#so i can appreciate the way the story is going by essentially punishing sora for it

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Double Trouble (And Nostalgia)

I beat KH:3D...more or less just now.

The idea of your enemy being a time mage and having to somehow overcome that is a neat one! I like the concept of the (basically) final boss of KH:3D. I’m just a little shocked at the execution, the difficulty.

Kingdom Hearts is in a weird place, from a storytelling perspective. Its form essentially proscribes nostalgia as a core element, no matter what else you do with it. If you’re not gonna include a bunch of levels based on Disney properties there’s no point calling it a Kingdom Hearts game, no matter how many keyblades, heartless, nobodies, dream eaters, Organization members, or gummi ships you include.

But their audience is getting older. The designers, while this is happening, are continuing to do their best to innovate with mechanics in every game, and even assuming that they only keep the things that feel best for the game this does result in a bit of complexity creep.

Complexity creep isn’t really a problem, so long as the use of the skills represented is required only for optional content and maybe one boss with really good “how to do this” transmission built in. A good example would be the difference in Mario’s movement options between his original 2D titles and the New or Galaxy series. As long as it’s possible to beat all but one or two levels without needing to long jump or backflip under pressure, the new additions are fine.

But...well, my problem with the Young Xehanort fight isn’t the structure of the fight. If you defeat him, he time-stops you and reverses time to the start of the fight. You can do a Reality Shift - something you’ve had to do several times to reach this point - to stop this and enter stage 2 of the fight. And then stage 2 has a time limit in which you have to win, or (again) he reverses time to the start of the whole fight (back to the start of stage 1, that is). I appreciate the fact that time-reversal takes a bit out of him. He’s got something like 5-6 bars of health when you first take him on. If you fail to do the Reality Shift (probably the most annoying thing with this one is it’s kind of fiddly - you have to hit his clock spell a time or 2 to get the Shift to become an option, but hit it just one time too many and you’ll miss your window to enter the command) the “back at the start of the fight” Xehanort has 2 or 3 bars of health. Even more important, the same is true of the timed second-half-of-fight. So if you failed by just a bit because you didn’t have the damage output and were playing cautiously, the second time you do it you only have to deal about half as much damage to win.

In concept this is really neat. It’s a two-part fight that basically becomes a 4 or 5-part fight if you screw it up a few times but don’t die.

My problem with the fight is that his baseline tactics are cheap and unpredictable, and more than that they’re designed with a minmaxed character in mind. He’s got attacks designed to hit you for a lot of damage, then hit you for just a little while you’re still in your stagger animation. Which looks suspiciously like it’s designed as a direct counter to Second Chance - a powerful skill you can earn that makes sure you fall to 1 hp unless you were at 1 hp when you got hit. The thing is that Second Chance is earned. You’re not required to get it at all, in the game. So getting it should give you an easier time, with the boss.

Fighting him is not fun. And I don’t mean that as an exasperated expression of his difficulty (though one could). I mean that even when I won I didn’t feel as if I had a clear sense of how to play properly against him.

Looking at Mario Galaxy again: There’s a trick to beating each boss, and the distance between comprehending that trick and working out how to execute it is always manageable.

The big difficulty with Xehanort is raw speed. There’s a substantial portion of his moveset that has no warning and no counters if you’re not countering before he gets started. Which leads to embarrassing moments when he’s just standing there looking at me, and I’m hitting the block button, and then hitting it again when it runs out and hoping he won’t hit me during the refresh animation...

There’s more than a decade between them, but I still feel as if KH1 got the final boss right: A challenge that will punish you if you don’t pay attention, but a basic movement pattern to learn and a downright cakewalk if you’ve gotten used to the difficulty afforded by hidden optional bosses. The extra mini-boss fight - if they hadn’t made visibility such an issue - to end KH:3D would have been much closer to what I wanted from a true final boss. The two near-final boss fights are honestly more what I was expecting. They’re hard at times, but you can adjust, get a sense of enemy rhythm, and then win. That’s how it should work, and it really seems like someone on the KH:3D boss design team thought that was unfair in the player’s favor, and set about trying to confound the players getting a clear idea of the monster’s timing and attack patterns. This, to me, is a lot like a DM who thinks it’s their job to kill their players. It’s so painfully wrong-headed and completely misses the point of why you’re cultivating this experience in the first place.

Vision (literal, not metaphorical) and pacing were the big problems in the boss designs of KH:3D, and both flaws come to a head in the final few bosses. Against Xehanort you can generally see him okay, but you can’t really tell what he’s doing until it’s too late for the game system to read your inputs. Against the Dark Armor, or whatever it’s called...(Nightmare of Ventus? Something like that.) the problem is less pronounced, mostly because the fight’s not that hard, but it’s still not a fun fight and the reason is you can’t see any of what’s going on. (Seriously. I literally couldn’t see my target for more than about 10% of the battle. I relied on the keyblade auto-targeting when I attacked with an enemy in melee range, and I relied on longer-range auto-targeting attacks like the flowmotion wall jump or Firaga when that failed. When my enemy turned into some kind of cheaty bubbly blackness I dodged in a circle until that ended - still unable to see my attacker most of the time, because if I could see him he was already on top of me) And that’s a big issue throughout the game. I had trouble seeing the boss in...by my count, more than half of the boss fights. The fight against Pete and the Beagle Boys was actually kind of a joy, because they DID have clear rhythm and timing and you COULD see what was going on. More than half the fights should have had that kind of clear transmission of how to approach the battle, and the first step is to make the enemy easy to see most of the time.

The original point I was getting at, before I started ranting about controls, is that the difficulty seems like something a kid of an age to enjoy the Disney Animated Three Musketeers storyline or Goofy’s “Gee, I think ALL our hearts are connected to Sora” sentiment wouldn’t be likely to endure or enjoy. This feels like they decided their audience for this title was almost exclusively Kingdom Hearts Series Veterans. I’d set the minimum age to complete this game - based solely on complexity of mechanics and complexity of storyline - at around 13, and I’m talking gamer 13. Not some random 13-year-old. I think the original Kingdom Hearts was accessible to kids as young as seven (again, “gamer” 7). They might not get 100% of the plot they were playing through, but a) nobody did, and b) the story in each zone used these distilled forms of Disney plotlines to make experiences that were simple and clean as the way that you’re making me feel tonight (it’s hard to let it go).

Anyway. The other thing that hit me really hard, right at the end, was the monologues from elder Xehanort and DiZ. Not because of the content - that was the usual KH fluff. But the delivery was excellent, and I realized with a pang that I was listening - perhaps for the last time - to recordings I’d never heard before, of Leonard Nimoy and Christopher Lee. Their delivery was SO GOOD, you guys. DiZ’ monologue isn’t spectacular writing but it’s really great to listen to. You can hear Lee coating every word with significance using that honey-rich royal voice of his. Dude wasn’t in the entire rest of the game - in fact DiZ isn’t in the credits - but Christopher Lee steals the whole damn scene with that delivery.