The story isnt interesting though its stream of conciousness nonsense that doesnt elevate it above bad guys vs good guys. What I'm saying is that for anyone following the story, the fun has to be the fact that you have to put in the leg work to follow the story across all those different platforms and mediums.
Official Kingdom Hearts Thread
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Its interesting because while mobile kh games were a unique and cool thing to be apart of. There's no denying that I got a lot more out of it by checking out the story then I did by actually playing it. Im hopeful this story will come out in some way or form, but it would be nice if they could package it in with KH4 as dlc as opposed to a simple back cover movie. I'll take what I can get but this is a bit of a loss.
Dunno how they will salvage this, because it's clear this was supposed to explain a lot going on behind the scenes of 4. In a perfect world it's going to be repacked as a standalone game for consoles and PC but I have no idea if that's even remotely practical with the engine. Part of me wonders if Nomura and the writers enjoyed the mobile titles a bit more because it did seem like they had more creative lee way to go wherever they wanted and get characters killed.
They did do a pretty good job getting most of it out on the 1.5 2.5 collection. I just hate the recolored enemies and way they don't have them in release order. As for getting closure to the series I completely understand, I was pissed too. Only started coming around to it when I realized Nomura was attempting something genuinely ambitious with KH4 and needed kh3 as a stepping stone to pull it off. Hope it works.
It'll be out when it's out, and we like that.
What else are you sensing my Seer?
Any faint indications about TLOU season 3 or Witcher 4?
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Lone Star
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Considering how long we were waiting for the fucking thing, I'd much rather the game have just come out instead of getting scrapped. I'd rather a subpar Gacha game than nothing at all. Especially with this massive Kingdom Hearts drought we've had the last three years.
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Im tired of great shit coming out on mobile that goes away after 5 years. Better it be something that can stand the test of time instead of being forgotten
ruckingfetard
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If they wanted to go all in with the gacha aspect, maybe they shouldn't have been reusing old Nomura and Shiro Amano art assets. Just saying. I've seen what other gacha titles get, there is way more work put into hyping up the fans. I think these mobile games thought the story would be enough, and for a while it was! But would it kill Square to get some new KH artists involved to make some character things that hyper autistic japanese NEETs would love?
By the time Dark Road's gameplay was shut down they continued the story until its conclusion. I think it is clear they were more invested in finishing the story, which isn't bad, in fact I am glad Nomura isn't sick of whatever story he's crafting out here. But again these mobile games rely on specific types of players to keep it alive.
By the time Dark Road's gameplay was shut down they continued the story until its conclusion. I think it is clear they were more invested in finishing the story, which isn't bad, in fact I am glad Nomura isn't sick of whatever story he's crafting out here. But again these mobile games rely on specific types of players to keep it alive.
Retarded Weeb
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I wasn't really following Missing-Link's development closely since I generally only really pay attention to games after they're actually out, but the impression I got was that the big development hurdle was them trying to get the whole Pokemon Go-ish GPS-based gameplay to work. I know there was a couple beta tests in the last couple years, and grain of salt but I remember reading a 4chan thread saying the general impression was that the game just wasn't fun and the second beta test did nothing to fix that. I'm guessing the dev team has basically spent the past few years floundering about trying to make the game playable and fun, and just not coming up with any solutions that wasn't redoing the entire thing from scratch, and I guess at that point they decided to just scrap the entire project and put more people on KH4.
Considering the amount of time they've been working on it, I would think Nomura and the other writers already have the entire story of it thought out and partially made, so hopefully they put it out in some form even if it's just a short movie like Back Cover. But it's hard to tell how much effort Square is willing to put into smaller projects, since after the company looked like they were on an upward trend around 2020, now in the last few years they seem to be back to running around headless and not knowing what to do with themselves.
Considering the amount of time they've been working on it, I would think Nomura and the other writers already have the entire story of it thought out and partially made, so hopefully they put it out in some form even if it's just a short movie like Back Cover. But it's hard to tell how much effort Square is willing to put into smaller projects, since after the company looked like they were on an upward trend around 2020, now in the last few years they seem to be back to running around headless and not knowing what to do with themselves.
ruckingfetard
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I was actually pretty excited for the pokemon go aspect, as well as the team raids. That's the only thing I will be disappointed about missing out on, tbh. But I could see that being a lot of work to maintain.
MarineN*4235431
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maybe if they kick that stunted manchild called tetsuya nomura the series might have a chance
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Birth by sleep is by far the best kingdom hearts game gameplay wise blowing 1 and 2 the fuck out out of the water and its not even CLOSE.
People hate it because kingdom hearts 1 and 2 teach you to brainlessly mash X while dumping magic on cooldown to win, so the instant a game requires you to actually pace your attacks and think about what to use and when and how and actually mind your positioning for shotlocks and use CC and such they get upset because its too hard or too unfair or too weird or whatever.
Interweaving commands with regular attacks and targeting specific enemies (i.e. water for shadows to pop them out of the ground) is infinitely more engaging than spamming magnet and thunderaga on cooldown.
Drive forms in kingdom hearts 2 were a cool idea executed horribly. Each form you unlocked was better than the last, so once you unlocked the next form you never had to see the old ones, you could only use them more or less once per combat, and they were just a glorified rage of the gods mode where you just mash X harder for more damage, it did not integrate into the regular combat gameplay loop and you never wanted to use them in regular battles because you needed them for bossfights.
Command Styles are a vastly superior execution of the same idea. You get rewarded for pacing your attacks, they give combat a way more varied flow as you climb through the tier and do the finisher before returning to base power (so combat goes through a motion of escelation and descelation), and while stronger they also discourage X mashing because you will get to the finisher before you unlock the next tier if you do.
The command deck is also a vastly superior method of using abilities over kh1/kh2's "lol pick one at random at the end of your combo idk" by virtue of letting you actually plan a build and chose which abilities to use and when meaning you can actually strategize and have actual playstyles.
Birth by sleep is the first time kingdom hearts became more than a glorified theme park rollercoaster and dangerously close to becoming an actual game with actual gameplay and actual builds and buildcraft and tactics and shit but because the series was aimed at 11 year olds (no hate, i also played kingdom hearts at 11 years old) the whiplash of going to from a game with no mechanics (kh1/kh2) to a game with actual mechanics was too much to bear so the game got burried in favour of more "mash x".
Also, while I'm dropping hot takes, 365/2 should be experienced before kh2. If you agree that CoM needs to be played before kh2 to make sense of the story I do not see the excuse that 365/2 should be played after. Both games take place side by side and both explain to you wtf is going on from both sides.
Without the context of 365/2 kh2's story is incomplete. If the argument is "Oh but that's the point, you enter kh2 with questions and they are answered in 365/2" then the same reasoning applies to CoM meaning that you also need to play it after kh2, if it doesn't apply to CoM, then it doesn't apply to 365/2 either.
People hate it because kingdom hearts 1 and 2 teach you to brainlessly mash X while dumping magic on cooldown to win, so the instant a game requires you to actually pace your attacks and think about what to use and when and how and actually mind your positioning for shotlocks and use CC and such they get upset because its too hard or too unfair or too weird or whatever.
Interweaving commands with regular attacks and targeting specific enemies (i.e. water for shadows to pop them out of the ground) is infinitely more engaging than spamming magnet and thunderaga on cooldown.
Drive forms in kingdom hearts 2 were a cool idea executed horribly. Each form you unlocked was better than the last, so once you unlocked the next form you never had to see the old ones, you could only use them more or less once per combat, and they were just a glorified rage of the gods mode where you just mash X harder for more damage, it did not integrate into the regular combat gameplay loop and you never wanted to use them in regular battles because you needed them for bossfights.
Command Styles are a vastly superior execution of the same idea. You get rewarded for pacing your attacks, they give combat a way more varied flow as you climb through the tier and do the finisher before returning to base power (so combat goes through a motion of escelation and descelation), and while stronger they also discourage X mashing because you will get to the finisher before you unlock the next tier if you do.
The command deck is also a vastly superior method of using abilities over kh1/kh2's "lol pick one at random at the end of your combo idk" by virtue of letting you actually plan a build and chose which abilities to use and when meaning you can actually strategize and have actual playstyles.
Birth by sleep is the first time kingdom hearts became more than a glorified theme park rollercoaster and dangerously close to becoming an actual game with actual gameplay and actual builds and buildcraft and tactics and shit but because the series was aimed at 11 year olds (no hate, i also played kingdom hearts at 11 years old) the whiplash of going to from a game with no mechanics (kh1/kh2) to a game with actual mechanics was too much to bear so the game got burried in favour of more "mash x".
Also, while I'm dropping hot takes, 365/2 should be experienced before kh2. If you agree that CoM needs to be played before kh2 to make sense of the story I do not see the excuse that 365/2 should be played after. Both games take place side by side and both explain to you wtf is going on from both sides.
Without the context of 365/2 kh2's story is incomplete. If the argument is "Oh but that's the point, you enter kh2 with questions and they are answered in 365/2" then the same reasoning applies to CoM meaning that you also need to play it after kh2, if it doesn't apply to CoM, then it doesn't apply to 365/2 either.
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Epic damage control. Square just released this screen shot and a borderline apology.
Lone Star
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Should probably get the title right before you suggest a game order.
But seriously, Roxas' intro in Kingdom Hearts II is a lot more impactful when you have no idea what's going on. Same thing with the reveal of "Ansem" in the prologue as well.
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Right, because you have no way to tell which game I'm refering to.
Yeah, but all the impact is lost when you realize you still have no idea what's going on by the end of kh2.
When kh2 first came out it was disliked for a reason. People only like the story now with the hindsight of roxas and axel and are letting rose tinted glasses overshadow the fact that the story is kinda shit the first time around when you don't know what's going on.
If you wanna make the impact argument you should be making it for CoM as well because of Namine's story to justify playing that game after kh2 as well.
Retarded Weeb
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This doesn't even count as a hot take, it's just plainly the opposite of reality. Birth by Sleep is the most braindead Kingdom Hearts game, it's just a fact. Every enemy group in the game is easily dispatched by spamming Magnega + Thundaga over and over, and you can get multiple of those spells easily by the 2nd world. And you might as well do it because enemy groups are so erratic and hitstun is so unreliable that any "cooler" method you might use instead is horribly inefficient. And every boss in the game that isn't the couple superbosses can be easily killed by just spamming your best shotlock. Critical difficulty is like a couple hours of pain having to deal with early enemies until you have your abilities set up and then the rest of the game is piss easy. If KH1+2 are mash X to win then BBS is mash triangle to win. At least in KH1+2 you need to worry about positioning and mixing up your spells some. In BBS I just need to stand in the middle of the enemy group and hit triangle 4 times and they're all dead.
That first part is just untrue. Wisdom Form isn't better than Valor Form for obvious reasons, they focus on physical vs magic. Most people would even rather use Valor still. And despite the name and also being good at magic, Master Form isn't a straight upgrade to the other two since it focuses on aerial combat over Valor's ground combat and Valor and sometimes do better damage depending on the situation. The only straight upgrade is Final Form, and it's a secret you can only obtain just before the final boss fight. And even then if you're playing FM then you have Limit Form which is more useful than Final Form in some situations because of how its abilities give you constant healing.
The command deck system only feels good in Re: coded. In BBS and DDD it's garbage due to no balancing. You have a few overpowered, simple skills that can easily take you through the whole game, and a dozens of trap skills that looks cool but suck to use in practice due to things like long animaitons with no iframes and not enough damage to be worth it. It ends up feeling more limiting than anything once you realize you have to spam the same efficiant moves or else if you mix things up you'll keep randomly eating shit from enemies attacking you through your own attacks.
Days was released after KH2 and its story is an addendum KH2's plot that wasn't planned beforehand. It gives more emotional weight to Roxas and Axel's friendship that you only hear about in KH2, but it doesn't reveal any plot details that you need to know to understand what's going on in KH2. In fact, the whole plot conceit that everyone forgets Xion's existence at the end means it slots in without effecting anything (until KH3 later followed up on it). CoM was released before KH2 and its plot literally leads directly into KH2.
If you don't play CoM before KH2 then you'll have little idea why Sora and Riku are in the positions that they are, who Namine is, or why half the villains are already dead. If you don't play Days (which again, was never planned while they were writing KH2) before KH2 then you won't feel as sad about Roxas and Axel. And I guess you'll be spoilered on who exactly the villains are and what they're planning before KH2 would tell you it in dramatic reveals. These aren't comparable.
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Birth by sleep is braindead in spite of having actual abilities and requiring timing, and having escelating flow in combat, but kh1 and 2 where the entire gameplay loop is mashing X and getting a random finisher at the end is somehow deep?
What spells are you mixing up in kingdom hearts 2 exactly? Casting thunderaga 3 times and then waiting 5 hours for your mana bar to refill? BBS has actual spells that you CAN mix up you have multiple approaches to combat.
Kh1 and kh2 don't even give you the option to do that, its either mash x or go home.
Wisdom has ranged attacks which makes it considerably safer to use against bosses, valor is only better when it comes to clearing mobs.
Master invalidates valor and does way more damage than wisdom (unless the boss is so hard you need range), limit is better than both due to insane damage aoe and healing and final is better than all 3.
This also doesn't adress the issue of the forms having insane cooldowns and not being usable more than once per combat. If you use them in a boss its just free damage and if you use them in an encouter its more or less one free encounter in exchange for not having them the next one which locks them outside the 30 second gameplay loop.
In stark opposition to kh1 and kh2 where your only options are "Mash X".
You can argue that BBS's systems are unbalanced. I will argue that at least it HAS systems to begin with. The command deck works better than any game has handled magic or randomly selected finisher combos because it gives you control and consistency throughout combat meaning you can reliably integrate them into your playstyle.
The issue is that large parts of the plot hinge on axel which has no real motivation without days and most of the 13 gang don't get fleshed out in kh2 enough to make them intresting. The result is that you spend half the game fighting a bunch of (ironically) hollow characters waiting for a revelation that never comes. For a character based story having over half your characters be nobodies (haha) isn't satisfying.
Also, you speak of Riku, but Riku's story in kh2 hinges entirely on his final encounter with roxas in days which is just hamfisted near the end the kh2 campaign. It works better as a continuation than a twist.
Retarded Weeb
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Magic is stronger in KH1, but you can still throw out some Fires sometimes in KH2 because it's short-range and circles you in that game so can be used together with ground combos. Magnet and Reflect can also be useful.
I don't know why you're so hung up on random finishers. There's just a few of them in KH1, and while it was probably a poor idea which is why they dropped them in KH2, they're not so important that can't just ignore them, they're not that good even if they weren't random. Otherwise, even if you have multiple finishers equipped they come out in predictable ways depending on your current situation, and if you really want to be using a particular finisher even in situations were a different one would take precedence then you can just unequip the other finishers.
You seem to not like the idea of using regular attacks a lot, but that's kind of the game isn't it? You hit stuff a lot and sometimes mix in spells, special attacks, limits, and dodging/blocking. How exactly you go about it is changed up depending on how you build Sora since you have different options with abilities and keyblades that effects how your combos work and therefore how you should be approaching things. And all your spells and other special attacks outside your basic combo are always available to you, so you're free to use them help kill things when you get surrounded or if you otherwise in some situation where you basic combo doesn't cut it.
The problem with BBS is that regular attacks feel like shit. You don't want to just be mashing X because your combos feel awkward and you're often left in vulnerable positions. But most of the command abilities are also awkward to string together and leave you in vulnerable positions. So the best option is to spam abilities like Thunder Surge that do good, consistent damage while giving you plenty of iframes. You have "options" sure in that there's plenty of commands, but you have only a few on-hand at a time so you might as well choose only the best to make it count, and the best are braindead to use. You have "options" in basic combos, command styles, and shotlocks, but they're completely superfluous most of the time compared to what the best command abilities can do.
And Command Styles kind of suck. I guess "escalating action" is one way to look at it. Another way is the game interrupts what I'm doing to give me some other shit that isn't any better most of the time than my shitty basic combos. The only good one I want to actually see and use is Rhythm Mixer.
Overall, yeah you hit X a lot in KH because it's the attack button, but you'll be punished enough on higher difficulties for just mindlessly hitting X that you need to be paying attention to when and where you're hitting X, and you'll be using some other abilities for their utility. And you have options on how your attacks work that can give you different playstyles. BBS gives you a lot of attacks you could use and says "play how you want", but on higher difficulties it punishes you for doing anything other than the most efficient abilities, which means just mashing triangle.
I didn't address that because it's not really an issue, or at least it's a matter of perspective. I don't think there's any real issue with Drive Forms being something you can't use all the time. Though I would make the Drive gauge fill up faster or easier between fights so there's more reason to mess around with them more often. I always feel like they're too precious to use up and tend to never use them except against optional bosses.
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Im enjoying autistic analysis of the KH4 screenshots. The "heartless" look genuinely nightmarish and pissed.
Loving the 13 and versus call back in this.
Loving the 13 and versus call back in this.
Kh2 is probably one of the most critically acclaimed PS2 games ever.
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In hindsight. Go back on release and everyone was shitting on it. Why do you think reaction commands were removed from 3?
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I don't see why it can't be more than that. They're like 50+ hour games each. Making combat a little more involved and a little more varied wouldn't hurt. Most abilities don't have utility, its just 30 different flavours of different gatoraide colored damage.
Magnet in kh2 is reasonably unique in that its a utility spell that actually provides utility (unlike stop which was a pain to use despite beign strong with gravita)
Yes on critical mode there is a foundation for a good game where you have to ocassionally dodge and count your hits before you hit the revenge counter, but it still barely goes on further than that and for the most part it is just spamming x, just less frequently.
The best fight in kh2 (imo) is xaldin because its the only fight in the game that's more than just mashing X against a bullet sponge where playing it right rewards you with a quick kill and there's actual variety between attacking defending, parrying and reading.
A mix between that, the command deck and the command styles would result in a way more varied game with gameplay that can hold up on its own instead of just being a vehicle for the story.
Even if you hate BBS are you really gonna claim that wingblade isn't better than the default combos? Tier 1 styles werent' that impressive, but the tier 3 ones were all pretty strong and fun to use.
Using your command decks to unlock the tier 3 style that gives you a few seconds of godmode is pretty rewarding and gives combat a reasonable flow with risk and reward.
Hell, you don't even argue that BBS's mechanics like command styles and the deck are inherently worse than default kingdom hearts, you just dislike that they were sometimes unbalanced.
Wouldn't you consider that imbalance an issue? Presumably if its a fun and useful mechanic you want the players to engage with it constantly instead of being afraid to touch it because its too strong and charges too slow. ESPECIALLY considering how insanely grindy they are to level which implies you're supposed to be using them constantly.
I know because I grinded valor, wisdom and limit to max. Gave up on master and didn't even bother with final. To level these things normaly you're supposed to be literally using them off cooldown.
I mean fucking hell, there's ALREADY a solution for this, its called command styles. Valor and Wisdom can be T1, Limit and Master T2, and Final T3.
wtfNeedSignUp
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Why are you arguing over the depth of a combat skill in a game for kids? It's meant primarily to look cool and not to frustrate too much.
Retarded Weeb
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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'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.
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.
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.
I don't think the Command Deck system is inherently worse. I think Re: coded made it work fine. I'm only opposed to the idea that BBS did it well enough to be the best KH game. BBS and DDD are fine games, but they're far from masterpieces. Their frameworks are really shaky, and on higher difficulties it feels like I'm always on my backfoot for bullshit reasons unless I'm full on abusing the game so I don't have to care what the enemies are doing. BBS, DDD, and KH3 all just put too much effort into trying to make the games look cool over making them feel good.
Sure, but I like the aesthetic and feel of the Drive Forms more than Command Styles or Formchanges. Your idea sounds fine so long the game and forms feels more like KH2 to play.
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