January 19, 2011
Losing Heart
There was a time when I liked Kingdom Hearts. I remember this being the case. I thought Kingdom Hearts was fucking awesome. I mean, I have a Heartless t-shirt. The second game had a lot of bullshit story elements, but it, too, was awesome once you got out of the Twilight Town and into the game proper. I mean, you got to run around with Tron and shit. It was pretty awesome, right? Right. I certainly remember it as being such.
Therefore, when I heard they were making a Kingdom Hearts on PSP that used the Crisis Core system, a game whose combat I enjoyed, I figured this might be awesome! If it had the same great combat as Crisis Core and all the fanservice, I was sure I could dig it.
Well, it came in from Gamefly, and… I dunno. Have I changed? Or is the game just this bad? I have no idea, but I cannot stand this game.
The game started up with a bunch of Kingdom Hearts pointless story bullshit. It immediately grated on me. On top of that, there was a sequence where Roxas OOPS I MEAN Ventus is shirtless for no fucking reason. Like, seriously, absolutely no reason. It was then that I realized I could skip like a million scenes, and I totally did.
How long would this opening sequence had taken me if I had watched it all? Probably hours.
Eventually I got control of people, and it started flashing all kinds of tutorial information that made no sense because it had no context. Why do I have 3 different sets of abilities? I guess the abilities are like materia? You can level up and combined them and I don’t fucking know. The one thing I did learn, though, is that they loop. So using one readies the next in the list and so on. That’s actually a good idea.
Then it tells me that I can summon other people, but not really, I can just use their skills? Kind of? I have no idea why you would do this besides the fact that it heals you.
Also, after you spam combos, sometimes you transform for no reason for like 10 seconds, only it takes a long time to load.
I then end up at Cinderella castle, which is infested with not-Heartless. I was annoyed that they were there for no reason, but then I realized I skipped any explanation as to why they’d be there, so the game got a pass. In any case, you can’t go three steps without getting into a combat, and the camera controls are so shitty that I often found myself walking backwards after a fight, which meant I had to fight more guys. I basically just started dodging all combats until I got to a point where I had to protect a mouse with a key, which I constantly failed at, and then I stopped.
Was I insane in the past? I remember Kingdom Hearts combat being fun, and the interactions with Disney characters being entertaining, but man, this game is such bullshit. The thing is, it really seems like a good portable adaptation of Kingdom Hearts. It does everything I remember. I just hate it now. Man. I sit here, and I think about KHII, and the fact that I beat it, and I just can’t believe I played a game like that for the hours it would have taken me. I can’t.
Man.