Fabricant451

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@Fabricant451

So you've played Chain of Memories and the IOS game?

@Leaves

I've played Chain of Memories twice. One on the GBA and the other Re:Chain of Memories on the 1.5 thing. And yeah I played Unchained X on the Android. It was a miserable time.

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I've sat here for an hour and I've never seen two people go "you're factually wrong because my opinion" more than this.

@POOHEAD189

Here's the grand secret about video game discussion on the internet: It's always two sides dick slapping about opinions as fact. You were there in the Skyrim thread, dude.

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@Fabricant451
KH1 doesnt have limit breaks so you calling me objectively wrong about the game's mechanics just lost a bit of it's punch.

@Dynamo Frokane

It has Special Attacks which are the same thing and what I meant.

If I don't care about bland characters then I'm not doing anything wrong, the development is trope-ridden and simplistic and that's worse than it being non-existent.

You think they're bland when they aren't. You can dislike the archetype that Sora is or think that Riku is a bit cliche in regards to his role but that doesn't make them bland characters.

And yeah, I forgot jump attacks, deep combat bro.

Your glibness does you no credit.

Playing Sora like a mage is ineffective in KH1, the menu scroll in real time is to cumbersome to use magic consistently in mid level fights and you still have to do a shit load of rolling, its not smooth or visceral, that's why 80% of the time on speedruns OR regular lets plays or playthroughs they are spamming that god awful combo. The game isnt designed well enough for you to successfully mix it up in KH1.

Menu scroll? Dude that's what shortcuts are for. The game IS designed well for the type of game it is, and the game is designed around the combat. It can be beaten at level one not because the combat is shallow but because it's designed to be played in a variety of ways. It's a game where your HP numbers don't even break triple digits, it's not complex. But just because it isn't a Platinum game doesn't mean it's a shallow system.

But I mean if you're going to say that KH1 of all fucking things has a better Battle System, story, and character development than something like Tales Of Vesperia then I'm just going to have to tune out and post Gifs.

Battle system? No. Story? Character development? Ehhhhhh that's debatable. Vesperia is probably the single most overrated game in the franchise, taking the crown from Symphonia. Vesperia has a grand total of two likable characters and none of them are Yuri.

I fully expect a gif because that's what you do anyway.

And Cid can still be an ass without swearing, look at Dante for christ sake.

Dante isn't an ass so much as he is aggressively cocky. Also Dante is a shit character anyway.

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Wait. What?

You know what. I'll take it. It's better than nothing.

Fabrican pressed ▲ to win argument.

@Leaves

I like Kingdom Hearts 1 and one third of Birth By Sleep. Kingdom Hearts is a trashfire of a video game franchise and I hate it and I hate that I've played all of them.

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>> Me when someone defends the Kingdom Heart series

@Leaves

I don't even like the series is the sad part.

Joke's on me.

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The way even the KH1 fan is shitting on Alice in Wonderland makes me think that I might actually begin having fun with this game if I manage to slog through the shitshow that is the Alice in Wonderland level.

No, seriously, if I have three seconds of fun playing this fucking game tomorrow, I'll only have had three seconds out of my entire life having fun with it. It's that much of a chore to me. But it feels like a fundamentally wrong thing that I don't like Kingdom Hearts. I should like Kingdom Hearts. On paper it's my dream game. *Frustration*

@Silver Carrot

It'll help if you stop acting like you SHOULD like a thing. It's okay not to like a thing. You're putting it on a pedestal and you don't even like the damn thing. I guarantee that even if you manage to get further than you've ever gotten you're still not going to come away liking it if this is your response to it.

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but I do like Riku's growth but anime's i think have done this a lot better in a less tight time-frame.

@rebornfan320

Riku has character development but its nothing we haven't seen before in 1000 different animes/JRPGs done better.

Something being done 'better' elsewhere doesn't invalidate what is done somewhere else.

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KH1s combat is not deep, Kingdom Hearts playthroughs/speed runs on highest level of play consist of a lot of dodge rolls, one 3 hit combo, and using cure. No amount of you saying I'm belittling it is going to make it any deeper.

@Dynamo Frokane

If by teching, incorporating magic, summoning, and the use of limit break abilities is what you mean by highest level play. Speedruns are about doing things as quickly as possible so that's not exactly the metric of the average player considering speed runners will abuse whatever tactic they can if it saves point three seconds. Besides the fact, speedrunners use jump attacks.

If the combat is so shallow then by all means use the three hit combo and nothing else. See how well you do.

KH2s combat is deeper, it has more enemy types and different ways to mix up attacks, but a lot of that boils down to 'press triangle to do something cool' and turn into the powered up form for a limited time for access to more powerful attacks that totally isnt devil trigger. These things aren't necessarily bad by concept, but that's what they are.

I mean, you're wrong again and especially on the highest level of play but why waste the time here.

I mean look, if you find a happy go lucky kid gaining friends and confronting an 'evil' organisation a good story then fine, there isn't nothing inherently wrong with it just like there is nothing wrong with 70% of the Tales games you shit on, but it's just not particularly interesting when its lead by characters with simplified dialogue and childish humor. I'm not being a snob, this is what happens when you apply the children's story telling of disney to a 30+ Hour JRPG, simple pleasant enough things get drawn out and tired.

I didn't say it was a good story - I said it was a simple one. Tales games are like Kingdom Hearts except they are worse in near every way. Tales games are far more shallow and are much much more poorly written.

The platforming is uninteresting, trying to time those idiotic vine swings in deep jungle isnt fun, its not a particularly interesting enviroment, the level progression of finding pictures for tarzan's slideshow isnt engaging. Its a level that you would find in the video-game adaptation of a disney movie. And that goes for a LOT of them (I think I liked the jack skellington world but It was a long time ago).

The pictures are all in the same one area, it's not like you're traversing the entire jungle for one photo. The game flat out tells you when to jump onto the vines.

but because they couldn't bring back the movie voice actors for the game

Well it's a bit hard to have dead people voice characters. But then they went ahead and got the original voices that were still alive anyway so shame on them for doing that I guess. Except for Minnie Driver but then who remembers her anyway.

And yes they act out of character, obviously that is sort of the result of a non-canon variation of adapting FF characters to a kid friendly disney 'what if' story but yes Cid highwind acting like a friendly grandpa mechanic when he's supposed to be a chain-smoking, alcoholic, smart-ass prick, IS out of character, and I don't feel like his KH version really added much of anything to the narrative.

Cid not being a chain smoking alcoholic in a game rated E for Everyone doesn't make him out of character. He's not out of character because he isn't using profanity or smoking.

Kairi is a bland character so I found it impossible to care about any interaction between her and a nearly as bland Sora. I haven't played chain of memories or anything outside of 1 and 2 so I cant speak on the development there.

Okay so just say that you don't care instead of acting like the characters are bad because they aren't full of depth and blatant obvious one eighty changes in personality that makes up typical video game character development.

So yeah there's my subjective opinion, be sure to let Prawn remind me why it's objectively wrong.

Bitch I don't tell that dude what to do, stop acting like I do.

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The Character development in KH is non-existent, Sora being a brave young boy, evolving into a slightly braver young boy who has now made loads of different disney friends and understands a bit more about the heartless is not development. He's a thin character, and donald and goofy are one-note comic relief/sometimes expostion, and you spend too much of the game with them, Riku has character development but its nothing we haven't seen before in 1000 different animes/JRPGs done better.

@Dynamo Frokane

I mean sure, go ahead and ignore the development if you want. It doesn't make you any less wrong.

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This video game review was brought to you by Fabricant's Subjective Opinion_TM

@Dynamo Frokane

As opposed to? Having opinions are bad?

No but seriously, I've only played KH1 and 2 so I cant comment on birth by sleep. I'm being very genuine when I say I struggle to see what people like about these games beyond the novelty of seeing Sephiroth in the coliseum from Hercules.

Well there are many things and you'd have to ask fans of the series. For some it's a game that came out at a formative time in their lives. For others it's probably the fact that this baffling combination of two then-behemoths of their respected mediums actually worked well despite so much working against it. This is talking about the first one here specifically since by the time the second rolled around there was already the pedigree of the first and it wasn't until KH 2 that everything went to hell and they started fondling the corpse of the first game.

Mechanically, Kingdom Hearts 1 is not perfect, no, but just because the game has accessible combat doesn't mean it's shallow or easy - and that holds ESPECIALLY true for the sequels where the combat was clearly the focus. Play the game on Critical difficulty and say it's a tap X game. Play the game on NORMAL mode and you'll see that that's just incorrect.

The first game was awkward, bad almost movie-game level platforming, with extremely simplified and uninspired combat.

The platforming was only awkward and bad in two instances, those being Wonderland and Monstro and in the case of the former that is largely to do with the camera since the game came out when devs were still thinking the right analog stick was dumb. Kingdom Hearts 1 was the only game in the series up until Dream Drop Distance where they actually made a game that was as much about exploration as it was the combat; and DDD only gets that moniker because they made exploration a gameplay mechanic. Whether or not the exploration was worth doing is up to the individual but it makes the game fundamentally more interesting because the sequels are just a series of linear paths broken up by combat rooms.

Considering the different abilities you get for exploration and traversal, the platforming is not punishing or difficult and is fairly generous considering how early and experimental the game was. Wonderland is especially bad for it because you don't have any of the abilities and the vanilla camera is garbage.

As far as combat goes, see earlier comment.

The plot was somehow overly simplified on one level, but then convoluted on another, but mindlessly boring on both.

Are you talking about Kingdom Hearts 1 or 2 here? Because the convoluted shit didn't start until 2. Well, there were hints of it in Chain of Memories but 2 was when everything started going off the rails. What's the problem with a simple story? Games don't need Metal Gear Solid type stories (especially since MGS is bad story telling) or overly complex narratives when they can barely tell decent ones regardless of complexity. Kingdom Hearts 1 leans into the Disney trappings far more than the JRPG trappings in terms of story and when have you known a Disney animated movie to be complex?

The story in the first game could not be more simple and not at all convoluted. Three friends hang out on an island that's a quick trip away from the mainland. One of the three friends is not from their home which inspires the other two into wondering what's out there and together the three of them plan to explore all the while one of them is oblivious to the love triangle that is forming. Meanwhile, different worlds in the universe are disappearing for mysterious reasons and Mickey Mouse is trying to find out why and sends his two trusted allies to find the 'key' to this. The island where the three protagonists live is the latest the be overtaken by the darkness and through a series of events Sora meets up with Donald and Goofy and the three of them embark on a quest to find their friends/King and in so doing manage to save worlds from being taken over by the darkness.

The game uses very simple terminology. Light is good, Darkness is bad. It's very Disney like that since it's sort of a coming of age story and it's about the whimsy and wondrous sense of adventure that comes with childhood leading into the reality that childhood ends - like the whole Hollow Bastion section - but that doesn't mean the end of the world. The game literally ends with the powers of Light and love defeating the Dark and evil and the dark worlds are restored. It's not trying to be deep, it's all very on the nose. It's only in the sequels where they start delving into the convoluted and time travel and retcon and predestination garbage.

Which I blame mainly on the characters, I'm dying to hear any argument that KH1's characters aren't the most wafer-thin one-note trope cut-out, power of friendship-tween concepts out of anything that Disney OR FF have conjured up.

Is there something wrong with characters embracing the friendship concept? The concept that is core to JRPGs even today? You're making it seem like because the characters aren't super deep that they're bad characters or that a trope is inherently a bad thing. The characters develop over the course of the game and, yes, over the course of the entire series. Sora at the end of the game is not the same Sora as he was at the start, he's grown over the course of his adventure and while he's still staunchly in the camp of "FRIENDSHIP IS GREAT!" he's also matured as a person. He's still reckless and doesn't always think things through, and his loyalty to the concept of friendship is often used against him. That's a character flaw, not a writing one, and even comes into play at different points in the series - including being a reason why he fails his exam in DDD.

In the first game his devotion to Kairi's friendship is the catalyst for his confrontation with Riku. He puts one friend over the other and this carries into Chain of Memories all the way until KH 2. He hates selfish people and cowards - even though he himself often acts selfish - and over time these flaws of his have trickled out. Sora has more depth than you give him credit for. A character embracing the positive tropes of friendship doesn't make the character weak or flat.

When your game's deepest character is a walking 'dark rival' trope plucked from something out of a pokemon fan-ficiton you know you are dealing with some paper people.

Riku isn't the deepest character, he's just the one with the most obvious and apparent development. He's the Sasuke. Depth doesn't automatically make characters interesting or good.

Kingdom Hearts 1 was a polished snooze-fest which allowed me to see some fairly beloved final fantasy heores act out of character for a couple of cutscenes and getting to relive some plucked out nostalgic Disney cartoon scenes with little dialogue and no music.

What FF characters acted out of character? Also considering the music was done by icon Yoko Shimomura, 'no music' seems a stretch. Unless you mean no iconic music in which case go play the Atlantica or Nightmare Before Christmas worlds. Then go play Birth By Sleep's Cinderella world and want to die because it's terrible with the music loop.

]KH2 seemed to be even MORE convoluted but with slightly more bearable combat, (which was mostly just quick-time events and a poor man's devil trigger). I'll admit I skipped most of the cut-scenes a quarter of the way in, but it was fun playing the little mermaid mini game where I got to sing under the sea.

KH2 IS more convoluted. That's why 2.5 came out to contextualize a lot of the garbage that came out of nowhere when the game first came out. And the combat was not just quick time events/devil trigger and no amount of you belitting it will change the fact that the combat has depth to it.

Do you want to talk about how crap God of War is now?

I don't like God of War but the reason I don't like God of War has nothing to do with its combat and everything to do with Kratos.

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How do you 'back down' to a Mad Max gif which is literally saying 'I will not engage'?

@Dynamo Frokane