Kingdom Hearts Primer: Kingdom Hearts 1: Episode 1: The Unchosen One

Welcome ladies and gentleman. Interactive Friction returns once more. Sam and I have a new idea for a series, and today we're excited to share it with you.

So here's the setup: After Sam, Taylor, and I recorded the Hyperdimension Neptunia episode, the topic of Kingdom Hearts came up. Sam told me at this point, that although he played Kingdom Hearts, he didn't understand much of the plot to it.

As someone who is a huge fan of the franchise, I know a lot about the lore of Kingdom Hearts. In the middle of answering some of Sam's questions about the franchise, we realized the could make a whole series about this, so we did.

But then we came at an impasse, for neither one of us wanted to play Kingdom Hearts for the channel. That's when the idea of taking someone else's hard work and using it for our purposes. Fortunately, Miguel, javihavi, and Knowledge from Gamer's Little Playground gave us permission to use their work, so it's technically not stealing. (In all seriousness though, thank you generous souls who let us use your work.)

And so we set off on our journey across the Disney worlds. However, this is intended to be a series explaining the plot and lore behind Kingdom Hearts. So if you guys have any questions about Kingdom Hearts, or want anything clarified, feel free to ask. 

Please note though, that we will eventually be going through every single game in the franchise. That means that if your question is regarding a subject introduced in a future game, I will hold off on answering them until we cover those games.

With that said, enjoy. :)

#82: Kingdom Hearts 2: The Worlds At Large

Lately, I have been replaying Kingdom Hearts 2 via the Final Mix in Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX. As many of you are probably aware, I am a very big fan of the franchise. To that end, especially now that I am replaying the core games in the franchise, I have been thinking a lot about the franchise. When reflecting on many of the plots and central premises of the series, I began to notice some issues. Though I do have a love for the franchise, I must acknowledge the gripes I have with it. It is one of these gripes that I wish to more closely analyze this week.

Specially, what we will to examine are merely a few of the game's premises. They are as follows:

• All worlds were all once part of a larger, united world.
• Events in the past separated and segregated the worlds, with impassable walls of light.
• “Special help” is required to bypass these walls and travel between worlds.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that many scenes in the mini-plots of the various levels call these central tenets into question. Some of the small details in these scenarios call into question, if not outright contradict, these three central tenets.

As an example, let us examine the scenario for Beast's Castle in Kingdom Hearts 2. This level comes from the classic Disney film “Beauty and the Beast”, and, as one would expect, takes place in the castle, owned by the Beast, from the movie. The castle serves as the entire location for the world, as indicated by the title. It is also home to not just the Beast, but Belle and the servants that were transformed into furniture as well. At a specific point in the scenario, the Beast asks Belle to leave the castle because he feels that he no longer deserves her.

For the purpose of this article, we will not be discussing character motivations or anything of the like. Instead, our discussion will mostly stick to the logistical issues regarding this request. Primarily, the issue at hand is that even if Belle wanted to acquiesce, leaving the castle, she has nowhere to go. The entire world she lives in begins and ends with the castle. Without some form of outside assistance, she has no way of leaving to another world. The only way she would be able to go to another world is if she hitched a ride on Sora's Gummi Ship. Since Sora and company are not allowed to “meddle in the affairs of other worlds”, this is not an option.

The other way to approach is to assume that there is a second part to this world that we never see in the game. Though I suppose it is certainly possible, it seems extremely unlikely. After all, the title of “Beast's Castle” implies that there is nothing else to this world. If there was, then the title would logically be a bit more broad, describing an entire town or village. Again, this is not to criticize the notion of Beast asking Belle to leave. This is merely exploring the fact that this request implies, in the best case, a whole different element to the level that likely does not exist.

Atlantica is also another problem spot that opens up this type of conversation. This world, like how Beast's Castle draws from “Beauty and the Beast”, takes inspiration from “The Little Mermaid”. In Kingdom Hearts 2, Ariel falls in love with a surface-dweller named Prince Eric, just as she does in the movie. Like the case of Beast's Castle, this raises some logistical problems with the base premises regarding the worlds and how they are separated.

Chief among them being that Prince Eric seems to come from nowhere in particular. Here, we encounter the opposite problem that we encountered in the Beast's Castle scenario. Instead of trying to explain how somebody leaves the world, we are trying to understand how someone could have entered it. Like before, it has been established that one cannot travel to other worlds without special help. Though it was possible in the original Kingdom Hearts, since the darkness destroyed walls between worlds, this is no longer the case. At the time of Kingdom Hearts 2, the impassable walls are present once more. Even with the ship Prince Eric sails on, he would not be able to travel to Atlantica from an outside world.

The other possibility, similar to the case with Beast's Castle, is that he hails from a location in the world not known to the player. Again, this is technically possible, but unlikely. Were it the case, there are additional questions raised. It would call into question Sora and companies need to transform themselves into sea creatures to blend in with the locals. After all, were there to be a whole area of surface-dwellers, one would just land there instead. Furthermore, the title, like in Beast's Castle, implies that the sole domain of this world is King Triton's undersea kingdom. Therefore, I would logically have to conclude that this hypothetical location that Prince Eric comes from is unlikely to exist.

Now, the existence of the contradictions does not necessarily mean that the storytelling, or even the plot itself, is invalid. What it does indicate is that the developers at Square-Enix had difficulty either in keeping track of their lore, or adequately explaining it to the writer(s) of these scenarios. This has been an issue for Square-Enix for quite a while. For better or worse, Square-Enix, and particularly Tetsuya Nomura, has now become infamous for convoluted plots and writing. While I do appreciate the desire to make intellectually stimulating stories that cause fans to audiences to think about them, the plot to Kingdom Hearts is frequently criticized for the many elements that can be astoundingly hard to keep track of without assistance. Still, the games are extremely fun to play. As for the 2.5 ReMIX, the added content makes it easy to recommend to anyone who has an interest in the franchise, regardless of whether or not one has played these games before.

Impressions #10: Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix

The fact the I am a fan of the Kingdom Hearts franchise is not much of a secret. Even after my critiques of the series, I still find myself coming back to it over and over again. When I found a copy of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5: ReMIX for $19.99, I just had to make the purchase. Having spent much of my free time with Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix in particular, thoughts on the game are gathering in the back of my mind. Before I start, I would like to warn readers that I write this assuming you are already familiar with Kingdom Hearts, and have at least played the original release of the game. With that said....

When I started my latest playthrough of the game, I noticed that the Final Mix version of the original Kingdom Hearts changed the initial choices of difficulty. While the first version had only two choices: Normal and Expert, the Final Mix had three options. They were Final Mix: Beginner, Normal, and Final Mix: Proud. Having played Kingdom Hearts many times in the past, I decided to bring in some challenge by tackling the Proud difficulty. This became a choice I would regret at first, because the initial levels in the game are fairly brutal without Guard or Dodge Roll. Once the game opened up a bit, unlocking some magic and abilities, I changed my mind. On Final Mix: Proud, the game becomes much more about timing and positioning. If the player leaves an opening, the enemy will capitalize on it. On Normal mode, attacks do not inflict enough damage to be very worrying. Proud Mode is a different story. Foes can easily take out half of Sora's health with a single blow. As a result, I found myself utilizing magic and items a lot more than previous playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts, where I would mostly just attack, using Cure for healing. It added to the game in a way that I would have never anticipated.

Another thing I should mention are the scenes they added to the game's main story. Most of them detail Riku's involvement with the plot. None of the added scenes are absolutely essential to understanding the story. However, they do add a nice context to Riku's character and how it evolves over the course of the game. With these scenes, it is much easier to understand exactly why Riku joined up with Maleficent, and how she convinced him to work with her. Also, when Ansem takes over Riku's body towards the end of the game, the extra scenes help explain how he ends up on the other side of the door to Kingdom Hearts along side King Mickey. None of this is necessary for the plot to make sense, but it is nice to have the game explicitly answer these questions.

Aside from that, the story to the original Kingdom Hearts is all here, and it is as Simple and Clean as it was back then. The first game excelled at telling a simple, Disney-style story. It talks about friendship, heart, and the duality between light and darkness such that anyone in its E for Everyone demographic can understand. While later entries in the series will delve into the more complicated, Final Fantasy-esque storytelling, Kingdom Hearts started out differently, and the writing was better for it.

On a core level, this is the same Kingdom Hearts that I fell in love with way back in 2002. The combat feels grounded. I would not call it “realistic”, but it has a sense of plausibility that later games in the franchise did not quite recapture for me. Even today, the gameplay holds up extremely well. Hit detection is solid and the player has a lot of feedback with regards to when something takes damage or when an attack gets parried.

Having said that, there is key difference that I made a note of. In the original game, when Sora uses a technique like Ars Arcanum or Sonic Blade, he is invincible during both the initial attack and during all of the follow ups. In Final Mix, I noticed that during the follow-ups of either Ars Arcanum or Ragnarok, Sora is open to attacks, making both moves less useful overall compared to Sonic Blade or Strike Raid. I am not sure whether or not I appreciate that change. On one hand, the two moves are not as good as they used to be. On the other hand, not only were they overpowered to begin with, but their reduced effectiveness encouraged me to use other techniques instead. With the addition of new abilities and adjusted level up charts to accommodate them, the game feels fresh even for people who have already played Kingdom Hearts before.

Other notable changes help to bring the game into the modern age. In the original Kingdom Hearts, players needed to scroll down through the attack menu in order to select the contextual commands. The HD version of the Final Mix changes that by mapping them all to the triangle button in much the same way that Reaction Commands work in Kingdom Hearts 2. Follow-up attacks from Keyblade Techniques are also handled this way. Further, at the start of the game, players can choose to either stick with the shoulder button camera controls from the original game, or change it to the right-analog stick. When I saw the prompt, I personally switched it the the right stick as fast as I possibly could. These are both really nice convenience changes that improve upon the game by bringing it into the current gen. Shoulder button camera controls have always had issues, like their limited axis of effectiveness and general unwieldiness. Purists might be turned off, but I welcome the additions.

Kingdom Hearts always had a knack for looking good, even back in the PS2 era. Because of the game's use of bold colors and a stylized, cartoonish look, the game visually withstood the test of time. With the HD treatment, this is even more true. Everything looks fantastic with the higher resolution. However, given that this is still a PS2-era game, there are some noticeable graphical hiccups that games from that system were known for. For example, they did not have the technical ability to render a character's high detail face outside of cutscenes. When in gameplay, and even in some cutscenes, the faces on the characters are noticeably of lesser quality. As a port of a PS2 game, this is to be expected. Unfortunately, sometimes the higher resolution works against the game in this case. When uprezzing some of the textures for the character models, there are a few isolated cases where there is noticeable pixelation on them. Thankfully, it is no where near as bad as when Final Fantasy X-2 HD, where most character models had that issue. I only noticed in a few small, highly isolated cases. The pixelation is only a blemish on an otherwise highly polished piece of art.

Overall, Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix alone is well worth the asking price for the 1.5 ReMIX. As of the time of writing, I have yet to complete the boss fight against Unknown that was added to the Final Mix. I do not feel leveled enough to be able to fight him on Proud mode and right now I want to take a break from the game. I also do not currently feel compelled to play through Re: Chain of Memories. When it came out on the PS2, I purchased it and completed it 100%. As fun as that was, I do not feel like I want to do it again after doing it on both the GBA and the PS2. Nonetheless, I am extremely eager to purchase and play through the 2.5 ReMIX when it is released.