Crit Rate UP++

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Run It Back - Function-Only in the Coliseum (And A Cloud Glow-Up)

Sora and friends land at Olympus Coliseum and the game’s quaint early 2000’s architecture is on display once more. The area is baren, with a couple collectible chests and some unobtainable trinity marks scattered around an entry area. There are no regular enemy spawns, shops, or NPCs to greet the player. Olympus Coliseum serves more of a functional purpose than the host of any kind of meaningful narrative -- tournaments for various Cups are unlocked and held here as the game progresses, rewarding the player with munny, rare items, and one-off boss fights not found in the regular game. Though sparse, the space is still given some character by leaderboards for the various tournaments, towering statues of Greek soldiers and columns, and an impossibly large door that acts as an entryway to an impossibly small fore-room to the arena. The entrance to the arena itself is roped off, and only accessible during story events and tournaments.

I want to say that the limited use of already limited assets was meant to ration out the fun and surprise by limiting player’s movements to “approved” areas -- sort of a running theme of the series freshman effort is economy, and doing a lot with a little. To give Sora free-roaming access to the arena would maybe make it less of an event to be there, and would only be another large, empty space in an already bare-bones world. The modus operandi of the game design seems to involve dosing out the player’s exploration in measured increments, reserving the whole picture for late-game backtracking and revisits. The degree of its success is debatable, but it does at least feel purposeful.

Olympus introduces a redesigned Cloud Strife. It’s a very fun take on the character, with the base being using lots of elements from his home game of Final Fantasy VII embellished with very Nomura design touches. The personality feels very pre-Nibelheim Cloud -- a very unsure, brooding, and somewhat self-absorbed character. He’s being used by Hades and doesn’t necessarily know it, and takes on morally dubious work for a perhaps more dubious reward of personal freedom. He’s cool-almost-cold without a righteous streak when we meet him, and sets himself up as a rival and foil to Sora’s bright and optimistic disposition.

Visually, Cloud takes on a sort of fantastical, undead motif based largely off of fellow Final Fantasy VII alum Vincent Valentine (which works well, considering Vincent is essentially a vampire-were-beast.) His outfit is the familiar SOLDIER uniform, with a sleeveless thermal shirt and utilitarian pants and combat boots. He takes a gnarly looking golden claw on his off hand and a tattered crimson shawl from Vincent, with each being reminiscent of the character’s Dirge of Cerberus design as opposed to the relatively neat Final Fantasy VII look. Cloud wields his iconic Buster Sword, which is still as monolithic as ever. The weapon appears wrapped in tattered bandages, presumably serving dual purpose as continuing the undead motif as well as softening the effect of Cloud essentially cleaving Sora in two during combat. Nobody gets outright wounded in the Kingdom Hearts universe, with characters’ mortality usually restricted to abstract states of physical and spiritual banishment, life, and undeath. Though there are other instances of bladed enemies in Kingdom Hearts, the weapons are usually wielded by more outright hostile and villainous enemies. Cloud’s look is completed with a single wing on his left shoulder, an obvious nod to his arch-nemesis Sephiroth (whose wing appears on the right.)

It’s hard to overstate how outrageous the idea of an inter-Final Fantasy crossover was at the time. Mainline instances of Final Fantasy cross-pollination were somewhat few and far between at this point. Sure, the games had recurring themes, characters, and motifs like mechanics named Cid, soldiers named Biggs and Wedge, Crystals, Chocobos, airships, and Moogles, but actual characters meeting and fighting with and alongside one another was a seldom occurrence. The most notable example I can think of would be Cloud’s appearance in Final Fantasy Tactics for the original PlayStation -- an arcane process that involved reaching a certain spot in the story, collecting certain party members, speaking to NPCs to receive specific quests,  and collecting an item that could be used to summon him into Ivalice, after which you must complete a battle and some dialog choices before he finally joins your party. A far off easter egg probably only obtainable with the use of a strategy guide is a far cry from being part of a series of main story beats. However as crazy as the crossover potential was, it was a somewhat tempered effort. The characters present are limited to the PlayStation-era Final Fantasies of  VII-X, games which were hugely popular and still fresh on players’ minds. It wouldn’t be until later Kingdom Hearts entries that the cast of guest characters would expand to other Final Fantasy games and Square-Enix properties.

The rest of Olympus plays out as a sort of combat and movement skills test. Sora is tasked with completing a Junior Hero assessment by keeping up with Herc’s training regimen of timed barrel smashing and light platforming, followed by the first of many tournaments. The Devito sound-alike for Phil brings some much needed flavor to an otherwise monotonous section of menial tasks. The scene is topped off by a pair of boss fights with Cloud and Cerberus, defeating the latter of which gets Sora and co inducted as Junior Heroes.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s worth mentioning that the lack of immediate areas to grind for XP or an item shop can make the tournament and it’s proceeding boss fights a chore if you happen into this world underleveled, poorly equipped, or both, and really limits your options for advancement if you happen to have backed yourself into a corner.

Hercules and Phil watch on as Sora, Donald, and Goofy celebrate their newfound titles, with Herc coyly suggesting to Phil that he had something to do with Sora’s success in defeating Cerberus.

Join me next time when we visits Wonderland and witness its’ sometimes delightful level design.

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Eating In A Dream World: We Already Miss You, Jonathan Gold

It’s been about a day and half since I got the news and it still hurts so I think I’ll say something about it.

I think we were at a point where it was easy to take for granted Jonathan Gold’s work. He was everywhere, in overt and subtle ways. That place you go to for soon tofu has a framed review sitting on their wall; your friend’s Snapchat has him sitting at a counter in an Arcadia mall eating noodle soup; he’s in your car with Evan Kleiman talking about his favorite movies on KCRW. His work was prolific and spanned into every area of LA food you could think of.

It’s apparent through his work that Gold loved the San Gabriel Valley -- and as someone who grew up on the Eastside, I’ll admit that much of my respect for him came from how readily, how eagerly he made the trip and the effort to provide it coverage. It wasn’t just a spot on a list either -- it was serious, considered meditation on the ingredients, the dishes, and the people that made them. Before I encountered his work, I thought of food writing as reserved for celebrity or soon-to-be celebrity chefs opening their restaurants on Melrose or Sunset or in Beverly Hills or in Downtown LA. It meant something to a part of me that I didn’t know needed meaning that he would come to sit down at a restaurant owned and run by immigrants and give their food thoughtful appraisal in the same way that a brand new multi-million dollar restaurant project might receive it. That he would go to where these chef’s drew their flavors from and just cover the source was brave and welcome.

I wouldn’t say Jonathan Gold brought the city together -- I think he illustrated in a succinct way how we as a people drew our own lines through the city. As long as I have known it, food culture in Los Angeles has always been about going to a place for a thing because none of the other dozen places that you passed would do. We as a people will drive past Burger King, McDonalds, and a dozen other take out spots for In-N-Out for Double Doubles; we brave downtown traffic and parking for a French Dip from Philippes; in East LA where there are perhaps more taco trucks and cop cars per capita, we’d go to different trucks if we were craving certain meats and menu items because we knew some did them better than others; my dad would give up red meat for Lent and we’d drive to Tommy’s on Rampart at midnight on Easter Sunday  for a cans of soda and chili burgers, dogs, and fries. We as a city have never been afraid to go out of our way for something good. What was perhaps illuminating to the rest of the country was just how far and wide the pins fall on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants map.

I suppose the story wasn’t that Jonathan Gold found an amazing restaurant in a strip mall somewhere in an ethnic enclave in Los Angeles -- the story was that that’s where good food has always lived in this city, and that it deserved it’s due.

Jonathan Gold’s work is everywhere. He wrote for the LA Weekly and the LA Times at different points. He appeared on KCRW’s Good Food to talk about restaurants he’d visited and trends in the industry. He comes out in David Chang’s Ugly Delicious on Netflix. He even had a documentary made about him and his relationship to Los Angeles in City of Gold. To have it suddenly stop feels like I’m suddenly living in a vacuum.

I can’t recall specific stories by Gold. What comes to mind is instead the general hum that he created -- the background radiation to not just the LA dining scene, but food culture in general. I can hear him talking to Evan Kleiman, I just don’t know about what; I can see him in a blue striped shirt, suspenders, and dark brown slacks hovering over an old, bad stove -- I can’t remember what show it was on; I remember bookmarking his Majordomo review because I’d run out of free articles to view on the LA TImes that month, and the subsequent editorials and thinkpieces it wrought from the food world; I was going through Snapchat and “Jonathan Gold sighting” was overlaid on an incognito picture of the man at a food court I knew well; I remember something about a visit to Per Se; I remember walking into a restaurant and seeing his byline on a framed review -- I don’t remember where I was.

In one way, there’s a great silence over our city now. But I’d like to think that in another more hopeful way, there’s a closer ear to the thrum of it’s heart. And the way for us to remember Jonathan Gold, the way he’d want us to carry on, is by keeping that thrum going. The satisfaction in his life’s work was not in creating a scene in a city, but rather revealing that we all curated something beautiful, something special in our own view of the city.

Gold on KCRW’s Good Food https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/good-food-on-the-road

Gold at the L.A. TImes http://www.latimes.com/food/jonathan-gold/

Gold at the L.A. Weekly http://www.laweekly.com/authors/jonathan-gold-2126528

City of Gold trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__2uT1cZWkY

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Run It Back: Fuck The Gummi Ship (For These Precise Reasons)

The Gummi Ship sections of the game are almost irredeemably terrible. I suppose they’re meant to break up the normal rhythm of the game’s exploration, combat, and exposition, but they come off as tiresome and are almost never welcome. Each stage is set up like an arcade game, with the player shooting enemies that appear in Galaga-like formation, along the way destroying meteors, panels, and other random obstacles for power-ups and ship parts. Gameplay feels like Starfox with less depth perception -- the single reticule seems to indicate where on a single plane your shot will connect, and doesn’t have much to do with what’s actually highlighted. The Gummi missions are also plagued with pop-in and loading sections -- objects load in jarringly close to your ship, and the stages often have breaks part-way through that feel like they’re meant to give the player a breather in what’s already a breathy section. These problems are later alleviated somewhat by a warp ability and lock on weapons, but every first visit to a world is still accompanied by a mandatory Gummi Mission.

The Gummi Garage perhaps represents my biggest misgivings with the Gummi system in general -- on the one hand, it’s entirely unintuitive, clunky, and hides much of it’s utility behind messy menus; on the other hand it can be surprisingly powerful and expressive! Players have made ships in the form of Gamecubes, Mario sprites, and (my personal favorite) White Base from the original Mobile Suit Gundam.

The editor itself is three dimensional matrix that the player can individually place parts in, with each piece taking a fixed number of spots in the grid. Parts pop in and out of spaces with no regard for whether they are part of the base structure -- pieces can hang out anywhere within the given space. The game has canned blueprints for different ships you can build that are based on vaguely Final Fantasy terms like Highwind and Cactuar, but the way they are implemented leaves much to be desired. The blueprints require parts to complete, parts that can only be obtained by grinding Gummi Missions and special objectives within. If the player doesn’t have the required parts for a Gummi build there is no indicator in the blueprint select screen. When the player goes to build a blueprint there isn’t a clear indicator of weather or not they have the required parts other than a prompt that appears after they attempt to create it -- and at that there is no clear indicator of what specific parts are required, never mind where to find them.

The parts themselves have different properties reminiscent of spell progression in the Final Fantasy games -- for example there’s the Cure/Curaga/Life/Full-Life cockpits that have increasingly potent abilities. The system is built this way to create a sense of progression through the Gummi Missions -- they aren’t particularly skill-based or complex, so difficulty comes through a more brute force system of sending more enemies and obstacles at the player with higher health. The problem becomes that players can trivialize the encounters by simply adding and replacing more powerful parts to their ships. While it sounds like a net positive to allow players that collect more powerful parts by better completion of Gummi Missions to create more powerful ships, the editor is such a chore to use that it can feel like a player is being punished to have to go in and manually add them to their current design. The minimal rules restricting the construction of ships can also lead to creations that are entirely functional with little aesthetic continuity. At my current space in the game, this is what my ship looked like:

 it’s a mangled mess that uses many of the most functional parts available to me at the time, regardless of how they would intuitively fit in with the base ship’s design. It’s stats and functionality allow me to breeze through missions without investing in the time to grind for parts that complete similarly powered blueprints in my possession.

While compelling aesthetics may be of little concern to some players, there is definitely no question that the process could have been streamlined into something that allowed similar creativity while still maintaining some sense of decorum. Perhaps blueprints could have been built independently of available parts, with stat progression costing some resource tied to the scoring system. The freebuild option could have been maintained while still creating a progression system similar to the one in place. Players spend points to get access better weapons and armor, which in turn allows them better success at future missions, which further incentivizes mastery of the game system. As it stands you can complete a mission, take your drops and retrofit them onto your abomination of a ship, and maintain as close to an asymptotic relationship to the system as possible.

My biggest gripe with Gummi missions is how often they are mandated by the game. As stated previously, every new visit to a world is accompanied by a mandatory auto-scrolling Gummi Mission. There’s a reason that the concept is much maligned by the speedrunning community -- they put the brakes on a player, requiring them to abandon whatever pace or rhythm they’ve adopted at that point and become subject to the game’s own metronome. It’s tedious, and having to restart a mission when you fail feels like you’re being punished for not being good enough at playing the game you didn’t want to play in the first place.

It was at this point in my playthrough that I encountered a major frustration with the Gummi Missions. When completing Traverse Town you have the option of continuing on to Wonderland or the Olympus Coliseum. Worlds are ranked with difficulty according to a star rating -- and of the two given paths, Wonderland is marked as the easier of the two. I’m quite familiar with the series, so I thought it might be fun to attempt the challenges of Olympus Coliseum first. For the most part, I was right. I played through at a steady clip and hit my first real roadblock in the form of the Cerberus boss. Long story short, I burned through my pool of items and needed more to be able to complete the fight. It was at this point that I came to the realization that the only item shop thus far was in Traverse Town. Without the fast travel piece for my ship I would need to complete a Gummi Mission to get there, grind for Munny and items to fill out my inventory, and complete another mission to get back to Olympus. This tedium was inexcusable, and for a short while I proceeded to bang my head against a three-headed dog shaped wall until I ate it and made the trip back to Traverse Town. Situations like this have been alleviated in future games with shops located at every world, but going back to the first entry makes the grind stick out sorely.

Overall, the Gummi Missions feel like an incomplete idea that was sewn up for release. It was integrated with the narrative to explain how those who haven’t succumbed to the Darkness traveled between worlds and was given its own gameplay system to help flesh it out. It’s an idea the series doesn’t entirely abandon, either -- Gummi ships themselves make a return in Kingdom Hearts II, and Dream Drop Distance has a similar mechanic for entering worlds. Unfortunately in its debut the system comes off as peripheral to the main game, and never quite comes together as something satisfying and worthwhile to pursue.

Join me next time when we visit Olympus Coliseum and the completely bonkers idea of an inter-Final Fantasy crossover!

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Run It Back: Kingdom Heartroidvania in Traverse Town

Traverse Town is the first real stop in Sora’s journey and sets the template for what the visits to each world in the game would look like.

The town itself is meant to be a crossroads for travelers and nomads from other worlds. It’s set up with a Disney Parks-esque aesthetic, with major buildings conveying something about their works or purpose with popping features. The signage is all beautiful, with bright neon providing a warm glow against a perpetually dark and starry skybox.

A major issue with story progression comes up here where it can feel pretty aimless and undirected. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that gameplay advances along with the narrative -- shops open and close, abilities are handed over, and even enemy spawn rates are in cadence with the current goings on with the story. While this early combat is easy enough to avoid if you don’t want to, it can be be a chore to wander in and out of buildings, rooms, and areas hoping to trigger the next story event. There is no map (on screen or otherwise) or marker to indicate where a player should go next, and while non-player characters (NPCs)  can provide hints about your next goal they aren’t differentiated from the NPCs who just want to say something about the weather. Once in a while the camera work in a cutscene will hint toward the next objective by panning toward a particular exit or feature in the same area. It’s not very subtle but it gets the job done and I wish the game would lean on it more often.

One can argue that leaving the player to figure out the way ahead for themselves encourages exploration and that elements of the game would be hurt by a more linear, hand-holdy trek. And actually, I would agree to an extent with regard to the first Kingdom Hearts. This game adopts a Metroidvania-esque progression system, where certain areas are locked behind ability upgrades the player receives throughout the game. It’s usually hinted at by having a ledge with a chest just out of reach, or by placing some mysterious but obviously important object in plain view that the player is unable to interact with when they first encounter it. It’s a progression system that I actually really like. When done well it allows areas to transform and reveal themselves to the player at regular intervals, and tends to breath new life into places that would be otherwise tiresome and tedious to revisit. With the game being in the sort of sophomore class of Playstation 2 titles I think developers would still be worried about the economy of space with older titles, and with Traverse Town being one of the early hubs for story advancement it would make sense for them to get the most that they could out of it.

I think that the trouble is that the two systems are somehow intertwined but exist parallel to one another, crossing over but rarely intersecting in fun and interesting ways. The narrative is urgent and wants you to find your friends and the king and save the world. The gameplay tells you that you can also collect hidden chests, rescue all 101 dalmation pups, grind Heartless encounters for items money and experience points, or any number of other quests -- but it doesn’t quite tell you which you’ll be doing at any given time.

All in all, it takes a minute to get Donald and Goofy as companions, you have a pretty barebones fight with a boss, and get your first magic spell! Then it’s off to either the Olympus Colleseum or Alice’s Wonderland -- though to get to either, you’ll have to play a mandatory Gummi Ship mission, which I just typo’d as SHit and considering leaving as is. A bit too on the nose, huh?

[twiscool]

myla

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an excerpt from an upcoming piece about Myla, my favorite Hollow Knight bug!

When the player first encounters Myla, she’s dutifully picking away at the beautiful, gently glowing gems of what will become known as the Crystal Peak area. She hums along her droning work with a pleasant melody, though the contents belie the cheery and purposeful cadence. She sings about the rest of her family dying -- a mother, a father, sisters burried “two by two,” then eventually herself. The macabre tone and a particular line about “something even more valuable hidden just a bit deeper in” foreshadow her eventual fate and also gives the player cause for concern for who is otherwise a kind, cheerful, and child-like character. Her innocence is driven home with a charming stammer and a naivitee that stands out against the rest of the game’s cast -- she offers the player to join her in wealth gathering, in stark contrast to nearly every other bug that offers services in exchange for geo, with perhaps the only notable exception being Cornifer the cartographer beetle[...]

Happy Sunday, see you all tomorrow for the next part of my Kingdom Hearts retrospective!!

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No-Kill Run: The Dream Nail

The dominant verbs in videogames seem to boil down to attack and kill, often in tandem In the series No-Kill Run we’ll be looking at mechanics in games that provide meaningful interaction with NPCs and the scenery without being overtly destructive.

Hollow Knight came out in February of 2017. I happened upon it by chance months after it’s successful Kickstarter and later release, and went into it mostly blind. What I found easily became one of my favorite games of all time, with its wide and expansive world, satisfying combat, fluid movement controls, and loveable cast of characters. The bugs of Hollow Knight inhabit the Hallownest, a melancholy husk of a once great kingdom.

Part way through the game the player gains an interesting ability called the Dream Nail -- a secondary weapon that “cuts through the veil between dreams and waking.” In practice the Dream Nail is meant to collect Essence (a mostly optional resource/collectable that is essential for obtaining two of the game’s three endings), though it also creates an interesting way to interact with the denizens of Hollownest. Charging the Dream Nail and striking another bug with it allows the character to listen to their thoughts. Since the kingdom has fallen to a strange and ravenous infection, the Dream Nail invites the player into a unique if disturbing and grotesque view of the state of things. Sometimes bugs issue sharp calls for destructive violence; other times they hold regrets, doubts, and anxieties; and still others, shockingly deft observations by minds one would think degenerated and lost to the kingdom’s infection.

In effect the Dream Nail functions as a sort of environmental storytelling tool. The most surprising example of the Dream Nail’s use is that some of the dead bugs littering the kingdom can be struck to reveal their thoughts at around their final fate, usually hinted at by something in the environment. My favorite example involves a living bug named Willoh who you meet relatively early on in your adventure. She seems to be fixated on snacking on a fungus that her giraffe-llke neck reaches for to just out of frame. When the player revisits the area much later with the Dream Nail and a few traversal upgrades, you find Willoh snacking on what appears to be a fungus similar to one that shoots deadly explosives in a previous area as well as the corpse of a bug whose final thoughts were “Not..food…” huddled in the opposite corner. Striking Willoh with the Dream Nail from this vantage point reveals that she’s also considering eating the Knight, musing to herself “This little creature looks tasty. I wonder, should I eat it? The others around here were awfully bland.” It’s a mechanic that takes an otherwise unremarkable, inoffensive NPC and creates a delightfully macabre scene for curious players.

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Run It Back: Kingdom Hearts 1.5 -- The Introduction and Destiny Islands

The title screen of Kingdom Hearts remains to be my favorite intros in all of games. Dearly Beloved is a theme which by now has been arranged, reprised, and remixed into about a dozen official versions. It’s a theme so iconic that rather than start fresh with an entirely new track for each new series entry, it’s been repurposed as an overture of sorts -- every reimagining of the track can tell you something about tone, beats, and themes present in the game ahead. In this instance, the theme has a somewhat melancholy bass line married to a flittering melody. The rhythm goes in an unhurried circle arriving back unto itself, accompanied by the sounds of waves gently crashing onto the shore. Sora stands in a beautiful watercolor illustration, alone and looking out at the sea. Like most of the other parts of the game that I remember fondly, the elements come together in a way that just feels right. Sora is alone, and though his expression is relaxed you get the feeling that he isn’t quite happy either. There’s a touch of mourning to the scene, which stands as a somewhat abrupt contrast to the expectations one would bring to a licensed Disney game in the early 2000’s -- something was different this time, and it was exciting!

The menu options are unfussy. You can start a new game or load a save (and in the case of the ReMIX versions, back out to the game select screen), and upon starting a new file you’re greeted with an intro cinematic. The cinematic starts with a beautifully rendered cloudscape that flashes the title in an unstylized, spartan, and serif’d font, and fades into a scene with Sora voiced by Haley Joel Osmant narrating his thoughts. It feels a little surreal, with him floating in space eyes half closed, wondering aloud to himself if he can trust his grasp of reality anymore. It sets the tone for the series, and places its production values front and center with a flashy cinematic delivering visuals well beyond what the hardware could deliver and professional Hollywood voice acting on par with what we’d expect from a Disney production yet surpassing performances we’d heard from up to that point. It also captures a certain angst that just resonated really well with 14 year old me. My stresses were piled high though I wouldn’t know to call them that at the time. I was just beginning to process some intense personal trauma that had occured very recently; national tragedy had struck the year before, with 9/11 and the G.W Bush Administration altering the course of American politics; and of course I was just entering high school, and all the baggage that brings along. Something about the way Sora saw himself falling from the sky, eyes closed and unable or unwilling to take control of his descent, resonated close and hard with me.

This is also the first time we hear the iconic Simple and Clean track, here as the -PlanitB Mix- with clubby vibe that marks the dramatic sweeps of the chorus have just a little more flair. The soundtrack to Kingdom Hearts was so good that it led to me hunting down a copy of the soundtrack at Tower Records. The craziest thing to me was that it had a domestic release (!) complete with the english (!!) versions of the Utada tracks and an unabridged, two-disc version of the soundtrack. Yoko Shimomura has since become a favorite composer of mine, to the point where I’d instantly recognized her work when I saw the first Final Fantasy XV trailer.

As a somewhat technical aside, The PS4 remaster runs at 60 frames per second, while the original ran at about 30. While the gameplay with look and act much smoother as a result, it is worth noting that the animation in the cutscenes has been keyed to 30fps resulting in a visual discontinuity when moving to and from cutscenes to live gameplay. It’s understandable, but it also shows the beginnings of what will be a recurring question with the remastered version of the game running on modern hardware: should the game be presented as the original was in 2002, and what should be modernized to make the game more akin to something of a remaster (or ReMIX in KH parlance) in 2013 then again in 2017. Although I recognize the sheer amount of work hours it would have taken to go back and essentially reanimate every cutscene in the game would border on absurd, it does give the impression that there was some work the developers and management at Square Enix were seemingly willing and unwilling to do in a re-presentation of the game -- this is not a no-holds-barred recreation of the original, nor is it quick and dirty supplanting of the original. Rather, it’s something that lands in the world between, and I’ll be noting such seems as they occur to me.

The opening with the stained glass figures is still striking as ever, and the constant moody, cryptic narration sets the mysterious vibe well. There’s a short sequence of actual gameplay that gives a brief tutorial of basic movement and attacking controls, then asks you with somewhat cryptic messages to essentially choose a build for your playthrough. I chose defense as my boosted stat in my original playthrough because of the way it’s worded. “The power of the guardian. Kindness to aid friends. A shield to repel all.” Of course these were values that I was All About™ but to be frank in later years when I discovered speedrunners and disgustingly destructive magic builds I became all about them, and would probably have never chosen Defense as a buffed stat in any of my playthroughs to begin with. It’s telling how effective the copy is when I still feel a pang of shame in sacrificing the shield as my default stat nerf.

The opening moments of gameplay on the Destiny Islands are totally unremarkable, and serve to highlight a coming weakness in the game -- namely, the clunky as hell platforming, with something of an identity crisis to come. It attempts to make stages interesting and fun by including varied elements of traversal and platforming, but the game’s unforgiving movement and jumping mechanics make it a difficult sell. With small ledges, an obtuse camera, finicky movement and facing requirements, a seeming lack of jump buffering and ledge forgiveness (more on that here https://www.patreon.com/posts/gamemaker-tips-14531948), getting precise movement out of Sora takes a whole lot of patience. Some of this will later be alleviated with Metroidvania-esque upgrades like a glide and a high jump, but running through the game’s platforming challenges with a vanilla Sora is tedious. Punishment for missing jumps can be harsh, reminiscent of Ratchet and Clank’s Planet Novalis Waterworks where a single misstep would send you to the back of the line to redo an entire sequence.

There’s something kind of cool and again telling in the way the tides are rendered on the beach. They’re GIF-y, cycling between a few frames of canned sea foam animation. Out of place as they may look running natively on a Playstation 4 in 2018, the way the gentle ebb and flow are rendered serve as a quaint reminder of the hardware that served the original entry -- it’s something of a momento mori for the videogame age.

The cave/secluded room on Destiny Islands has a bunch of really cool chalk drawings that I recommend you check out. Some of them seem to be of elements to come in the series, like the royal castle, starry adventures, and what even appears to be a Donald and Goofy. Weather intentional markers of the series’ now apparent time traveling and mysticism shenanigans or just fun little easter eggs for attentive players using the first person view function, it’s still a nice touch.

After some tedious gathering missions meant to familiarize you with the controls, Sora’s weighty movement, and some minor characters, the meat of the story begins to reveal itself. The introduction of the trio of Kairi, Sora, and Riku is mostly to the point -- Sora is excitable, smiley, and kind of a bag of rocks; Riku is intent on accompishing his goal of leaving the islands, seemingly in spite of the costs; and Kairi is kind if somewhat mischievous. There’s something of a love triangle painted between the three which serves to further drive their division in the coming cataclysm.

This is (to my knowledge) the only time the parents of Sora, Kairi, and Riku are even briefly acknowledged in the series. There’s a quick and disembodied line about dinner being ready at Sora’s house, and Kairi only briefly mentions family as the island is being torn apart from within. It’s kind of weird and maybe telling that Nomura and company weren’t sure how the game was going to do and what kind of future it may or may not have had coming. It’s a weird appendage to the series that seems impossible not to acknowledge.

And with that, the trio are sucked into the abyss, we get a glimpse of King Mickey’s castle, Riku in what we’ll later discover is Hollow Bastion, and Donald and Goofy are introduced. The story is told from and omniscient, cross-cutting point of view and I think it works for the most part. There are a lot of threads to keep track of, with characters we’re given lots of reasons to care about. In a game where the player character is one of a group of protagonists, each thematically and literally lost and in search of something, it creates a bigger payoff in dramatic tension to see them criss cross and near miss in pursuit of one another.

Next time, we’ll visit Traverse Town and discuss it’s soothing, soft-porn sax track at the crossroads of every world.

[critrateup]

Run It Back: Kingdom Hearts 1.5 ReMIX, 16 years later

I remember when I bought Kingdom Hearts for the first time. I’d been tracking the game through the number of magazine previews and features I read about it. It seemed unreal -- Square, the house that built Final Fantasy, was going to mash up with Disney to create the wildest crossover you could think of. You’d be able to visit various Disney Worlds and do Final Fantasy stuff in and around them -- cast Firaga on an Ice Titan, summon Simba instead of Ifrit, theme your weapon with a charm gifted by Jack Skellington! To be frank, it was all a bit much to take in.

I went with my dad to Target the day it came out. I picked out the game, and when my dad saw the DIsney logo he asked “Are you sure?” with awkward hesitation. We went to the tall glass case, called the dude with the key, went to the Electronics register and paid the man. I remember holding on to it as we walked toward the exit, studying the metallic foiled cover. I remember how the adhesive from the sticker on top of the DVD case lifted a small but visible white line from the cover art.

Kingdom Hearts III is on the horizon now, nearly 17 years after the launch of the first game. Since then, there have been gaps and side games and mobile games and manga and re-releases and re-re-releases. A lot has changed -- the lore has gotten more complicated, the series signature gameplay has been experimented with and ultimately refined, and Haley Joel Osment has grown a beard.

In anticipation of the new title, and aided by the convenience of most of the titles being available on the Playstation 4 through the dizzyingly titled Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, I decided to play through the games in order of their original releases. I haven’t played through the original since it first came out, so nearly 16 years later it’ll be a fun little exercise to see what I remember (not much it turns out!), how the old gameplay stacks up, and what changes were and weren’t made to the game on modern hardware.

This will be a series of blogs, completed as I make my way through the game in one to two hours sessions. I’ll try to gather my thoughts into something cohesive, but I would like to be able to wander a bit so do try to keep up and if nothing else, enjoy it as the KH series was intended to be enjoyed -- not as an intricate but tightly woven series of threads, but for it’s pure and genuine moments.