Are you a Kingdom Hearts fan? And what do you think of Sora in smash?
I've said this before, but I wanted to like Kingdom Hearts a lot. It came from my Squaresoft obsession in the PS1 and PS2 eras and I built it up in my head as this great, epic thing. A Square RPG where you visit famous Disney movies? Perfect!
When I got my first PS2 in 2006, Kingdom Hearts 1 was one of the games I bought with it. By then, I was way less enamored with Square-Enix games, and even though I was still excited to play KH, I came away deeply disappointed. All of the Disney stuff was exactly as I'd begun to fear: transparent fan service where you replay worse versions of existing Disney movies. A dozen bland licensed games all rolled in to one.
Gameplay left a lot to be desired. Kingdom Hearts 1 is like a mediocre platformer, mediocre Devil May Cry, and mediocre JRPG smushed together. It tries to do a little bit of everything and none of it is done well.
The original, non-Disney-movie story bits feel like they are trying too hard to be deep without really saying anything meaningful. It's all navel-gazing tripe about "hearts" and "friendship" that's supposed to sound smarter and more artful than it actually is. It's very "precious" in a derogatory way. It doesn't help that a lot of the game feels unintelligible in a way that could be bad translation, bad writing, or both. People call Kingdom Hearts "anime as hell" but I don't think that's an excuse for being a terribly told, inscrutable story. The plot in these games feels a mile wide but an inch deep, while pretending to be the opposite.
So KH1 left a very sour taste in my mouth. I played it up to around halfway through Hollow Bastion. After that, a lot of discourse and discussion I absorbed via osmosis about the other Kingdom Hearts games paints a picture of a series I don't think I'd like. On top of that, the only other Kingdom Hearts game I've played was Re:coded on the DS, and while I liked the microchip skill tree system, the rest of the game was hit-or-miss (and, mostly, a retread of KH1 in terms of characters and environments).
That being said, I keep having friends tell me to at least play KH2, and there's a deep rooted part of my brain that still wants to like Kingdom Hearts. I do not currently own KH2, and I've been told I should get it on PS4 if I play it anywhere, because Final Mix 2.5 has important quality of life balance changes. It's just a matter of buying the collection and starting the game, something I've come close to doing but never made the plunge.
Sora in Smash is whatever. The trailer for him was kind of cool at first, but at the end of the day it feels a little cringeworthy. The whole trailer is everyone in the game waking from the dead to watch Sora gently fly around in a circle and go "look at me, here I am, I'm so cool!" without actually doing anything cool. Like, Sephiroth killed Mario. Kazuya dumped a bunch of people in to a volcano! Sora is basically him jumping up and down waving his arms and everybody clapping for what a good boy he is.
It reminds me of that dumb Batman x Fortnite comic from a few months ago where Batman fights Snake Eyes from GI Joe and the whole server stops to watch them fight because "it's just that epic". It feels like it's trying too hard to sell something that isn't that cool. Ready Player One pop-culture masturbation, in a way. The Sora trailer for Smash isn't that bad, but it has shades of that vibe in it. Maybe I'm just getting crossover burnout.
I never even bothered to watch the gameplay demonstration. It'll be ages before I break down and spend the full $120 to buy all of Smash Ultimate, if I ever do at all.
