Nerd Mentality

A post about Kingdom Hearts

Posted May 28th 2006 by Jordan Mammo.

This is a sloppily-put-together rant about a four-year-old game that, like most of the stuff in this blog, you probably won't finish reading.

I don't know much about Square-Enix; I'll be the first to admit that. I don't really know much about their games and I don't follow their release schedule with much interest, though I will say they're doing an amazing milk-job on Final Fantasy VII. However, I did buy Kingdom Hearts recently and I have to hand it to them: Tetsuya Nomura and Co. said all the right things and made all the right moves while slipping a little something in our drinks, because they had their way with us the moment we all spent our money to play this game.

Kingdom Hearts is stupid. At best, it is mediocre. How a publisher with a pedigree such as Square-Enix's can release something like this to critical acclaim and amazing reception should be unthinkable, and yet it's not altogether shocking. I see "Disney + Final Fantasy" and I think, "Game finished!" and apparently so did the people behind it, though they probably also heard a "Cha-Ching!" and saw a seizure-inducing amount of dollar bills flash before their eyes. How so? Well, for starters...

The battle system sucks. In the opening tutorial, the game teaches you how to play. It says, "Use X to attack." So I hit X a few times. Then it tells me, "Alright, you've got it!" Little did I know, I really did have it... this is the entire game so far. Well, I shouldn't say that. Sometimes I jump around a bit and hit X in mid-air. It may actually be a blessing that the combat isn't more sophisticated since:

The camera is atrocious. It's so low sometimes you can barely see what‘s in front of you. In battles it's even worse: spinning around all the time, getting caught, and overall just screwing you over every chance it gets. It's as if Square was so intent on showcasing the fact that you're running around with Disney characters that they forgot to make it, you know, functional. Magnifying the camera problem is the fact that:

The controls are horrible. Sora is so floaty and unresponsive that the most simple platforming challenges are a pain in the ass. Using the lock-on features in battle would seem to be a good idea because of the spinning camera, but unfortunately it's a crapshoot as to whether you'll even lock on to the enemy that's closest to you. I have no effective transition to my next complaint, so I'll just say it:

Building your Gummi Ship is mind-numbingly boring. I think most people agree with this, though. Your Gummi Ship basically looks like someone put a few Lego's together and called it a day, so who cares about building one anyway? It's so boring and unnecessarily complex that there's just no incentive to spend time on it, especially when:

Flying your Gummi Ship sucks. These flying sequences are like the ones in Star Fox except they‘re horrible. Sometimes I can just hold down the "shoot" button, not move the ship at all, and still make it through the obstacles with barely any damage taken. I can't even breathe a sigh of relief when I arrive at my destination because:

The level "design" might as well not exist. I don't even know if you can really call the various areas you visit "worlds," as they only consist of a few rooms you run back and forth through. They are, quite literally, boxes with different backgrounds. Sometimes the room is rectangular. Traverse City is virtually lifeless save for about three people at the entrance. When you fight in the Coliseum, and this is after you're told it'll be a giant spectacle where "a ton of heroes are supposed to show up," there's not a soul in the crowd. It's just empty, bland, and boring.

How do people enjoy running around these areas? Would anyone bother if these levels weren't in a game by Squaresoft or if they didn't represent licensed worlds that millions of people around the world remember fondly? When I consider that the game's objectives are just as bad as everything else, I find it hard to believe anyone would play past the second or third level.

I think Square knows that, though, and that's where the crossover comes in.

There's been a trend where many game critics never miss an opportunity to rag on RPG's from Japan, or if you're really hardcore, "JRPG's," for their cliche storylines and cookie-cutter characters. How Kingdom Hearts managed to sidestep this attack is interesting to me, but it‘s (sadly) probably just because of its crossover of famous characters. It's pretty much the same thing we've been seeing in RPG's since... forever? Kids looking out at the world, wondering what else is out there. "The darkness" is taking over. Sora is "the one... who will open the door." *Roll eyes dangerously*

It gets worse because Disney and Square characters come and go with no real purpose. Aerith tracks down Goofy and Donald to talk to them in some hotel room for three minutes before just disappearing. Squall and Yuffie show up to unite you with Donald and Goofy, and sometimes there are no intros because, hell, you probably know who the characters are anyway, right? Isn't that the whole point? That you already love these characters and worlds so much that it doesn't even matter how they're thrown together so long as they just are? There have been a few times where there's a slow, dramatic scene as a character is revealed or walks by, and I suspect this is when Square expects you to whip it out and get to work because, holy shit, Cloud Strife just fuckin' showed up to fight you in a level from Hercules, isn't that totally super awesome and surreal?!?! *Splooge pants violently*

This is how I suspect Kingdom Hearts keeps people playing, because I can't imagine why else anyone would subject themselves to one fetch quest after another, broken platforming, and mashing the X button thousands of times. Nothing stands out except for the fact that Square characters are walking around with Disney ones, and the game exploits this one feature mercilessly. Just like Nintendo knows they can get people to push that block or light that torch a million times over in Zelda because it's Zelda, Kingdom Hearts knows it can make you run around collecting "evidence" or "freeing gorillas," because goddammit people will want to see the next cool sequence where Tarzan meets Yuna and they have a threesome with Jane. And, for the most part, people did all this with a smile on their face. Meanwhile, Square-Enix and Disney can just relax, sit back in their chairs, and laugh gleefully because they know they've stuck it into the butt of every person who purchased this game... and everyone wants more.

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