Wolf Kanno
is a Level 99 Chocobo
Memento Mori
Site Contributor

Do it. Its better to have a bit more of a challenge and finish something faster rather than get tired of it. Like, I feel I could’ve stuck around in the Witcher 3 much longer, but I felt I’d reached a point that I was just satisfied enough to just leave it there, but still far from sick of it.

I’m definitely not a completionist at heart, is what I’m saying I huess

A lot of people, especially nowadays, just don’t really give ideas too much thought and just latch on to whatever confirms their preconceived notions the most. It’s lame, but it’s there. I know it’s hard, considering they’re a pretty vocal part of the fandom, but they’re still a minority and most people I feel still make their own minds on things. It’s really best to just ignore them.

Yeah, starting from Halloween Town, the worlds get really huge, up until the last floor. Honestly, Halloween Town was the last world where I actually did every room and cleared them of the Heartless - beyond this point I just gunned it.

I think I’ve acthwlly seen the video you linked? But yeah, I see the “there used to be just one Keyblade” argumen thrown around a lot and it’s just dumb as hell. Like, even in the first game we have three Keyblade wielders. How does everyone forget that? And like, it’s the whole point of the series that it’s not the Keyblade that makes Sora special, but the fact that he’s so empathetic that his heart can literally connect to everyone. It’s like prople’s power fantasies got in the way of what was in the actual text

That's honestly interesting, because Caddicarus was also confused when in 3D (he played it before BBS) everyone says it like its obvious that Riku was the one chosen by the Keyblade first and only after playing BBS did he get an explanation, but all the while I was like "but this was flat-out stated in the first game and is the whole plot of the first Hollow Bastion arc". In his defense, though, his KH "marathon" was spread over like a year or more even (that and he's still in love with the series despite acknowledging its flaws, so he's more easiliy forgiven in my book ),

I think this might be an issue for the younger fans actually. Back when we had to wait years between games, we had a lot of interviews and stuff to stew on, we could replay the games ad nauseam, and now people just get these sexy collections and maybe just... don't read into it enough? Idk. I've always felt that particular detail of the overarching plot was a very important plot point that's pretty much impossible to miss, but then again, I don't exactly come into this with the same perspective as those people.

If you think those trophies are ridiculous, just wait until you get to coded Some of them are legit the stuff you mentioned in your message as "at least they didn't ask for xyz"

About your conversation with The White Wizard of Fynn:

​https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/188...mories/Cetra29

The thing with Birth by Sleep is a good question. I was so excited but I think my expectations were simply ridiculously high. I also guess it did not do the game a favor to make it 3 shorter games. KH CoM at least had Riku and Mickey's section as an unlockable with Sora's story alone still feeling like kind of a complete experience. But BBS has the three guys, so Sky 2.0, Water 2.0 and Land 2.0 so much interwoven that you just have to do all of that to get a complete experience. It just was not what I expected. It is also kind of similiar why I did not like the shattering of Nier 2's story. Nier 1 made it differently because I had to play through the game and then unlock stuff, Nier 2 made it like other Drakengard games and I did not like that that much, and Drakengard even made it better because it at least had the purpose of telling "oh, so let's see what would alternatively happen on another timeline". So CoM kind of had a similiar compostion to Nier 1 where I got one full thing that actually felt complete and then I got an extra while Birth by Sleep just did not succeed in giving me this exact feeling. At least not initially. It might still also have to do something with the PSP and that it just failed to deliver on the grand scale of projecting this awesome KH action game feeling. I am not so sure. I am glad that later I grew to like it more but it will always be the game that I was so eager to play and then I actually delayed getting through it - which is not a good thing for me.
I think a lot of things played a role here. I was not all that great when it came to reading Japanese at that time and I was not too invested in fusing skills together so I did not even do that to make it a more fun experience. I remember how I played the board game on PS3 so I could get Magnet early, the Lightning Ray shotlock as well as level up Magnet and my Thunder spells to blitz my characters through the level up process.

So to answer your question, it might have been a bit of a lot of things that just did not make it click for me. Mainly the action atmosphere not delivering that great on that system as well as the narrative composition that was chosen in an if you ask me unwise way. It is funny because right now I am playing the Resident Evil 2 Remake and you have a Leon and a Claire playthrough so as you can see it is all about how the developer pulls it off. I would like to see that for one certain game in particular and that is a Zelda game with some pseudo fantasy crap about Ganon converging the time branches and you being able to control 3 Links of all 3 timelines, or even better, one Link, one Zelda and one Ganon.

It's a good thing the game doesn;t expet you to be that high a level as Riku. Imagine the tedium.

Funny that you mention KHI's gameplay. I can see what you mean but you know what KHI has what I am missing from every other game? KHI feels more imposing to me. The camera is much closer to Sora and I like that. Yeah, in II and III you can look around a larger area from a greater distance but this "being close to Sora" makes me feel a lot more comfortable with the characters and perceiving my Kingdom Hearts as this large scaled adventure. I for example absolutely love that certain character battles like with Ansem take place right in your and their faces but in KHIII there is one battle in particular where I hate that you had such a far away camera. GRANTED, it is smarter because you easily lose track in that clustersmurf of actions but it frustrates me a lot because there was a certain feeling the close cameraman of Sora gave me that I never got from any other installment.

As far as Chain of Memories is concerned, I always liked it. It was the time when I played Yugioh and stopped doing so for like the 1000th time and sold my cards again. I bought Yugioh for GBA then and shortly afterwards CoM which I only played halfway on emulator until then. I could kick my ass for having lost the cartridge when I moved. I still have the box but the cartridge was in a small bag and without noticing I must have thrown it awy, same for the Yugioh game.
Re: CoM is a very nice and impressivle remake though. I also have it on PS2 in the Final Mix + version. CoM did a smurfing GREAT job introducing Twilight Town in an absolutely mysterious way. And for some time it was the only thing we had of it. The GBA version was also the only one that actually translated Twilight Town and called it "Dimmerstadt" because one KHII came out it was back to "Twilight Town". Honestly I cannot say which CoM Version I like more. The GBA version has more nostalgic value for me though.

About Birth by Sleep: It was very disappointing for me in the PSP. I imported it when it came out in Japan and I had such high hopes but then it just did not meet my expectations It was thanks to the PS3 and PS4 port that I started to appreciate it more and more closely to what I felt about it before I first got it. The game also pretty much shows a lot of story establishments where I can flat out contradict fan arguments that try to downplay or pseudo explain the plot holes or sloppy consistency. Well, let's not start that. I still have to post the behemoth post anyway.

Final Mix II I must say, while great,is not even that necessary. I feel for example Zodiac Age which you mentioned almost an hour ago, is more of a necessary extension than Final Mix II (bar addtional story scenes). I think Kingdom Hearts II itself is already pretty solid. Which is also why people ranting about "oooh you say Kingdom Hearts III is crap and that Kingdom Hearts II was so much more, NO YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT FINAL MIX" are just plain wrong. The whole composition of the second installments just feels a lot more complete, rounded and is flat out a solid work. It also helps that it only had the ending of I and one spin-off to tease it other than the third one which had 200 games to tease it.

I also think KHI is the best for the very fact that it does not have those aircraft-fitting plotholes and was a simplistic fairytale that made my teenage self cry and for a short time even think of it as better than Final Fantasy VII. Something that never happened again. Not even with Nier Gestalt. But I absolutely can agree that the other games have their right to exist. Well, maybe except Coded but even that is sort of "more justified" by now.
About those speedrunners - in KH there is only one that I can think of that is an absolute piece of crap guy and that guy is called Bizkit. I am not sure which one because there are two big speedrunners with such a name but speedrunners have shown me a new kind of disgust when it comes to pseudo elitist fans; a disgust that I feel for them. Same for the Final Fantasy speedrunners like Cereth, SevenSins and Crumps. I will not go into detail though because you probably are not interested anyway. Really the one speedunner that I legitimately like is the Silent Hill and Resident Evil speedrunner bawkbasoup because he is a genuinely good guy.

Consider yourself lucky that you just now found out about the Kingdom Hearts fans. Rule of thumb is always if there is something big and complex (not necessarily in its narratively composition though but of course that is also a thing) then there are enough people that are trying to bulltrout around. What do you think why I am getting so mad at people. There is a reason why I say they sound like the cliché Dragon ball fans when they argue. I have to know it, I love Dragon Ball and had to do with them.