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My kingdom for a sensible battle system
Apr. 26th, 2010 11:34 amIt's always been a very large mystery to me why I don't hate Kingdom Hearts. It started as a rather charming if unlikely combination of Square and Disney, but rapidly evolved into a sort of perfect bridge between Disney and Hot Topic, channelling the American youth straightforwardly from Mickey Mouse to Evanescence. And that's a sort of contemptible thing to exist for - on the positive side it has also led a lot of them in to discovering Sonata Arctica, as their song "Kingdom for a Heart" has now been set to this game on Youtube eighty thousand times.
A sad exception to my conspicuously absent dislike was the last game that we got out from Gamefly, Kingdom Hearts RE:Chain of Memories, which upholds the series' attempt to have the daftest-named sequels in history and uses the most ill-conceived battle ideas since the instant-adhesive hand grenade. Unlike the other games which are fought just on the normal playfield, this one reintroduces the standard RPG system of seeing enemies roaming about on the screen and being transported away into hallucinogenic dreamspace somewhere to fight them when one of them touches you. In this strange other dimension, you still have to run about in a 3D environment avoiding enemy attacks, but your own actions besides movement are based on a deck of playing cards in the bottom left of the screen, which you have to flip through one at a time to select attacks or spells that happen to have numbers that beat the cards that are being thrown at you by the enemies while positioning yourself on the play area.
This is as completely impossible as it sounds - it's all right for quieter battles and I almost thought that I was getting the hang of it at one point, but for the bosses it's a complete nightmare, having to keep one eye on the decks, one eye on the cards the boss is playing and another eye on the main screen, and to react in times of under a second to things that require you to plan ahead as to what cards you want to conserve. It's a task more suited to Deep Blue than a JRPG player.
It's a shame, because I liked the other card-related concept of the game a lot - instead of having fixed levels and environments like games indeed tend to have, the game's worlds are all built up from individual rooms that are chosen by you as you go through them. The exit door from each room presents certain requirements to you, such as wanting a green card with a value above 8 (and in a wonderful touch, the cursor shows the initial of the colour of card that you're currently over - consideration like this is a rare find!) and the name of the card you play determines what the room will be like. So as you go through each new door you gradually build the world yourself, trying to avoid having to play cards like "Dark Space" which is a totally black room full of monsters with glowing eyes, and trying to conserve the cards that will give you save points, treasure chests or Moogle shops. This is a much better use of the cards - the battles are just like this, except if you don't find one that meets the criteria within half a second you're punched in the face.
I think we got a fair distance into the game, seven or eight worlds in, but after a string of stressful-at-best end of level fights, I suffered a complete failure to survive against one of the Organization XIII bosses for more than a minute, so in the end I told it to stick it up its backdoor keyhole and sent it back. I'm now playing through the DS entry to the series, which seems enjoyably possible by comparison. But then, so does juggling chainsaws.
A sad exception to my conspicuously absent dislike was the last game that we got out from Gamefly, Kingdom Hearts RE:Chain of Memories, which upholds the series' attempt to have the daftest-named sequels in history and uses the most ill-conceived battle ideas since the instant-adhesive hand grenade. Unlike the other games which are fought just on the normal playfield, this one reintroduces the standard RPG system of seeing enemies roaming about on the screen and being transported away into hallucinogenic dreamspace somewhere to fight them when one of them touches you. In this strange other dimension, you still have to run about in a 3D environment avoiding enemy attacks, but your own actions besides movement are based on a deck of playing cards in the bottom left of the screen, which you have to flip through one at a time to select attacks or spells that happen to have numbers that beat the cards that are being thrown at you by the enemies while positioning yourself on the play area.
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No, I've no idea either |
It's a shame, because I liked the other card-related concept of the game a lot - instead of having fixed levels and environments like games indeed tend to have, the game's worlds are all built up from individual rooms that are chosen by you as you go through them. The exit door from each room presents certain requirements to you, such as wanting a green card with a value above 8 (and in a wonderful touch, the cursor shows the initial of the colour of card that you're currently over - consideration like this is a rare find!) and the name of the card you play determines what the room will be like. So as you go through each new door you gradually build the world yourself, trying to avoid having to play cards like "Dark Space" which is a totally black room full of monsters with glowing eyes, and trying to conserve the cards that will give you save points, treasure chests or Moogle shops. This is a much better use of the cards - the battles are just like this, except if you don't find one that meets the criteria within half a second you're punched in the face.
I think we got a fair distance into the game, seven or eight worlds in, but after a string of stressful-at-best end of level fights, I suffered a complete failure to survive against one of the Organization XIII bosses for more than a minute, so in the end I told it to stick it up its backdoor keyhole and sent it back. I'm now playing through the DS entry to the series, which seems enjoyably possible by comparison. But then, so does juggling chainsaws.
