Let A Little Darkness Into Your Heart

And it'll clog your arteries!


So, another game goes into the list.  It took a fair bit of doing, but Kingdom Hearts Final Mix is now a game that I've beaten.  Ansem was quite a final boss, and even though I suspect I was over-leveled, it took a few tries and quite some time to put that set of battles away.  It was just hard enough to keep me coming back for more. 


Overall it was a helluva run.  KHFM is just as fun as advertised, and I don't doubt it's old news to say that this game deserves a spot on the RPG enthusiast's shelf.  The tone was wonderful, being very optimistic and cheerful without becoming saccharine, having just enough dark moments to remind you how high the stakes can really be.  Going on a multidimensional tour of random Disney worlds to smack eldritch legions of stolen and corrupted hearts (with a giant damn key!) sounds friggin' stupid on paper, but it just works out so well.  The latter third or so was the best part, full of freaky and memorable locations, challenging battles, and just crazy moments.  It's a rare game that takes fairly predictable twists and turns and still actually can pull off some OMGWTFBBQ doing them.  Hell an unexpected highlight was stumbling onto a bonus superboss and getting totally wrecked for my trouble; I won't spoil things completely, but I can't say I've gotten some laughs out of getting slaughtered by what amounts to a Square-style Sith Lord before.  Welcome to Kingdom Hearts!


It's still not perfect (but perfect doesn't exist anyway).  I do have some minor quibbles.  The summon system just wasn't all that great; Square games typically used it as a once-per-battle supermove, with plenty of flash and occasionally game-changing effects.  KHFM retains the once-per rule, but adds a few other restrictions that just doesn't let be all that fun.  It's very telling that the only one really worth it is Tinker Bell which invokes an almost game-breaking health regeneration (almost, you'll want and need it in later boss fights).  The coliseum fights are also a bit of a pain, mostly though a combination of no summons and no heath or mana pickups; that's a lot meaner that it sounds.  The final gripe is that the designers traded depth for variety.  The various worlds you visit have plenty of distinction and fun visuals, but they rarely feel like worlds.  Neverland was especially bad, giving you unlimited flight...in an abbreviated series of claustrophobic halls and cabins, finally letting you loose on the deck for a boss fight and later hanging around Big Ben (by the way, you can only move something like 30-50 yards from the big clock before hitting an invisible wall).


Those are about it for the gripes, though, and there is plenty of good things to fanboy about.  The battle system is overall simple but deep, and your AI partners will actually meaningfully contribute along the way.  Traditional revival items and spells are forgone for a timed comeback mechanic, which both relieves the player from traditional AI babysitting and adds a fair bit of tension to tricky battles.  That and listening to Donald Duck wig out and then fling arcane doom is hilarious.  The guest star members do run the gamut, but Final Mix seems to have tweaked them to where none are actually useless.  Beast is still far and away the best of the lot.  Seriously, eh OHKO's Heartless and doesn't afraid of anything.  They all seem to have a hidden extra luck mechanic as well; putting a world specific character in the battle lineup seems to make the drop rates skyrocket for some reason.  One final thing, the production values are through the roof.  This is a very fun game to look at and listen to.  I'm running a relic of a CRT television which far from does justice to it, and I've still gotten lots of wow-inducing visuals and wonderful sound.  Traverse Town's battle theme is just something special by the way.  Oh, and Deep Jungle feels a lot less like a Disney world and more like somebody snuck in some World of Mana flavor with the visuals and especially the soundtrack.  Yes I geek out at video game music, why do you ask?


In any case, all good things must come to an end, and it's time to decide what adventure to pop in next.  We shall see.

At The End

Well, here we are finally.  I've taken my first steps into the final world of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, the aptly named End of The World.  It's an appropriately dark, unsetting place, full of impossible physics and eldritch creatures.  It has the potential to be the best final level I've encountered in an RPG for a good while. 


The ones I've played over the last few years have never quite gotten there.  The three Tales games I've played were alright (and even downright brilliants in spots). Legendia's final level suffered from both ending fatigue and a much too high OMGWTFBBQ factor.  Abyss has the wondrous Luke vs. Asch fight (and managed to trigger a bit of vicarious acrophobia) but was just too damn bright. Vesperia's final dungeon felt out of place, until the very last section, which came across as alien and disturbing somehow, and was evocative enough of Lovecraft to feel built and inhabited by Deep Ones or something; it actually scared me some. 


But this one is different somehow.  It's something of a pleasant surprise, since RPGs (even good ones) have a bad habit of screwing them up somehow.  Most of them have length issues, being too much of a slog compared to the rest of the game (at least to me), or feel anticlimactic somehow.  It's good to know that Square still knew what it was doing in the PS2 era.


Anyhow, things are going along pretty well, though some of that can be explained by some incidental grinding.  I decided to go ahead and hunt down the last of the 101 Dalamations and get the final Aero upgrade.  Things devolved fairly quickly, and the final set of puppies eluded me.  I wound up tearing through Hollow Bastion for three hours, stopping and looking it up on GameFAQs, then futilely beating on it another hour.  I thought I had managed to find a nasty glitch, and Googled it.


I didn't find a glitch.  It had been moved the final set into a semi-secret area I had ignored (the hidden Lift Stop in the Library) thinking I has already thoroughly looted the place.  Check Everywhere is the first rule of RPGs, and I forgot it!  This was all compounded by the fact that the FAQs I consulted were copied and pasted from the original version to the Remix/Final Mix versions database without any corrections or new data.  Frickin'.  Lazy.


Anyway, I'm probably over-leveled now, but the monsters are still not pushovers at least.  That's good, because we're down to the wire, and where the game needs to bring out the badasses.  The Harvest Never Rests!

For The World Is Hollow

And I have smote some Heartless.


I've been dealing with even crazier stuff than normal IRL, but I'm managing to get some time into Kingdom Hearts.  I'm finally nearing the endgame, and hopefully this one can be put to bed before my next big campaign can go into full swing.  I'm still deciding on whether to go ahead and figure out the roadblock I encountered in Atelier Iris:  Eternal Mana, but as it stands right now I'm not going to waste perfectly good-off time on it.


In any case, KH is still loads of fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing how deep this rabbit hole actually goes.  I've finally gotten to some of the more fun/amusing/inexplicably badass monsters and boss fights take place.  One of my favorite mooks is the Battleship, a mini-airship fused with a pirate Heartless that tears around and lobs destruction all over the place,  Another is the Drake, a little Heartless Bahamut-lookalike.  It's not all that challenging (at least for now) but it's fun to fight.


I'm currently in Hollow Bastion, one of the more eldritch locations I've been in my vidya adventures.  It's dark and creepy, and somehow the whole weirdness factor is amplified by how light and airy a lot of it can be.  It's hard to describe; I fully expected this whole dark, dank, gothic-looking place, with lots of rubble and undead-analogues and baroque scenery everywhere.  There's plenty of that to be had, but there's all this outside sky-and-clouds stuff to be had.  It's got to be a deliberate design decision, and it's thematically appropriate with the whole juxtaposition of light and darkness that KH espouses.


I'm still kicking myself a little over not giving this series a fair chance back in the day, but at least I'm making up for lost time.  The Harvest never rests!

Ducks Make Hilarious Wizards

Seriously, watching Donald Duck wig out and then unleash arcane fury is a necessary gaming experience.


I'm about roughly halfway through Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, and it's been a pretty fun ride thus far.  I do have some fairly minor gripes.  The most annoying one is traditional 3-D platforming camera screw; it's not the worst but it can be a pain.  The other big one is just how small all the worlds you visit are.  There's a lot of variety to be had, and we do have is great, with a good deal of little details here and there to help flesh things out.  Everything just feels so hemmed in.


But other that all that (and -urgh- Gummi levels) it had been an absolute blast.  The combat is fun and pretty fluid.  Square was decidedly strutting their stuff here, and it shows.  There's little signs here and there that this game has a pedigree including the kickass three-character combat of SNES-era Seiken Densetsu games, along with all the delicious kookiness Final Fantasy has brought us over the years.  Toss in all the best parts of Disney's own brand of craziness (and the pedigree of quality Disney licensed games were known for back in the day) and voila, something that should have been a circus car trainwreck in the middle of an extra-baked Pink Floyd concert wound up just...well, special and actually pretty awesome. 


I can see why this game elicited such a large and passionate fanbase, and can very much relate; it's a damn shame I skipped this jewel when it got released the first time (didn't have any excuses either, wound up with a copy from a buddy and wound up piffling it away for something or another).


Oh, and you can friggin' summon the Genie from Aladdin.  That's the awesomesauce right there.

Smash Evil and Save Puppies

Well, after dealing with the lamest case of food poisoning ever (or a bizarre allergic reaction, I'm not sure), I managed to do a little more Kingdom Hearts.


There's just so much stuff here that I should either loathe or be too mature to even take seriously.  The platforming is crap, the worlds are somehow shallow and confusing at the same time, the Gummi Ship shmup levels drive me crazy.  There's characters running around from movies and games I haven't been able to look at with a straight face for a decade (or two).  Pretty much every RPG cliché ever is cropping up, along with high-fructose Disney clichés.  I might have taken this thing and tossed in a woodchipper while "Shot In The Dark" is blaring and so forth if I didn't know better.


But let's face it:  This shit is awesome!  You're tearing around the multiverse, wrecking the mindless hordes of badness, stopping along the way to smack the shit out of random cartoon villains and do various little tasks like make friends and rescue puppies.  There's just something about come back to Traverse Town and hanging out with various badasses and then touring a house full of tiny Dalmatians just tearing about and being adorable.  Then you can venture forth and watch Donald damn Duck unleash hell and gorram Goofy shield bash the shit out of evil, all while you unleash the Harvest upon random abominations and make them drop all sorts of shinies. 


You can just tell that this was when Squeenix was bringing their A-game (none of that fal'Cie horseshit or Final Corridor XIII blandness).  I just hope that I'm actually enjoying things later and not just experiencing a game though a fever filter.  The Harvest Continues!

Smashing Evil With A Key

Well.


I'm not going to mince words; Atelier Iris 1 finally gave out and wound up a disappointment.  Then I wound up with a double whammy when my newly-arrived copy of Castlevania:  Lament of Innocence proved to have some really frustrating platforming mechanics...right out of the gate.  I got pretty damned upset; I can't recall when I had something in my nerd life go that south that quickly.


But all was not lost!  After some dithering, I pulled out something I should have a long time ago:  Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Final Mix.  Holy crap, I was impressed.


It's a strange thing.  I wound up with a copy of the original Playstation 2 version way back when, played it for all of two hours, and put it back into the stack.  I don't really remember why, either.  The whole Disney/Square thing didn't turn me off or anything.  Maybe it just too damned weird or something for me back then.  Then a wild Playstation 3 appeared, and along with it came both KH Final Mix compilations.


And like an ass, I ignored the games I was gifted and wound up buying Amalur.  You can see how that ended in earlier posts; repensem canicula est.  One thing led to another, and now here I am, doing what I should damned well have to begin with (nerds have nerdy life lessons, I suppose) and popping in one of my gifts.


It was a wonder to behold.  There I was, doing what should have been crappy early-game fetch quests and screwing up mini-games left and right, and enjoying every last second of it.  I got stomped by Riku McAngst and laughed.  I watched Black Mage Donald Duck give Guardsman Goofy a good jolt and laughed more.  I even got a few giggles out of the subtle references to Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Cross (hell, I didn't know Squeenix was willing to acknowledge Chrono Cross).


Does anybody else remember when us gamers thought it was all a sick joke?  When we thought that this whole crossover thing was going to be total crap and ruin Final Fantast forever?  When we were all hoping it was just going to be a failed experiment and join the scrap heap with other bullshit marketing ideas?  The joke was on us, and damn if isn't funny.


Granted, the storyline as it stands now is a trainwreck, and (before the Final Mix compilations) having to play random handheld episodes to get the whole story only makes sense in a evil corporation sort of way.  But here I am, ready to fight the tides of evil and see where this goes.


All Hail Galactimouse and his herald, the Imperial Death Star!