Your thoughts on the Kingdom Hearts series?

[Ronnie]

I remember being interested in Kingdom Hearts as a kid, the art style of the illustrations, the main theme song/end credits, and something about the plot of searching for missing friends stuck out to me. However even then I always thought having Disney characters in it felt so jarring. Like it was hard for me to take the plot seriously when you see Mickey Mouse walking around looking like The Undertaker (WWE wrestler for those uninformed). Of course as a kid, I never had PlayStation. Only SNES, GBA, and Gamecube. Never got a chance to play, only watch.

Anyways, what are your experiences with the series? You enjoy the games? Do the Disney characters break the immersion of the anime-as-fuck story for you? Then again the whole nobody and heartless stuff still confuses me lol. I feel like I'd enjoy KH1 and 2 just to satiate my childhood curiosity but I've no interest in the spin-offs.

[Rex Glacies]

I've heard a lot of good about it, and heard a lot of good in it (Yoko Shimomura's music is truly divine) but I haven't actually played any games. I never owned the consoles the games were on in the past, and by now I'm too terrified of how diverse and complicated the story is to know where and how to jump in. I could watch some walkthroughs of the games, but there's so many I still don't know which games are necessary for the story and such.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

Eh. I don't care for them. Them trying to make Mickey Mouse all "edgy" just doesn't work for me, and never mind that AWFUL Goofy "death" scene. Like, wow, that is legitimately one of the worst things I have ever seen in a video game ever period.

[Ronnie]

12 minutes ago, Rex Glacies said:

I've heard a lot of good about it, and heard a lot of good in it (Yoko Shimomura's music is truly divine) but I haven't actually played any games. I never owned the consoles the games were on in the past, and by now I'm too terrified of how diverse and complicated the story is to know where and how to jump in. I could watch some walkthroughs of the games, but there's so many I still don't know which games are necessary for the story and such.

It's actually not too bad from what I remember. Start with Kingdom Hearts 1 of course. Watch a walkthrough of Chain of Memories. Then play Kingdom Hearts 2. KH2 starts immediately after Chain of Memories. Without seeing the plot for that, you'll be confused by all the "new" characters in 2.

[kingddd]

The spin offs unfortunately fill in many of the unanswered plotholes of the series and some are part of the timeline.  So if you do want to get into the lore further you may need to play them to understand them further.  The mainline's story as itself isn't too confusing as it's mostly focused on you saving disney worlds with the usual original backstories but 2 definitely kicks off the really random background lore stuff.  And it's unfortunately the one that started the expansive lore behind the many kingdom hearts plot timeline. 

However!!  If you don't care about the story and go right ahead and play the mainline games perfectly fine.  However definitely get the bundle or the mega collection that is currently rumored to come out.   If you like Action RPG style gameplay this is the definitely the genre of game for you.  1 can be a bit slow but it has the most exploration in terms of level design.  2 is all combat oriented and much faster paced then 1.  But both do their jobs well.

Currently the definitive versions are on the PS4

Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix  (which contains every single enhancements, updates, fixes and changes and in high definitions)
It contains:
KINGDOM HEARTS Final Mix (First Game)
KINGDOM HEARTS Re: Chain of Memories (GBA Remake)
KINGDOM HEARTS 358/2 Days (DS Remake)
KINGDOM HEARTS II Final Mix (Second Game)
KINGDOM HEARTS Birth by Sleep Final Mix  (PSP Remake)
KINGDOM HEARTS Re: coded. (Mobile remake but it's cutscene movie only)

Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 Final Chapter Prologue (Which are remakes and enhancements of some of the spin off titles)
It contains:
Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD
Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage
Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover

Personally as someone who played a couple of them to completion.  The mainlines are definitely worth your time if you want awesome gameplay, action rpg combats.  Otherwise the spinoffs are only worth your time if you want some of the unfilled answers and their gameplays are a mixedbag.  Other than that there are rumors of them bringing both the above two as one package again because square loves repackaging these games.  Don't get me wrong though they did an awesome job remaking these games from the ground up from the handheld side to a full console experience.

I would definitely say play at least.  Kingdom Hearts 1, Re:Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts 2 if you just want to experience the series as a whole.

Birth by Sleep is essentially your origins story so that has some merits of play if you want to learn more the background.  But otherwise the rest if you jsut want to learn more of the random plot and may or may not be worth your time.

Edited December 6, 2017 by kingddd

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I think the Final Fantasy characters broke the immersion for me a million times more than the Disney worlds and characters. There's just no context for Cloud and Sephiroth to be hanging around. They show up at key story moments and fights, but have no unique stake in the series plot or lore. You can't even summon them, and Auron is the only one that ever joins your party for a spell in 2. Final fantasy has such a little effect on this series, that it makes sense why everybody asks "what Disney worlds do you want to see show up?" because we routinely forget this is a crossover franchise in concept.

Anyway, I experienced the series on PS2 per friend's recommendation in high school when he heard I just finished FF10. Returned years later once they started dumping remix collections on PS3. Got the platinum trophy for 2. 2 is my favorite because it's a fundamentally well built action game. The drives have good function and reward you with new abilities, the limits are good risk vs reward, all the summons are useful, you have a lot of customization for your basic attack combos, and the Final Mix version of the game has excellent post game content. Everything I like in this series exists in 2, and in my opinion the rest just don't compare. The only knock I have for 2 is the story is pretty bad, and not in an entertaining way. The three hour prologue sequence never gets explained in this game, only in the spinoffs. The minor characters and villains are throwaway, and most of the major story beats are style over substance, like when you get a bunch of cutscenes of Final Fantasy characters fighting back to back in the 1000 Heartless fight. Even in high school I was totally uninterested in this story.

I am still interested in what Kingdom Hearts 3 will be like. Of course it has been over four years since they confirmed it was being made, and it still feels like we're years away from playing it. Another spinoff game was developed and released in the time they've been teasing 3. But when it does come out, it will be an event. And the gameplay they have shown looks at least better than the spinoffs. I don't have a console that will be able to run the game, but if it reviews well, then that may be what makes me pull the trigger on a PS4.

Edited December 6, 2017 by Glennstavos

[peener weener]

they're pretty shite

[SoulWeaver]

I started on 358/2 Days and was hooked. Yeah, the last guy I said that to asked me what the heck was wrong with me if DAYS got me interested in the series instead of just blatantly confused.

For me, at any rate, the appeal Days had was that I had almost no concept of the game when I first played it - I knew Sora was pretty much Ash Ketchum and that was it. Oddly enough, this meant that I wasn't actually confused by the plot at all, because I wasn't trying to fit it into some master plan - I was just watching this kid in a black coat eat ice cream on a clock tower while trying to figure out what a heart was, which actually really resonated with me - I still don't really know what a heart is, at least not in the context that KH talks about.
Looking at it completely on its own, the game isn't half bad - the gameplay felt smooth(at least to me, it takes a bit of getting used to if you started on a different game), the protagonists felt much more relatable than I later found Sora to be once I started the other games, there was a decent amount of drama and intrigue with just the shenanigans and goings-on within the Organization(not to mention the last in-game week…a lot of emotion there!), I liked almost all the characters involved, there was a multiplayer mode, good music(I have like three remixes of Xion's Theme alone - I recommend the Vyridia Dubstep and the 'Remember' mix w/ lyrics), the list goes on. It's only when you try to go to it while playing the games in chronological order you run into issues, especially as the events of Chain of Memories happen during Days so you have to spend some time going back and forth between the two to stay chronologically correct. Overall, when taken with the rest of the series, I'd probably give Days like a 6 or 7 out of 10, but on its own it gets a straight 9 from me.

After Days I went to 2, and I've got to say it has easily the most fluid gameplay of any KH game I've played, so all of them except BBS and 0.2. The Prologue also actually made so much sense since I just came from Days, and it made the transition from Roxas as Protag to Sora as Protag much easier for me. I'll finish the rest of my thoughts later, I've gotta go for now.

[Slumber]

Long story short, it's a convoluted mess of a franchise that will never live up to the potential that KH1 displayed, and squandered 90% of the good will that came with Final Fantasy and Disney by the second game. 

I'm not a fan. 

Just listen to the soundtracks, or skip the story if you think you might be interested in the game play. 

Edited December 6, 2017 by Slumber

[Retyl]

.

 

Edited September 6, 2018 by Retyl

[Reality]

The only ones with gameplay I could stand were Chain of Memories and Re:Chain, the others disappoint me. I don't really pay attention to the story in any of them. 

[Zera]

Kingdom Hearts was a pretty good idea, until it took 16 years and ~15 releases to reach the number 3. I lost interest after Birth by Sleep, partly because KH games are not fun to 100%, and partly because I got tired of how samey the series' gameplay started to feel. I think I'll jump back in with KH4, which should only be a decade or two.

[Roxas]

I'm too damn old.

[Armagon]

I've never played but i've heard both good things and bad things. I've personally never been interested though. Played the Dream Drop Distance demo years ago and thought it was eh.

I do think a lot of the Kingdom Hearts titles just have stupid names. Like, what the fuck is "Birth by Sleep" and "358/2" supposed to mean? Even when there is context behind it, it still just sounds stupid.

[Infinite Dreams]

I tried the first one shortly after it first came out on the PS2.  My little brothers really liked it, but I couldn't get into it.  (At the time, I was a bratty teenager who thought that the Disney part of the game was really lame. )  I haven't tried it again since then. 

Seems to be a very well-loved series, so I don't doubt that the games are good.  

[DragonLord]

This is all coming from someone who's never played a single game. In a single word, I'd say it seems like a mess. I recently watched Somecallmejohnny's marathon of the games, and I can see why he feels the way he does. Most of the games seem to be pretty subpar (the spinoffs for the most part), story is awfully convoluted, and most characters don't seem very interesting. The saving grace seem to be the main games with their gameplay (So KH 1, KH 2), but even those don't have great stories. If the majority of games in a series range from subpar to downright bad either due to gameplay or story (which the KH games take seriously), why are people so invested in it? Seems like really bad fanfiction at this point, never understood the hype surrounding the story. Gameplay is another thing, I can see why people look forward to KH 3 for that.

This is all just my opinion though.

Edited December 6, 2017 by DragonLord

[Slumber]

Seriously, you'll never hear the word "Dark" the same after playing the games.

 

[SoulWeaver]

6 hours ago, Armagon said:

Like, what the frick is "Birth by Sleep" and "358/2" supposed to mean? Even when there is context behind it, it still just sounds stupid.

I don't know the answer to Birth By Sleep as I haven't played that one yet, but 358/2 Days is because the game takes 358 in-game days - Roxas works for the Organization exactly one week short of a full year, which actually ends up being kind of cool once you realize the Roxas Prologue for KH2 takes up 7 in-game days. The 2 is a little more ambiguous - my personal theory is that it's because 

Spoiler

Roxas is basically a second Sora

but that may just be me.

 

Also, in the same vein as Slumber's comment, you'll never see a rainy night quite the same after Day 358 - Believe.

Edited December 6, 2017 by SoulWeaver

[TheGoodHoms]

Ah Kingdom Hearts! The biggest love-hate franchise ever that somehow remains one of the most popular video game franchises to this day by some stretch of a miracle. My relationship with the franchise is weird, I've played most of the spin offs, but only parts of the "main line" games at friends houses. Of the ones I've played Birth by Sleep is my favorite mainly because you don't need to have played an other games to enjoy it being a prequel and all, I also think the command deck is the best combat system in the series. As for the series as a whole it's fine, it's not the greatest thing ever, but it's not atrocious either. But man is that story a real headache! Thanks to the magic of the internet I think I know what's going on, but I don't know if that makes me really bright or really insane.

Edited December 6, 2017 by TheGoodHoms

[Azure Sen]

Gameplay wise, they're pretty good outside of the original and its Final Mix, although even those have just aged badly rather than being outright bad. II in particular has aged fantastically and is still as fun now as it was when I first played it over a decade ago.

Story-wise...honestly, they're a hot mess. The first game was a nice, self-contained story with few loose ends and a clear narrative, but every subsequent entry has just added more and more unnecessary plot elements and characters, because Nomura as usual goes overboard if no one's around to tell him no.

5 hours ago, Slumber said:

Seriously, you'll never hear the word "Dark" the same after playing the games.

Even watching a few seconds of that has overloaded me to the point where "darkness" doesn't look like a real word anymore.

[Slumber]

4 minutes ago, Azure Sen said:

Even watching a few seconds of that has overloaded me to the point where "darkness" doesn't look like a real word anymore.

Dark dark, dark? Dark's darkness darkness dark dark dark dark dark "dark" darkness dark. Dark dark dark darkness dark Leonard Nemoy, Christopher Lee dark Mark Hamill dark dark darkness dark dark dark darkness dark darkness dark.

[Armagon]

1 hour ago, SoulWeaver said:

358/2 Days is because the game takes 358 in-game days

Yeah, i know that but it's still a stupid name. I think it would've been better if they took the /2 off. Call it Kingdom Hearts: 358 because then at least people can make jokes about how 358 came before 3.

41 minutes ago, Azure Sen said:

Story-wise...honestly, they're a hot mess.

This is probably what prevents me from getting into the series. The story and lore are just so confusing. I feel like it would've gone much better if it didn't have the Disney part in it but then it's not Kingdom Hearts anymore.

6 hours ago, Slumber said:

Seriously, you'll never hear the word "Dark" the same after playing the games.

 

Jesus Christ. In just one minute alone, they said "dark-" 79 times. 79! That gave me a headache.

[Slumber]

13 minutes ago, Armagon said:

This is probably what prevents me from getting into the series. The story and lore are just so confusing. I feel like it would've gone much better if it didn't have the Disney part in it but then it's not Kingdom Hearts anymore.

Honestly it's not Disney that's the problem. It's not even Final Fantasy, despite that series' reputation for convoluted stories as of late.

It's the dumb, generic anime crap they tossed in after the first game.

I think if you talk to most people, the first story is the most cohesive one. In that game, it's an original villain using Disney villains to kidnap Disney princess so they can use their pure hearts to open an evil gate with Chernabog inside of it(Something to that extent. There's more with Ansem, but it's very minor). They take peoples souls("Hearts") and turn them into heartless, and that's the generic fodder you fight. You're the good guy and you have to stop them. It's simple, it's easy, it's dumb but it works. The first game is the most Disney-centric one. There's basically 4 original characters that you have to keep track of in KH1, and the rest is Disney and FF.

Chain of Memories and KH2 is where it got convoluted, and it's where they introduced 20 new characters who don't have anything to do with the sales pitch of the series. Now not only are there Heartless, but they have counterparts who are Nobodies, who CAN look human but sometimes don't, and the Nobodies are running through Disney worlds with no real connection to the worlds they causing problems in, there's a 3 hour tutorial at the start of KH2 that has nothing to do with the rest of the game, Sora's best buddy is body hopping, there's a dude who's the villain but he's actually not the villain who needs to shoot a vacuum at the moon, which is a heart(THE Kingdom Heart), the main villain has a Nobody who also is part of the anime brigade, Mickey is part of the trenchcoat mafia... They started scaling back after KH2(Well, more after 358/2), but the damage had been done.

Edited December 6, 2017 by Slumber

[HK Motendra]

My favorite series that I've been on since the beginning, with the only one that I haven't played being Re:Coded and favorite being Birth By Sleep.

Regarding the regular story complaint, I can't say that they're ill-founded, but that doesn't make them less annoying to hear.  Admittedly, much of the mess could have been avoided had they have gotten the order down pat from the get go, instead of cramming so many blank points into KH II, which is where it all begins to go down, due to leaving too many questions to be answered; being the cause of all these side games in the first place (even if I found Re:Coded to be [somewhat] unnecessary).  Its no wonder peeps scoff at it so much.

Starting off II with this character (Roxas) that you know nothing about in an unfamiliar setting, along with a new kind of enemy controlled by basically the Akatsuki is quite a lot to take in without any context to keep it afloat. Days should have come before II because of this to make for a smoother transition, as it is more or less the sequel/midquel to Chain of Memories.

Everything afterwards is fine as is, given that II was alluding to Birth by Sleep (though much more apparent in Final Mix). My only actual grievance with BBS being that it wasn't on a console. So much potential went to waste for whatever reason it may have been and didn't make it to the end product and would have made for more details to be included had it been treated like the main entries, 1 & 2 (the devs consider it as KH 0, hence the 0.2)

Then of course.... Dream Drop Distance happened. Can't exactly defend that one for not entirely understanding it, myself. (In addition to not liking Dream Eaters at all)

The way I see it, its less so the story, itself and more how they went about it, in regards to what you gotta do to connect all the dots,  which... not everyone has the patience for. Tis a shame.

[Acacia Sgt]

8 hours ago, Armagon said:

Yeah, i know that but it's still a stupid name. I think it would've been better if they took the /2 off. Call it Kingdom Hearts: 358 because then at least people can make jokes about how 358 came before 3.

From my understanding, the /2 refers to Roxas and Xion. Since they (and Axel to a lesser though still significant extent) are the focus of the story, that's the way the subtitle is written as it is.

"358 days over/with 2: Roxas and Xion"

That's the thing about KH subtitles for the non-numbered games. It's all about the symbolism. Well, not just the games' subtitles.

Edited December 7, 2017 by Acacia Sgt