Dive to the Heart: A Kingdom Hearts Retrospective | Part 3 - The Grande Finale?
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- Опубликовано: 9 сен 2024
- Stiles loved the first Kingdom Hearts and is a defender of Chain of Memories... but he is a lot less fond of Kingdom Hearts 2, you'll have to watch the video to find out why! This is Part 3 of a Multi-Part Kingdom Hearts Retrospective. You can view the whole retrospective as it's made here: • Dive to the Heart: A K...
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Interesting video and I agree with a lot of what you said, Kingdom Hearts 2 was the only game in the series I beat all the way through to the end but I am not so sure why. The combat is good, yes. But the game does very little to challenge me to make me get the most out of it, a lot of games like this suffer from this issue and why I think Doom Eternal's approach to difficulty was the right one even on Normal difficulty, you will get destroyed if you don't weapon switch, blood punch, and chainsaw even Easy mode requires you do some of this stuff just to less of a degree so I don't agree with the whole play on the "right difficulty" philosophy. If KH2 and even stuff like Devil May Cry wants me to use it's "options" then I should be forced into it. You might as well say Assassin's Creed games are well designed since they give you options too but counter killing everyone is the easy way out.
You also get stuff like Modern Warefare 2 2009 where they say, "switch to pistol, its faster than reloading" and the hardest difficulty never makes you do this.
Then there is the fact KH is a story driven series and people are going to pick the difficulty that allows them to consume the story faster. I have seen a number of people who play KH games for the plot and if Sqaure took the Doom approach then less people would experience the epic plot they want people to experience, I would prefer the Eternal approach, but I doubt Square would. Plus, is playing the game on Critical going to magically make me like the tedious parts of the campaign and most of the combat comes from the optional encounters?
I agree on the exploration too. KH2's levels are pretty dull but I do prefer it over the DMC3 and 4 approach, all though the former is the lesser of two evils.
Thank you for the very thoughtful and in-depth comment! I still need to play Doom Eternal... I actually don't think I beat Doom 2016 either despite really enjoying what I played of it.
Isn't the Call of Duty 'switch to other weapon' thing kind of an exploit though and not the intended way to play? I don't play a lot of shooters so I don't know for sure, but I know a lot of other shooters have 'reload canceling' as an exploit.
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In the tutorial of MW2, the soldiers tell you to do that, it seems intentional on the part on the devs but actually playing on Veteran is basically just "ADS, shoot, get shot, wait for health to regen" rinse repeat. It's not exactly the epic Matrix Lobby shootout power fantasy that it sounds like.
KH2 is one of the games that got me into gaming in my early teens and while I have a lot of nostalgia for it and love the super bosses... I agree so much with this review, it's not the best game ever made.
I've seen people call this game "the peak of action RPG" and after my latest playthrough I don't know what are they talk about. Ys games tend to have far better flow of combat and story over this game and same with a lot of Tales games. Yes a lot of Tales games tend to feel a little mindless here and there gameplay wise but they have a lot of systems to dig into if you choose to delve deep, especially on higher difficulties where bosses have more special attacks (you're even rewarded for titles for beating those higher difficulties in some games) not to mention they give more exp for how fast you beat battles (of course there's a cap to this).
That's not to say that KH2 doesn't use it's RPG mechanics but it feels so light that it might as well not be there, nor you have a lot of incentive to combat outside of exp and material.
I did two level 1 playthroughs in the game and while I liked the challenge, it made me realize just how much more cheap the game's difficulty is. you die in two hits and it's cool they let you live with a single health but it's not enough when you realize how many of those abilities you gain regularly through leveling are mandatory to survive fair and square (I'm aware it's dumb to complain about this since it's a challenge run but it does illustrate how unbalanced the game really is on higher difficulties).
Of course that's not to say the combat is bad, a large appeal of this game to many people that it's more focused on being a character action game like DMC rather than have huge focus on the RPG mechanics (which is also debatable if you consider grinding for forms as a must for this game). Even then I would say that DMC is more focused on it's combat because it wants you to go back and find new ways of achieving higher style ranks.
Level design in KH2 is trying to mimic those character action game's level design too, empty hallways that are designed for fights, and I pretty much I agree with that it's a huge downgrade from KH1's clever exploratory level design.
To get back to what I said earlier, I think people who say that this game is the peak of action RPG barely played action RPG, there's a lot of great stuff that range from simple but fun and complex but awesome stuff.
Thank you for the long and in-depth comment.
I haven't played Ys Past the first two... I played the PSP remakes back in the day. Have been meaning to give them a try but my backlog is enormous haha.
@@StilesReviews They are really short games but worth playing :) I recommend Ys 8 the most as a first game in the series to try, that game is massive but very well made. though the story can a tad confusing at some point so giving this warning right ahead haha.
@@thepositiver9977 I tend to like playing games in order, but tough call haha.
I respect this decision. Most people just jump to 8 since it's the best new one, but I tend to try to start with the first games as well :) @@StilesReviews
Hmm, someone briefly shown in this video seems familiar, but I'm not sure who or why...
Lol, I generally either agree with most of this, or at least understand the criticism. And I think it's important that you try to understand WHY certain things were designed the way they were. I'm always really annoyed when people say KH2 has bad level design. But it's MOSTLY because people call it 'bad', without recognizing that its goals changed from KH1. When you bring up the reasoning for the choice, but still don't gel with it, I can't really be upset.
Yeaaah I thought you'd catch that. Whoever that guy is I think he likes KH2 a bit TOO much. xD
I forgot to put it in the script, but part of me even understands the focus on combat given that this very much felt like it was meant to be a 'finale' for at least the story at hand. A focus on action when fighting the war to take out the big bads makes sense.
Thanks for leaving a comment, my KH stuff always does pretty poorly so this helped make my night.