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

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.