Monday, April 10, 2017

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Kingdom Hearts 2 - Episode 25 - Going Full Stupid

It's so refreshing to have cool, interesting conversations about the story.


The scenes in the first seven minutes of this episode are all Final Mix exclusive, and that's honestly a large problem. In those seven minutes, so many of the reveals from future games are foreshadowed that the people who only played the original release don't have the foundation that they should. Unless you're like me, and read the wiki, the only way you'd have this content is to:

  • Look it up in the wiki
  • Import the Final Mix version from Japan
  • Wait several years for the ReMix to be releases, that you'd have no way of knowing about at the time Kingdom Hearts 2 came out
And up until recently, this was one of the biggest problems with the Kingdom Hearts series. In order to have the complete story, it was required to have the following systems so that you could play every game in the Kingdom Hearts series:
  • PlayStation 2
  • Game Boy Advance (any variant)
  • Nintendo DS (and later 3DS)
  • PlayStation Portable (PSP Go and Vita wouldn't work due to copyright protection)
  • Mobile Phone
This all changed recently with the ReMixes. While this was a problem for a long time (and part of why Kingdom Hearts was so hard to get into), now all one needs is a PS3 and a PS4 to have access to every game. Soon, with 1.5 + 2.5, the PS3 won't even be necessary, and the PS4 will be the one-stop shop for Kingdom Hearts.

Square Enix has had this problem for a long time, and finally they've solved it. Still, disregarding the financial commitment of getting all the systems and games, there is still the issue of having to play all of the games. As you can see, even with a ton of the gameplay edited out, going through all of these stories is still quite time-consuming.

It's a messy complicated problem Square Enix dug themselves into. While I appreciate the attempt to solve it, it's still a problem.

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