[archived from a cohost post, originally made on may 23, 2024]
this game is infuriating.
eminently breakable, and infuriating. I'm gonna be bitching under the cut, dead dove etc
the partner who I burdened with the weight of playing kingdom hearts is mostly being a good sport about this but I feel bad. about making them play this game with its myriad shortcomings of design after they suffered khfm and its own cocktail of painful Bits, especially if you, as they did, try to get all the annoying trophies in one run.
playing through kingdom hearts final mix on proud, without changing equipment, without being allowed to simply continue if you lose a fight, and suffering the painfully doubled damage that proud pointlessly inflicts to do the endgame grinding, even once you can swap equipment, is not how people typically fondly remember kh1. they remember playing the original game on normal! without a bunch of extra challenges tacked on!
achievements/trophies are a problem, as applied by most designers. that's a pretty stable opinion of mine. here, however, they're a problem on top of the design issues that chain of memories (and its poor conversion to 3D) traipse along with.
the card acquisition? wack. sleights? wack. the card break mechanic? wack. the way the plot is 95% actually pointless kh1 rehash by volume? wack. let's go over some things that are wack:
card acquisition is pulling RNG packs of color-coded cards for varying amounts of moogle points, which, hey, do not drop from encounters by default. you only get moogle points from environmental objects and aladdin's friend sleights. also experience is dropped by enemies killed in battle and can and will fade away if you don't pick it up and take too long before finishing the battle
the first card used in combos (sleights) disappears until the end of the battle meaning if you rely too heavily on sleights, especially early on, you will literally run out of cards and have to rely on friend cards dropping in to pull your ass out of the fire. if you even survive that long. the only way to restore these cards are with one-use-per-battle item cards. but not the first ones you get! only the higher versions of all three of these cards (one for attack, one for magic, one for both).
this disincentivizes the idea of building a deck with card consistency because you really need as many cards as you can manage to fit in... and consistency isn't a problem because it's a fixed order! in fact, one of the most efficient (read: only effective) ways to play the game is to stack your deck full of sleights that then produce a second layer of sleights when you delete the first card on the second reload!
doll (the partner I inflicted this fate on) is right to compare this to battle network, because that has a fixed deck size of 30 and building your deck for consistency is a real thing you can do and you don't get to just wallow because your number isn't bigger than the enemy's. in this, you can level grind to just make the "I fit more cards into my deck" resource pile bigger and you should be spending about 80% of your levels on that! it's ridiculous!
there are SO many different complaints I could lob at this game. but I'm so tired of thinking about how much this game annoys me to play. it wasn't even really worth it for the closure I got from seeing the narrative through after all this time. good grief.
at least the next game is better. darkest on the road to dawn, I suppose.