(Note: All of the pictures are from the internet, none are from me)
Firstly
I have been a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series since 2008, when I first discovered these games on the PS2. I hadn't really played any JRPG's outside Pokémon before them, so I got really into them. However, outside quickly trying the PS3 remaster collections, I hadn't touched most of the series much sine 2012 when Dream Drop Distance came out. That changed when I grabbed the 1.5 + 2.5 HD collection for the PS4. That gave me an ample excuse to play most of these games again. 60FPS really made these games (and DDD on the 2.8 collection) a blast to play again, framerate made them feel lot more fluid than before. It also inspired me to write up this RTTP thread.
This thread will be RTTP on the four games on the 1.5 + 2.5 collection, so Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, Chain of Memories and Birth By Sleep. I decided to not add the games on the 2.8 Collection, since honestly the scope of this thread is big enough as it is. I'm also not including the two movies on the collection (358/2 Days and Re:Coded) since they don't have any gameplay, and honestly the stories are not worth it to go thoroughly into. With each game, I'll discuss the gameplay and the story/writing somewhat separately. With this series in particular, I think those two aspects are quite disconnected, so that one game can have good gameplay and bad story, or vice versa. I expect the people reading this to have at least slight knowledge about these games, so I'm not looking at the bare basics.
In this thread you can discuss just one of these games, or all at once, or how you feel about the collection in general.
Kingdom Hearts 1
It is the first game in the series, released in 2002. The 60FPS upgrade on PS4 made it feel lot more fresh, but it still doesn't hide the fact that a lot of tha game has not aged very well, especially on the gameplay department.
The most obviously aged aspect of the game is the Camera for me. It felt already clunky and unintuivitive when I first played the game, and it's not much better here. The developers tried to update it by moving the camera control from L2 and R2 to the right analogue stick, but it still feels very awkward to use. The camera keeps getting stuck, and is way too close to Sora, so that you don't really see the battlefield as well as you should.
The other big thing that feels very aged are the movement options. For a big chunk of the game you are tied to a very clumsy jumping option, while you are expected to do some fairly strict precision platforming. This turns especially Wonderland and Deep Jungle into something of a slog, when you keep missing those critical jumps, and need to re-try again. The platforming and movement becomes lot more tolerable after you obtain High Jump and Glide later, but this just makes me wonder why they decided to deliberately gimp the movement controls for first 1/3 of the game. It just doesn't feel fun for that time.
The clunky movements translate a bit to the feel of the combat itself as well. It's fairly serviceable, but it feels pretty stiff and never as responsive as it should be. It never becomes outright bad though outside the underwater combat in Atlantica, which feels honestly really badly if you don't just spam magic to deal with the enemies there. It's pretty alright, especially considering it's the first game in the series from 2002, when Square hadn't done lot of ARPGs yet.
Even though the combat doesn't feel as fleshed out as some of the later titles do, there's some great ideas in there I wish were explored in other games do. I feel that the Tech system in particular was quite inspired idea. In that system, you could gain extra experience points from deflecting and guarding enemy attacks at the right moment. This incentivized players from simply spamming attack combos to look at enemy and boss behavior with more nuance, and try to approach them with more tactics in mind. I wish the later games would have this system in place too, even if it could be used to grind easy exp with maybe bit too ease.
One of the most interesting things about this game compared to the rest of the series is the world design. I think KH1 feels the closest of letting you feel like you ever inside a Disney Movie. The levels were pretty open ended, and let you mostly explore at your leisure, without holding your hand too much. This came with its own share of problems though. Most notable one is that you can get lost really easily. In some levels the game expects you to do lot of backtracking, and it's not always very clear what triggers the next story event. The first visit to Traverse Town and to Deep Jungle are guilty of this in particular. You end up wandering around pretty aimlessly in these two examples, which combined with clumsy platforming makes Deep Jungle in particular pretty annoying. The later games fix this, but not always in satisfactory way, as we will later see.
That more or less caps out my thoughts on the gameplay, but there is still the story aspect to discuss. I think the story and writing here are pretty strong. None of it is masterful, and the premise is inherently very silly, but it is quite cohesive, stand-alone story that holds your interest well until the end. The dialogue writing here is surprisingly natural, especially compared to what would be coming later. I in particular want to point out how well the game establishes the friendship between Sora, Riku and Kairi in the beginning. They all feel like real kids with personalities, character faults and pretty fun character dynamics between them. This early establishment is very important, so that once Sora sets out to find his friends, you feel at least a bit invested in his plight, and feel sorry for the kid. The writing also remembers to keep most of the main cast at least two-dimensional, since they all feel like actual kids. I need to put emphasis on this, since the later games on the series really seem to forget this aspect.
Last thing I want to point out is that the music in this game is really good. Yoko Shimomura does a really good job here, and her quality keeps being consistently high for rest of the series, so I won't mention it again.
All in all, the first Kingdom Hearts game is really solid game, even though its age shows, especially with lot of the quality of life elements the later entries bring to the game. It might be bit of a slog to get to if you are only starting the series now, but I'd say it's worth it.
Chain of Memories
I'm basing this RTTP on the remake version of the game, not the GBA original. I played some of that one, but never to completion, unlike with this remake, which I have finished twice. First and foremost, I want to commend the remake for being quite impressive on it's own. If I didn't know that this game was originally on a 6th generation handheld, I would have never guessed. Sure, the game recycles heavily assets from KH1, but it still feels like a pretty big game. Oddly enough though, it seems that the PS4 remaster wasn't given as much love as the other games were. Most of the cut-scenes look very fuzzy and unfocused, almost as if they were just given weren't even given a resolution bump at some parts. It's really odd, when rest of the games look very sharp even during cut-scenes. Still, the gameplay isn't affected by this.
For this game, I want to talk about the story and the writing first, because honestly, I think this game has the best writing out of all of the games in the series. The writing in Disney worlds is 100% filler, but the stuff that happens between the main floors is shockingly good. Again, it's not Shakespeare, but everything just feels very good. Sora is really relatable as a protagonist in this one, for example. The writing doesn't shy away from giving him some well needed character flaws and character traits. He doesn't always do the right thing, he is sometimes even outright mean to his friends. This makes him feel quite real. The villains are very good as well. They have nice banter with each other, have interesting dynamics and feel menacing. The story isn't very grand, but what's there is done really well. It's pretty interesting especially compared to Kingdom Hearts 2, but we'll get to that later. Sora's side is also again pretty self-contained and understandable story. Riku's side is bit less so, but I always felt like his side was more of a side attraction for the people who were invested in the series as a whole.
From gameplay side, this game is really combat heavy. There isn't really anything else to do in Sora's side but to fight, maybe open few treasure chests and tweak the card decks. With Riku's side there is even less. Luckily the card system is quite a novel idea. At first I thought it would just be a boring gimmick, but it actually adds a lot of moving parts you have to consider before and during combat situations. Sleights, when to use 0 cards, how to make sure your action is not broken while using an item… it's pretty fun, really.
However, even the combat system cannot save the game from just how repetitive it is. Like mentioned, combat is what you will be doing almost all the time. It doesn't help that the rooms are quite literally just copied and pasted over and over, just with a slightly fresh coat of paint depending on what world you are visiting at the time. This is tied to the synthesis mechanic where you can decide what the next room will look like, but it gets really boring really fast. I do appreciate the power to create save points wherever you want to, though.
So even if there's some enjoyable writing in here, the repetitive nature of the game makes it one of the weaker ones of the series. There was potential for more, but for a game that was originally on the GBA, I'm most likely expecting bit too much.
Firstly
I have been a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series since 2008, when I first discovered these games on the PS2. I hadn't really played any JRPG's outside Pokémon before them, so I got really into them. However, outside quickly trying the PS3 remaster collections, I hadn't touched most of the series much sine 2012 when Dream Drop Distance came out. That changed when I grabbed the 1.5 + 2.5 HD collection for the PS4. That gave me an ample excuse to play most of these games again. 60FPS really made these games (and DDD on the 2.8 collection) a blast to play again, framerate made them feel lot more fluid than before. It also inspired me to write up this RTTP thread.
This thread will be RTTP on the four games on the 1.5 + 2.5 collection, so Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, Chain of Memories and Birth By Sleep. I decided to not add the games on the 2.8 Collection, since honestly the scope of this thread is big enough as it is. I'm also not including the two movies on the collection (358/2 Days and Re:Coded) since they don't have any gameplay, and honestly the stories are not worth it to go thoroughly into. With each game, I'll discuss the gameplay and the story/writing somewhat separately. With this series in particular, I think those two aspects are quite disconnected, so that one game can have good gameplay and bad story, or vice versa. I expect the people reading this to have at least slight knowledge about these games, so I'm not looking at the bare basics.
In this thread you can discuss just one of these games, or all at once, or how you feel about the collection in general.
Kingdom Hearts 1
It is the first game in the series, released in 2002. The 60FPS upgrade on PS4 made it feel lot more fresh, but it still doesn't hide the fact that a lot of tha game has not aged very well, especially on the gameplay department.
The most obviously aged aspect of the game is the Camera for me. It felt already clunky and unintuivitive when I first played the game, and it's not much better here. The developers tried to update it by moving the camera control from L2 and R2 to the right analogue stick, but it still feels very awkward to use. The camera keeps getting stuck, and is way too close to Sora, so that you don't really see the battlefield as well as you should.
The other big thing that feels very aged are the movement options. For a big chunk of the game you are tied to a very clumsy jumping option, while you are expected to do some fairly strict precision platforming. This turns especially Wonderland and Deep Jungle into something of a slog, when you keep missing those critical jumps, and need to re-try again. The platforming and movement becomes lot more tolerable after you obtain High Jump and Glide later, but this just makes me wonder why they decided to deliberately gimp the movement controls for first 1/3 of the game. It just doesn't feel fun for that time.
The clunky movements translate a bit to the feel of the combat itself as well. It's fairly serviceable, but it feels pretty stiff and never as responsive as it should be. It never becomes outright bad though outside the underwater combat in Atlantica, which feels honestly really badly if you don't just spam magic to deal with the enemies there. It's pretty alright, especially considering it's the first game in the series from 2002, when Square hadn't done lot of ARPGs yet.
Even though the combat doesn't feel as fleshed out as some of the later titles do, there's some great ideas in there I wish were explored in other games do. I feel that the Tech system in particular was quite inspired idea. In that system, you could gain extra experience points from deflecting and guarding enemy attacks at the right moment. This incentivized players from simply spamming attack combos to look at enemy and boss behavior with more nuance, and try to approach them with more tactics in mind. I wish the later games would have this system in place too, even if it could be used to grind easy exp with maybe bit too ease.
One of the most interesting things about this game compared to the rest of the series is the world design. I think KH1 feels the closest of letting you feel like you ever inside a Disney Movie. The levels were pretty open ended, and let you mostly explore at your leisure, without holding your hand too much. This came with its own share of problems though. Most notable one is that you can get lost really easily. In some levels the game expects you to do lot of backtracking, and it's not always very clear what triggers the next story event. The first visit to Traverse Town and to Deep Jungle are guilty of this in particular. You end up wandering around pretty aimlessly in these two examples, which combined with clumsy platforming makes Deep Jungle in particular pretty annoying. The later games fix this, but not always in satisfactory way, as we will later see.
That more or less caps out my thoughts on the gameplay, but there is still the story aspect to discuss. I think the story and writing here are pretty strong. None of it is masterful, and the premise is inherently very silly, but it is quite cohesive, stand-alone story that holds your interest well until the end. The dialogue writing here is surprisingly natural, especially compared to what would be coming later. I in particular want to point out how well the game establishes the friendship between Sora, Riku and Kairi in the beginning. They all feel like real kids with personalities, character faults and pretty fun character dynamics between them. This early establishment is very important, so that once Sora sets out to find his friends, you feel at least a bit invested in his plight, and feel sorry for the kid. The writing also remembers to keep most of the main cast at least two-dimensional, since they all feel like actual kids. I need to put emphasis on this, since the later games on the series really seem to forget this aspect.
Last thing I want to point out is that the music in this game is really good. Yoko Shimomura does a really good job here, and her quality keeps being consistently high for rest of the series, so I won't mention it again.
All in all, the first Kingdom Hearts game is really solid game, even though its age shows, especially with lot of the quality of life elements the later entries bring to the game. It might be bit of a slog to get to if you are only starting the series now, but I'd say it's worth it.
Chain of Memories
I'm basing this RTTP on the remake version of the game, not the GBA original. I played some of that one, but never to completion, unlike with this remake, which I have finished twice. First and foremost, I want to commend the remake for being quite impressive on it's own. If I didn't know that this game was originally on a 6th generation handheld, I would have never guessed. Sure, the game recycles heavily assets from KH1, but it still feels like a pretty big game. Oddly enough though, it seems that the PS4 remaster wasn't given as much love as the other games were. Most of the cut-scenes look very fuzzy and unfocused, almost as if they were just given weren't even given a resolution bump at some parts. It's really odd, when rest of the games look very sharp even during cut-scenes. Still, the gameplay isn't affected by this.
For this game, I want to talk about the story and the writing first, because honestly, I think this game has the best writing out of all of the games in the series. The writing in Disney worlds is 100% filler, but the stuff that happens between the main floors is shockingly good. Again, it's not Shakespeare, but everything just feels very good. Sora is really relatable as a protagonist in this one, for example. The writing doesn't shy away from giving him some well needed character flaws and character traits. He doesn't always do the right thing, he is sometimes even outright mean to his friends. This makes him feel quite real. The villains are very good as well. They have nice banter with each other, have interesting dynamics and feel menacing. The story isn't very grand, but what's there is done really well. It's pretty interesting especially compared to Kingdom Hearts 2, but we'll get to that later. Sora's side is also again pretty self-contained and understandable story. Riku's side is bit less so, but I always felt like his side was more of a side attraction for the people who were invested in the series as a whole.
From gameplay side, this game is really combat heavy. There isn't really anything else to do in Sora's side but to fight, maybe open few treasure chests and tweak the card decks. With Riku's side there is even less. Luckily the card system is quite a novel idea. At first I thought it would just be a boring gimmick, but it actually adds a lot of moving parts you have to consider before and during combat situations. Sleights, when to use 0 cards, how to make sure your action is not broken while using an item… it's pretty fun, really.
However, even the combat system cannot save the game from just how repetitive it is. Like mentioned, combat is what you will be doing almost all the time. It doesn't help that the rooms are quite literally just copied and pasted over and over, just with a slightly fresh coat of paint depending on what world you are visiting at the time. This is tied to the synthesis mechanic where you can decide what the next room will look like, but it gets really boring really fast. I do appreciate the power to create save points wherever you want to, though.
So even if there's some enjoyable writing in here, the repetitive nature of the game makes it one of the weaker ones of the series. There was potential for more, but for a game that was originally on the GBA, I'm most likely expecting bit too much.