Simple and… Clean?
Returning to the original Kingdom Hearts in its Final Mix form, I had a certain image in my mind. I remembered a fairly straightforward action RPG without too many bells and whistles, and I figured “what the heck, I don’t recall it being too hard, let’s try it on Proud Mode.”
At least, that’s what I THINK happened. I don’t exactly remember my thought process because I took a break from the game due to travel for the holidays. I returned and started it up, still with that image of the game not being too hard but forgetting I had started the game on Proud Mode.
And I promptly found myself getting my ass kicked due to underestimating the game. After a while of banging my head against Cerberus in the Olympus Coliseum, I opened my menu to take a look and found myself wondering “why the heck did I start this in Proud Mode?”
I’m not much of an action gamer. When I do play action games, I tend to gravitate towards whatever dominant strategy I can find and just do that over and over. Whatever gets me to the next narrative point is fine by me. Seeing as most action games aren’t focused on narrative, I don’t play a lot of “pure” action games. Yet I decided “well, why not stick with this” for Kingdom Hearts. The alternative would be to restart and replay five hours of game, which nope, not gonna do it.
Kingdom Hearts Final Mix on Proud Mode put a taste for difficulty in me throughout the rest of my series crawl. The core loop of bashing baddies with a giant key started feeling more satisfying when there wasn’t an easy strategy that always wins. Learning the core blocks and dodge rolls that make up the bread and butter of Kingdom Hearts defensive play felt nice for a change.
I rather miss difficulty in JRPGs, but I understand why they had to change. As JRPGs became more about “telling a story” than “delivering a game”, it was inevitable that shortcuts would be taken. So it’s kinda nice being given a game that has difficulty that feels fair most of the time, and make me earn my random silly cutscenes of an anime boy hanging out with Disney characters. It made the experience more cohesive.
The play of Kingdom Hearts is still fairly rough at this point in the series, however. A number of mechanics are introduced that are justifiably no longer present in later titles. The MP system is one that requires a large amount of whaling away with weapons in order to recover MP, and both Magic and Special Techniques utilize MP. This creates a flow of combat that feels rather unsatisfying, as most of the time you are attacking to recover MP, and spells are often not as effective as attacking anyway.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the options of weapon at the start of the game provide a significant difference in role for Sora, but in my research I’ve found that it largely just changes the order in which the player gains abilities. Choice of sword gives you combo oriented skills earlier, choice of staff gives you access to skills that boost MP gain earlier and increases your total base MP, and Shield gives early access to useful defense skills. The difference in stat gain is actually quite small. Kingdom Hearts envisions Sora as a physical attacker with some magic abilities, and all that your choices amount to is which path he takes to get there. Some useful abilities are thankfully learned not by level, but by progressing the story and beating certain challenges, which make the coveted level one run seem feasible.
Items in this game are a hassle to use. Not only do you need to restock manually upon use, which is especially painful when Goofy and Donald waste their items frequently, but there’s no easy shortcut to your items. Navigating a menu in a turn based game isn’t usually a problem, but in an action game like Kingdom Hearts, having to access and navigate a menu is a serious pain point. Unfortunately, they would not think to include items in the shortcut menu until Kingdom Hearts II.
Then there are the small annoyances that show up once and never again. Trinity marks, small icons showing three hearts of assorted colors, are meant to encourage replaying stages to find new treasures, but ultimately just discourage using guest party members when you visit new worlds. Platforming is emphasized without truly considering how frustrating it is to miss a jump in Hollow Bastion and have to start over all the way at the start of the monster infested level. Worlds that substantially alter your controls, Atlantica’s swimming world and Peter Pan’s flight, never appear again in the series.
These design issues add up to reveal that Kingdom Hearts is still just a concept at this point in the series. As a game, it is still rough and unpolished. They don’t quite know WHAT Kingdom Hearts is yet other than “platformer action JRPG”.
This is fine.
Video Games almost never get things right the first time, and while the core concept of what Kingdom Hearts “is” would be refined in the later console iterations, II and 0.2 Birth By Sleep, this first game is a necessary step to figure out what works and what doesn’t work with the concept.
Retelling the story of Kingdom Hearts feels tired at this point. Anime boy’s world gets destroyed by strange critters of darkness, discovers he can summon a magic key sword that opens all sorts of things, and goes on an adventure to find his missing friends with some Disney characters.
Friendship is the primary overarching theme of Kingdom Hearts, and it’s expressed in its simplest form in the first game. Sora’s primary characteristic is his empathy, his ability to enter each world and make friends with people there. A major plot point, Kairi’s missing heart, hinges on Sora’s empathy by having Kairi literally in Sora’s heart.
I don’t particularly want to hash out exactly what that means. People who obsess over lore remind me of Will Ferrell’s character in The Lego Movie. The dad, I mean, not Lord Business. There’s a certain sense of anti-play at work when people fixate on lore. While we ask that fiction be consistent, I don’t think that requires it to have some kind of deep lore, simply rules that make sense.
But I digress.
Donald and Goofy round out the primary trio of friends, with Donald often being a source of conflict due to his short temper and Goofy often being a peacemaker with his true power, pointing out simple solutions. Even if controlling these two is a pain and a half in Kingdom Hearts’ limited AI settings which often seem to result in them running their faces in to monsters and wasting items and MP no matter what you tell them to do, they are still a needed presence, as any JRPG worth its salt needs an ensemble cast.
While all the themes of friendship are present in Kingdom Hearts, it’s very clear that the concepts that drive the series are still in flux. Kingdom Hearts is a free wheeling concept at this stage, one that neither Disney nor Square seems all that certain about. The Final Fantasy characters appearing so early in the story and dropping off in relevance feels like an admission of a lack of confidence in the world the team is building, and the late appearance of the true villain, Ansem, reinforces it.
The story seems to treat light and darkness as a basic good versus evil dichotomy, but given the theme of friendship, there’s another reading I prefer. Darkness is selfishness, and Light is empathy and giving. Darkness separates the worlds, and closes people off from each other within the game’s cosmology. Knowing that the worlds used to be ‘one’, but eventually were separated by darkness creates a creation myth around this notion of separation and togetherness.
That conceptualization of Kingdom Hearts, and its mythology, is what gives way to the rest of the series, even if the creators don’t seem to have an idea of what to do with it yet.
That’s why what comes next is so important.
❤ Touhi
Touhi Touko's Blog 