhaps if I had fought Kurt Zisa much earlier, he would have
been a lot harder: problem is that it’s almost impossible to know at which point you’re over or
underpowered at endgame. Bosses don’t have star rankings or level recommendations, they’re just…
there. Is it possible that I could have struggled more against the Phantom or the Ice Titan if I
wasn’t higher leveled from synthesis grinding? Maybe. Is it possible that I’m supposed to fight
Sephiroth or the Enigmatic Man when I’m level 100 and I’ve crafted the Ultima Keyblade? Maybe.
It’s hard to say for sure. Unfortunately, you’re encouraged to grind here for synthesis materials,
a process that’s interesting at first, but grows incredibly repetitive, incredibly quickly. In
order to craft the ultimate weapons for Sora, Donald, and Goofy, you need to synthesize every
item on the synthesis list at least once. You can get this material from normal enemies or secret
chests, and a lot of these materials are gained through the main quest. Going back to explore the
worlds is inevitable as you learn new colors of trinity that allow you to gain more secrets
that you couldn’t get on your first visit, a lot like a metroidvania backtracking
system. It makes sense when paired with the new secret heartless scattered across all
the worlds: Kingdom Hearts 1 funnels you into revisiting each world after the final boss to
get the most mileage out of every pixel.
The secret heartless are really unique too. I love
figuring out how to reap the most rewards from them, and as you’d expect they make cool use of
the tech point system. The Pink Agaricus revolves around the spell “stop”, and counts as many hits
as you could fit while its stopped. Tech points count up from 1 for each hit inflicted, which
affects the percentage and rarity of the rewards it drops. In the HD remake, you need Serenity
Power from this thing, and the drop rate is mighty low if you can’t get to 100 hits. Now, this would
be fine if you only needed one Serenity Power, but you need seven. The most I could manage is around
50 hits consistently, which gives about a 10 to 20 percent chance of it dropping a Serenity Power.
That is remarkably low. You need seven. True, this is an optional side thing, the ultima keyblade
isn’t required, I get that. It’s just that you can strike a much better balance. Instead of
making you grind for a bunch of materials, why not heighten the challenge so that you only need one
Serenity Power, but to get it, you must land 100 hits. It already feels good to figure out the best
way to get those 100 hits, and it doesn’t require that you have to grind for seven of them every
single playthrough, you only need the one.
Every secret heartless is a test of strength
anyway, so why not make it simpler? The Black Ballade are a test of your tracking skills: it’s
the classic mini-game where you have to keep your eye on one of the heartless and pick the correct
one after they shuffle. Why do I have to play this minigame multiple times, instead of just
succeeding the one time? It’s quite a difficult mini-game, so it only makes sense that you’d get
the Ultima Keyblade after a hard challenge, not after a hard challenge done a million times over.
The Grand Ghost only takes damage when you give it healing items, it’s fun to figure out, but it
isn’t fun to leave the throat, enter the throat, do the platforming challenge, deposit items onto
him, and repeat the cycle. Every secret heartless needs to respawn, and in some cases they don’t
always respawn when you enter and exit the room. The Pink Agaricus, for example, doesn’t spawn
100% of the time. You have no idea how much time I spent running around this simple, maddening
loop, finding all three of the stopped mushrooms, spawning the Pink Agaricus, trying the mini-game,
failing to get a Serenity Power, and doing it all over again: why does it have to be this tedious?
Why do I have to run in and out of this part of Halloween Town over and over again just so I
get another opportunity to fight the Chimaera? I get that some of these heartless aren’t super
special, more that they’re just extra heartless that operate normally, but maybe tying RNG drops
to them isn’t a smart move. Maybe tying anything more than temporary healing items and gummi
blocks isn’t a good idea, because being forced to grind for anything, in my book, is incredibly
boring. At least make it so that you need a lower amount of materials, my gosh: It feels like it
took me years to acquire the ultima keyblade. Doesn’t help that you’re funneled into doing
all this grinding after you’ve beaten the game, and only a fraction of this synthesis item
gathering is done through the main quest’s optional chest content. There’s an alarming amount
of required synthesis items solely from things you can only do at a certain point in the game, which
does make sense: you don’t want to give players the Ultima Keyblade too early on, but there must
have been some way to eliminate the tedium?
I guess that leaves me with… the gummi ship
segments? What an odd thing to save for last, but you know: much like this game, I’ve grown
fond of these little distractions over the years. I used to outright hate them, but could you blame
me? I was never one to mess around with building new gummi ships, so I stuck with the default model
through and through, I never saw these sections as anything more than slow moving, boring Star
Fox bootlegs. It sucks even more that they make you go through them in the beginning of the game
before getting the warp drive, that’s something you should have definitely had from the beginning.
Forcing you to do the same gummi ship segment over and over just to travel a long distance highlights
how shallow the actual gummi ship combat is with the normal model: you have one peashooter,
you move slowly, you avoid a few obstacles, deal with a few harmless, directionless ships,
you reach the world. They feel… pointless, until you start messing around with gummi blocks
in the workshop. That’s when I realized why they were put in the game to begin with, and I’m
more fond of them nowadays than I’ve ever been. There’s a robust building block system
for making new ships that reminds me of making my own lego creations once upon a time. Something
about this block system turned me off as a kid, and to some extent as an adult, so I didn’t
touch the system in either game until very, very recently. What I ended up finding was my
inner child, trying to create cool looking ships by putting thrusters in the right places, using
the blocks to make imaginative shapes, to give me better speed or power, and that made going through
some of the more difficult gummi ship missions a hell of a lot more fun. Instead of viewing each
section as a formality, doing each section for fun with challenging mission objectives got me to
smile a little bit. It’s definitely no Star Fox, no Sin and Punishment, but it got a laugh
out of me. It made me happy, sometimes, and I think that’s enough.
That’s Kingdom Hearts 1 in a-WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIT
You thought I’d forgotten about the music, didn’t you? I wouldn’t dare gloss over the work
of my favorite composer: Yoko Shimomura. Truth be told, I prefer her work in the future games, so I
won’t dwell too long on this point, but come now: this music is top tier. She created two music
tracks for each world: one as the main theme, and one as the battle theme for that world. Nobuo
Uematsu is great and all, but having more than one battle theme makes them each stand out more. As
iconic as the Final Fantasy battle themes are, having only one for each game can become tiring,
especially thanks to the somewhat high random encounter rates. Pair this with the excellent
opening theme “Simple and Clean” by Utada Hikaru, and you’ve got yourself a neat soundtrack:
not nearly as good as the rest of the series, but oh well: this was still the game to
introduce Dearly Beloved, Hollow Bastion, and Dive into the Heart.
That’s Kingdom Hearts 1 in a nutshell: it makes
me happy. Having grown up with the second game, going back to this slower, more archaic combat
system felt really weird, to the point where I would focus solely on the slower combat and
nothing else. I didn’t think about the story or the level design or anything else, I was just
stuck on this slower, more primitive combat. Now, as an adult, with changing tastes, more
appreciation for the series as a whole, I get a lot out of Kingdom Hearts 1. As a first
attempt at making a Final Fantasy action RPG, it did a great job nailing the most crucial
aspects of its design. For every bad boss, there are two great ones; for every
moment you’re mashing the X button, there’s a magic spell or Disney summon to spice up
the combat; for every boring gummi ship mission, there’s a harder variant you can test out
with your new, built from scratch ship. Kingdom Hearts is about give and take, and
for me: the good far outweighs the bad.
