Friday, 31 July 2009

• Lousy Games Revisited: Kingdom Hearts

  

  An action-RPG developed by Square Enix (then known as Square Electronic Arts), Kingdom Hearts' main hook is the combination of classic Disney characters, worlds and situations with the style and characters of Final Fantasy. So Cloud and Aeris hob knob around with Princess Jasmine and the Eddie Murphy dragon from Mulan.
  
  A bizarre idea for sure, and before the first game's release way back around the turn of the millennium, I trumped it up as some revolutionary thing - a crossover between two media giants, a dazzling new experience from one of the finest game makers in the world - and oh my god, it has a Nightmare Before Christmas level!
  
  The reviews were positive. Word-of-mouth was ecstatic. Everyone loved it.
  
  Then I played it... and I beat it... and I couldn't remove my palm from my face.
  
  Imagine a bland clichéd character from a bland clichéd anime, say, any doe-eyed dope from Bleach or Naruto. Now plop this Mary Sue, Sora, in the middle of a mess of a game plagued with the most basic of problems - camera issues, faulty collision detection, useless features and concepts that were implemented only so there could be more bullet points on the back of the box.
  
  "Build and fly your very own Gummi Ship!"
  
  "Collect all 101 Dalmations and get a secret reward!"
  
  "Summon Simba the Lion King and Aladdin's Genie to help you!"
  
  But why bother when all you have to do to win is mash the attack button over and over? You can use magic and summon allies like Simba and the Genie yet you have no use for them. They show up, do some paltry amount of damage, and disappear, eating away your mana points all the while. Gosh, thanks, guys. Partners like Aladdin and the Beast are useless as well since they're not going to stick around.
  
  Kingdom Hearts is just a brainless hack-and-slasher, a few Disney cameos away from other mind-numbing brawlers like Dynasty Warriors or The Bouncer, another Square dud. You'd get more satisfaction from swatting flies in Mario Paint. Any sense of danger or immediacy only appears when fumbling around the D-pad to scroll through menus for an item or healing spell. Because mapping a bunch of RPG-style menus to the D-pad in an action game is totally a brilliant design decision, right?

  

  Aside from the controls, the camera is your primary foe in Kingdom Hearts. It doesn't want to be controlled. It wants to perform sigmoidoscopies on Sora, which would actually make for a far more compelling game. The whole time, it's implied you can target your enemies Zelda-style, but the perverted camera is way more interested in crawling its way up Sora's butt than in the fat ghost clown you're fighting. Which, y'know, can be incredibly frustrating when you want to see what you're doing.
  
  Not that it matters since nothing interesting happens. The game crawls at the slowest, most tedious pace, like, it's more exciting to watch Stepmom than to play this. All you do is travel via Gummi Ship from Disney world to Disney world - Agrabah, Alice's Wonderland, Halloween Town, etc. - and do fetch quests, which only serve to artificially lengthen the game. This, and the Gummi Ship, and all the stupid cutscenes, is why Kingdom Hearts is 30 hours long. A game that relies on mashing one button over and over doesn't need to be that long. There's no justifiable reason for it. And it's all the game is! FETCH FETCH FETCH. Point A to point B, grab something then backtrack to the same areas 10,000 times.
  
  To make matters worse the platforming is a nightmare. Almost every jump in the game is juuuust out of reach for Sora, for no other reason than to have him latch onto the ledge with his hand and hurl himself upwards. Why not just have the jump at a regular distance? Why does every leap have to be juuuust far enough to waste an extra second of my time to watch this kid pull himself up? That's not a challenge, that's level design failure on a massive scale.
  
  The overall level design fails. Slapdash is the word, and you need only look at the Monstro level. Like there really needs to be a level in the WHALE FROM PINOCCHIO anyway. Who was clamoring for that? It's completely random too, a giant whale in space swallows you up during a Gummi Ship level. It's a literal stopgap. I mean, come oooon, game, work with me here. I WANT to like you, but you're not leting me!

  

  And what's inside a giant whale's stomach? A bunch of random rooms and planks of wood and shit sticking out at random, of course! It's just another stupid level you don't want to be in. It's bland, empty rooms. No scenery, no thought involved. It's a stupid way to extend a game's playtime. It's filler in a game full of filler. It's absolutely thoughtless.
  
  And poor Agrabah. Remember how lively and animated it was in Aladdin? Now it's just an ugly series of empty rooms. Sometimes the rooms are filled with Arabian-themed Heartless (the main enemies of the game) for you to fight! Ohhh joy.
  
  And that's what every level is like. The, ah, wonder of Wonderland and whimsy of Halloween Town gets crushed in a compactor until all the wonder and whimsy oozes out and soulless little empty rooms filled with Heartless are all that's left. Annoying 30-second loops of songs like "This is Halloween" and "Under the Sea" remain as the only reminders of their former selves. It's depressing.

  

  And... the Gummi Ship. Perhaps the worst offender in this whole mess. How did Square, the guys behind classic PS1 shooter Einhander, make what's basically a shooter so boring? I wanted nothing to do with these pointless Intermission stages. That's all they are - intermissions. Diversions. They're not necessary. They're idiotic. Why not just WARP from one world to another?
  
  Despite all the ways the story tries to justify it - meteors and whatever - there's no need for interstellar travel in Kingdom Hearts! The Gummi Ship, despite what Cid or Chip and Dale might tell you, is just another feature to put on the back of the box. It's extraneous bullshit. It's not fun to build and even less fun to fly. Beyond a few lines it doesn't even matter within the context of the story.
  
  The embarrassing, embarrassing story... Every scene is on par with the laughing scene from Final Fantasy X - which was supposed to be forced and uncomfortable. Kingdom Hearts is supposed to be earnest and genuine, yet comes off childish and at worst, offensively moronic. Saturday morning cartoons have less embarrassing dialogue than Kingdom Hearts, and often they're better delivered too despite the game's supposedly A-list voice cast. Every word or phrase out of each character's poorly-synched mouth involves "hearts" or "darkness" or "Paopu fruit." It got to the point where I dreaded anyone walking in on me playing, er, watching the thing.

   

  Apparently, the story turns into over-convoluted baloney anyway. I was warned to stay away from the sequel, so I had to check out the Wikipedia entries for these... Organization XIII? Nobodies? DiZ? Ansem's Nobody? What the heck?! There's a line between building a concise mythology and overstuffing a plot with so much contrived nonsense that eventually all depth and meaning seeps out through the bottom. Just ask Metal Gear Solid. For what possible reason does Kingdom Hearts need a plot where you need a map to follow it? What the hell is going on in Kingdom Hearts anymore?
  
  Series director Tetsuya Nomura doesn't even know. Doubt he cares either! He's fine stringing you along with arbitrary spin-offs forever. That's franchise building. It happened to Final Fantasy, it's happening to this. And since that's all Square does these days, well... I wouldn't hold my breath for anything substantial for a long time.
  
  I will say some good things now: Yoko Shimomura's been making fantastic music since Super Mario RPG and Parasite Eve, and her lovely work in Kingdom Hearts still pleases. Traverse Town has one of the best "town themes" I've heard in any game, and the "March Caprice for Piano and Orchestra" is stellar ending music (Square knows how to do stand-out end credits - see Advent Children...'s end credits). The recurring, melancholy piano tune "Dearly Beloved" truly is dearly beloved, as it almost lends the game an air of class. Utada Hikaru's pop anthem theme songs, Simple and Clean and Passion (from Kingdom Hearts II), are way more fun and infectious than they have any right to be, and Shimomura's orchestrated versions of them are fantastic.

  Isn't that grand?
  
  The graphics, as to be expected from Square, are also pretty good. They know how to put all the audio-visual bells and whistles together, it's what they do best now. It's just that sometimes they forget to throw in a fun game.
  
  I like the idea of Kingdom Hearts, so don't accuse me of hating for the sake of hating or whatever. I love Square. I love Disney. That makes me the game's target audience, doesn't it?  With a better gameplay and a better (lesser) story Kingdom Hearts could deserve all the adoration it receives. As it is now, it doesn't deserve it.
  
  Not one bit.
  
  And hey, I liked what I played of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. The card-based gameplay seems to require some strategy, and I love love loved The World Ends With You, which is from the same team of developers. If it's portable (and competent), maybe I'll enjoy the DS Kingdom Hearts?
  
  And If anyone can make a compelling argument for why I should give Kingdom Hearts II a shot, please do so. It looks like more of the same to me, but I'm open to eating my own hat (and writing about it) if I'm off-base about the whole thing.
  
  What do you think? Does Kingdom Hearts deserve to get knocked off its pedestal, or is it really zomg liek the best game evar olol sora is so kawaii~~?

  

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