Kingdom Hearts III

[one-armed dwarf]

So I've played more of this and I'm afraid to say the dlc is total trash. Its just a retelling of the ending from different PoVs with the option to play as other characters for about 30 seconds.

 

Literally they built out an entire combat repertoire for Roxas and a few others for no reason, it feels like. Pure fan service if you're one of the uber weebs who cares about these characters, but I dont lol. So this is just suffering for me.

 

I think for me the real value will be in these data fights you can do. I've linked one here I saw on twitch to show what they can be like

 

 

Trigger warning for @Maryokutai

[one-armed dwarf]

The 'data's fights in this are so intense but also tell me I know nothing about high level combat in this game.

 

Consider this: KH3 is a brain dead easy game for stupid babies. You mash X and win the prize. Then you get these data fights in the DLC which require you to know about recovery frames, animation cancelling, exploiting I frames to phase through attacks. This knowledge isnt optional, you actually have to know this shit to clear them on top of learning boss mechanics so arcane they feel like they belong in an MMO. These fights are the combat being pushed as hard as it will go.

 

Where's the middle ground here? Lol. This kiddy game has no fucking chill.

 

I finally cleared one of these fucking assholes, but only due to an AI glitch and spamming Simba who is a hell demon in this game. Which makes me wonder the sorts of arguments Square had to have with Disney when representing their properties in this.

 

 

edit, a more legit clear. I accidentally overwrote my save so had to do it again.

 

 

These fights are genuinely the hardest thing I've tried to do in a game this gen, I think. Fucking Orphan of Kos didn't give me half as much trouble as this.

[one-armed dwarf]

I guess I will be playing this thing all the way through again. I think my hill to die on is that this game is actually great if people completely ignore the story (which I think you should do for all of these games tbh). Since the game's release it's got a 'critical' mode. Well this critical mode is pretty fucking hard and I couldn't just mash X to beat the tutorial boss. I had to learn his tells and block/counter its attacks, so I'm glad I left it this long to check out this new mode. I'll probably enjoy the game even more the second time through

 

 

It's also got a bunch of Hades-esque difficulty modifiers like the way 'heat' works in that game, I only turned on 4 cause some of them look like they make the game worse (no magic for instance)

[Maryokutai]

I've recently seen one of those 60fps videos of this game being played on a new console and I am always baffled at how good it looks. The Toy Story world looks just like Toy Story 3, it's ridiculous what they managed to pull off here in certain areas.

 

I've also played that rhythm game in the KH universe these last weeks (Melody of Memory) which gave me massive nostalgia flashbacks even though I only played the first game (and CoM on GBA but I remember nothing of it). So I also bought that KH collection a couple of weeks ago but have absolutely no clue how to find the time to play all these things.

 

And yes, that was a bit of non-post, but whatever.

[one-armed dwarf]

I've not played KH2 since it released but people maintain that it is the best one.

 

A lot of the other spinoff are pretty terrible tho, I played through a few of them during my spine convalescence. That thread can be searched for I think. BBS is pretty rubbish but Dream Drop Distance has a few decent bits and kind of shows how the 3ds was actually a well more capable system than I'd though especially compared to psp

 

On framerate I often don't notice the difference between 60fps and 165fps, but it is very noticeable here with how fast everything is and all the waterga firaga spell effects popping off. Looks sort of surreal, except where Hercules' rock throwing animation is still at 30fps for some reason. I think even on ps4 that stood out

[Maryokutai]

Ah, too bad, I was actually looking forward to BBS the most as the songs from that game in MoM have all been ace.

 

I remember playing a demo of DDD on 3DS and being rather impressed by it. Not only visually but also in how fluid and dynamic combat was. I never bothered buying the full version though because at that time it was still borderline impossible to retroactively get into that franchise. 

[one-armed dwarf]

When I turned myself into a KH expert a few years ago I found out what spin offs you should play and not. Basically chain of memories is the real KH2 (or 1.5), Birth by Sleep is KH0 (its the series Revenge of the Sith) and Dream Drop Distance is the real KH3 (or 2.5). That's a lot of games (back to back you're looking at least 100 hrs to beat all of those, so yeah..) but you absolutely do not need to touch any others but these ones. Even then CoM is only worth playing if you think you have the patience/interest for its weird card combat system, otherwise a scan through a wiki and/or a 10 minute video will suffice. BBS is unfortunately both very important story wise and not a good playing game by modern standards. Dream Drop Distance frontloads and backloads most of the important bits, but I think that game has some really interesting level design so it's worth sticking with but I really hate the weird mini games and pokemon system.

 

If they ever get in the business of remaking these games then BBS is the one that they should target IMO to get the quality level up a bit. Here's a thread for them, I think Rik liked them way more than I did. IMO chain of memories actually ended up being the best one just for being really different. 

 

I have only just got to Toy Story so far in KH3 critical, it is rly hard and I die multiple times on every fight. But definitely this is one of those games where I actually notice the high framerate for once (high as in 100fps+). I spent hours just trying to kill this big swarm of black stuff, as everyone knows the true antagonist in the KH series is the evil camera. Also it sucks that I had to beat it just to learn cure. Herc's keyblade is my favourite for the ranged attacks in its form change and the really powerful counter attacks when you block. This video doesn't actually show how smooth the game runs tho cause it's a 60fps vid. One thing I need to get good at is that flowmotion thing where you bounce off walls, feels like that is the missing mobility that I haven't figured out yet. The key difference on crit is mashing will not get you through it, unless you have a special ability you can look forward to 2 hit deaths (3 if you have the ability).

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

I've always liked this game but I think with the re-releases it's gotten it really demands a critical re-appraisal. I know it didn't live up to the 13 years of hype the core fanbase had for it but at the very least the issues with gameplay challenge have been completely resolved by now. It's absolutely a solid action RPG at this point with all the Re-Mind adjustments, new difficulties as well as new abilities (and 160fps framerate if your hardware has the minerals ?)

[Maryokutai]

Well I bought that collection that came out a while ago. Don't ask me the name because KH names are all over the place, but I think it includes KH1, KH2, COM, BBS and maybe DDD? Not sure about the latter. So I will at some point play those games with a question mark above CoM since I played that before. I don't remember disliking it but I think it was rather repetitive and there were a couple of annoying difficulty spikes.

[one-armed dwarf]

I've come across a complaint with the way this is designed, actually. So in vanilla KH3 you had these spammy 'attraction' moves. Basically massive screen filling fair ground rides that killed everything. They were cool looking but made the game boring. Well on critical mode I'm noticing more and more how enemies don't wind up and telegraph attacks, yet they can also delete you in a single move. So I think teh game was mostly balanced around the spammy attacks on the triangle button. I've turned them off and going one-on-one with even some of the trash can be a fraught experience

 

If it gets too rough going I might try and see if I can nab a fully completed save file and just jump right back into Re-Mind, where the fights are much better balanced and still really challenging in a fun way. Also it makes me lol just how insanely rubbish Dolan, Gooby, Woody and Buzz are in this toy shop when they get instantly deleted by one attack. They were already pretty bad but it's comical here