The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Why I didn’t like Kindgom Hearts 2 reason #3: The Intro

If you played Kingdom Hearts, you no doubt remember how much the beginning of the game sucked. If you don’t, or if you never played it, I’ll summarise: you spend about an hour running around on an island talking to the cast of Final Fantasies VIII and X, playing dodgeball, and having scavenger hunts. Then you answer some strange questions that will actually set unchangable options that don’t seem to be related to the questions. Then you run an obstacle course. Then you watch a few cutscenes. In all, it’s an hour of time you’ll never get back. When I played Kingdom Hearts 2, I found myself longing for that kind of gameplay.

See, the intro to Kingdom Hearts 2 is four hours long, and consists mainly of running back and forth and talking to NPCs over and over again, punctuated with cutscenes of Christopher Lee cackling ominously. But it’s worse than that. Where the first game has you go on a scavenger hunt – which is easily outmoded by the internet – this time you need to raise munny so you can go to the other side of town (which, I guess, is a pretty exclusive community), and so you take odd jobs from the job board. There are three available. You’ll need to do something like twenty to raise enough money, which means you play the same minigames over and over again until you’re done. Now, I’m never a fan of minigames, and I know how you people can be with your "oh Darien hates everything" routine, but this is a little over the line I would think even for tolerant people. I repeat: you don’t just play minigames to raise money, you play the same three minigames repeatedly.

Once that’s done, there’s some gimmicky battle arena nonsense where you basically hit the mob twice and then run away from it for two minutes and then you win. Then you do THAT again about four more times. Then you run around town and ineffectually whack at Nobodies with your stupid wooden sword until you get saved by a cutscene. Then more cutscenes happen and you go to the mansion and it gets really insulting.

Once you fight your way through all the really boring Nobodies in the mansion, you get to the White Room where you watch a cutscene that I guess is supposed to be dripping with pathos, but failed to have any impact on me since the character I was supposed to care about was somebody I’d never heard of before and wouldn’t hear of again. Then you get down to the basement, randomly destroy some expensive-looking machinery, go through one more bullshit fight, and then find Sora so you can start the real game and basically render everything you just did totally irrelevant.

Yeah, because you haven’t been playing the right game this whole time. You’ve been playing like a game within the game, where you’re this other guy called Roxas and you have to avoid succumbing to tedium before you can get to the real game. It’s bullshit, and I hated it, and I was really annoyed that the entire first night I spent playing this new game I just bought went into playing minigames so I could unlock the real game. And I know I just linked to this, but it‘s still funny. So I’m going to link to it again.


October 29th, 2007 Posted by | Games | 4 comments

4 Comments »

  1. I repeat: you don’t just play minigames to raise money, you play the same three minigames repeatedly.

    I just had flashbacks to the last month or so of me trying to get my epic flying mount by doing daily quests.

    Comment by Dave | 5 November 2007

  2. At least you’re doing something that follows the fundamental mechanics of the game you’re playing. Oh, and something optional. Did I mention that this raising money bullshit in KH2 isn’t?

    Comment by Darien | 5 November 2007

  3. It’s not optional. Blizz forces me to do it. Duh.

    Comment by Dave | 5 November 2007

  4. Fuck, man. Don’t they work for you? I’m pretty sure you pay them the princely sum of fifteen dollars every month.

    Comment by Darien | 6 November 2007

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