Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (3DS)

This review can also be found at The Yorker, here.

As I've said in the past, the Kingdom Hearts games are a slave to their narrative. Regardless of your opinions on whether the plot of the series is any good or not (It's not very good); there are now 7 games all part of the same story - of which Dream Drop Distance is the latest in terms of both release and chronologically. To properly appreciate a new game in the series, it almost requires a working knowledge of the previous entries. And that's a bad thing.

©Square Enix

KH3D tries to mitigate this with in-game reference material and flashbacks to the game's past events - but to the newcomer, the convoluted path that leads plucky anime teens Sora and Riku to an all-important quest that involves 'diving into the dreams of sleeping worlds' is confusing, and ultimately feels irrelevant. It's almost as if Square Enix want you to ignore the overarching plot altogether, which may really be for the best.

See, it's not the narrative that has made the Kingdom Hearts series so enjoyable, it's all about spectacle and satisfaction. The spectacle of exploring bright and detailed worlds, and the satisfaction of weighty and involved combat.

In regards to the spectacle, Square Enix definitely took the time to use the 3DS' graphical abilities as effectively as possible. The 3D is strategically used to be more noticeable in cutscenes than gameplay, so while battles do benefit from the depth-of-field, they won't strain your eyes.

The series staple of exploring multiple Disney franchises is of course present, and although they all have shared design aspects to get everything looking cohesive, they're also incredibly distinct through set-pieces and colour use. The clean, geometric and faintly pulsing landscape of the Tron Legacy world caught my interest in ways entirely other to the soft golds, rich purples and towering buildings of the Hunchback of Notre Damme world.

In regards to gameplay satisfaction, every sequel to Kingdom Hearts series has improved on the base mechanics of the original in some way. To those who have played Re:coded on the DS or Birth by Sleep on the PSP, you'll already be at home with the basic setup, but KH3D adds three new (notably huge) features: Parkour, Pokémon, and Narcolepsy.

The opening stage quickly introduces parkour - or 'Flowmotion' as the game insists on calling it. This allows you to slide along rails, swing around poles and spring yourself off walls, all of which gives you incredible freedom of movement and new context-sensitive attacks. The wall-springs work out to be rather imbalanced in the long run, as you quickly find you can use it to scale walls of any height, and you can accidentally trigger it if you try to dodge roll too close to a wall.

Instead of classic Disney characters assisting you as party members, you can summon friendly versions of the enemy 'Dream Eater' monsters you battle throughout the game. The Dream Eater system is very robust. Every monster has its own abilities and AI patterns; they unlock special abilities for you via simple 'skill trees'; and there are even Nintendogs-style minigames for the cuteness factor. The part of me that never grew out of loving Pokémon adores this addition, but it's a shame that because of this system, I can never fight alongside the main characters of each world.

To keep with the theme of 'sleep and dreams' beyond just the plot and the game title, sleep even affects the player characters. The protagonists Sora and Riku are playable in tandem - both exploring the sleeping worlds, but in separate realisations. However, they (for vaguely explained reasons) cannot be awake at the same time. As you play as one character, you'll see a 'Drop Meter' that acts as a timer until they spontaneously fall unconscious, and he counterpart takes over. This can happen literally any time outside of menus and cutscenes. Bosses suddenly become a lot more harrowing when it's against a time limit.

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance makes some undeniable design faux-pas. The ability to scale any surface trivialises platforming. Raising Dream Eaters eventually becomes more time consuming than the main combat. The idea of using theming as a limit on you feels just... wrong. And yet, that it keeps the gameplay of the series solidly intact, and still dares to try new ideas and push things even further. And I've gotta give it props for that.

Time Shenanigans! Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review

This review can also be found at The Yorker, here.

Note: I have discussed Final Fantasy XIII recently, found here. I'd suggest giving it a quick read; as much of what I have to say here, relates heavily to that game.

Okay, so to be frank, Japanese RPGs and the Final Fantasy series in particular have an incredibly specific target audience. For the most part, you know whether you're interested in a Final Fantasy title or not; but the sticking point here is that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a spin-off sequel; and what's more, to a game that was rather unpopular with some vocal RPG fans.

In terms of plot, you'd do well imagining Doctor Who cast with anime stereotypes. Initially set 3 years after FFXIII's ending, you play as Serah, the sister of FFXIII's protagonist Lightning. Even though the day had been saved, it seems as though Lightning never came back home, even though Serah has memories of her doing so. Cue the introduction of Paradoxes, appearances of out-of-time phenomena that may well be the cause of Lightning not returning home. Serah teams up with plucky-young-hero-from-the-future Noel, and the rest of the game involves jumping around locations in ages both future and past, correcting whatever Paradoxes have shown up.

Square Enix saw the complaints that FFXIII had gotten, and actively publicised FFXIII-2 as for the people who disliked the previous game. Under most circumstances that would be a bold gesture - an admission to wholeheartedly diverting from the main series would cause fans of a series to panic in most circumstances; but when you bear in mind that FFXIII was a big subversion of RPG standards in multiple ways, what Square Enix is saying here is that they're going back to staple stylistic choices.

And that has certainly happened for Final Fantasy XIII-2; for the worse more than anything else.

The overt linearity of the original game has largely gone. The nature of the time-travel plot means there's a lot of hopping back and forth between different locations; though there's only a single plotline to follow. This becomes a problem in two big ways - if the plot isn't clear about where to go next, you're stuck with scouring every location you've been to for the next piece of plot; and the loading time for entering each area is abysmal.

Of course, with the linearity reduced, FFXIII-2 brings back one of the things I hate most about RPGs - grinding. For those who aren't familiar with the term, grinding refers to beating up the same monsters in an area for a long period, in order to gain extra money, items, or experience. This could take anywhere from minutes to days depending on the game (If you know someone who plays World of Warcraft, this is basically what they're doing).

Personally, excessive grinding in a game kills the experience. Whatever pacing is established is ruined once you deem it necessary to halt all progress and level up some more. What I absolutely loved about FFXIII was the complete abolishment of grinding. You were always in a state to take on the next boss and progress with the story. It kept things snappy and fresh, but FFXIII-2 slows you all the way down.

The side-ponytail is not a good look... ©Square Enix

In terms of plot and characters FFXIII was competent, but hardly pushing for the greatest video game story ever told. This gives FFXIII-2 room to compete but... that doesn't really manifest. Serah and Noel are only two playable characters in FFXIII-2(ignoring downloadable content), and neither of them are particularly compelling; or even really that endearing. To fill out the rest of your party you can recruit wild monsters that you defeat, a feature familiar to many. Though some of the monster designs are definitely filled with more personality than the main characters, they obviously don't deepen the storyline any.

Aesthetically, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is all-positive. The locations are stunning. The time-hopping plot lets you jump from sweeping plains to rain-soaked ruins to super high-tech cities, and they all look great. But what really stands out is the incredible music direction. For the majority of the Final Fantasy franchise, we've had the musical styling of Nobuo Uemasu; who, while having a lot of experience, a lot of his work got very similar. He's out of the picture in FFXIII-2 and I've never been happier. The tone shifts from ballad to electronica to jazz tointentionally cheesy metal without jarring. It's worth playing with a pair of headphones or a good speaker system to hear all the subtleties.

My grievance with FFXIII-2 is that the changes it has made from its prequel has turned it into a generic Japanese RPG. For me, that's a huge deal-breaker; but then again, there were a lot of fans who disliked FFXIII, and they'll surely love the traditional sensibilities and the less-serious storyline.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is out now on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. (360 version reviewed)

Summer Backlog: Kingdom Hearts Re:coded

 

 

Sharing a similarity with films, video games that get enough sales in their initial release periods are almost guaranteed to see a sequel. Mainline developers that produce only standalone titles are few and far between. This can be attributed to fan recognition - why make a new platformer mascot or sports game when a Mario sequel or FIFA will bring home the big bucks? When you have those kind of assured sales figures, you can get away with making games that aren't designed for the newcomers. Die-hard fans make for the easiest sales pitches, and no series uses this notion more than the Kingdom Hearts franchise.

 

Starting out as a strange but relatively innocent action RPG on the PS2, Kingdom Hearts was an unexpected crossover of Final Fantasy and Disney - and even for gamers who aren't particularly fans of either franchise (I know for sure that I keep the amount of Little Mermaid in my life to a minimum), it became a hit due to it's then-uncommon gameplay and well-told story. But the director of the series, Tetsuya Nomura, wanted to make his story more ambitious. Sequels were put into production, and although the games were backed by waves of fan popularity, the stories became an increasingly convoluted mess. Nothing made sense unless you had played the previous games, and even then you might have trouble.

You would think that the games covering side-plots would be easy enough to understand on their own - but not here. At a glance, Kingdom Hearts Re:coded (Called such because it's a remake of a series of mobile phone games – Kingdom Hearts coded. Yes, the name is silly, but they've been sillier) is a DS game that even newcomers to the series can get behind. It's a retelling of the initial Kingdom Hearts, but with an interesting twist - it's only a 'virtual' version of the initial game's locations; and like any computer, the thing's ridden with bugs and glitches.

Having played a fair number of Kingdom Hearts games, though not in the right order (which made things confusing down the line), I found the premise rather charming. It's not often that a series will willingly parody its own plot, and knowing the story well enough so the intentional subversions and differences stand out. As far as game play is concerned, it means the landscape is ridden with 'blox', scattered across the landscape. Somewhere in all the mess is a source of all the glitches, a Backdoor that leads to a series of challenge stages. Defeat 30 enemies. Complete the stage within 2 minutes. Don't use any healing abilities. Finish these arbitrary requests, and you'll fix whatever errors that were barring your progress.

My run through of this game was rather straightforward. Like Call of Duty or Street Fighter, if you've played one instalment of the series the others become a lot easier to adjust to. The game goes to great lengths to ensure it's possible for anyone to finish - the difficulty can be changed at any time; 'Cheats' to mess with enemy health or how much experience you get from fights; and a helpful hint for what to do every time you die against a boss. But what got to me were the frequent changes in genre...

Like a lot of a recent games, it's not enough for Re:coded to stay the Action RPG it advertises itself as on the box. Every so often the game will set aside the rules that you've learned and turn the game into a 2D platformer. Or a Scrolling Shooter. Or in one instance; removal of the ability to defend yourself entirely, and the inclusion of (incredibly dense) AI partners to fight for you instead. These points were novel to start with, but more often than not I found them to entirely mar my gaming experience. It's a reasonable experiment to see if a game engine can handle multiple styles of play, but I can't be alone in thinking that a game that only does a single genre, but executes it in the best possible way is far more preferable. Re:coded has a great pedigree, with the controls refined from the 5 previous outings; but around half the game ignores it or heavily simplifies.

If you've already played a Kingdom Hearts game, you already know whether you want this title for your collection; but for those who've not heard of it, or glossed it over due to the Disney content, I do recommend giving the series a try - but don't start with Re:coded; it's a fan-bait game on all accounts. The original PS2 game is very abundant and can be picked up on the cheap, so have a little gaming history lesson and experience a game that had a hand in shaping the modern Action RPG.

 This article can also be found at The Yorker.