felis_ultharus | (no subject)

So I just finished Kingdom Hearts I. I have to admit to admit I avoided this one for awhile -- Disney makes me squeamish and even a Disney-Final Fantasy crossover made me worry.

Overall, though, it was an excellent game. As it progresses, it becomes less and less Disney and more and more Final Fantasy.

The story is more intelligent than you'd expect from Disney, and it reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid -- where a true master of fantasy-writing tackles the dull, clichéd superheroes of DC, and weaves them into something mythic and brilliant.

Final Fantasy dileuted a lot of Disney's saccharine, and did the usual Disney theme of following your heart instead of your head much better than Disney ever has.

Still, it wasn't perfect. My criticisms:

I could not kill Goofy. Try as I might -- drive him off of cliffs, put him in the way of harm without a weapon -- nothing works. If he gets knocked out, he just wakes up a few minutes later.
In Final Fantasy games, you can summon Bahamut, King of Dragons, to exhale a blast of continent-obliterating hecatomb at your enemies from orbit. In Kingdom Hearts, you can summon Bambi, who makes useful objects pop out of the ground. I feel the game could have been significantly enhanced if Bambi could exhale a blast of continent-obliterating hecatomb at my enemies from orbit.
I could not kill Goofy. Putting him in the way of the full force of the major enemy attacks, getting him stomped on by a Behemoth, and targetting him with your own weapon all don't seem to work.
I remember seeing a documentary on Edward Said, where his voice discussing stereotypes of Arabs was overlaid on top of footage of Disney's Aladdin. well, I suspect Agrabah-world was the nightmare Said woke up screaming from every night. I doubt there'd be quite so many faceless horrors in turbans if the game hadn't been programmed so soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
I could not kill Goofy. I couldn't abandon him to the Heartless to have his soul devoured -- he must not have one to steal. I tried replacing him with other Disney characters, but they don't let you keep them. When the Darkness devours Goofy towards the end, they make you rescue him to progress the game. I felt that was totally unfair.

On the other hand, I knew the game would get much better when I reached Nightmare Before Christmas world, and it did ^_^

For those with no interest in video games, I'll just mention that there's a black squirrel here in Verdun, living in a tree on fourth avenue.

This is significant -- Montrealers are always fascinated by black squirrels, and often tell me that there are no black squirrels in Montreal, that you only find them at Oka, or up in the Laurentians, etc.

I've nicknamed him Kokki. Fans of 12 Kingdoms will know why ^_^

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

My question is: Did you defeat Sephiroth? I've always had problems with that one. 1. He's ridiculously strong. 2. I can't imagine Sephiroth being defeat by Sora.

(Warning: small spoilers for the second game but really it's nothing important) In the second game there is this scene were you think Goofy sacrificed himself for another character. I never thought for a second he would really be death but you don't even get to fight a level without him. He comes back at the end of the cut scene...

Also KH2 longest playable intro ever. But enough about that game, you've just finished the first one.

I don't remember using the summons in the first game (I used them in the second one) but remember: Never underestimate the power of The Cute. :p

The Cute is all powerful!

When I lived in Ontario, there was a squirrel that was half brown and half black; we called him Pants. I've never seen a black squirrel before though.

It's just that I somehow overheard three conversations in one week by Montrealers about how they saw a black squirrel for the first time upon leaving the city.

This fascinated me, because Montrealers don't notice nature under most circumstances.

Then I saw a black squirrel this week. Made me wonder how many there are like Kokki.

Never met him -- I knew he was there, and that he was voiced by Lance Bass (!), but I knew I wouldn't be able to fight him. But I've already started replaying the game.

I bought a copy of Kingdom Hearts 2, and I'm also playing that. You weren't kidding -- that intro clocks in at a good 4 hours.

As for cute summons, that could be enhanced by white-hot flares of fiery hecatomb. Cute is powerful, but the kind of adorable that leads your enemies into a false sense of security is better ^_^

The battle to get to Sephiroth is doable, if lengthy -- it's just rounds and rounds of Coliseum battle. Sephiroth is damn near impossible. I got all the way there once, to see his intro and judge the new CG model, then pretty much resigned myself to dying miserably.

An optional Sephiroth battle also exists in KH2. You'll stumble onto it pretty much naturally if you're in the habit of revisiting everywhere you've been after major plot-bits. The optional battle is harder in KH2, as judged by the fact that I survived through about half of Sephiroth's HP in KH, and I survived about twenty-five seconds in KH2. If you want the bonus ending video for 100% complete, you must win all optional challenges in Normal Mode -OR- replay the plot, but not all the optional bits, in Proud Mode, which becomes available after you complete the game the first time. The second is substantially easier, although possibly more time-consuming.

I have to say, though, that KH2 actually manages to be prettier than KH. I didn't think it was possible. Save one world that I felt dipped a bit far into the Uncanny Valley, the whole thing was visually impressive from start to finish. The tendency to slash also does not diminish in the slightest. ^_^

What did you think of the ally AI in the game? I was fairly impressed with how quickly Goofy and Donald "learned" to help you, until I realized that they were learning so fast they were training themselves to be idiots. It's pretty easy, by the end of the game, to train Donald to do nothing but Aeroga-Curaga-Curaga-Curaga-Aeroga in boss battles, but heaven help you if you decide to try and teach him the novel concept of 'not pissing through your MP like it's going out of style' when you're just wandering around bashing Heartless.

The AI is slightly improved in the second game, although it actually takes you a while to get back to the point where you even HAVE Donald and Goofy tagging along. They changed the MP regen system too -- I can't recall whether it regenerates with time or with damage dealt in KH, but whatever it is, in KH2 it's the other one. Sora in KH2 is noticeably speedier, but lacks a 'Dodge Roll' ability, which was tremendously annoying. He makes up for it by being able to stay in the air pretty much indefinitely, as long as he has something to hit.

Donald and Goofy both come back from KO after some time has passed, as in the original game. Interestingly enough, so does Sora -- but only in some very specific situations.

I would only recommend bothering with Chain of Memories, the GBA game, if you have a lot of patience and some very twitchy fingers.

To be honest, I never really noticed the AI -- I found that Goofy just cramped my style and did very little, while Donald was useful so long as he still had MP, then was downgraded to useless, too.

In major battles, I did hand them curative items, so they'd have a use, but mostly I assumed I was going it alone.

I'm also so hack-n-slash that I never actually used dodge roll. I just basically assumed that the best defence was a good offence.

When does Sora come back from KO? Usually he gets his heart ripped out of him.

In KH2, there are certain plot battles in which Sora will come back from KO for a second chance. You get to play as one of his allies in the meantime. I shan't say who; that would be telling. XD Suffice it to say, I found the mechanism interesting enough to try it once, after someone else alerted me to it. I believe it's restricted to battles against the Organization XIII people, although I could be merely working from incomplete information on that.

The ally AI in KH is based on 'what did we do in previous battles that didn't get us killed?' There may be a subsidiary algorithm that tracks how much damage Sora deals or takes or something like that. I mostly tried to train Donald to cast Cure-type spells, but after the battle with @#$@!#% Ursula he managed to teach himself to cast Aero on Sora constantly. Never did manage to train Goofy to do much; I typically just activated his Berserk and Charge ability and let him bash everything else Sora wasn't paying attention to.

Dodge Roll is actually rather effective for getting behind the Fat Bandits and other similar giant tubby Heartless. Since you have to hit them either with magic or from behind/atop the head to deal damage to them, using Dodge Roll while they're the active target is a quick way to orbit them and then dispatch them with a combo from behind. Dodge Roll maps to direction + square when activated, so basically if Sora's moving, Sora can be dodging faster than his run. It's also effective against the Monkeyshines in the Tarzan world, who zip around faster than Sora can follow with mere running, and is the only reason I even kind of survived the battles with Dark Riku, who typically blocks and counterattacks if you just wail on him from the front. If you do the bonus battles in the Coliseum, it's also a good way to get away from Yuffie's Limit Break combos, and escape Cloud's Omnislash, which always cuts in a straight line.

Dodge Roll per se doesn't really exist in KH2, partially because there are special parrying abilities, and partially because Sora is much faster. You can also extend combos by more hits in KH2 -- I think I got it up to five or six before I quit chaining abilities -- so there's less need to dodge things when you can just hit them continually, so long as you have a sense of timing.