- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
Opinions will vary sure, but I would argue a big reason kh1 and kh2 are playable for 50 hours is that they have a lot of set pieces and there's a lot of levels but aren't actually very big so the enviroment constantly changes to the point where it never starts to actually get boring or drag.I mean, I found KH1 and KH2 to do things well enough that it was fun for 50 hours. If you didn't think so, not much I can say about that. Conversely, I didn't BBS and DDD's implementation of the Command Deck system did anything to make combat more involved and varied.
That said I always found that around the end they start to get annoying. I found the end of the world to be insufferable for how dragged out it was, the world that never was is better in this regard due to the affomentioned set pieces changing and the fact that riku is the one party member in the whole game that actually integrates into your combos.
That's KH3, which dumbed the spell list down to a bunch of attack spells that all work almost the same but some enemies are weak to a particular flavor. Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder all worked noticeable different from one another terms of their range and situational usefulness in KH1+2, and then you had defensive spells with Aero and Reflect, and some weirder spells with Gravity, Stop, and Magnet, though Stop is admittedly pretty useless.
Eh. In Kh1 blizzard and firaga were more or less the same and thunderaga traded quality for quantity in regards to damage. Gravity is just another flavour of damage.
For the most part you stuck to one, and weren't really encouraged to swap between them. Did you really bother swapping between all 3 in kh1?
And yeah aero was brutally overpowered, I don't think it was balanced though, its for the best its gone now.
In kh2, blizzard is absolutely useless (don't know why they saw fit to make it 10 times worse than fire was in kh1), fire is intresting and has potential but is ironically undercooked and not really needed unless you want to show off and for the most part kinda niche and thunderaga becomes the generic damage spell.
Magnet and Reflect I actually like quite a bit, I don't have many complaints with them, though I with they were smoother to integrate into combos.
In general, the core 3 damage spells even in the first two games, don't do much to seperate themselves. Kh2 does a better job seperating them, but the game still never encourages you to alternate between them (and neither does kh1), when setting up your quickbar you usually pick 1 damage spell and 3 utilities.
I will give kh2 props because you can at least justify picking firaga+another damage spell unlike kh1, but in general both games fail to make magic intresting.
Yeah, both of those were great, too bad if you equipped more than one the game chose at random which you would get which is my main issue with finishers too.KH1 also had a few special attacks like Sonic Blade and Strike Raid you could use for MP cost which could be quite useful. In fact, you almost need Strike Raid for beating Sephiroth. KH2 had limits, which were mostly just some big damage, but some were more effective on groups vs bosses, and they all gave you iframes when activated which makes them a clutch defensive option.
Equiping both reduces your ability to reliably do what you want, but equipping only one makes the combat more boring. Wouldn't the game be better if these abilities were balanced around the command deck instead of randomly popping up whenever the game felt like it?
I think your dislike for the game is clouding how you remember it, a lot of the command styles were considerably faster and more fluid than their predescessors.I think I used some starting Command Styles early on, but once I got my Command Deck in order I mostly just avoided fighting with the Keyblade as much as I could. I mostly just remember Rhythm Mixer because it had some unique and powerful effects, and activated off stuff I was already using. My problem with Command Styles isn't that they're useless, it's that I'm not a fan of the game interrupting what I'm doing to force me into a form change. It changes what I can do outside my control and possibly leaves me vulnerable for a second when it happens. You can plan around them eventually, but they feel like more of a nuisance than a reward. The Keyblade formchanges in KH3 work better by putting the change in your control, though I'm not much of a fan of how many of those formchanges felt to play.
It was the equivallent of going from valor, to master to final style mid combat.
I'm gonna gonna on a limb here and assume that you played with terra, because every every criticsm you have of the command style and attacks is true, IF you've only ever played terra.
Yes his command styles are terrible and his default combo sucks. He is terribly undercooked compared to the other characters and arguably an order of magnitude worse. His default attacks are agonizingly slow and I can see why if you were stuck with him for the whole game you would think that his styles are "a nuisance" and "not much better than you have by default" because his command styles are more or less the default with some flair, as they have no mobility no flow and little aoe.
I will say that this does not apply to ventus or aqua though. Playing with them is an entirely seperate experience because they are both faster and their command styles are considerably better.