A Brief Look Back At Kingdom Hearts

So, probably the biggest ‘we knew what it was from the moment the trailer started but we didn’t care because it was awesome’ moment at this year’s E3 was the long overdue announcement of Kingdom Hearts III, which will be coming to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One sometime in the future. The Kingdom Hearts series has long been one of my favorite gaming franchises, and with the apparent conclusion to the saga forthcoming, I’ve prepared these brief descriptions of the earlier games, as well as my opinions on each entry. It has been a long, strange road for Sora and company, as well as for fans of the series- but with the third main game finally on its way, let’s take a look back at Kingdom Hearts.

Kingdom Hearts (2002) (Playstation 2)

The original Kingdom Hearts marks the beginning of what must be one of the strangest crossovers in fiction (Squaresoft’s particular brand of RPG with settings and characters taken from Disney films), but the original Kingdom Hearts made it work, and kicked off a series that has become even larger than Square’s own Final Fantasy was at the time.

Christmas party! And BBS update

Going to be in Chicago for the next three days to celebrate the holidays with my extended family. Wishing everybody happy gaming in this post-Christmas season. ;D

Also, I beat the first campaign of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Terra's, and I'd like to share something I noticed. Remember how everybody complained Kingdom Hearts 2 was too easy? Well, Square listened.

Oh, boy, did they listen.

The difficulty of the game is actually very fair, up to a point. The difficulty spike of Terra's final boss (not going to spoil much here) is ludicrous. He's basically a copy of you, and has all of the abilities you had prior to entering the fight. In this regard, whatever preperations you had for the boss can be used right back at you, including your limit breaks, shotlocks, and healing spells. The ONLY way to do serious damage against him is to block and counter his attacks (which, by the way, if you get caught in one of his combos, you are DONE), deflect his ranged attacks back at him, or abuse your own shotlock and constantly recharge it with Elixers. Now, it's only natural that a final boss would be hard, but this one seemed overly so, especially compared to everything we'd fought prior to him.

Terra's story, at least, was interesting. I'll be starting Ventus' campaign next.