Terra-Xehanort, also referred to as Xehanort, Apprentice Xehanort, Ansem, and Not-Ansem […] is the human form of Ansem and Xemnas
I’m reading about Kingdom Hearts, having never played a Kingdom Hearts game, and wow … this sure is complicated
I played the first Kingdom Hearts game, which was mostly just a fun “the barriers between worlds are coming unraveled!” type story. A simple enough excuse to jump around to Disney worlds and fight villains and rescue princesses.
And I think there are only two games… all of these complications in the story must have been introduced in the second game, which must have been something of a god damn mess.
There are two main games and a huge collection of side games and other media.
But the second main game itself was kind of a colossal mess. (And not nearly as good as the first game, although 90% of people disagree with me).
I mean, I like the gameplay better in the second game, but the story there was certainly moving rapidly in the direction of the absurd continuity snarl that is the series today.
The dungeons were topologically straight lines! In KH1 the dungeons had structure and puzzles and you needed to come back to old areas after you got new movement techniques, and there was exploration and thinking. In KH2 you land at the new area, progress basically from the beginning to the end, and then leave. (With one or two exceptions).
I remember thinking the combat system was really dumbed down, but it’s possible there were a lot of complex interactions that I just didn’t see because I was playing on the easy difficulty and you can win essentially every fight by holding the control stick forward and mashing “attack”. (That’s a slight exaggeration, but not by much).
And the story is not only more confusing, but also less well executed. It loses a lot of what was clever and well-done about the first game.
I’ll concede the point on exploration, but I do think it’s a bit odd to play on easy mode and criticize the game for being too easy. KH2 was the easier of the two games overall, but it was still plenty challenging on hard. The combat actually had a good amount of depth to it, and it felt smoother and less clunky than the first game’s. Drive forms in particular added a lot of interesting options and trade-offs, and it was nice that there wasn’t a build as dominant as magic was in the first game. I did like the exploration and platforming elements of 1, but ultimately the battle system was the core of the game, and I think 2 improved on its predecessor in a lot of ways there.
Which clever and well-done elements of storytelling are you thinking of?
So my complaint wasn’t that the game was too easy, although I can see why I was unclear.
KH1 did not have terribly difficult combat. But I felt like I was making decisions and engaging in tactics throughout the (relatively easy) combats. (I particularly remember enjoying the counter-attack mechanic a lot).
KH2 also did not have terribly difficult combat. But I also didn’t feel like I was doing anything interesting or making decisions during the combat. I felt like I was basically just mashing forwards and attacking. And then periodically the game says “Hit Triangle to see a video of your character doing something cool!” and then you do that. But none of that’s interesting.
The point about difficulty came in because I wanted to admit that since the game was so easy, it’s entirely possible that there was depth and complexity to the combat system that I just never noticed because I wasn’t forced to discover it.
(Also, it may be relevant here that I think the best form of combat is slow defensive kiting with magic; maybe part of what’s going on is that KH1 rewarded you for fighting the way I want to fight anyway.)
As for the story: one of the things I appreciated most about the KH1 storyline is that they managed to preserve the themes and character arcs of the story of each world while doing a sometimes completely different story that tied into the metaplot. I think here in particular of Ariel’s world, where they replace “wants to move to the surface” with “wants to explore other worlds,” which makes way more sense because (1) her world is a closed water world and you have no way of getting out, but (2) other worlds are totally a significant metaplot element. I could make similar comments about Halloweentown and probably a couple others if I remembered it better.
In KH2, in contrast, they wedged your characters into the pre-existing plotlines almost without change. This was particularly jarring in the worlds like Ariel’s and Halloweentown that (1) had appeared in the first game and (2) been handled really well there. But there was a lot of “We handled their character arc in game 1, and now we’re going to forget about that character development and run the original-movie storylines exactly, except Sora is hanging around too.
