Hey there folks. Just to clarify, this blog was originally posted on a different site in January 2020. In the interest of keeping all my games-focused writing in one place, I've decided to copy it over to my Giant Bomb blog.
The Portal Will Open in Three... Two... One...
I'm not sure there's another video game whose first ninety seconds are as perfect as Portal's. Fading from black, the player is placed into the body of protagonist Chell and encounters the disembodied voice of GLaDOS for the first time. As the psychopathic AI delivers her opening monologue, the player has the opportunity to explore the confines of their cell, their ability to roam limited by glass walls fencing them in. Then, something incredible happens. GLaDOS's speech tails off with a countdown, and at the end of that countdown, a mysterious opening appears in one of the walls of Chell's cell. Approaching it, the player sees something seldom witnessed in a first-person game; their avatar. Not face-on, as one might see themselves in a mirror, but from the side and at a distance, like some sort of out-of-body experience. Curiosity gets the better of the player, so they step further forward, and pass through the opening. As they do so, they witness themselves stepping through the void in real time, and as they emerge on the other side, they find themselves on the outside of the cell looking in.
This is the genius of Portal; in a little over a minute, it introduces the core conceit of its gameplay and reinforces the player's understanding by making their first interaction with it as memorable and meaningful as possible. This is no happy accident, but the product of intelligent game design. The developer commentary track, unlocked after beating the game for the first time, explains as much. The player's cell is rendered memorable by the inclusion of recognisable objects that act as visual anchors. The radio is playing an instrumental version of Still Alive to provide a constant audio anchor as well. The portals are positioned in such a way that the player will always see Chell's character model when looking through them. All of these design choices amount to a short segment of gameplay that teaches players how Portal operates on the most rudimentary level without the need for a conventional tutorial or any on-screen prompts.
This is especially important in Portal's case because its core mechanic is not a conventional one. In a first-person shooter, where the core mechanic is point-and-shoot, it's not unreasonable to assume that players will be familiar with that mechanic, because it's in a lot of games out there. There aren't many games out there that allow the player to defy the laws of physics by passing through wormholes connecting different points in space. By extension, it's therefore not unreasonable to assume that players might need familiarising with what is a pretty complex concept. By framing the player's first interaction with a portal in this very deliberate way, the developers are able to give players the basic understanding needed to engage with the game's other mechanics and solve the puzzles it presents to them. It is information conveyance at its very best, and that is why I hold the opening moments of Portal in such high regard.
Environmental information conveyance is a big part of Portal's design philosophy. The game communicates with the player through a language comprised of audio-visual cues that the player subconsciously learns to read as they play the game, even if they may not realise they're doing it. This is not an uncommon practice in game development; one of the best examples of this is red barrels, whose striking colour denotes explosive properties in almost every game in which they feature. Because Portal's core mechanic is so unique, it goes to follow that the language it uses is pretty unique as well. In another example taken from its developer commentary, Portal communicates points of interest to the player through shapes; objects which can be interacted with, or are important for solving puzzles, typically have rounder edges (not unlike the game's eponymous portals) to make them "pop" against its angular environments. The contrast between light-grey, concrete walls and darker, reflective metal ones teaches the player to recognise which surfaces can and cannot host portals. When it comes to "flinging", a late-game mechanic which involves using gravity to build up momentum and launch out of a portal across a gap, Portal educates players by placing a checker-board pattern on the ground in places where it needs to be employed. These constants help the player to associate mechanics with certain aspects of the environment, giving them at least some indication of what the solution will involve without ever explicitly spelling it out.
Aperture Science: We Do What We Must, Because We Can
Portal's environments don't just relay information about the game's mechanics. They're also one of its most important tools when it comes to storytelling. Environmental storytelling is a technique largely unique to video games, where interactivity permits players to explore maps and extrapolate narrative threads from things like object placements. Valve have long been proficient in this kind of storytelling, and Portal is no exception. Although Chell's personal story is never really addressed in Portal, morsels of the wider story of Aperture Science are littered throughout the test chambers and backstage corridors that make up the Enrichment Center.
Perhaps the most well-known examples of this are the "Rat Man dens", a handful of hideouts tucked away in corners of the game's last few test chambers, with scribbled drawings and text adorning their walls. These dens represent a crack in the gleaming facade of the Enrichment Center, often being the player's first opportunity to get behind the scenes and see what the facility actually looks like beyond its clinical test chambers. While nothing in these locations advances the core story of Portal, their existence fleshes out the wider scope of the narrative by painting a picture of events transpiring outside of the player's perspective. In these instances, the scrawled warnings on the walls of the Rat Man dens also serve to foreshadow upcoming events in the story by alluding to GLaDOS's murderous and mendacious nature before it ever becomes apparent to the player through Chell's eyes.
The Rat Man dens are the most obvious example of environmental storytelling in Portal, but there are several more, and most of them much more subtle in their execution. One of my personal favourites is the projector screen that appears in the game's final stages, when the player is traversing several office environments on their way to confront GLaDOS. This simple prop, which cycles through about four slides on a loop, depicts Aperture Science as being in fierce competition with another scientific organisation, namely Half-Life's Black Mesa, for several government contracts. Not only that, but it shows that Black Mesa clearly has the upper hand in this regard, with their awarded contracts and funding far exceeding those of Aperture. It's the kind of thing that could easily be missed, but which adds so much flavour to the situation around the core story, as well as giving a glimpse of the connective tissue that ties Portal to the Half-Life universe.
One final example I'd like to highlight, and which I only really noticed through this most recent playthrough, is just how empty and abandoned the Enrichment Center feels. It's a fact that manifests itself through several facets of Portal; for instance, how the player never meets another human character for the duration of the game. It's also evident in the environmental design, though. On this playthrough, I fully appreciated the textures attached to the walls of the test chambers; clinically pristine at first glance, but under closer scrutiny, revealed to be crumbling at the edges. The water hazards that cover the floors of some chambers are not clean and clear, but murky and green, also suggestive of an environment gone to seed and not properly maintained. When the player makes it beyond the test chambers and into the bowels of the facility, the metal panels on the walls and floors are rusting. The environment artists went to incredible lengths to create this air of abandonment about every single aspect of Portal's visual style, and I feel they deserve nothing but the highest praise for doing such a fantastic job that I felt it without ever really noticing why until now.
Didn't We Have Some Fun, Though?
But what of the story itself? The moment-to-moment events that unfold as the player makes their way through GLaDOS's fiendish labyrinth of challenges? In all honesty, I think it's okay. It justifies the gameplay well, and provides just enough of a motive for the player to tackle the antagonist that the final confrontation feels rewarding, but it is at its core a very simple story without too many unexpected twists or turns. Portal's story is elevated not by its content, but by its delivery. Environmental storytelling, information conveyance and gameplay are important parts of that delivery, but what ties it all together is its inimitable personality. Almost all of that personality belongs to GLaDOS, the sardonic AI communicating with Chell (and by extension, the player) from that aforementioned incredible opening to the game's equally memorable denouement.
For a significant portion of Portal, GLaDOS serves the role of narrator by being the player's guide through the Enrichment Center. The player may or may not trust her, but given she is the only character present besides themselves, and therefore the only perspective the player has on the unfolding action, they have no choice but to follow her instructions. As the player progresses through the test chambers, seeds of doubt begin to be sown, primarily through the environmental storytelling in the Rat Man dens I discussed previously, which start to call GLaDOS's reliability into question; if "the cake is a lie", can this AI really be trusted? This comes to a head at the end of the final test chamber, when GLaDOS attempts to incinerate Chell as a "reward" for completing her little game. In this moment, GLaDOS's role changes from mentor and narrator to primary antagonist, and the remainder of the game becomes about getting to her and putting her out of action. In a fantastic example of ludo-narrative concordance, this is also the point in the game at which the training wheels really come off and some of the established rules around portal placement and puzzle solving get re-written, mirroring Chell casting off the shackles of GLaDOS's control.
Let's be honest, though. GLaDOS isn't just memorable because she's a mentor figure who transforms into an antagonist. She's mainly memorable because she's very funny. There's a clever juxtaposition between her cool, robotic delivery and the darkly humorous content of her dialogue, which often results in jokes only truly landing when the player stops to think back on the meaning of what they've just heard. Credit is due to both the writers at Valve for imbuing a supercomputer with so much personality, and voice actress Ellen McLain for delivering her lines so brilliantly. In the age of "meme humour", it's easy to think back on Portal as just "the 'cake is a lie' game", but I think that to do so is a disservice to how legitimately funny Portal was, and indeed still is.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4)
Hey folks. Long time no chat. Dan here, breaking my hiatus from the blogosphere to announce my participation in this year's Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run.
Now in its tenth year, the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run is a community-driven initiative spearheaded by Giant Bomb moderator @thatpinguino, wherein members of this incredible online community stream all manner of video games over the course of an April weekend to raise money for good causes. This year the GBCER is attempting to raise $15,000 in aid of COVID-19 Response via Direct Relief, an initiative that aims to provide healthcare workers with personal protective equipment and other items crucial to the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. As a patient-facing NHS worker over in the UK, this is a cause I can identify with and get behind on a personal level, and I have every faith that this amazingly generous community and those connected to it will help us to smash the target.
This is my fourth year participating in the GBCER, following on from 2017's Pokémon Gold Randomizer Nuzlocke, 2018's "Karma by Committee" run of InFamous 2, and last year's attempted lv1 Proud Mode run of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix. I have to admit, I've found it particularly difficult selecting a game to build my challenge around this year. I was initially thinking about returning to the Nuzlocke format and streaming a standard Nuzlocke of Pokémon Sword on the Switch, but I ultimately decided I'd rather not retread old ground and instead do something new. I spent over a week thinking about what to play this year, knowing that it would need to be something I had a good working knowledge of, as well as something that would lend itself to player-imposed difficulty modifiers to satisfy the "endurance" aspect of the challenge. After a lot of deliberation, and a little help from a friend (thanks Tom!), I've managed to make a decision.
What I've settled on is a playthrough of perhaps my favourite stealth game of all time - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Not just any playthrough, mind - I'll be attempting to beat the game on its Extreme difficulty level. Full disclosure - I have never played a Metal Gear game on anything above Hard difficulty before now, so Extreme is going to be completely uncharted territory for me. Thankfully the game itself won't be. I've played through MGS3 several times, most recently as part of my Metal Gear May Madness series back in the Spring of 2013, so I do have a pretty good working knowledge of the game's structure and systems which I'm hoping will stand me in good stead in the face of the ramped-up difficulty. I'll be playing the HD Edition on PlayStation 3, which utilises the full-3D camera from the Subsistence re-release rather than the top-down angle found in the original.
In addition to the challenge posed by MGS3's Extreme difficulty, there is potential for you folks at home to make things even more frustrating for me, by way of a series of handicaps that will be implemented as I reach certain milestones. These are as follows:
$50 - No Mk22 - A lot of Metal Gear players consider the advantages gained from using tranquiliser pistols to be game-breaking. Historically I've relied heavily on the Mk22 "hush puppy" when playing MGS3, but once I hit $50 raised I will no longer be able to fall back on this overpowered snooze-inducer.
$75 - Naked Camo Only - Camouflage plays a big role in MGS3's gameplay, with the player expected to periodically switch Naked Snake's equipped camo and face paint to better blend in with their surroundings. Once I raise $75, I will forfeit the advantages of camouflage and be forced to play the remainder of the game with Snake in his 'Naked' state.
$100 - No Treating Injuries - MGS3 introduced a number of survival mechanics to the series' stealth gameplay, including wounds and injuries which would need to be treated in order to keep Snake in good health. Once I hit $100 I won't be allowed to treat these, meaning I'll have to suffer any deep cuts or broken bones sustained along the way.
$125 - No Active Sonar, AP Sensor or Motion Detector - In the absence of the series' staple Soliton Radar, MGS3 offers a variety of gadgets intended to keep track of enemy movements. When $125 has been raised, I will have to stop using these useful pieces of equipment and rely on my own eyes and ears instead.
$150 - No Night Vision or Thermal Goggles - Useful in MGS3's dense jungle environments and almost necessary for some boss battles, these ocular augmentations are invaluable parts of Snake's arsenal. But if we hit my target of $150, I will remove them from my backpack entirely.
$200 (STRETCH GOAL) - Backpack Blocker - If the generosity of my supporters truly knows no bounds and we manage to hit $200 raised, then whatever equipment is in Snake's backpack at that point will serve as my permanent loadout for the remainder of the game.
In addition to these milestone-based incentives, I am also offering an incentive for individual donations. For every donation of $20 or more received during streamed gameplay, I will perform a rousing rendition of Snake Eater's iconic opening theme live on air.
I guess all that remains is for me to promote the heck out of my planned schedule, so here goes. I'll be splitting my stream across both Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th April, playing twelve hours each day until I either beat the game or twenty-four total hours pass, whichever comes first. Each day's stream will run from 9:00am to 9:00pm BST (which I believe is 4:00am to 4:00pm EDT). I'll be streaming my gameplay through my YouTube account, or through ExplosiveRuns.com (along with everyone else's contributions to the event). If you'd like to donate towards my challenge directly, you can do so by following this link. Alternatively, click here for the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run's Team page, where you can either check out the other participants' individual challenge pages or donate to the Endurance Run as a whole.
I think that's all I have to say for now. Thanks very much to everyone who's taken the time to read this. Hopefully I'll catch some of you in the chat on my stream next weekend. Until then, take care, stay safe, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Animal Crossing: New Horizons (NSW)
Hey there folks, and welcome to My End of 2019 Awards. As we reach the last days of the year, it becomes customary for everyone and their mother to put together a list of the best video games they’ve played in the last twelve months and put it up somewhere on the internet. While I can’t speak for my mother, I can at least confirm that I’ve played some games this year, and have seized this opportunity to write something about them and share it with all of you.
Compared to other years, 2019 was not an overly productive year for me in terms of playing video games. At the time of writing, I’ve recorded twenty-four games as beaten in the last twelve months, and I don’t expect that number to increase before the clock strikes midnight on December 31st. That’s nine games less than last year’s final total of thirty-three titles. That’s not the full story though. Of those twenty-four titles I’ve recorded, three of them represent cutscene movies which were watched rather than played, bringing the true total down to a mere twenty-one. Only 2016, with its paltry total of twelve titles beaten, ranks lower.
There hasn’t been a great deal of diversity in what I played either, at least not on the surface. A cursory glance through the list of games I’ve played this year reveals that almost half of the titles mentioned all come from the same franchise. A similar amount of the entries are games which I’ve played at least once before, a factor which usually negates a title’s eligibility for this kind of list. With all these limitations at play, I wasn’t sure I would be able to muster enough content to justify one of these year’s-end blogs. Thankfully, my worries have proven unfounded. If anything, I think my list for this year might be one of my most diverse and interesting yet.
As was the case last year, I won’t be acknowledging everything I’ve played this year by giving individual awards to each game. While I’ve enjoyed this approach in previous years, my game-playing habits have been so skewed towards one specific franchise this year that I wouldn’t feel comfortable revisiting that format. Instead, I’ll be restricting myself to a more conventional list of the ten games that best embody the time I’ve spent with a controller in my hands over the last twelve months.
It’s worth noting a couple of things before I start listing titles. First, this is not a ranked list. I’ve never been a fan of assigning a hierarchy to these lists, because the experiences offered by these games often differ so greatly that it becomes impossible to quantify one against another. I’ve listed the ten chosen games alphabetically, and none of the titles that I’ve selected should be assumed to hold more or less weight than any of the others. Second, this list is not restricted to games that have been released in this calendar year. It is intended to be a full reflection of the games I have played this year, and as someone who predominantly plays older video games, limiting myself only to 2019 releases would make it impossible to populate a full top ten list.
With all that said, let’s begin by moving to my first selection:
Celeste makes this list for a few reasons. First, it earns its spot by being a fantastic masocore indie platformer. This isn’t typically a genre that I enjoy playing. Indeed, Celeste is the first game of its kind since 2010’s Super Meat Boy that has not only piqued my interest, but managed to hold my attention right through to the end. Its controls are tight and responsive, its mechanics are simple to grasp, and its level design does a fantastic job of educating the player as it gradually ramps up the difficulty. All these factors conspire to make Celeste a game that rarely frustrated me, despite its often crushingly hard nature.
Celeste also holds the honour of being the last video game I intend to play on an Xbox console. Earlier this year I made the decision to step out of the Microsoft gaming ecosystem, in order to thin down my expansive video game collection before my girlfriend and I moved into a home of our own. Prior to making that decision, Celeste was the last video game I played on my Xbox One, having taken advantage of the Games with Gold programme to pick it up for free back in January. Celeste therefore serves as the final bookend for the eleven years I have spent playing games on Microsoft consoles, affording it a little extra reverence in my mind.
But if we’re being real, neither of these factors constitute the main reason for Celeste’s inclusion on this list. As someone who has suffered with low mood, depression and anxiety over the years, it was Celeste’s story, and the way it supports that story through its gameplay, that truly touched me in the relatively short amount of time I spent with it. Mental health issues can often make even the smallest of tasks feel like an insurmountable obstacle, a fact that makes Madeline’s allegorical ascent of Mt Celeste all the more relatable. What strikes me as truly special, though, is how Celeste’s moment-to-moment gameplay serves as a reminder that no mountain is ever climbed in an instant. In Celeste, each screen is a small, isolated ordeal that must be conquered before moving on to the next. If the player fails, there is no punishment for doing so. They are only set back to the start of the current screen and simply asked to try again. Celeste’s gameplay loop is centred around perseverance and tackling one thing at a time, teaching the player the important lesson that small steps add up to big progress. That’s a lesson I really needed this year, and I’m thankful to this game for teaching it to me.
I’ve long held up Crash Team Racing as my favourite kart racer of all time. Its fantastic track design, feature-packed Adventure mode and peerless drift-boost system have always put it a cut above Mario Kart and its other imitators in my mind. When Activision announced their next retro-revival project was to be a ground-up remake of this underappreciated gem for the current generation, I was both ecstatic and terrified. The thought of an updated version of CTR with online multiplayer was an appealing one, but the original has such near-perfect “gamefeel” that I was worried developers Beenox wouldn’t be able to replicate it.
Thankfully, those worries were completely unfounded. Nitro-Fueled doesn’t just replicate CTR’s excellent gameplay and feature-set, it does what I previously thought impossible and improves upon them. The original’s fast and furious gameplay is intact, with some subtle tweaks to the drift-boost system that make it easier than ever before to navigate tracks at blistering top-speed. Alongside the entirety of CTR’s content, Nitro-Fueled boasts an expanded roster of tracks and racers by incorporating all of the characters and re-designed courses from its underwhelming PS2 follow-up Crash Nitro Kart, as well as offering a multitude of unlockable character skins, kart bodies, paint colours and wheel designs amounting to almost limitless customisation options. And as if that wasn’t enough, Beenox has continued to support the game post-launch with monthly Grand Prix events, each one bringing a handful of additional racers and karts along with a brand new track to learn and master. These Grands Prix have kept me coming back to the game over and over again since its launch six months ago, easily making CTR: Nitro-Fueled my most-played game of 2019.
Sadly it’s not all sugar and rainbows. The online multiplayer component of the package, one of its biggest draws, still feels woefully feature-light and continues to be plagued by connectivity issues even half a year after launch. Activision’s corporate greed has also managed to bleed into the game post-launch, retro-fitting microtransactions into the experience by allowing players to purchase Wumpa Coins (the in-game currency used to buy new characters, karts and skins from the Pit Stop storefront) with real-world money. It really hurts me to see such under-handed monetisation practices in what is ostensibly a game for children, and makes me reluctant to recommend it to newcomers. Even with these downsides, though, I can’t deny that Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is my new favourite kart racer of all time.
Placing the original Kingdom Hearts on this list feels like cheating. I usually enforce a rule that prohibits games I’ve already played before from qualifying for the top ten. In Kingdom Hearts’ case, I’ve already waived that rule once before when I replayed the remastered PlayStation 3 version back in 2015. To waive it a second time for another version of the same game feels unfair on many levels, but if you’re prepared to hear me out, hopefully you’ll agree with me that it has once again rightfully earned a place in the pantheon of games that defined my year.
2019 will go down in personal history as the year where I finally made it through the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise. It’s something I’ve been half-heartedly attempting to do since the first teaser trailer for Kingdom Hearts III dropped at E3 in 2013. I made a half-decent attempt back in 2015, making it about halfway through Kingdom Hearts II before burning out, stepping away and failing to return. A similar thing occurred last year where I foolishly committed myself to blogging my exploits alongside playing the games, a gargantuan endeavour that proved to be too much for me to manage as my enthusiasm for the playthrough and the accompanying Keyblade Chronicles series fizzled out very early on. Determined to make my third attempt successful, I set out a plan to clear a portion of the franchise each quarter – the contents of HD I.5 ReMIX between January and March, HD II.5 ReMIX between April and June, HD II.8 Final Chapter Prologue between July and September, and finally, Kingdom Hearts III between October and December.
The journey began, unsurprisingly, with the first Kingdom Hearts game – specifically the Final Mix version of the game included with the HD I.5 + II.5 ReMIX collection on PlayStation 4. I feel comfortable saying that this is the definitive way to play Kingdom Hearts in 2019. The upgrade to a buttery smooth sixty frames per second, alongside the previous quality-of-life improvements introduced in the PS3 release like right analog stick camera control and Kingdom Hearts II-style reaction commands mapped to the Triangle button, make this unarguably the best-feeling version of the game. The game itself remains an all-time favourite for me, melding real-time action and platforming with a pseudo-Final Fantasy menu-based combat system that rewards both careful strategising and quick reflexes in equal measure. It’s a little clunky in places, but if we’re being honest, there are very few games released in 2002 that aren’t. What have stood the test of time are its undeniable charm and its memorable cast of characters.
In April I found myself returning to Kingdom Hearts for my contribution to this year’s Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run. The twist in this particular tale was my attempt to play through the entire game in twenty-four hours, on the hardest difficulty, with my characters locked at Lv1. What ensued was one of the most unique video game experiences of my life. Without raw stats and a lengthy list of abilities to fall back on, I had to start really paying attention to the game’s choreography. I saw intricate patterns in boss fights that I’d previously only ever brute forced my way through, each major encounter becoming a deadly dance as I struggled to learn the steps on the fly before eventually mastering them and emerging victorious.
I didn’t complete the game unfortunately, coming unstuck at the Riku/Ansem fight in Hollow Bastion, but after twenty-four hours of play across two days I came away feeling like Neo at the end of The Matrix, like I could see the code flowing through everything. I’ve never attempted speedrunning, but I imagine that how I felt on that weekend in April is how speedrunners must feel when they run their chosen games. It was an experience that gave me a newfound appreciation of the mechanics of one of my all-time favourite video games. I’d really like to return to the main numbered entries in the Kingdom Hearts series at some point in the future and properly attempt Lv1 Proud/Critical runs of them. Just not any time soon – I’ve had enough Kingdom Hearts this year to last me a long time!
I feel less guilty about Kingdom Hearts II appearing on this list than I do about its predecessor. Although I have played the franchise’s second numbered entry before, I have only done so once, and it was around thirteen years ago when the game debuted on the PS2. Consequently, this is the first time that Kingdom Hearts II has been in the running for one of these lists, making me feel slightly more comfortable about its inclusion.
I’ve long been of the opinion that the first Kingdom Hearts is a better game than its sequel. I think that stance was born from being more familiar with the first game than the second, and thus more sentimentally attached to it. With the benefit of hindsight, and having played both games in a very short space of time, I feel comfortable saying that I’ve long held a very questionable opinion that I am now properly qualified to rethink. Kingdom Hearts II blows the first game completely out of the water in just about every way possible.
Kingdom Hearts II takes its predecessor’s gameplay as a proof of concept and refines it almost to the point of perfection. It scales back clumsy platforming and poor level design in favour of increased manoeuvrability in more open, less precarious environments. It replaces vague objectives with clear instructions and better signposting to steer the player in the right direction. And it augments the basic combat model with a dizzying number of options – basic Keyblade combos, equippable abilities (both active and passive), powerful magic spells, several specialised Drive Forms, Disney character Summons, collaborative Limits and opportunistic Reaction Commands. Every attack, spell, Form and ability has situational advantages and disadvantages, and many of them have both offensive and defensive properties, resulting in a deep combat system that encourages experimentation and rewards strategic play.
I even surprised myself by enjoying the story a lot more than I thought I would. It definitely marks the start of the franchise’s descent into full-on incomprehensible nonsense, and doesn’t touch the emotional resonance of the first game’s story in my humble opinion, but there’s no denying that the high points really hit me in the feels, especially with the added context provided by a wider knowledge of the series as a whole. Ultimately though, it’s the gameplay that wins out here. Kingdom Hearts II boasts one of the best combat systems ever seen in an action RPG, making it without a doubt one of the most fun video game experiences I had in 2019.
If Kingdom Hearts earned its space on this list by being the game in the series that I have the fondest memories of, and Kingdom Hearts II earned its place by being the best-playing game in the series, then Kingdom Hearts III’s place is justified by it being the culmination of a journey over sixteen years in the making. This is the game that I’ve been waiting over a decade for, the one that I spent nine months of this year working towards, navigating the entire franchise from start to finish. In that respect, Kingdom Hearts III defines 2019 from a game player’s perspective for me better than anything else on this list.
Was it worth the wait? Kinda, I guess? It’s impossible to deny that the story is a badly-paced train-wreck of a narrative that meanders meaninglessly for thirty hours before trying frantically to tie up every loose end in its last three hours. From a plot perspective, it’s difficult to justify the number at the end of this game’s title, since it ties so heavily into subtitled side games like Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance. It’s also difficult to get away from the fact that it feels both rushed and unfinished, a remarkable feat considering the game was in development for at least six years. The upcoming Re:Mind DLC looks set to address that by expanding the story and bringing a bevy of end-game content to bolster the base game. But I can only pass judgement on the game I’ve played as it currently stands, and right now it leaves more than a little to be desired.
From a gameplay perspective though, there is absolutely no denying that this is Kingdom Hearts III. After experimentation with Command Deck systems in the stop-gap titles, KHIII reverts to a command menu with an MP bar and a ton of options at the player’s disposal. Alongside the return of a spell menu, there are plenty of mechanics analogous to those of Kingdom Hearts II – Formchanges replace Drive Forms, Links and Attraction Flow replace Summons, and Limits and Reaction Commands are succeeded by context-sensitive Situation Commands. While Formchanges, Attraction Flow and Situation Commands are invariably powerful, the fact they are randomly triggered means it’s unreliable to build strategies around them. Consequently, I ended up eschewing them in favour of basic Keyblade combos and magic most of the time, resulting in combat that felt more limited than that of Kingdom Hearts II, despite offering a similar number of options. It’s still a lot of fun to play, but it often feels like substance has been sacrificed for style.
That being said, when it comes to picking my favourite games from the series, Kingdom Hearts III comfortably sits in the top three with its numbered brethren, flaws and all. As the game that encouraged me to play through an entire franchise in the space of nine months, just to see the conclusion of a story almost two decades in the making, it would be impossible to consider Kingdom Hearts III as anything other than one of the most important games I played in 2019.
I may not talk about it much, but the Oddworld franchise has always been one of my favourite series of video games in a low-key sort of way. I grew up playing Abe’s Oddysee and Abe’s Exoddus on the original PlayStation, and found them fascinatingly unlike anything else on the system. Their endearingly ugly character designs, their focus on methodical puzzle-solving gameplay, and their environmental, anti-corporate themes stood in sharp contrast to colourful mascot platformers like Crash and Spyro. While I felt Munch’s Oddysee struggled to adapt the series’ gameplay to a three-dimensional gamespace, spin-off title Stranger’s Wrath restored my faith in the franchise and secured a place in my top games of all time in the process.
In recent times, Lorne Lanning and Oddworld Inhabitants have seemed keen to return to the start of the Oddworld Quintology and give Abe’s origin story a fresh coat of paint. Thus we come to New ‘N’ Tasty!, a reimagining of Abe’s Oddysee for current-generation hardware that seemingly seeks to reboot the franchise for a modern audience. For the most part it leaves the core of its inspiration intact, instead focusing on quality-of-life improvements that make the experience feel more contemporary. The series’ GameSpeak mechanic, for instance, remains Abe’s primary tool for interacting with other characters and solving puzzles, but the inclusion of an “all of ya” command allows Abe to direct multiple Mudokons at once, streamlining puzzle solving and cutting out a lot of the original’s busywork.
This ethos is present throughout New ‘N’ Tasty’s campaign. Another, and perhaps the most disorienting alteration is the inclusion of a scrolling camera that follows Abe’s movements, rather than each area being divided into different screens. While it takes some getting used to for players returning from Oddysee and Exoddus, in practice it makes everything feel more seamless and doesn’t negatively impact the gameplay experience at all. By far the most important and most useful upgrade, though, is the inclusion of a Quicksave system. Well-implemented and easy to use, this feature minimises unnecessary repetition in some of the game’s more trial-and-error puzzle segments.
Oddworld Inhabitants are currently hard at work on Soulstorm, a full-on re-imagining of Abe’s Exoddus which I believe is currently slated for a 2020 release. New ‘N’ Tasty! has not only got me interested in that, but it’s made me excited about the future of the Oddworld franchise. On that basis, its place on this list is wholly deserved.
Last year was the first time a Pokémon game didn’t appear on my top ten list since 2012. I decided to skip over Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Eevee!, partly because I didn’t much fancy yet another go around the Kanto region, and partly because I was starting to feel burned out on the franchise as a whole. The seventh generation was a bit of a bust for me. 2016’s Sun and Moon felt rushed and left me feeling disappointed. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, released the following year, felt like the games that Sun and Moon should have been from the outset, but due to poor marketing that led me to mistake them for direct sequels in the style of Black 2 and White 2, also failed to impress me. The fact that most of my Pokémon-playing buddies seemed to fall off the series around the release of Sun and Moon probably didn’t help, either. With a year off from their annual release cycle and the jump to much more powerful hardware in the form of the Nintendo Switch, I had hoped for Pokémon Sword and Shield to be a significant evolution for the series in terms of its gameplay and presentation.
Instead, Game Freak and The Pokémon Company seem to have invested the additional time and resources into a game that has polarised their hitherto loyal fanbase. Pokémon Sword and Shield are not the leap forward that many people expected. In many respects, they can be considered a step backwards, most notably in the decision to drop support for the full National Pokédex, supposedly in favour of focusing on improving things like animations. That might have been acceptable were there actually any evidence of these promised improvements, but the games continue to use the same Pokémon models and handful of canned animations that originated in the series’ first full-3D entries, 2013’s Pokémon X and Y. Much like Sun and Moon before them, Sword and Shield feel like products rushed to meet a holiday deadline, and we probably won’t see the full potential of this generation until their ‘Ultra’-equivalent versions (likely with a reinstated National ‘Dex) see the light of day next year.
This probably reads as overly negative for a game that made enough of an impression to reach my top ten list, and sure, there are a lot of things I like about these eighth-generation games in spite of their myriad issues. The core battle mechanics remain as enjoyable as ever. I like pretty much every new Pokémon design I’ve come across in my journey through the Galar region. And speaking of Galar, boy does it feel great to finally have a pair of Pokémon games set in an approximation of the United Kingdom. The Wild Area is by far the games’ best new feature, and is hopefully a sign of the direction the series is heading in. I also thought the writing, while nothing outstanding, was pretty darn good for a Pokémon game, with some unexpected commentary on the current socio-political landscape and the climate crisis towards the end, as well as a lot of the supporting cast getting meaningful narrative arcs of their own.
I can see myself spending a lot more time with Pokémon Sword in 2020 as I endeavour to complete my Pokédex and see everything the Galar region has to offer. I may even look into doing some competitive battling for the first time since sixth-gen, or at the very least getting online for some Max Raid battles with other trainers in the near future. But unless Game Freak and The Pokémon Company can find some way of revitalising the series’ formula and actually put some major effort into meaningfully evolving the franchise going forward, Pokémon Sword is also likely to be the last Pokémon game I play for a while.
When I wrote My End of 2018 Awards this time last year, I gave Red Dead Redemption II an honourable mention and stated that it was definitely going to feature in My End of 2019 Awards. Fast-forward twelve months and here we are, the prophecy fulfilled. I’ve had a lot of time to digest the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption II, having finished it within the first week of 2019, but even now I find myself thinking back on it on a pretty regular basis.
More often than not, the subject of these reminiscences is Arthur Morgan. Going into the game I didn’t think it would be possible for Rockstar to deliver a better protagonist than John Marston, but I was pleased to be proven wrong. Arthur is an intensely likeable character, an outlaw with a heart of gold and a tongue that’s just as quick on the draw as his revolver. From his interplay with the rest of the Van Der Linde gang in the game’s early chapters to his more touching, personal moments with John towards its end, there wasn’t an interaction Arthur took part in that I didn’t come away from liking the character more. His own personal character arc, and the redemption he earns at the end of it, would have been enough to secure Red Dead Redemption II’s place in this top ten.
But Red Dead Redemption II wasn’t simply a story I experienced, and nor was it just a video game that I played. For over two months, it was a world that I lived in. I explored every region of its vast map, from the snow-capped Grizzly Mountains in the north, through the flourishing city of Saint Denis and the surrounding bayou in the south-east, to the arid deserts of New Austin and Cholla Springs in the west. I hunted in its forests and fished in its rivers, then returned to camp to cook my kills and feast on the spoils. I ran errands in its towns, and I robbed travellers and stole stagecoaches on the dirt roads between them. I watched the sun rise over mountain ridges, rode across state lines through thunderstorms, and spent nights just gazing up at the clear, starry sky. I don’t think I’ve been so utterly absorbed in a video game world since the first time I played Skyrim almost eight years ago. That is probably the best way I can convey the significance of the impact Red Dead Redemption II had on me.
The Smash Bros. games have been mainstays of my friends’ get-togethers for years now, from Melee on the GameCube through Brawl on the Wii and the slightly less imaginatively-titled 3DS and Wii U instalments. I’ve long enjoyed the social aspect of Smash Bros., but the series’ most recent entry, the Nintendo Switch’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, marks the first time I’ve spent a significant amount of time with the franchise as a solo player. Initially purchased as an attempt to justify my owning a Switch for something other than Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, I wasn’t expecting to go quite as deep down the rabbit-hole as I did this year.
The reason for that descent into the Wonderland of Smash Ultimate? World of Light. For the first time, a Smash Bros. game has offered a lengthy single-player component that actually held my interest. Set against a backdrop of the world being ravaged by Galeem, a being composed entirely of light, the player is free to navigate an overworld populated by the captured Spirits of Nintendo characters. Each of these Spirits is locked behind a themed Smash battle that borrows motifs from the character in question. Once unlocked, Spirits can be assigned to the player’s character to buff their stats and gain other bonuses, giving them a better chance of beating stronger Spirits and progressing across the overworld. It’s a really neat concept that is, for the most part, incredibly well realised. No two battles in the World of Light are ever quite the same, which explains why I was able to sink almost forty hours into this game mode without once getting bored.
Even with World of Light cleared, I still find myself jumping back into Smash Ultimate on occasion to unlock a few extra Spirits from the Spirit Board, a rotating catalogue of Spirits which can be fought in one-off battles and added to your collection upon victory. In this respect, Spirits replace the Trophies from previous Smash Bros. games, serving as collectibles as well as in-game stat modifiers. I’m currently sitting at just over 1,000 Spirits collected, with about 350 still to earn, plus new Spirits are being added all the time through the various game updates and expansion of the roster with DLC characters. And all of this is technically just icing on the cake, since the core multiplayer action I’ve always loved the series for is still intact and as enjoyable as ever. All of this adds up to make Super Smash Bros. Ultimate the best game in the series for me, and a sure-fire candidate for this year’s top ten list.
Now here’s a game I didn’t think I’d ever be writing about. When Telltale Games folded at the end of last year, I wrote off any hope of seeing a conclusion to their series based on Robert Kirkman’s zombie-filled graphic novels. Not because I didn’t want to see Clementine’s story resolved, but because her fictional fate was inconsequential next to the very real collective fates of the two-hundred-plus developers employed by the studio who had helped to bring her to life. The project’s subsequent acquisition and completion by Skybound Entertainment, under the watchful eye of Kirkman himself as well as many of the former Telltale development team, made me feel less uncomfortable about returning to see the end of a story I’ve been following since 2013.
The Final Season of The Walking Dead is, in my opinion, its strongest offering since Season One. A big part of that is probably down to how much it mirrors parts of that first season, thrusting Clementine from the role of the child into that of the parent and showing her as mentor to Alvin Junior in much the same way that Lee was to her. The moments between Clem and AJ were the highlights of this season for me, bringing the whole story full-circle in a fitting way without ever explicitly recycling anything or feeling like pandering to players’ nostalgia.
Being able to finish Clementine’s story was also personally significant for me because of the role that The Walking Dead has played in my relationship with my girlfriend Alice. In the three-and-a-half years we’ve been together we’ve played through every season, including the Michonne mini-series. Reaching the end of this season wasn’t only bittersweet because I knew I’d be leaving Clementine behind, but also because I knew it marked the end of a shared experience for me and Alice that I honestly think we’re going to struggle to find in any other video game. I’m pretty sure if Alice was writing this list, she’d put The Walking Dead: The Final Season right at the top of it. It only feels right that it earns a place on my list too.
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So there you have it – my picks for the top ten games I played in 2019. It may not be the most exciting list, but it’s the truest one I could have written, and I’m really pleased with how it represents the time I’ve spent with video games over the last twelve months. I’ll be sure to spend the coming days getting acquainted with all of your top tens, not least to pick up some recommendations for things to play in 2020.
Speaking of 2020, this feels like the right time to mention my plans moving into next year. Many of you will be aware that I’ve taken a major step back from blogging here on Giant Bomb over the last couple of years. I’ve previously written a blog explaining my reasons for doing so at great length, so I won’t repeat myself here. To paraphrase, I don’t write much in this space any more because I feel that the audience has moved on, and it’s no longer the right space to share written thoughts about video games. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about how I can channel my creative energy into something similar to this blog, without feeling like I’m targeting the wrong people, and I think I’m ready to share the answer I’ve come up with.
That answer is Text Boxes.
Text Boxes is a blog dedicated to written criticism and analysis of video games, focusing primarily on their stories and mechanics related to storytelling. Starting in January 2020, I will begin posting regularly on Text Boxes, sharing thoughts on the games I’ve been playing and how they choose to tell their stories and convey information to the player. I’ll also be migrating a selection of my Giant Bomb blogs over to Text Boxes in the coming months, with the intention of keeping an archive of all my best video game writing in one place.
I realise that this is not a place for advertising or self-promotion. For that reason, I won’t be attaching this blog post to the Giant Bomb forums. I also want to stress that there is no money involved in Text Boxes. There is no Patreon, no sponsorship deal, no ad revenue – it is purely a passion project, and I don’t stand to benefit financially from pursuing it. All I wish to do is invite you, the people who have enjoyed my writing enough in the past to follow me as a user of this website, to follow me once again into this new endeavour. In return I intend to show my appreciation to those who choose to read and comment on my work by being as responsive through Text Boxes as I possibly can. I realise I’ve not been great at interacting with people here on Giant Bomb in recent years, but I am determined to build a back-and-forth dialogue around these blogs by engaging in discussion with people beyond my initial posts.
Here is a link to the Text Boxes blog. If it sounds intriguing to you, please consider adding it to your list of bookmarked websites or subscribing to the RSS feed. It’s pretty empty at the moment, but I believe that over time, and with your support, it has the potential to grow into something truly special.
Thanks very much for reading folks. Wishing a happy and healthy New Year to all of you. Take care, and I’ll see you around.
Hey there folks, and welcome to the first instalment in a series of blogs I'm calling 'Eleven Years of Xbox'. It's intended to be a celebration of the time I've spent within the Microsoft gaming ecosystem, having decided earlier this year to part ways with my Xbox consoles and streamline my video game collection. You can read more about it in the introduction to this series by following this link.
One thing I didn't explain in the introduction is that I'll be reminiscing on these games in the order that I played them, starting with the furthest back and working my way up to the present day. There is no hierarchy or ranking inherent in the order of these posts, it's simply a chronological recap of my time with the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. With that minor point out of the way, let's begin. And where better to begin than where it all began? The first game of Eleven Years of Xbox is none other than Grand Theft Auto IV.
Fresh Off the Boat, Fresh Out the Box
To begin this series, I'm turning the clock back just over eleven years, to the spring of 2008. I'd not long turned eighteen, I was on a gap year between secondary school and university, and was working a part-time administration job at my local doctor's surgery - the same doctor's surgery where I now work full-time as a dispenser, as it happens. Back then I was working fifteen hours a week doing data entry, spending my mornings in an office adding information to patient records from hospital letters, and passing my afternoons at home playing a ton of video games. At this point I was still entrenched in what was then the outgoing generation of consoles, splitting my time between the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Nintendo DS. I was itching to make the leap to current-gen hardware, and had been saving some of the disposable income from my job towards that very goal.
I had initially intended to remain firmly within the Sony wheelhouse and pick up a PlayStation 3, but the exorbitant price they were still charging for their hardware a year after its European launch meant I'd need to keep saving for quite some time before that could become a reality. My alternative choice was picking up Microsoft's Xbox 360, a console I felt a natural bias against due to my previous loyalty to Sony and Nintendo, but which promised to be significantly kinder to my wallet. When Microsoft announced a £50 price drop for its 20GB model in March 2008, bringing its price down to £199 (a full £100 less than the cheapest PS3 on the market at that time), I finally decided to pull the trigger and earmarked the 360 for purchase with my end-of-April paycheck. I ordered my console through Amazon on Wednesday 30th April, and came home from work to receive the parcel containing it on Friday 2nd May.
Initial impressions were, I'll be honest, a little underwhelming. The console itself was the stock white model with the grey 20GB hard drive bundled in, and I have to admit I was a little bit put out that this ivory monolith was going to spoil my gaming set-up, as it looked very out of place next to the sleek black aesthetics of the PS2 slim and GameCube. I was still in possession of a fourteen-inch CRT TV back then, so high-definition gaming was a distant dream at this point - my Xbox 360 started its life hooked up with a SCART cable, outputting a mere 480p to a minuscule screen. Even so, it was immediately apparent that the graphical fidelity was a major step up from the capabilities of my PS2 and GameCube. I quite liked the simplicity of the original 'blades' interface, something I came to miss as subsequent updates like the New Xbox Experience and the next generation of consoles started flooding their UIs with advertisements and links to their respective digital stores. While my Xbox 360 was connected to the internet through WiFi, I didn't have an Xbox LIVE Gold subscription, and therefore wasn't able to sample online multiplayer for quite some time.
But I didn't buy an Xbox 360 to critique its appearance and interface. I bought it to play video games. And one video game in particular...
The Rise of a Criminal Empire
My history with the Grand Theft Auto franchise goes back a very long way. Back to before the series found its third dimension, when Rockstar North was still known as DMA Design, and way before I was actually old enough to be playing those sorts of games. I got my first taste of the series when I was around eight years old, when a friend of mine brought his dad's copy of the original Grand Theft Auto over to my house after school. We can't have played more than twenty minutes, but that was enough time to cause a serious amount of chaos in that top-down original render of Liberty City. Presumably attracted by our hysterical laughter, my mum came to investigate. She turned off the PlayStation in horror, confiscated the disc and forbade us from playing anything else for the rest of the afternoon. I didn't stay in touch with that school friend, but I forged a strong relationship with the GTA series from that day onward.
About a year and a half later, with my mother's blessing (although I'm not sure what caused her stance to soften), I received a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2 for Christmas. I spent hours playing this with my younger sisters, never seriously engaging with the missions or story, but instead entering every crazy cheat code we could find and causing unprecedented levels of mayhem with maximum ammo on all weapons and almost infinite lives. To this day, GTA2 remains the only entry in the series that I've never played to completion - something I hope to rectify one day.
When Grand Theft Auto III launched in the autumn of 2001, I didn't yet own a PlayStation 2. Instead, my first taste of the series in three dimensions came at a (different) friend's house. He invited a group of boys from my class over to his place about a week after the game came out, and we all took it in turns to play it on his brother's PS2. He loaded up his brother's saved game, punched in the All Weapons cheat, and we spent about two hours terrorising the streets of Liberty City, passing the controller whenever one of us got Busted or Wasted.
Vice City came a year later, and by then I'd acquired a PS2 of my very own. Unfortunately I didn't have enough disposable income to pick up a copy of Rockstar's latest, but the same friend was kind enough to loan me his copy for about a week and a half at the start of 2003. This was my first experience of actually engaging with the mission-based content of a GTA game, and I loved every minute of it, becoming totally absorbed in that sun-drenched approximation of Miami and the characters that inhabited it. I didn't manage to finish the game in those ten days (I'm pretty sure I got stuck on that mission where you have to save Lance from the scrapyard), but it was an experience that elevated my relationship with the series from respect to pure admiration.
Later that year I picked up second-hand copies of both GTA III and Vice City and played through their stories back-to-back. When the hotly-anticipated San Andreas released in the autumn of 2004, I convinced my mum to accompany me to our nearest Argos and pick it up for me on launch day. I was blown away by its size and scope, not to mention the technical feat it represented with its seamless open world devoid of load times (something neither III nor Vice City could manage on the PS2 hardware despite having substantially smaller game worlds). By this point I'd fallen in with a different (and much nicer) group of kids at school, and we would meet up on weekends to play San Andreas's limited but still fantastic two-player mode. It was our go-to game for the best part of three years, and provided some of the best moments of my gaming adolescence.
All this history with the franchise conspired to make Grand Theft Auto IV my most-hyped video game release of 2008. In all the time since, I don't think I've ever been as excited for the release of a game as I was about the launch of Rockstar's next open-world offering. In my eyes, it was a guaranteed system seller. And when it launched on 29th April 2008, it sold me on the Xbox 360 and began a relationship with Microsoft consoles that would last the next eleven years...
Taking It To the Next Level
The last nine paragraphs have been my incredibly convoluted way of saying that Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 was my first experience of a 'seventh-generation' console. I'm sure for a great many people here, that wasn't the case. A lot of you probably cut your teeth on other major titles that released earlier. Perhaps 2006's Gears of War had already provided you with your first taste of high-definition graphical fidelity. Maybe 2007's Assassin's Creed had already redefined your expectations of what open worlds in video games could be. But I'm also sure that there are others out there like me, who waited for Rockstar to grace the next generation of consoles with something other than a table tennis simulation before taking the leap themselves. And for those of us who did, I think I speak for almost all of us when I say that Grand Theft Auto IV blew my fucking mind.
The first thing to strike me on launching the game was its incredible visual presentation. As someone who'd spent the last six years playing PS2 and GameCube games, the level of detail present in absolutely everything in the game was earth-shattering to me. The fidelity of the character models and their facial animations, the meticulously detailed interiors of the vehicles and the way they realistically deformed on impact, the individual bricks in the textures on each building, the windswept detritus on every sidewalk - everything I saw on screen almost defied belief because I had never seen anything like it before. And not just the graphical detail, but the quality of the animations as well - the way protagonist Niko Bellic's feet fell realistically on the steps of every staircase, or how shooting different parts of an enemy's body yielded different reactions, all thanks to the complex Euphoria physics supporting Rockstar's own RAGE engine. This was all stuff that would have been categorically impossible on the previous generation's hardware, and helped me to feel justified in my purchase of an Xbox 360.
This visual upgrade was supported by a multitude of enhancements to the series' gameplay. Combat got a major overhaul, adopting cover-based mechanics and shoulder-button controls akin to third-person shooters like the aforementioned Gears of War. The new physics engine and increased weight of vehicles contributed to a more realistic driving model, again supported by a more modern shoulder-button control scheme for acceleration and braking. At the other end of the spectrum, an insane amount of attention to detail was incorporated into the gameplay on a micro level. It was possible to hail a taxi cab and have it take you to a preset destination, an equivalent to fast-travel that didn't break the player's immersion within the game world. Mini-games ranging from darts and pool to bowling and arcade games were sprinkled throughout the map. The televisions in Niko's various apartments broadcasted a wide variety of TV shows and adverts created specifically for the game. It even featured its own version of the internet which could be accessed and browsed in a number of internet cafés. All these touches, big and small, helped to make GTA IV feel like a significant step up from anything I'd played on the PS2, and further vindicated my decision to upgrade.
This shift towards realism and attention to detail was also echoed in the game's story and tone, both of which eschewed the overblown action movie pastiches of the PS2 trilogy in favour of an original narrative supported by satirical social commentary rather than overt parody. Niko's story wasn't one of a meteoric rise to the top of a criminal empire akin to Tommy Vercetti's, but instead a much more grounded tale rooted in a bastardised version of the American dream. "From rags to slightly better rags" is how I believe one Rockstar figurehead put it (unfortunately a quick Google search doesn't reveal exactly who), and I think that best sums it up. Grand Theft Auto some growing up in the three-and-a-half years between San Andreas and IV, and while a lot of people came to view that as being to the game's detriment, for me personally it was a huge step forward - another indication that I'd truly taken a bold leap into a new generation of video games.
While I wasn't willing to pony up for an Xbox LIVE Gold subscription to play the online multiplayer, Grand Theft Auto IV did serve as my introduction to another online phenomenon of the seventh console generation - downloadable content. Released in the spring and autumn of 2009, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony (later marketed collectively under the title 'Episodes from Liberty City') gave players the chance to revisit Liberty City from a different perspective. The Lost and Damned was my personal favourite of the two, mainly because its grittier tone and grounded characters and story felt more in keeping with the whole GTA IV package. The Ballad of Gay Tony, while enjoyable in its own right, seemed to be trying too hard to appease the vocal part of the player base clamouring for another dose of San Andreas's kitchen-sink craziness. Nonetheless, Episodes from Liberty City served as a pretty incredible introduction for me to what DLC could be, and set a precedent for size, scope and quality that very few games have managed to reach with their downloadable offerings in the years since.
Finally, although it's not exactly in keeping with this blog's theme of making a generational leap, I'd like to reference the soundtrack in a little more detail. While licensed soundtracks were par for the course in the Grand Theft Auto franchise by this point, GTA IV was the game where the music got its hooks into me more than any other. The synth-drenched 80s soundtrack of Vice City and the hip-hop-driven radio stations of San Andreas did a fantastic job of creating a sense of time and place in their respective games, but they didn't resonate with me on a personal level, being a nineties child whose tastes lie firmly within the boundaries of rock, indie and blues. Vice City's V-Rock was alright, but more hair-metal than out-and-out rock, and San Andreas's K-DST had some great tracks but didn't feel in keeping with the early-90s California atmosphere the game was trying to portray. In GTA IV's Liberty Rock Radio, however, I finally found a home in the in-game radio of a GTA game - especially when The Lost and Damned expansion virtually doubled the station's track list. Most notably, it introduced me to The Black Crowes, a band who went on to become one of my all-time favourite artists, through their track Remedy. The moment when that track came on the radio and I was able to use the in-game phone's Shazam-style 'ZiT' service to identify it was the starting point of an ongoing love affair with the music of the Robinson brothers, and I'm sure it will stick with me forever.
I'm aware that time has not been kind to Grand Theft Auto IV's reputation as a video game. Where it was met with universal acclaim upon its release, public opinion has soured on it significantly over the last decade. People deride it for its more serious tone, its drab colour palette, its archaic gameplay and mission structure, and its problems with ludo-narrative dissonance. It very much occupies the black sheep role in the GTA family, an awkward cousin sandwiched between its zanier forebears and its more refined successor, the immeasurably successful Grand Theft Auto V. And yet, eleven years since its original release, it remains my personal favourite game in the franchise, and without a doubt the most memorable and important in terms of its impact on my gaming history. It was the game that ushered me away from the PS2 and into the next generation. It was the perfect vehicle for demonstrating what the new hardware was capable of. And it was the catalyst for an eleven-year relationship with Microsoft and Xbox that has brought me thousands of hours of joy and entertainment.
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If you've made it this far, thanks very much for sticking around to the end of this blog post. Next time I'll be jumping forward a couple of months to the end of 2008, when I'll be talking about a collection of games that helped define my interpretation of the phrase "value for money", and taught me the inherent value of first-person gaming experiences. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care folks, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled (PS4)
Hey there folks. It's been a while since I last put anything up here. I hope this blog finds everyone well (if, indeed, it finds anyone at all). I had originally hoped to start up something away from Giant Bomb, for reasons I outlined in my last proper blog post way back in October. Unfortunately that hasn't come to fruition yet, with various other life-related commitments getting in the way, but I still hope to launch something new and exciting once real life calms down and stops getting in the way. Until then, as unsuitable as it might be, Giant Bomb remains my best avenue for pouring out my thoughts on the world of video games. And boy, have I been thinking about video games a lot recently.
This was my gaming mainstay for about a third of my life. But alas, no longer...
Last month I made a tough decision to step out of the Microsoft gaming ecosystem, and part ways with my Xbox consoles. It's a decision made after a great many weeks of deliberation. It's not a decision I've taken lightly either, because the Xbox 360 in particular has served as an exceptionally loyal gaming workhorse for me for over a decade. I've invested thousands of pounds in consoles, accessories and software, a significant amount of which is digital and which I'll never be able to recoup any costs on, so trust me, I've thought long and hard in the run-up to this point. Ultimately it boils down to the standard reasons of getting older. I'll be thirty in a little over half a year, and don't have the time to dedicate to this hobby that I did ten years ago. I'll also be moving into a flat with my girlfriend within the next few months, which means combining our worldly possessions under one roof, and consequently making the compromises that come with that kind of commitment. My man-child dream of accumulating my own personal video games museum, an Aladdin's cave of consoles and games from through the years telling the story of my history with my favourite pastime, has had to face up to reality.
In terms of deciding what to stick with and what to say goodbye to, it was tough deliberating, but looking back on it the solution seems pretty obvious. The PlayStation 4 is where I do almost all of my current-gen gaming. It's a fantastic console, and Sony has been completely knocking it out of the park in terms of first-party exclusives over the last few years. I remain very much in love with my Switch as well, and given the resounding success of Nintendo's recent Direct over the E3 period, I imagine I'll be playing that for a long time to come as well. Even my PS3, for years my most neglected console, has been seeing more action in recent years. That leaves my Xbox 360 - the console that defined the previous generation of video games for me - and my more recently acquired Xbox One gathering dust on the bottom shelf of my TV stand. I'm just not playing them like I used to. And if I'm not getting any use out of them, then it makes sense for those consoles to be the ones to go.
Some Xbox-exclusive games are bound to feature in this series. Not this one, though...
But I didn't want those sleek black consoles and their neon green games cases to go quietly into the night without any kind of send-off. That's why I'm back here, in the Giant Bomb blogosphere, to launch a little blog series I'm dubbing 'Eleven Years of Xbox'. It'll be an eleven-part series where I look back on the eleven most important and influential games I've played on Microsoft systems over the last decade and change. A celebration of what the Xbox 360 and Xbox One have meant to me ever since I first bought into the Microsoft gaming ecosystem back in the spring of 2008. Some of these eleven games will be Xbox-exclusive, while others will be multi-platform games that I chose to play on Microsoft consoles and therefore will forever associate with those machines. They will all be important titles that have shaped my tastes in video games and who I am as a person over the last eleven years.
I don't intend to announce any kind of regular schedule for the subsequent entries to go up, since I've accrued something of a reputation for missing deadlines and falling behind on things over the years. I'll write as and when I find the time, and post each entry when it's done. I will say that the first entry, at least, will be up in the coming days, since I've already started writing it and will likely be finishing it before the weekend is through. Until then, thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled (PS4)
Hey there folks. Daniel here, breaking my blogging silence to make a special announcement.
As some of you will know, the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run is almost upon us once again. Now in its ninth year, the GBCER sees members of the Giant Bomb community taking on incredible video game challenges and livestreaming them in a bid to raise money for charity. Once again this year, the charity in question is Pencils of Promise, an organisation dedicated to providing kids in developing countries with access to education. This year we’re hoping to raise $10,000 for the cause – enough to build a school classroom. Livestreams will be running from Friday 12th to Sunday 14th April, and can be viewed collectively at the Giant Bomb community livestreaming hub, ExplosiveRuns.
This year will be my third taking part in the GBCER, following the Pokémon Gold Randomizer Nuzlocke in 2017 and last year’s inFamous 2 ‘Karma by Committee’ playthrough. This year I’ll be turning my attention to one of the most impactful games of my adolescence – Kingdom Hearts. I’ve played through Sora’s original adventure many times over the years, completing my most recent playthrough only a couple of months ago. Across those countless playthroughs I’ve hit the level cap, completed all the side quests, synthesised every special item and taken down every optional super-boss. However, there’s one challenge that I’ve never attempted before – a Zero EXP run.
For anyone not in the know, the Final Mix version of Kingdom Hearts from the HD I.5 ReMIX collections on PS3 and PS4 includes an optional ability called Zero EXP. Only available in Proud Mode, the game’s highest difficulty, it’s available from the start of the game and while it’s equipped, Sora and his party won’t earn any experience at all. That means no levelling up, which has a huge impact on Sora’s growth throughout the game, locking him out of learning many abilities and limiting stat boosts only to those given by equipment and items.
I’m not going to lie – this is going to be fucking hard. Although I’ve gained a fair amount of knowledge of Kingdom Hearts’ combat system over the years, I still have a tendency to favour brute-forcing my way through difficult challenges with grinding and over-levelling. That won’t be an option here – every combat encounter will become a tense, gruelling affair, and some of the game’s toughest bosses are going to force me to strategise in ways I never have before. Given that this is also a marathon playthrough, I’m also going to be combating the physical and mental effects of fatigue as the stream progresses. Basically, as the game gets harder, I’m going to get more tired, making me exponentially more likely to screw up the further I get.
My goal for this Zero EXP run is to play until either I defeat the final boss, or twenty-four hours have passed, whichever comes first. To that end, I won’t actively be engaging in any side quests or optional content (unless my donation incentives dictate otherwise – see below for more details). I’ll be commencing the playthrough at 3:00pm BST (that’s 10:00am EDT) on Saturday 13th April, and will be livestreaming the whole thing via YouTube.
If you’re interested in donating, you can do so by following this link to my Pencils of Promise fundraising page. Last year I was able to raise $225 for Pencils of Promise – enough to send three kids to school for a whole year. This year I’ll be aiming for a similar amount with a goal of $200, funding for 2% of the classroom we’re collectively hoping to pay for. To encourage folks to donate, I’ll be offering a number of donation incentives linked to the playthrough:
The donor with the highest unique donation prior to the start of the stream will earn the right to name the raft/Gummi Ship near the start of the game. Simply leave your chosen name within a comment alongside your donation on the Pencils of Promise page – maximum ten characters!
For each individual donation of $25 or more, I will perform an acoustic rendition of Kingdom Hearts’ iconic theme, Simple and Clean, live on the stream. Be warned that I am a bad guitarist and a terrible singer, so donate at your own risk!
In terms of the overall donation total, I’ll be attempting optional combat challenges when we hit certain milestones. These will begin from the $100 mark, with new challenges being introduced for every additional $25 raised. Please note that so as not to interfere too much with the main goal of finishing the game within twenty-four hours, I’m promising only to attempt these challenges, spending no more than an hour on each one, with no guarantee of completing them.
$100 – Phil Cup at Olympus Coliseum
$125 – Pegasus Cup at Olympus Coliseum
$150 – Hercules Cup at Olympus Coliseum
$175 – Kurt Zisa at Agrabah
$200 – Phantom at Neverland
$225 (STRETCH GOAL) – Sephiroth at Olympus Coliseum
$250 (STRETCH GOAL) – Mysterious Figure at Hollow Bastion
I think that covers everything. Thanks very much for taking the time to read this blog. I hope you’ll consider giving generously in support of the cause. And hey, if Kingdom Hearts isn’t your thing, then please check out the official Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run IX forum thread – someone there is bound to be doing something that you can get behind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the GBCER is only four weeks away, I have a lot of preparation to do. Take care folks, and I’ll see you around.
Hey there folks, Daniel here. I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas had a great one, and that everybody has had a joyous and peaceful holiday season. Now that the end of the year is upon us, it’s once again time for me to welcome you to another slew of Game of the Year-style content in the form of My End of 2018 Awards. I know I said I’d be taking a step back from blogging here on Giant Bomb a couple of months back, but it would be remiss of me not to suspend that hiatus in order to talk about some of the games have defined the last twelve months for me personally. Looking back over my list of games played this year, my grand total comes to thirty-three titles – a pretty respectable total, and slightly over my projected target of thirty (although nowhere near last year’s monstrous achievement of fifty beaten games). Of those thirty-three, it’s now time to separate the wheat from the chaff and curate a final list of the ten titles that best defined my experience as a player of video games in 2018.
These awards have varied greatly over the years, and 2018 brings with it some more changes to the established formats of years past. For a start, I won’t be dispensing individual awards for every game I played this year. My reasoning for doing so is similar to the one that saw the format change back in 2014 – I’ve played a lot of games within certain franchises this year, to the point where offering up individual awards for some of those games would definitely enter hair-splitting territory. Consequently, the format of this year’s awards is going to be very pared back in comparison – just a single blog post honouring my top ten gaming experiences from this year.
What haven’t changed are my eligibility criteria for these awards. Perhaps controversially, games are eligible for these accolades regardless of their year of release, provided I played them within the last twelve months. Being as I’m someone who plays quite a lot of old games, and rarely gets around to checking titles out within their release years, limiting myself to just 2018 releases would result in a very short list indeed. Opening up the playing field like this allows me to populate my awards with a much wider variety of game experiences and (hopefully) makes for a more unique and entertaining piece of writing. One thing I will say, however, is that games I’ve played before are much less likely to appear within these blogs than ones I’ve experienced for the first time – the former have likely had their chance to shine in previous awards already, whereas the latter are more likely to leave a lasting impression by virtue of their novelty.
It’s also worth noting that none of these games are in any kind of hierarchical order. I don’t like ranking these sorts of lists, partly down to the aforementioned hair-splitting issue, and partly because directly comparing some of the wildly different games on this list in the pursuit of a definitive ranking would be a futile exercise. For that reason, as with previous years, I’ll be sticking with an alphabetical format for this year’s list.
Honourable Mentions
Before I get properly underway, I’d quickly like to acknowledge a couple of honourable mentions – games that, under different circumstances, would have made their way onto this list without incident. As it stands, however, I can’t in good conscience place them above my top ten:
inFamous 2 – inFamous 2 warrants a mention for being the featured game for my contribution to this year’s Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run. My “Karma By Committee” playthrough saw Cole’s moral compass dictated by the donations I received, resulting in a thoroughly evil seventeen-hour romp across the rooftops of New Marais. Thanks to all who contributed to the cause, enabling my stream to send three kids to school for a year through Pencils of Promise.
Life Is Strange – Life Is Strange earns its honourable mention by being the most notable game that I played through alongside my girlfriend Alice this year. While I enjoyed the experience overall, and appreciated the novelty of being able to rewind and do over some of the major decisions, it didn’t quite hit the heights of other Telltale-style games we’ve played together, relegating it to sub-list status.
Red Dead Redemption II – Red Dead Redemption II is the sequel I never expected to one of my favourite video games of all time. It would have undoubtedly been on this list this year, if I’d only been able to finish the darned thing. I’m currently on Chapter Six, and while I feel like I’m making good steady progress through it, there’s no way I’m going to be completely done with the story by the end of the year. It’s definitely going to be on the list for My End of 2019 Awards, though!
Now, with my piece said about those excellent also-rans, let’s get down to brass tacks and reveal the ten most memorable gaming experiences I had in 2018!
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
SEGA – Master System – 1986
I think this marks only the second time I’ve ever included a game on one of these lists that is older than I am. Released over thirty years ago, Alex Kidd in Miracle World holds a very special place in my heart, it being the first video game I ever played. When I was around four years of age, my parents brought a Master System into the house, with SEGA’s original answer to Super Mario Bros. built into the console. To this day I hold vivid memories of the bright colour palette, simple but effective sprite art and rudimentary level layouts. But for all the time I spent with this platforming classic in my childhood, I never saw the whole adventure through, always coming unstuck around seven or eight levels in.
Fast forward to the late spring and early summer of 2018. Inspired by the exploits of Messrs Caravella and Ryckert and their fantastic ‘This Is the Run’ video series, I decided to take that mentality and apply it to the biggest white whale in my gaming catalogue. I downloaded the PlayStation 3 port of Alex Kidd in Miracle World and, over the course of about four weeks, uploaded a series of daily runs to YouTube with the goal of beating the game fair and square – no save states or cheats, just gradual improvement born from trial and error. Along the way there were rock-paper-scissors patterns memorised, lives lost to cheap deaths that would later be avoided, and some inspired lateral thinking to get around a seemingly impossible late-game maze puzzle. One of the most rewarding aspects of this endeavour was how it forced me to deconstruct my own learning processes, an experience which has stuck with me and made me feel more present in the act of playing games.
After gradual progress through seventeen failed runs, I finally completed Alex Kidd in Miracle World on my eighteenth attempt, on Saturday 9th June. But it wasn’t just an achievement in the sense of finally getting one over on the first game I’d ever played. It was also an achievement in the sense of learning more about who I am as a player of games. It was an experience similar to the one I had playing the Android version of the original Dragon Quest back in 2016 – one that I’d be hard pressed to recommend to anybody else, but which was essential in shaping how I will look back on 2018, and will undoubtedly affect my game-playing habits and choices going forward.
Dark Souls
FromSoftware – Xbox 360 – 2011
After playing through Demon’s Souls for the first time two years ago and falling in love with its unique approaches to world-building and player challenge, I knew I needed to make its spiritual successor a priority. Even then, it took me nearly two years to get around to checking out Dark Souls, and I really wish I’d succumbed sooner. FromSoftware’s part sequel, part reimagining of their PS3 cult classic stands head and shoulders above its forebear, providing an experience that is brutally enchanting and steeped in mystery.
One of Dark Souls’ biggest strengths is in its shift from Demon’s Souls’ hub-world approach to a seamless, interconnected world more in keeping with the design sensibilities of Metroidvania titles. This design choice makes Lordran feel expansive and authentic in a way that Boletaria never quite did, allowing players to catch recognisable glimpses on the horizon of places they explored several hours previously, to loop back on themselves in interesting ways, and to tackle objectives in multiple orders or even out of sequence. The world is by no means its only star, either, as the game plays host to some of the most memorable and challenging boss encounters I’ve ever witnessed. The likes of the Gaping Dragon, Ornstein and Smough, the Great Grey Wolf Sif, and the Four Kings are battles that I won’t forget any time soon, in terms of their designs, the level of challenge they presented, and the thrilling sense of achievement upon their eventual defeat.
Dark Souls is an experience that begs to be unpacked on its own terms. In the seventy-something hours it took me to dissect its campaign and reach its conclusion, at no point did I feel compelled to cheese my way through any of its challenges, or look up any of the solutions to its myriad mysteries. Furthermore, thanks to my transferable working knowledge of the mechanics of Demon’s Souls, I didn’t feel the need to resort to online crib-sheets. I took my time, gradually moving further from Firelink Shrine and towards each new bonfire with only ambiguous hints left by other players to guide my hand. That’s what makes it one of my most memorable gaming experiences of the last twelve months, and why it deserves its spot on this list.
Unfortunately a number of factors conspired to halt my progress – an imperfect storm of social commitments, beginning to learn to play drums, and the pressure of revising for looming A-Level exams all took their toll on my available free time. The game itself was also partly to blame, in hindsight, with a plodding narrative accompanied by methodically-paced gameplay and a combat system whose nuances I struggled to understand. Consequently, I never finished the original release of Final Fantasy XII, and now I probably never will. Returning to Ivalice over a decade later has confirmed to me that the Zodiac Age re-release on PlayStation 4 is the definitive way to play Final Fantasy XII in 2018. Thanks to some essential quality-of-life improvements, most notably the ability to double or even quadruple the game speed at the press of a button, navigating its over-large environments and grinding for loot drops or experience gain no longer feels like the arduous slog it once was. This, in turn, makes the game’s narrative flow at a much better pace, since it isn’t being constantly interrupted with hours of slow-moving tedium.
And at the risk of getting controversial, this remains one of my favourite stories in the franchise. Final Fantasy XII’s insistence on prioritising the political machinations of Ivalice over the development of its characters has long been a divisive talking point, but given that the game’s world is its best character, I feel that was the right decision. And while a third of the playable cast might as well have not been there (looking at you, Vaan and Penelo), the characters who do matter are well-developed enough to care about, with interesting character arcs and just enough personal stakes in the greater scheme of things to justify their starring roles. The fact the story is essentially Star Wars with a fresh coat of paint is undeniable, but that fact didn’t stop me from getting caught up in its myriad twists and turns.
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age earns its spot on this list because it trimmed exactly the right amount of fat from the original experience to see me through its seventy-hour story without losing focus or interest, finally enabling me to tick another core Final Fantasy game off my backlog. Final Fantasy XV, I’m coming for you in 2019.
God of War
Sony Santa Monica Studios – PlayStation 4 – 2018
I’ve been a fan of God of War ever since the original game appeared on the PlayStation 2 in all its bloody glory in 2005. In all the games that have come since, critics have lauded improvements made to the series’ tight action gameplay, but have also derided Kratos as a joke character who knows nothing but how to get his rage on. I don’t necessarily disagree, but within all that discussion through the intervening years, I feel that the original God of War gets unfairly overlooked from a story standpoint. Sure, it’s no masterpiece, but it features Kratos at his most human and relatable across the original canon. It’s the main reason that to this day I still prefer the original God of War over its bigger, better and more varied sequels.
Having written themselves into that rage-fuelled corner, the easiest route for Santa Monica Studios would have been to hard reboot their intellectual property and start with a blank canvas. Instead, Cory Barlog’s team embraced the history they’d created, acknowledged it, and used it as a foundation for something very special. It’s not new for Kratos to be caught up in the petty squabbles of the gods, but by framing him as older, wiser, and way more self-aware, he’s able to bring something more than just blood and vitriol to the table. It’s not new for Kratos to be a father, but by placing Atreus alongside him in the present rather than making him a memory of his past like Calliope, we get to actually see him being a father instead of just being reminded that he used to be. By shifting the action from Greek to Norse mythology, Kratos is rendered vulnerable by his lack of knowledge, making him as reliant upon Atreus as his son is upon him. God of War is the first game in over a decade to portray Kratos as something more than just a murderous player avatar, and I love that.
From start to end, God of War is an intensely intimate experience, and I’m not just talking about the story. A big part of that is down to the shift to an over-the-shoulder camera perspective that never cuts away, ensuring the player is always close to Kratos and what he is experiencing. This is a far cry from previous God of War games, whose static cameras would often pan up or out to reveal enormous temples or gigantic Titans (or indeed, enormous temples on gigantic Titans), revelling in scale in a way that often compromised the gameplay experience. God of War retains a sense of scale by casting it from a different angle, without sacrificing the experience of actually playing it. Combat is visceral and hectic, with a focus on crowd control and mixing up tactics and weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies – thematically not that dissimilar to the old games, but again, that in-close camera makes you feel part of the experience, rather than divorced from it.
God of War gets its spot on this list because it takes everything I loved about the original series – its reverence for mythology, its sense of scale and spectacle, and its incredible action combat – and marries it with characters, worlds, and a story that I actually care about and finally feel invested in. After thirteen years, God of War finally grew up with me.
Gran Turismo Sport
Polyphony Digital – PlayStation 4 – 2017
When a racing game shows up on one of my end-of-year top ten lists, it’s not usually because of their overall quality, but because of their ongoing impact on my gaming habits within the given year. Such was the case with Forza Motorsport 4 some years back, and such is once again the case with Gran Turismo Sport in 2018. It’s certainly not one of the very best games I’ve played this year. In fact, on multiple levels, it was quite a disappointing experience. As a predominantly solo player of games, I found the scant single-player content in the launch version of the game to be way below par, especially for a game born from the same franchise as the impossibly enormous Gran Turismo 4.
Thankfully, it didn’t stay that way. 2018 saw Polyphony Digital delivering on a lot of the promise shown in last year’s base release of Gran Turismo Sport. Over the last twelve months they’ve shown an incredible amount of support for the latest entry in their long-running franchise, consistently adding new cars, tracks and events by way of regular free updates. Every major overhaul has brought me back to the game to purchase new cars, whizz around new Circuit Experience tracks, and participate in new events in the GT League, a single-player mode added post-launch that channels the spirit of GT games of old.
Not every change Polyphony has made has been for the better. In the context of the increasingly aggressive monetisation practices of the AAA game industry, their decision to allow purchasing in-game cars with real-world currency leaves a particularly sour taste in my mouth. By and large though, I feel like they’re doing right by their product, populating the relatively blank canvas they released just over a year ago with a bevy of worthwhile content. With every passing month, Gran Turismo Sport gets a little bit closer to delivering the experience that I want out of a current-generation racing game. I can’t wait to see what improvements and additions 2019 will bring.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Nintendo – Switch – 2017
When I bought myself a Switch at the start of 2018, it was for the express purpose of playing the new Legend of Zelda. Well, that and future-proofing my personal investment in the core Pokémon franchise, but mainly for the Zelda thing. It was a decision fuelled by the reception it garnered in last year’s Game of the Year awards, a level of universal acclaim that confirmed I needed to pick up Nintendo’s new bit of hardware to experience it. After investing three-hundred English pounds of my money and one-hundred hours of my time, and having ten months to distance myself from the experience, I still feel that Breath of the Wild is one of the finest open-world adventure games I have ever played.
Breath of the Wild achieves this by pushing back against so many of the conventions that have become ubiquitous in open-world game design, rebuking each one with an inspired alternative that puts exploration, discovery and fun at the centre of the experience. Instead of an in-game map littered with “icon barf”, the waypoints on the map in Link’s Sheikah Slate are set by the player, and can be placed without interrupting gameplay should anything on the horizon pique their interest. Instead of rigid quest design that limits player freedom, the Divine Beasts and Shrines are constructed in a way that encourages players to be creative in their approach to environmental navigation and puzzle-solving. Rather than equipping players with an inventory full of items and abilities that have very specific uses, Link is bestowed with a handful of Runes that have a multitude of in-game applications to support player experimentation.
All of this is situated within a vast game world which is governed by systems that support and enhance the gameplay at every turn. Breath of the Wild’s physics engine, weather systems, elemental properties and behavioural AI are all intrinsically linked, such that pushing up against one or more of these systems is often what yields its most memorable moments. Using metal weaponry to conduct electricity for a Shrine puzzle, or re-purposing the updraft from a bush fire to quickly gain altitude with Link’s sailcloth, or hunting wolves on the slopes of the Hebra Mountains and watching their meat freeze if left on the ground too long, or rolling an explosive barrel downhill into a group of unsuspecting Bokoblins – these incidents represent a minuscule fraction of the systemic interactions I experienced while playing Breath of the Wild. Simply put, its version of Hyrule is one of the most enrapturing places I have ever had the privilege of travelling to via a game controller. My only regret is that I’ll never be able to play it for the very first time again.
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-7
TT Games – Steam – 2010/11
I played through five of TT Games’ LEGO titles this year, which is roughly four-and-a-half more than the recommended annual quota for anyone who plays video games on anything more than a casual basis. The games are almost painfully similar to one another, usually with just aesthetics and one or two simple mechanics serving to differentiate each instalment from the rest of the herd. Despite the over-saturation, though, I had a lot of fun losing myself in brick-based versions of various beloved media franchises. LEGO The Lord of the Rings was perhaps my favourite, being very closely tied to the Peter Jackson films I loved so much growing up. LEGO Jurassic World was probably the most enjoyable game of the bunch, with the pursuit of 100% completion somehow feeling a little less monotonous than its brethren.
It’s perhaps a surprise, then, that the games I’ve picked to hold the torch for the LEGO franchise in this top ten list are the two LEGO Harry Potter titles. While they weren’t my favourite or the most enjoyable experiences I had with the franchise this year, they were without a doubt the most memorable. LEGO Harry Potter brought me closer to my youngest sister this year, through a shared love of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world that I’d recently rekindled as I started to revisit the books (I’m currently up to Order of the Phoenix, which I keep putting off starting because it’s my least favourite). At weekends through the spring and into the summer we would camp in front of my laptop or her TV screen and play LEGO Harry Potter together. My sister isn’t big into video games so although the option to play co-operatively was there, she was much happier taking a back seat, steering me through each level and around the hub of Hogwarts in search of more Gold Bricks, Character Studs and Crest Pieces, eventually reaching 100% completion in both games. That experience stands as proof that Dumbledore was right – love is indeed the most powerful magic of all.
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Capcom – 3DS – 2015
While everyone else was getting excited over a brand new console-based Monster Hunter game this year, I was predictably living in the past by playing an older version of that new hotness. In this particular case, the game was Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on my Nintendo 3DS. This wasn’t my first corral as far as Monster Hunter was concerned – I played a significant chunk of Freedom Unite on my PSP back in the spring of 2015 – but it was my first time feeling comfortable with the series. And I’m not just talking about from a gameplay perspective, either – having access to a New 3DS with a built-in C-stick meant that MH4U was thankfully not an experience defined by claw-grips and hand cramps.
4 Ultimate succeeds in a lot of places where Freedom Unite failed for me, and that’s not just limited to the controls. Its single-player content is structured in a much less confusing way, surfacing more of its gameplay idiosyncrasy for new players and tying together its hunts with a cohesive story that guides players admirably along its still-steep difficulty curve. Although I came into MH4U with some dormant knowledge of Monster Hunter’s gameplay loop, I still feel like it taught me more in its opening quests than Freedom Unite did in the entirety of the fifty-plus hours I spent with it. It’s also worth mentioning that this iteration of the franchise features some much-appreciated improvements to gameplay, such as the ability to mount certain monsters and the added verticality that brings to both exploration and combat.
My only regret with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is that I never got a chance to experience it the way it was truly intended to be played – namely co-operatively, with friends. While I have a couple of friends with 3DSes, none of them have yet been bitten by the Monster Hunter bug. Consequently, a large amount of the game’s content remains unexplored, and I suspect it always will. However, that doesn’t diminish the amount of fun I had Switch-Axe-ing my way through its single-player content. Perhaps in the new year I’ll take the plunge on Monster Hunter: World and finally get to join other players on more demanding hunts. Until then, what I did play of MH4U more than justifies its inclusion on this list.
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
Toys for Bob – PlayStation 4 – 2018
I am a nineties kid. I grew up watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, listening to S Club 7, and playing mascot platformers on the original PlayStation. While last year’s excellent Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy did a lot to recapture my misspent youth by updating an essential piece of my formative gaming history for modern hardware, it wasn’t quite the game I was hoping for. Why, you ask? Simple – I was hoping for Spyro. Insomniac’s little purple dragon always held more sway than Naughty Dog’s fuzzy orange marsupial in our household, probably because my mum loved playing Ripto’s Rage (subtitled Gateway to Glimmer here in the UK) and Year of the Dragon so much. This year, I actually got the game I was hoping for, in the form of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy.
Reignited succeeds in basically all the same ways as N. Sane did before it. It faithfully reproduces a trio of much-loved mascot platformers for the current generation, preserving their core gameplay while cranking the aesthetics up to eleven. It unifies the presentation of those games with consistent controls, UI and functionality across all three titles. It introduces Trophy support, plus a number of quality-of-life improvements, such as right-stick camera control, modernising the games without sacrificing the classic feel of the originals. It retrofits additional iterative improvements from the later games into the older ones, namely Skill Points and the ability to have Sparx point to any missing treasure within a given level. All of this was to be expected.
What I wasn’t expecting was for the games to play so damned perfectly. As someone who has played the originals to 100+% completion so many times that I’ve genuinely lost count, I still have an innate muscle memory for these games. In the N. Sane Trilogy, that muscle memory failed me due to the changes they made to the physics of Crash’s jump. In Reignited, I don’t feel like my muscle memory failed me once. Everything felt exactly how I expected it to feel, making all three of these games instant winners in my eyes. Last year I said that the N. Sane Trilogy was the definitive way to play Crash Bandicoot in 2017. This year, I say that the Reignited Trilogy is the definitive way to play Spyro the Dragon in 2018. Here’s hoping that next year’s impending release of Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled can make it three out of three for Activision on the retro-remake front.
Super Mario Odyssey
Nintendo – Switch – 2017
Whenever the question of why we play games comes up, the almost universal answer is to have fun. We play for those little hits of dopamine that stimulate the pleasure centres of our brain each time we reach a new area, defeat a challenging enemy, or overcome a complex puzzle. Super Mario Odyssey is a game that understands this perfectly, because it is purpose-built to keep those dopamine hits coming at frequent and regular intervals. Its main collectibles, the Moons that power the game’s eponymous spaceship, are overwhelmingly ubiquitous. You’re rarely more than a few minutes away from your next one at any given moment, and the “one more Moon” mentality this instils in the player makes it incredibly difficult to put Odyssey down.
But it’s not just quantity that sets Super Mario Odyssey apart from its peers. After all, having hundreds upon hundreds of collectable Moons on offer would mean nothing if they weren’t rewarding to acquire. Thankfully, the tasks and challenges standing between Mario and those Moons are wildly varied, as are the eclectic collection of Worlds he explores along the way. Odyssey’s other big strength lies in its simplicity and accessibility. Mario’s moveset is fairly limited, essentially boiling down to a series of jumps and the ability to throw his anthropomorphic cap around. However, each tool in Mario’s belt has a huge number of applications, allowing players to overcome complex challenges through mastering just a handful of basics. The novel capture mechanic is very well thought-out too, with each potential capture having one or two clearly defined abilities that allow players to explore old environments in new ways, yielding even more Moons along the way.
It’s worth mentioning that Super Mario Odyssey was also the game that ignited my brief fling with streaming this year, as I broadcast my forays into its post-game challenges for the enjoyment of a live internet audience. For just over a month, Super Mario Saturdays encouraged me to keep coming back to the game in the hopes of wringing more joy out of it, and thanks to the multitude of post-game Moons available to unlock, that well never dried up. In fact, I still have the Dark Side of the Moon challenge to complete, something I’ll likely try and overcome at some point in 2019. Knowing that there are almost five-hundred Moons still waiting to be grabbed, even after everything I’ve done already, makes me feel excited to jump back in. That’s why I play video games, and that’s why Super Mario Odyssey is on this list.
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There you have it – the ten games that best define my game-playing habits over the course of 2018. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on any of the titles listed above, as well as your own picks for the best games you played this year. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of Game of the Year content to catch up on, a ton of community blogs and user lists to peruse, and more Red Dead Redemption II to play. After that, I’ll be heading back into whatever the blogging equivalent of hibernation is. Thanks very much for reading folks. Here’s wishing a very happy and prosperous New Year to each and every one of you. Take care, and I’ll see you around.
Hey there folks. Daniel here, with a bit of slightly sombre news. After a few weeks of deliberation, I've decided to take a step back from this space and cut down on my Giant Bomb blogging activity.
I have a few reasons for reaching this decision. First and foremost, I'm getting old, folks. Ten years ago, when this site first launched, I was eighteen, between the end of my part-time job and the start of my university course. I had bucket-loads of free time, with no major commitments or responsibilities outside of my own education. Now, I'm twenty-eight. I work full-time hours in a stressful job. I have a family - parents, grandparents, sisters, nieces and nephews - who have their own health and social problems, who I feel the need to support in ways that I couldn't before. I have a wonderful girlfriend whose family I'm now just as much a part of as my own. I captain a local darts team. I play in and pseudo-manage a band. All of these commitments and responsibilities eat up time in ways I never had to worry about ten, or even five years ago, and it makes it harder to justify spending what little remaining time I do have typing up scattered thoughts on the video games that I've been playing recently.
On a less personal level, I've come to realise that Giant Bomb is not an appropriate platform for the content I wish to produce. This is in no way intended as criticism of Giant Bomb itself. I love this site. I love its staff, who work tirelessly to create what I (and many others) believe to be the most entertaining games-based video content on the whole internet. But Giant Bomb has, and I think always will have, an identity crisis. When it launched back in the summer of 2008, it was a site trying to be all things to all people - it was a Wiki, a news outlet, an entertainment channel, a community forum, an Achievement tracker, an FAQ and guide repository, all rolled into one ambitious, hulking beast of a website.
As time has passed, the site has become more focused in the kind of content it seeks to deliver - predominantly Quick Looks, casual live-streams, and pseudo-Let's Plays. Consequently, all the things outside of that focus have been hugely neglected, but (with the exception of the Achievement tracker) never completely excised. God of War, one of the biggest video game releases of this year, has a total of six lines of text on its Wiki page. A more recent PS4 exclusive, Marvel's Spider-Man, is totally empty. Forum activity is through the floor, with (as of the time of writing) only twenty-nine threads showing any comments in the last twenty-four hours. Guides are still an active feature on the site, for some reason, but I genuinely can't recall seeing one being highlighted or even worked on in the last five years.
And blogs, once the centre of a beautifully networked community experience, have been rendered almost invisible by a combination of profile redesigns, broken notification systems, and the general downplaying of cultivating a community in favour of highlighting the personalities of the staff. With a couple of notable exceptions, such as the peerless productivity of @mento and the insightful writings of @gamer_152, most of the bloggers I used to follow here have either cut down their output drastically, or simply moved on altogether. As I said, none of this is meant with any ill will. I don't blame Giant Bomb for identifying and subsequently carving out its place in the world of video game coverage. If anything, I blame myself for spending so long willing this website to be something that it was never going to be.
To those of you who were enjoying the Keyblade Chronicles and awaiting the next instalment, I apologise for not following the concept through to its true potential. It has done wonders for my productivity, getting me to write an average of around 8,000 words per week. But as much as I enjoyed writing what I did of that series, I couldn't shake the niggling voice at the back of my head, telling me that my energy would be much better spent on other, less frivolous creative pursuits. I have an unfinished novel that I need to pick back up, and lyrical ideas that I need to develop into full-blown songs. Both of those feel like worthier outlets for my creativity right now than a weekly blog series about a games franchise I haven't felt properly invested in for over a decade.
I'm not saying I'll never blog here again. Like I said at the start, this is a step back, not a departure. If the mood takes me one day in the future, I'm not ruling out the possibility of sitting down at the keyboard and bashing out a few paragraphs on what I've been playing recently. Nor am I saying goodbye to the site as a whole. I still love playing, watching and reading about video games. I still love the content that Jeff, Brad, Vinny, Dan, Alex, Ben, Abby, Jason, Jan, Rorie and the rest of the GB crew create. I'm still going to watch the videos, lurk on the forums, and read the blogs still being written by the people I've grown attached to over the last decade. But for now, that's all I'll be doing. As a final point, I'd like to thank each and every one of you who has engaged with my writing over the last ten years. Your input is what's kept me going this long, and is ultimately what will see me over the line with whatever creative project I shift my focus towards next.
Take care folks, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS)
What do you get if you cross a key, a sword, and a blog that's far longer than it has any right to be? Why, the Keyblade Chronicles, of course!
As always, a quick preamble to remind you that this is the latest episode in a series chronicling my efforts to play through the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise before the release of Kingdom Hearts III in January 2019. We're still pretty close to the start of our adventure, but if you intend to follow along, it's best to start from the beginning. There are handy navigation links at the top of this blog to take you either to the previous episode, or to the main episode hub (which also contains a more in-depth explanation of what this series is and why I'm writing it). If you're all caught up, then by all means read on!
In this week's episode we'll finally be taking a look at the Gummi Ship building mechanics and constructing a new ride that will take us to new, uncharted worlds including Agrabah from Aladdin. We'll then briefly zip back to Traverse Town to open up the Synthesis Shop, before an unexpected encounter derails our journey to the next world.
Part 14 - Becoming a Master Builder
When we last left our intrepid trio, they were about to hop on board their Gummi Ship and use the newly-installed Navigation Gummi to find and explore new worlds. However, things are about to ramp up a little difficulty-wise, making this the perfect opportunity to finally dive deep on the game's Gummi Ship building mechanics. After the Traverse Town Keyhole is sealed, Cid leaves the Accessory Shop and starts hawking Gummi blocks on the streets of the First District. This new storefront gives the player access to previously inaccessible Gummis, including sturdier cockpits, faster engines and more powerful weapons. After purchasing some of these upgrades and adding them to the handful of new pieces we've found across the worlds, we're ready to go and build a new Gummi Ship! Time to return to the World Select Screen and take a look at that Gummi Garage menu we've been avoiding until now.
First-time visitors to this screen are greeted by a tutorial, and I implore anyone new to Kingdom Hearts to read the whole thing. Heck, I've played this game five times before, and even I sat through the tutorial again to refresh my memory. The tutorial isn't the best I've ever seen - it explains all the features of the ship editor well enough, but the wording used and its passive nature mean it's difficult to equate what's happening on screen with the buttons the player needs to press. A more active tutorial, giving the player some agency in building a basic Gummi Ship, or even an on-screen controller depicting which buttons are responsible for which actions, might go some way to better acclimatising the player to using the ship editor.
As for the editor itself? If you've ever played Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, it's pretty similar to the vehicle-building component in that, only about a hundred times worse. The ship editor has three distinct modes - Select mode, which lets you scroll through the many Gummi blocks in your collection; Build mode, which lets you place and arrange those blocks into something resembling a spacecraft; and a viewing mode, which lets you see your ship as it will appear in flight. Players can toggle between these modes using the R1 and R2 buttons.
The selection mode is fairly straightforward - you can cycle left and right between different groups of Gummis, and up and down within groups to find specific kinds or shapes of Gummi. Gummi blocks are grouped by their function (cockpits, engines, armour, wings, weapons, etc) and are named after Final Fantasy spells which help to identify their purpose (engines are named after the Fire/Fira/Firaga spells, cannons after the Thunder/Thundara/Thundaga spells, wings after the Aero/Aerora/Aeroga spells, etc.). When you find the Gummi you want, you can press either X or R1 to enter Build mode. Ship construction takes place within a cubed grid, which can be increased in size with the appropriate upgrades from Cid, and every Gummi block takes up a specific number of spaces within that grid. You can move your selected Gummi around the grid with the D-pad, rotate it with the left stick, and move up and down levels using the L1 and L2 buttons. When you're done placing that type of Gummi and wish to select another, pressing R1 will return from Build mode to Select mode. Inspect mode can be accessed by pressing R2 at any time while in Build mode.
If this all sounds confusing, that's because it is. Building a Gummi Ship is not an intuitive process. It's the painful experience of constantly forgetting which buttons do what. It's the heart-breaking agony of accidentally highlighting and deleting an entire ship when it's almost complete, and having to start over from scratch. It's the soul-crushing reality that you've spent twenty minutes sticking glorified Lego blocks together for the sake of a two-minute on-rails shooter sequence. That's not to say it can't be rewarding. Building a strong, fast Gummi Ship that can tear apart Heartless ships and look cool doing it does feel good. It's just a very, very steep learning curve to get to that point. For the most part, it's just as viable (and much less of a slog) to keep upgrading the default Kingdom Gummi Ship with better armour and new doodads as you gain access to them.
It is theoretically possible to bypass most of this nightmarish process by building a replica Heartless Gummi Ship using blueprints picked up from destroyed enemy ships. This is not a method I would advocate, however. Most of the default Gummi Ship blueprints come devoid of weaponry, forcing you into the editor anyway to chuck a few cannons and lasers on top of the pre-determined design. Far more infuriating for me personally, however, is the fact that these blueprints are largely useless without the correct Gummi blocks in your inventory. Attempting to build a ship without all the necessary parts will result in the ship being built, but with all the parts you don't own simply absent from its structure. On top of this, there's no in-game way to find out which blocks you need to complete a specific design, so I couldn't actively seek them out even if I wanted to. All these things conspire to make me never want to engage with the preset blueprints, and this playthrough is no different. Doesn't stop me from wanting to collect them all, though.
For all the negativity I've spewed on the subject of Gummi Ship creation, I do have to applaud the level of depth and freedom within the ship editor, especially considering it exists in a game that's over fifteen years old at this point. All a ship needs to function is a cockpit and an engine, so slap a Fire-G or two on the back of a Cure-G and you literally have a working Gummi Ship. There are also interconnected weight, power and speed ratios at play, too - using more armour-type Gummis will give your ship more health, but the extra weight will also slow it down, meaning you'll need more and/or bigger engines to keep it moving at a decent clip. Each weapon type has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages, forcing you to weigh up their pros and cons during the building process. There is a neat little engine under the hood of this part of the game, and one that was way ahead of its time, even if it is incredibly confusing to use and get the most out of.
For now I'm keen to build a ship that will see us comfortably around the next set of worlds. I use the Curaga cockpit and Firaga engine that I've earned from saving the dalmatian puppies as my base. From there I bulk out the body with Shell and Dispel armour blocks, slap a pair of Aeroga wings on the sides for manoeuvrability, and attach a Thunder cannon and Comet laser to the undercarriage. When I'm done it looks a bit like a flying saucer with very square edges - not especially glamorous, but it'll get the job done.
Part 15 - Arabian Nights
With our new Gummi Ship ready to go, it's time to set off in search of new worlds. A pair of suspicious, black hole-looking portals have opened up, and they're just begging to be investigated. One is placed between Traverse Town and Wonderland, and the other between Olympus Coliseum and Deep Jungle - smart positioning which means you can access a portal regardless of your current location. Both routes are pretty comparable from a content perspective, and both wind up in exactly the same location, bringing the crew out near a desert world with a huge palace. This is, of course, Agrabah, taken from one of the most popular films of the Disney Renaissance, Aladdin. Let's disembark and see what awaits us.
Down on the surface, resident villain Jafar is speaking with Maleficent about their plans. The Heartless are currently swarming over the world, looking for its Keyhole. Of less concern to Jafar are the whereabouts of Princess Jasmine, but he soon changes his tune when Maleficent explains that she is one of seven "Princesses of Heart", needed to open the "final door". These nebulous terms will likely be fully explained in due course, but for now, Jafar summons a group of Heartless to search for her. Maleficent offers some advisory words about the dangers of becoming over-reliant on darkness and the Heartless, but Jafar brushes them off with a laugh and walks away. Jasmine, hiding behind a market stall nearby, hears the whole exchange.
The cutscene abruptly shifts to active gameplay, and if Deep Jungle had the slowest build-up, Agrabah easily has the fastest - we're immediately beset by Heartless. I notice two things here. On the positive side of the equation, the Heartless designs here are just as good as those in Deep Jungle. The Bandits and Fat Bandits that litter the city streets are very world-appropriate in their design, adorned with turbans, vests and curled-toe shoes, and carrying deadly scimitars as weapons. The downside is that the plaza in which we're currently fighting is not designed for combat. In fact, all of the zones that make up the city portion of Agrabah feel very hemmed in, making it difficult to create breathing space while fighting, and also making things difficult for the camera, which invariably ends up too close to the action and ruins the player's situational awareness.
Fighting their way through the narrow city streets, Sora, Donald and Goofy are funnelled by a series of roadblocks into a nearby alleyway, where they meet Jasmine for the first time. She gives us the full backstory, explaining that Jafar has overthrown her father, the Sultan, and seized control of Agrabah in his search for the Keyhole. She had been imprisoned in the palace, but was helped to escape by someone named Aladdin. As she finishes her story, Jafar shows up and sets his Heartless on the group. Sora and co. manage to buy Jasmine enough time to escape, but lose both her and Jafar in the process. With no indication of where to go next, I guess we're reduced to wandering around in search of the next story beat. I wasn't expecting to have Deep Jungle flashbacks this soon...
There's a surprising amount of verticality to the design of Agrabah's city zones, with multiple paths leading between the different areas at various heights. While I've complained about the jumping and platforming in Kingdom Hearts already, Agrabah manages to mitigate a lot of potential frustration through its level design. Unlike Deep Jungle, where a misstep could put you back multiple screens, it's quicker and easier to regain the high ground in Agrabah thanks to the multitude of ledges and market stall canopies that can be reached from ground level. This verticality ties into some light puzzle-solving and item-hunting, and while it's nothing particularly strenuous, it's an appreciated change.
The place we should be, as it turns out, is a hideaway inside an old abandoned building. Along with a couple of treasure chests, the crew encounter something out of the ordinary, even by their standards - a flying carpet, pinned to the ground by heavy furniture. Moving the furniture will release it and cause it to fly off towards the desert, giving a slight clue as to our next destination. The desert can be accessed by leaving through the city gates, where Carpet will be waiting to take Sora, Donald and Goofy across the sea of sand.
Carpet takes the crew to a far corner of the desert, where a young man is trapped in quicksand and in desperate need of help. Another combat challenge ensues, tasking the player with taking down a large number of Bandit Heartless. These new enemies are much easier to deal with and keep track of in this open space, giving the player more opportunities to read and react to their attacks. That's a luxury I intend to make the most of here, since we're starting to enter territory where standard enemies will regularly outspeed Sora, making his default combo feel more sluggish than ever. Bandits are also the first non-boss enemy type we've encountered who can parry Sora's physical attacks, encouraging me to mix some Fire and Blizzard magic in amongst my Keyblade swings.
When a certain number of Bandits have been defeated, a cutscene plays showing the young man hoisting himself out of the quicksand, rubbing an old oil lamp, and wishing for the Heartless to disappear. A huge blue genie erupts from the spout of the lamp, rolls up his invisible sleeves, and dismisses the remaining Heartless with a single click of the fingers. Based on that display, I guess he didn't really need our help after all. The young man introduces himself as Aladdin, thanks Sora for coming to his rescue, and explains what he was doing out in the desert. He came all the way out here to explore the Cave of Wonders in search of the magic lamp he now holds. Whoever holds the lamp becomes the master of the genie inside, granting him three wishes. Aladdin intends to use his wishes to become a prince and win the heart of a princess named Jasmine. The mention of her name suddenly jogs Sora's memory, prompting him to tell Aladdin that his prospective girlfriend is in trouble. With no time to lose, everyone bundles onto Carpet, who sets off back towards Agrabah. En route, Aladdin promises to free Genie from his servitude to the lamp when Jasmine is saved.
Now that we've met all the key players in Agrabah, it might be a good time to talk about this world's voice acting. On the whole it's pretty darn good, with almost all the film's actors reprising their roles here - Scott Weinger voices Aladdin, Linda Larkin is Jasmine, Jonathan Freeman reprises Jafar's memorable drawl, and even Gilbert Gottfried comes back as the wise-cracking parrot Iago. The major noticeable omission here is Robin Williams as the Genie, and although Dan Castellaneta (who voiced Genie in the direct-to-video sequel Return of Jafar, but is probably best known as the voice of Homer Simpson) does an admirable job as understudy, Williams' absence is felt. The voice acting is a little more consistent here as well, with only a couple of lines coming off as rushed due to odd intonation. More than any other world so far, Agrabah has nailed the feel of its film origins with its voice acting.
Since this is also the point at which he becomes selectable as a world-specific ally, let's quickly talk about Aladdin from a gameplay standpoint. Much like Tarzan, his active combat abilities are very combat-oriented, using his limited MP to deal additional damage to enemies with his scimitar. In that respect, also like Tarzan, he's best suited as a replacement for Goofy in the party. What I only noticed on this playthrough is that Aladdin's support abilities play extremely well into his status as a "street rat" in the film. They're almost exclusively centred around money and treasure, including abilities like Jackpot (earn more Munny from battles), Lucky Strike (increase the drop rate of rare items) and Treasure Magnet (pull in orbs and items dropped by defeated enemies from further away). It's a very clever allusion to his status as a thief through the abilities he possesses.
On returning to Agrabah, a different set of paths have been blocked, impeding the group's progress towards the palace. If you didn't get acquainted with the rooftops of Agrabah before, it's now mandatory. The aim here is to explore the city above ground and find keyhole-shaped switches. Using these switches will open various locked gates, allowing the party to access old areas from new perspectives, as well as different areas altogether. It's a little reminiscent of the Bizarre Room from Wonderland, except not quite as confusing since there's a logical progression to everything, and at no point does the orientation of the city completely shift.
Eventually Sora will unlock a gate which leads to the front of the palace. There he meets Jafar, who has found Jasmine and his holding her captive. Using his second wish, Aladdin wishes for Genie to save her. As Genie swoops in and tries to carry her away, Jafar has his parrot Iago steal the lamp from Aladdin and bring it over to him. No longer under Aladdin's control, Genie drops Jasmine into an empty pot, which becomes a Pot Spider. Summoning a Heartless to keep Sora and Aladdin busy, Jafar disappears, the lamp now in his possession.
Mini-Boss - Pot Centipede - Agrabah is filled with bosses and mini-bosses, and here is our first - a giant centipede whose body is comprised of the Pot Spiders we've already been fighting up to this point. The head and tail are its primary weak points, and each end of the Centipede is adorned with a pair of whip-like antennae which serve as its main weapon. These antennae will glow when an attack is inbound, giving the player a brief window to get out of range before being hit. As for strategy, the trick is to try and break the Centipede into its constituent parts, since it's much less mobile when it's in pieces. The most reliable method for achieving this seems to be a critical hit to the head, which will send the Pot Spiders that make up its body flying in all directions. For this reason, it might be worth giving up the Jungle King (which does more damage, but lowers Sora's critical hit chance) and equipping the classic Kingdom Key instead. I also found the Ripple Drive ability very effective in this fight, since its area-of-effect properties helped me to take out multiple Pot Spiders with single combos. Your reward for beating the Pot Centipede is a Ray of Light accessory.
After the battle, Jasmine is nowhere to be found. A maniacal disembodied laugh from Jafar is apparently enough to tell Aladdin that their next destination is the desert. Carpet carries the team back to where we first encountered Aladdin, and a new threat rises from the sand. Anyone who grew up watching Aladdin is likely to be hit pretty hard by this next cutscene, as Sora, Donald, Goofy and Aladdin watch the entrance to the Cave of Wonders emerge right in front of them. All is not as it should be, however, and we have another battle on our hands before we can enter.
Mini-Boss - Tiger Head - Another interesting mini-boss fight, we have to knock the power of darkness out of the Cave of Wonders' eyes before it will allow us to pass through its mouth into the caverns below. Its weak points, therefore, are its purple glowing eyes. Although initially out of reach, the Tiger Head will lower its mouth into the sand periodically, bringing its eyes into range. In terms of attacks to watch out for, the Tiger Head only really has one - it shoots homing balls of dark energy from its eyes at regular intervals. The real threat here comes from the numerous Bandits, Air Soldiers and Fat Bandits that spawn throughout the battle. Donald, Goofy and/or Aladdin will minimise the amount of time these additional Heartless spend focusing on Sora for as long as they can stay alive, but it still pays to be aware of your surroundings at all times during this fight.
It's a good idea to have Sora equipped with the Hurricane Blast ability at this stage if you have it, plus an Aerial Combo Plus to prolong the amount of time Sora can stay airborne and attacking the eyes. If timed well, it's also possible to catch a lift on the Tiger Head's nose as it rises out of the sand, giving Sora plenty of time to wail on those eyes while perched on the bridge of its snout. Another viable alternative is to summon Simba when the Tiger Head's nose is down in the sand - this will bring both of its eyes (as well as a bunch of the minion Heartless) within range of his Proud Roar, letting you deal some decent damage. When both eyes have been subdued, the battle ends, and the team are at last able to pass into the Cave of Wonders.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the Cave of Wonders is one of the best level environments from any of Kingdom Hearts' Disney-inspired worlds. Not only is it visually consistent with the environments seen in the film, but the level design is some of the most adventurous in the game up to this point. There are two distinct areas within the cave, a linear upper level, and a more maze-like lower level. These two levels have different colour palettes (reds and blues, respectively) making it easy to tell at a glance which level you're on. The upper level is more combat oriented, throwing lots of Heartless at you, while the lower level is quieter and more puzzle-oriented, asking the player to hit switches to open doors and reveal secrets. While there are numerous different paths to take between the two levels, it's never a chore to switch between them, since there's usually a hole nearby to jump down or a staircase nearby to head up. There's a minor level of persistent progression between the two levels as well, with Sora needing to damage a pillar on the lower level to lower it and open a path on the upper level. It's a real step forward in level design, with the only real shame being that the developers didn't do more with the concept.
While progressing through the cave, a cutscene plays showing Jafar in the lamp chamber, using his first wish to make Genie reveal the world's Keyhole. The team arrive on the scene as Jafar is talking with Maleficent about Sora interfering with their plan, mentioning Riku's name in the process. Maleficent disappears before Sora can speak with her, leaving Jafar to deal with the intruders. He explains what the audience already know, but Sora doesn't - that Jasmine is one of seven princesses whose hearts hold the key to opening a door of some kind. There's no opportunity to ask questions, as Jafar makes his second wish and commands Genie to crush them all.
BOSS - Jafar - After the great exploration-based gameplay to reach this point, Jafar is a bit of a let-down as a boss. You fight him in the lamp chamber, a large circular arena with three raised platforms around its perimeter. Jafar will float between these three platforms and periodically attack with one of a number of spells from his staff - either a Blizzard-style spell that fills the centre of the arena, a Fire-element melee attack, or a laser-like beam. All the while, Genie will move around the arena and attack with a slam (pre-empted with a lengthy apology that telegraphs his intentions long before the attack lands).
Provided you keep the aerial combat abilities equipped following the Tiger Head fight, Jafar shouldn't be too tough to take down. Simply jump onto whichever platform he stops near and launch an aerial combo, concluding with Hurricane Blast for maximum damage. After taking a few hits, Jafar will start to transform into a glowing ball of darkness while he floats around. He's impossible to damage in this state, but it's worth sticking close to him to land some attacks when he reverts to his human form. Honestly, this fight is more of a chore than a challenge, with significant periods of waiting around for Jafar to move into position for a good attacking opportunity. Patience will prevail, earning Sora his first magic upgrade (Blizzard to Blizzara, increasing the spell's spread and damage output) in the process.
As Aladdin and Sora rush over to help Jasmine, a desperate Jafar makes his final wish - to become an all-powerful genie himself. Genie obliges, and Jafar's writhing body sinks into a newly-opened crater in the floor of the lamp chamber. Sora quickly follows after him. We should have known this was too easy...
BOSS - Genie-Jafar - The fourth and final boss of Agrabah (for now) is Jafar in his genie form, but he's not our target in this fight. Instead, we're shooting for Iago, who's flying around the arena carrying Jafar's own genie lamp. Honestly, if the previous fight was a chore, this is one is just plain disappointing. Iago is completely defenceless, making the lamp a sitting duck (or should that be sitting parrot?) of a target. Jafar's genie form has a couple of attacks including a close-range arm sweep and the ability to throw balls of volcanic rock over a distance, but since you're rarely close enough to him to trigger the former and the latter is telegraphed several seconds in advance by a voice clip, neither of these attacks should trouble anyone who's already played the game up to this point. As a final hindrance, some areas of the ground in this arena will raise and lower, occasionally putting Iago out of reach. Just be patient, wait for him to change course, and start attacking when he's back in range. For maximum efficiency, keep those aerial combo abilities equipped to really lay the smack down on Jafar's lamp.
Acting as Jafar's master with lamp in hand, Sora returns the villain to his new home. His reward for doing so is another spell upgrade - Fire becomes Fira, increasing its damage output - and the first part of Ansem's Report, the document that the Final Fantasy crew have been referring to, hoping it might hold the secret to getting rid of the Heartless. By the time the team return to the lamp chamber, Jasmine is nowhere to be seen - like Alice in Wonderland, it seems she's been kidnapped by the Heartless. Sora uses his Keyblade to seal the world's Keyhole, just as the entire Cave of Wonders begins to collapse.
What follows is a brief playable carpet-riding sequence that pays homage to one of Aladdin's most iconic scenes, giving the player a small amount of agency as the team escape from the crumbling cave. It doesn't really amount to anything, and the controls are pretty unresponsive which makes it difficult to avoid any of the obstacles in Sora's path, but it's still a really impressive spectacle, especially when you consider this was originally running on the humble PS2. It's actually slightly surprising this wasn't fleshed out more into a full-on mini-game in the same vein as Jungle Slider or Vine Swinging back in Deep Jungle, since it would probably lend itself well to that kind of treatment.
Back in Agrabah, Sora breaks the bad news to Aladdin that he can't come with them on their journey to find Jasmine. To do so would be "meddling" with the world order. Genie urges Aladdin to use his last wish to find Jasmine, but true to his word, Aladdin uses it to free Genie instead. Now no longer a slave to his lamp, Genie decides to go along with Sora of his own volition. Quite why it's alright for Genie to travel with Sora when it isn't okay for Aladdin to do the same isn't really explained, but nobody questions it, so I guess it's okay? Genie thus becomes our second available Summon. Another offensive Summon, he uses a variety of magical spells including Thunder, Gravity and Stop to damage and disable foes as part of his Showtime ability. I don't foresee myself making much use of Genie over the course of the game, since I could use most of these spells more reliably through my own Magic menu.
Alongside a new Summon, Aladdin gifts Sora a new keychain from his Keyblade. Named Three Wishes, it offers a slight attack boost from Jungle King without sacrificing critical hit chance, albeit with a slightly shorter reach. It's a trade-off that's worth it in my opinion, so I waste no time equipping it. Our final reward for clearing Agrabah is the ability to activate green Trinity marks. These marks allow the team to use Trinity Ladder, sitting on each other's shoulders to reach high-up objects. I've seen the green Trinity mark in a few places already, most notably the one on the floor of the Accessory Shop in Traverse Town. Perhaps we should head back and check that out...
Meanwhile, back at Villain HQ, Hades and Maleficent have witnessed the events that occurred in Agrabah. It's revealed that Jasmine was kidnapped not by the Heartless, but by Riku, who's now working in league with Maleficent and the other villains, having been promised that they will help him find what he's searching for. Apparently true to her word, Maleficent seems to suggest that she's located Kairi, and tells Riku to travel with Captain Hook on his ship to find her. Riku senses there's a catch to all this, but Maleficent plays innocent, saying that she only cares about his happiness. Reluctantly, Riku does as he's told...
AGRABAH Thoughts - Much like Deep Jungle did with Tarzan, the events of Agrabah sync up pretty well with the plot of Aladdin. Aladdin meeting Jasmine on the streets of Agrabah, Jafar seizing control of the city, Aladdin acquiring the lamp, befriending the Genie, losing the lamp to Jafar and ultimately defeating him are all story beats from the film that are represented within Kingdom Hearts, albeit with some artistic licence to accommodate the Heartless and the Keyhole as plot points. Agrabah might also be the best instance of character representation in the game so far, with almost all the film's main characters represented and the only notable omission being Jasmine's father, the Sultan.
Aesthetically, Agrabah matches up brilliantly with the feel of the film it's been taken from. The city streets, while cramped and confined, are visually faithful. The stars of the show, though, are Aladdin's House and the Tiger Head that forms the entrance to the Cave of Wonders. Once again Yoko Shimomura's soundtrack is brilliantly on-point, with eastern influences aplenty in both the exploration and battle music that conjure up the feel of Aladdin without directly cribbing from any of the film's big musical numbers. I've also spoken about how most of the Heartless here feel thematically appropriate for the world thanks to their attire and weaponry, but it bears repeating here. All in all, I'd be hard pressed to call Agrabah anything other than the high point of Kingdom Hearts up to this point. It's just a shame about those underwhelming boss fights.
Part 16 - This Band Needs Synthesisers
Back on the World Select screen, two new paths have opened up on the far side of Agrabah, leading to worlds with battle levels of five and six stars. Before heading to either of those, though, Goofy points out it would probably be a good idea to return to Traverse Town and check out that green Trinity mark in the Accessory Shop. Thanks to the addition of the Warp Gummi enabling instant travel to previously visited worlds, backtracking becomes much less of a chore from here on out.
Inside the Accessory Shop, I meet a new face, and it's not the guy who's taken over shop-keeping duties since Cid went back to dealing Gummi blocks. It's Pinocchio, the living puppet who Jiminy Cricket used to look out for on their own world, and he seems to have been helping himself to the shop's stock. He's quick to lie when Jiminy confronts him about it, causing the nose on his face to grow. Jiminy gives him a lecture about telling the truth and listening to his conscience, and Pinocchio promises not to lie again, shrinking his nose back to normal size. It's an interesting little cameo that doesn't really amount to much, but it does remind the player that Jiminy Cricket is actually travelling with them, and also serves to subtly set up the next "world" we'll be visiting.
With Pinocchio dealt with, it's time to activate the green Trinity mark on the floor. This lowers a ladder granting access to the first floor of the shop, which as it turns out is home to a bunch of Moogles, the lovable cat-bear creatures from the Final Fantasy series. They've served many roles in those games, from voodoo doll weaponry and postal workers to actual playable characters, but here in Kingdom Hearts, they're master craftsmen. These Moogles run the Synthesis Shop, a special outlet where the team can hand in loot dropped by enemies in exchange for rare items, accessories and weapons. The more items the Moogles synthesise for Sora, the longer their list of available recipes will become. It's a neat little side quest that rewards exploration and combat with some incredibly useful bits and bobs, although some of the rarest items can be a real pain to get hold of. I'll be engaging with (and writing about) item synthesis once we hit the end-game content in a few weeks' time. For now, I have enough gubbins to craft a handful of healing items and a couple of new accessories.
While we're here in Traverse Town, we may as well check in on some old faces for new items. The first port of call is the Dalmatians' House, where we're gifted another Gummi block for rescuing more puppies (33 down, 66 to go!). The other place worth visiting is the Item Shop, which is now carrying new weapons for Donald and Goofy. In the interest of keeping them within their mage and tank roles respectively, I decide to pick up the Magus Staff for Donald and the Golem Shield for Goofy. After quickly re-tooling my party with their new gear, I head back out to the World Select screen and set off for the world with a five-star battle level.
Part 17 - Sora and the Whale
Flying from Agrabah to the next world is the first time I've noticed a substantial step up in difficulty on these Gummi routes. From here on out, enemy ships and obstacles start taking a lot more damage to destroy, and with our ship's pretty limited arsenal, it proves more effective to try and avoid incoming ships and asteroids than obliterate them. As I near the end of this Gummi route, the HUD clears from the screen and a huge grey bulk appears in the distance. What might initially be mistaken for another asteroid turns out to be (of all things) a giant whale, identified by Jiminy as Monstro. Swimming through space. A quick note to anyone who might have been holding out hope for this game to start making some kind of sense - this is your first and best chance get off the ride. Sora tries to pilot the ship out of its path (allegedly, since he spends a lot of time doing sweet nothing while the whale approaches), but it's too late. Monstro approaches, mouth open, and swallows the Gummi Ship whole.
We're treated to a flashback at this point, depicting Sora and Riku as young children on the Destiny Islands. Sora is convinced there's a monster inside the Secret Place, and gets Riku to come with him to take it out. As it happens, the growling sound heard by Sora is just the wind rumbling around in the cave. Myth debunked, the pair spot the mysterious door at the back of the cavern. They try to open it, but it won't budge. As they leave the cave to check on the new girl at the Mayor's house (presumably Kairi), Riku vows that when they're older, they will leave the island and go on real adventures instead of make-believe ones like their monster hunt...
Sora, Donald and Goofy awaken inside the mouth of Monstro, and it seems they're not the only ones here. Donald spots Pinocchio carrying a Gummi block, and Jiminy insists the team follow him to find out what he's up to. It's never actually explained how Pinocchio came to be inside Monstro only moments after we saw him in Traverse Town. My assumption has always been that he stowed away on the team's Gummi Ship somehow. It turns out Monstro is hosting quite the party on his tongue - alongside everyone else, Pinocchio's father Geppetto is here as well. Pinocchio presents him with the Gummi block, saying they can use it to escape from Monstro. Geppetto explains to Sora that he's been hunting for Pinocchio since their world disappeared, and he ended up swallowed by Monstro in the process. While telling his story, he doesn't notice Pinocchio wander deeper into Monstro, apparently in pursuit of someone else...
Sora and the others give chase, meeting Pinocchio inside the first of many "chambers" that constitute the innards of Monstro. They try to talk him back to Geppetto, but Pinocchio isn't budging and it quickly becomes apparent why. Riku is also inside Monstro (I'm beginning to wonder if there's anyone who isn't inside Monstro at this point), and says he's playing with Pinocchio. When Sora asks about Kairi, Riku challenges him to catch them before he'll reveal what he knows. It's an interesting shift in roles between the two characters here, with Sora taking on the serious tone juxtaposed with Riku's playful mockery. When Sora tries to talk him down, Riku grabs Pinocchio by the arm and retreats even deeper into Monstro.
Visually, I think the inside of Monstro is the most mixed bag the game has presented us up to this point. The Mouth area is rendered in a very realistic style, true to the visuals of Pinocchio, but the "chambers" that make up his innards are rendered in a much more stylised, cartoon-like fashion, with vibrant spots and blobs of colour adorning the walls and floors. I appreciate this stylised approach is more kid-friendly than a realistic, fleshy rendition might be, but it still seems very at odds with the design of his mouth. An unfortunate by-product of this design choice is that navigating inside Monstro is on a hellish par with getting around Deep Jungle. The chambers are numbered from 1 to 6, but there's very little in the sense of a logical progression from one chamber to the next. There are multiple paths and routes to chambers from other chambers, and they don't even run in numeric sequence - our goal here is to get to Chamber 4, but in order to do so we have to pass through Chambers 5 and 6 to reach it. Add to this the fact that all of these chambers look identical thanks to their Mr Blobby-esque interior decor, and players are in for a very perplexing exploration segment here.
Eventually Sora will catch up to Riku, who's once again being manipulated by Maleficent into believing that Sora has abandoned him in favour of the Keyblade and his new friends. Riku questions Sora's loyalty to Kairi, suggesting that if he was serious about saving her, he wouldn't be gallivanting from world to world and showing off his Keyblade at every opportunity. While Sora and Riku argue, a scream off-screen alerts them to the fact that Pinocchio is in trouble. Following the scream into Monstro's Bowels, the pair are met by a monstrous-looking Heartless that has ensnared Pinocchio within its cage-like stomach. Putting aside their differences, Sora and Riku agree to work together to rescue the puppet.
Mini-Boss - Parasite Cage - This is the first of two battles against the Parasite Cage, and since it's notably easier than the second, I'm reducing this one to mini-boss status. In what is a rarity in Kingdom Hearts, this battle sees the three-piece party augmented with a fourth character in the form of Riku. While his actions can't be controlled in any way, he also doesn't have any visible HP bar and (unlike Donald and Goofy) can't be knocked out. This, coupled with the decent damage dealt by his bat-wing sword Soul Eater, makes him a far superior combat ally to Sora's usual accomplices. In terms of strategy, this first encounter with Parasite Cage doesn't demand too much of the player. Its only attacks involve swinging its tentacles back and forth, and these are easily deflected with the correct timing. Chipping down its short health bar shouldn't take too long at all.
Once defeated, Parasite Cage will drop Pinocchio through a hole in the ground and retreat. Riku follows down the hole, and once I regain control of Sora, I do the same. Something that I feel we need to talk about here is that after leaving a zone named Bowels, through a hole in the bottom of the zone, Sora and co. somehow end up back in Monstro's mouth, and are visibly seen falling from above. Now, I'm no marine biologist, but I do know enough to know that the bowels of an animal don't connect directly to the roof of its mouth. Either the level designers on Kingdom Hearts need to learn the basics of biology, or there's something incredibly screwed up about this whale's anatomy.
It seems that the truce between Sora and Riku was short-lived, because the latter is now working on a fresh attempt to kidnap Pinocchio. He claims that a puppet with a heart might hold the key to helping someone who's lost theirs, prompting Sora to ask if he's talking about Kairi. Riku shrugs off his answer and leaves Monstro's mouth via his throat. Desperate for his son to be saved, Geppetto gifts the player a new ability so they can pursue Riku - the ability to High Jump. This marks the first appearance of a shared ability in Kingdom Hearts. These abilities are linked directly to traversal, and although they need to be equipped like individual character abilities, doing so does not cost any AP. High Jump, as its name suggests, adds extra height and distance to Sora's default jump, allowing him to reach previously inaccessible areas. While it doesn't improve the feel of the game's cumbersome platforming, it does make things slightly more forgiving by giving the player that extra bit of air-time to play with. Once equipped, it's very unlikely you'll ever turn it off.
The addition of High Jump, combined with the water level in Monstro's mouth being lowered, allows me to access a number of platforms and treasure chests that were previously out of reach. Not only that, but it allows me to reach the passage to the throat that Riku took Pinocchio through. Monstro's throat poses a combined platforming and combat challenge, tasking the player with ascending a series of platforms within a cylindrical room, while also throwing several waves of enemies their way with each successive platform reached. The awkward camera makes it incredibly difficult to both ascend and fight, often meaning the best course of action is to stay in place and clear out all the enemies on one platform before attempting to jump to the next. I'd also neglected to mention that Monstro introduces a new minion Heartless in the form of the Search Ghost. They're pretty unremarkable to fight, but I want to acknowledge their ubiquity throughout the next few worlds. Clearly designed with an altogether different world in mind, their overuse in Monstro and other upcoming areas just feels lazy, particularly after the care put into the designs for world-specific Heartless in Deep Jungle and Agrabah.
Reaching the top of the throat puts Sora, Donald and Goofy in Monstro's stomach (seriously, level designers, take a biology class already!). Riku is here with Pinocchio, and he reveals his plan - to sacrifice Pinocchio's heart to the Heartless, in the hope that his twisted experiment will show him how he can help Kairi. Riku offers his hand to Sora as an ally, saying they can save her if they join forces, but Sora takes up his Keyblade in defiance. He knows Riku is on the wrong side in this fight, and isn't prepared to join him. As Riku leaves through a portal of darkness, the Parasite Cage from before descends into the arena, looking for a rematch.
BOSS - Parasite Cage - While the Parasite Cage was a pushover before, it won't go down so easily this time. In addition to a much larger HP bar, Parasite Cage brings a few new moves to table this time around including a full-body swing and an acid breath attack. This breath attack is lethal, since as well as dealing damage on contact, it will also inflict a poison-like status effect on Sora, sapping his health over time for a few seconds after contact. The new location of this second fight is also worth noting, since the outer edges of the floor are covered with stomach acid that can inflict the same poison-style status effect on Sora. Finally, it has a new weak point - a ball of darkness held inside its cage-like stomach, where Pinocchio was trapped before.
In light of Parasite Cage's change of tactics, we're going to have to change ours too. Using raised platforms around the outer edge of the arena, the player needs to target its head with aerial combos and magic attacks. Dealing a sufficient amount of damage to the head will cause its top half to topple back, opening its stomach and exposing the darkness within to Sora's Keyblade for a few precious seconds. After a while the Parasite Cage will recover and it's a case of rinse and repeat. Parasite Cage will become more aggressive as the battle progresses, increasing use of its acid breath attack to try and put the player on the back foot. Staying mobile and using the raised platforms to flank it is the best way to stay safe, attacking little and often between its own onslaughts.
Defeating the Parasite Cage gives Sora and Donald access to the Stop spell. This passive spell will cause enemies to freeze in their tracks, leaving them open to attack. Although enemies cannot be defeated while stopped, they will still accrue damage, which will then be dealt in full once the Stop spell wears off. It's a useful support spell for crowd control, more so at this point than towards the end-game content, and also has some specialist uses which I'll address at the appropriate points in this series. Learning Stop gives the team access to the full set of seven spells present in Kingdom Hearts, meaning all magic learned from here on out will be upgrades to existing spells.
After the fight, the action follows Riku's return to Captain Hook's ship. He's found Kairi, and she has indeed lost her heart. Maleficent believes it was taken by the Heartless, but says there may be a way to recover it. By gathering seven maidens of the purest heart, known as the Princesses of Heart, it will be possible to open a door to the heart of all worlds. Beyond this door, Maleficent says, Riku will likely find the wisdom needed to restore Kairi's heart to her body. She also bestows upon Riku the ability to control the Heartless, giving Riku another weapon to use in his pursuit of the seven princesses.
The battle inside Monstro's stomach causes him a bit of internal discomfort. The huge whale lets loose an enormous sneeze, firing Sora, Donald, Goofy and the Gummi Ship out of his mouth and back into Gummi-space. There's no sign of Geppetto and Pinocchio, although I have a feeling this isn't the last we'll see of the inventor and his walking, talking puppet. The Gummi Ship drifts back towards Agrabah, and puts me back on the World Select screen. Looks like we'll have to set off for that world with the five-star battle level next time.
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Once again, apologies for the delay in bringing this week's episode to you. The delay in processing last week's episode had me playing catch-up, but I'm now all square once again, and should be back to Monday releases from next week's instalment. As always, if you have any thoughts on the sections of the game covered in today's blog, please share them with me by dropping a comment below. I'll be back next week to cover the second Coliseum tournament and visits to both Atlantica and Halloween Town. Until then, thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Kingdom Hearts Final Mix (PS4)
AUTHOR'S NOTE - Apologies for the delay in getting this blog up folks. Monday ended up being an incredibly busy day as I bought myself my first car, after passing my driving test last month. I got so tied up with reading paperwork and organising insurance that I wasn't able to finish this episode on schedule. I'll be returning to Monday releases going forward.
Hey there folks. It's time for another dose of Square-Enix/Disney crossover madness as a new episode of the Keyblade Chronicles gets underway. Roll title card!
As always, a quick preamble to remind you that this is the latest episode in a series chronicling my efforts to play through the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise before the release of Kingdom Hearts III in January 2019. We're still pretty close to the start of our adventure, but if you intend to follow along, it's best to start from the beginning. There are handy navigation links at the top of this blog to take you either to the previous episode, or to the main episode hub (which also contains a more in-depth explanation of what this series is and why I'm writing it). If you're all caught up, then by all means read on!
This week's instalment will see us visit the final world in the first group, Tarzan's Deep Jungle, then head back to Traverse Town to move the overall story along. After that we'll tie up a few loose ends and pay another visit to Olympus Coliseum before wrapping up this part of the journey.
Part 10 - In the Jungle, the Terrible Jungle
Last time we were with Sora, Donald and Goofy, they'd just departed from Olympus Coliseum, having defeated Cerberus in the arena and foiled Hades' plan to eradicate Hercules in the process. That leaves just one unexplored location currently charted on the World Select menu, so that's where the newly-dubbed "junior heroes" will be heading next. Being as the worlds are arranged in a circle, this next destination is accessible from either Wonderland or Olympus Coliseum, and both Gummi Ship routes are pretty comparable - they both feature more obstacles that require manoeuvring to avoid, and for the first time enemy ships are equipped with projectile weapons. Even with these extra hurdles, both these routes can be cleared pretty comfortably with the default Kingdom Gummi Ship, so we won't be building a new one just yet.
The final world of this initial set is Deep Jungle, a beautiful green world full of trees and waterfalls. Sora is keen to land here and look for Riku and Kairi, but Donald wants to keep going, sure that the King would never visit such a backwater world. A fight breaks out in the cockpit, Sora seizes the controls, and the Gummi Ship crash lands in the jungle. This scene (and without foreshadowing too much, this whole world) help to establish and develop the friendship dynamic between Sora and Donald. Both characters clearly have their own agendas and believe their respective quests to be more important than that of the other. Hence this argument breaking out. However, there is also a level of respect and friendship between them, even if they're reluctant to acknowledge it. This dynamic plays perfectly into Donald's hot-headed, but ultimately caring character. It's a shame that Goofy is such a non-entity in this trinity by comparison.
Sora wakes up after the crash landing, separated from Donald and Goofy and alone in a rickety old treehouse. He's thrown almost instantly into a fight against a vicious leopard. Although technically a mini-boss, I won't give this fight its own paragraph for two reasons - first, the fight is so short as to be insignificant, and second, we'll be engaging in a proper mini-boss fight with this creature later in the chapter. All that's really worth remarking here is that once again, Sora doesn't have to win the fight for the story to progress, although losing will forfeit some experience. However the fight ends, the leopard is ultimately chased away by the arrival of a wild man wielding a spear. Sora thanks him, and although there appears to be something of a language barrier between the two of them, they're able to introduce themselves to each other. This fellow's name is Tarzan. Sora asks Tarzan if he's seen his friends - initially referring to Donald and Goofy, he quickly changes his mind and asks about Riku and Kairi instead. Again, the language barrier doesn't help here - Tarzan seems to understand what Sora is asking, but can't reply in English, only in gorilla-speak. Hoping Tarzan will be able to lead him to his friends, Sora leaves the Tree House with him.
Meanwhile, Donald and Goofy are elsewhere in Deep Jungle. A gorilla runs past and drops a Gummi block, which catches Donald's attention - maybe the King is here after all? They don't have time to discuss it though, as the gorilla is followed by an imposing man carrying a shotgun. Before we can find out their fate, the action shifts back to Sora and tasks the player with following Tarzan. There are a couple of ways to leave the Tree House, but in this instance I always opt for the most flamboyant - leaping over the edge into the trees below. The reason for this is simple - tree slidin', baby! Deep Jungle features a playable sequence where Sora can slide along tree branches, similar to how Tarzan does in the Disney movie. While not particularly challenging from a gameplay perspective, it's at least something a little bit different (and preferable to navigating Deep Jungle in the conventional way, as we'll soon discover). Later on this sequence becomes a bona fide mini-game, which I'll cover in due course.
Deep Jungle is also the first world in Kingdom Hearts where Sora can choose to swap out either Donald or Goofy for a world-specific guest ally - in this case, that's Tarzan. Generally speaking, I don't usually engage with these world-specific allies in Kingdom Hearts. Aside from the fact that they don't usually have any distinguishing combat features to set them apart, there's also the downside that you can't activate any Trinity marks while using them. For this playthrough, however, I'm going to break that personal rule and make use of them, if only to make this series as comprehensive as possible. In Tarzan's case, he's a physically-oriented character with attack moves comparable to Goofy's, plus unique moves which act as equivalents of the Cure and Aero spells - this is magic I haven't learned yet, which could make him pretty useful as a support character in upcoming fights. His support abilities are geared towards damage dealing, including Berserk (which boosts attack power when HP is critically low) and Critical Plus (which increases the chance of landing a critical hit). When the opportunity comes, I'll be swapping him out for Goofy to keep the party reasonably well-rounded.
Completing the tree sliding route puts Sora and Tarzan at the Porters' campsite. Inside the tent, Sora meets Tarzan's friend Jane and is reunited with Donald and Goofy, who've been escorted here by Clayton, the gun-toting gentleman we saw earlier. Sora and Donald are initially thrilled to see each other and run to meet, before remembering that they're supposed to be mad at each other right now. They both announce that they're staying in Deep Jungle - Sora because Tarzan seems to know where his friends are, and Donald and Goofy on account of the Gummi block discovery. Since they're both staying, they reluctantly agree to work together... "for now!".
Jane seems to think that the key to unlocking what Tarzan is saying in gorilla-speak is to show him some pictures, and see if any of them correspond to what he's thinking of. This is the trigger for yet another fetch quest. See, the slides for her projector have all been lost, and are now scattered around the campsite. Guess it's down to me to find them all then, eh? Maybe it's latent memory from my most recent playthroughs, but this fetch quest doesn't seem quite as bad as the others. All the items are in a single zone of the map, for a start. They also subtly animate by spinning on the spot, making it easier to pick them out against the stationary environment. It's still significantly lacking in both fun and challenge, but at least it wasn't downright aggravating. There are six of the slides to find in total, and once Sora has them all, he can return to Jane and have her pop them into the projector.
While exploring the campsite, players may also engage in a couple of minor puzzles (although as in the previous episode, I feel like I'm being generous by using that word) dotted around the campsite. Various items hold instructions for completing a pair of scientific experiments, and if Sora carries them through, he'll be rewarded with an extra Ether and Hi-Potion. While the recipes imply that a Potion is needed as a base ingredient, I'm pretty sure I had run out of Potions at this point but was still able to complete the experiments. It's a minor distraction, but a cool extra bit of detail nonetheless.
Back in the tent, Jane shows Tarzan her slides. One of them, an image of a castle, stirs up some feelings inside of Sora. Despite having never seen or been to the castle before, it feels familiar to him somehow. For what feels like the thousandth time in this series, all I can say about this is that it's worth remembering, since it ties into something that will happen much later. Sadly, none of the slides have the same effect on Tarzan, and Sora is still none the wiser as to where Riku and Kairi could be. Losing patience, Clayton reasons that if Sora's friends are anywhere, they must be with the gorillas, and demands that Tarzan takes them all to the nesting grounds. Tarzan is reluctant at first, but his trust for Sora wins out and he agrees. (perhaps a little too easily, since we've only been on-world for fifteen minutes?). Sounds like we're going to see the gorillas!
...or at least, we would be if we knew where we were going. If players haven't already found out by now, this is likely the point where they'll realise that Deep Jungle is one of the most poorly-designed levels in all of video games. While each of its individual 'zones' is competently constructed enough to navigate on its own, there's no logical or memorable progression in the way they connect to each other. This means that unless you've memorised the world layout perfectly, it can be difficult to work out which direction to travel in to reach your intended destination. The same was true of Wonderland to an extent, but Wonderland got the other piece of the puzzle right - namely player guidance. The Cheshire Cat was a serviceable guide, his riddles leading the player towards the Lotus Forest or Bizarre Room as appropriate, making sure the next bit of story was never too far out of reach. In Deep Jungle, there is no such guide. Tarzan, the one character who knows the jungle and could have acted in this role, is instead tied up in the party select system and doomed to either follow Sora's aimless wandering or not appear on-screen at all. The final nail in Deep Jungle's navigational coffin is its colour palette, which makes damn sure you're never in a month of Sundays going to spot that one green vine stuck to that equally green backdrop in a completely inconspicuous way, so you can climb it to reach the next area. Moving around Deep Jungle is hell. Even as someone who has played this game five times before and has more than a working knowledge of how this whole world fits together and which transitions trigger which story beats, I recognise that it is a nightmare to traverse. I think that's why this world is so widely cited by players of Kingdom Hearts as their least favourite in the game.
At any rate, our heroes' correct course takes them from the campsite to the Hippos' Lagoon. From there it's up a near-invisible trail of ivy and across a sequence of swinging vines to trigger the next story sequence. Tarzan pleads with Kerchak, the leader of the gorillas, to allow his new friends into their home. Kerchak disapprovingly turns away. At this point the player is expected to return to the Tree House where we started (Donald does suggest as much, in the game's defence), but doesn't give a clear idea of how to get there. Since most players (myself included) will have followed Tarzan in jumping from the Tree House balcony when they first arrived, resulting in what is very much a one-way branch-sliding trip to the campsite, they're essentially being asked to navigate their way back to a landmark they've visited before, but with no frame of reference to do so. In addition to this, after this cutscene, the game respawns the player in a completely different location from where they entered this zone, screwing up their orientation and making navigation even more difficult. Thankfully I'm able to remember that beyond the vines lies more climbable ivy leading to the Climbing Trees, and from there the path to the Tree House can be accessed.
Sora, Donald, Goofy and Tarzan arrive at the Tree House just in time to stop Clayton from shooting Terk, a member of Tarzan's gorilla family. The sly marksman claims he was aiming for a snake that was about to attack the gorilla, but nobody is buying his excuse. Back at the camp (after yet more aimless wandering, since the game never indicates that's where it wants you to go), Clayton parts ways with Jane, Tarzan and the others. In a cutscene that plays out away from any of the heroes, he gets a traditional villain's monologue, confessing his intention to hunt the gorillas. Having checked up on the game's cast, I was surprised to find out that British national treasure Brian Blessed reprised his role as Clayton for Kingdom Hearts, but given Blessed's usual calibre as an actor, I wouldn't have been surprised to learn this was the work of a sound-alike. His performance is another one of those that feels phoned in, with some unnatural intonation that suggests his lines were read individually and out of context from one another.
His tirade is cut short when he's distracted by something in the trees, causing him to anxiously fire his gun. Sora, Donald, Goofy and Tarzan rush out of the tent to investigate, but there's no sign of Clayton anywhere, only a bunch of Heartless. I think Deep Jungle might be the world with the longest combat down-time in all of Kingdom Hearts. From the opening fight with Sabor to here, it's solely exploration (and cruddy exploration at that) with no combat to be had at all. This contributes to making the world feel slow and boring, and is likely another factor in why so many players turn off after reaching Deep Jungle. Slightly more positive are the designs of the Heartless themselves, which in this world have taken the thematic form of monkeys. The burly, hard-hitting Powerwilds and the super-fast Bouncywilds feel like natural fits for Deep Jungle's environments, and the latter in particular pose a unique challenge in the form of avoiding the banana skins they drop. Stepping on one will cause Sora to comically slip, and not-so-comically drop a large amount of Munny, so you have to watch where you place your feet against these tricksy Heartless.
Our next challenge sees Sora and co. exploring the whole of Deep Jungle to rescue Tarzan's gorilla family from the attacking Heartless. Every emancipated ape will gift the party with another Gummi block which can be used later for ship-building. While this combat challenge should ramp up the fun factor of Deep Jungle significantly, it doesn't, and here's why I think this is. First, it involves more aimless running around a world that is already a pain in the backside to navigate. Second, there is no clear indication of when the task is over - most players will only likely realise there are no more gorillas to save after performing several sweeps of Deep Jungle, adding to the frustration factor from the first point. And third, once you're sure you've saved all the gorillas, there's no way of knowing where to head to move the story along until you either stumble across the next event trigger or look it up in a guide. These may all sound like little nitpicks but believe me, the frustration they cause adds up.
There are five gorillas to save in total, and once they're all free, Sora has to return to Jane at the campsite to trigger the next story beat. A note to anyone out there who may be stuck in Deep Jungle - if you're not sure where to go, head back to the tent at the campsite, since that's where most of this world's story stuff unfolds. From here, a gunshot and camera pan direct the player (at last, some competent direction!) to the Bamboo Thicket. There they find Clayton's pipe, abandoned, and a nasty surprise. The leopard from before is back, and ready for a rematch.
Mini-Boss - Sabor - The closest parallel I can draw for the fight with Sabor is the battle against Cloud at Olympus Coliseum. Like Cloud, Sabor is fast, his primary attack is a lunging forward strike, and if it connects you'll feel it. Also like Cloud, his charging pounce leaves him open to attacks from the sides and behind. With a little patience, Sabor can be defeated pretty easily. However, he can also be defeated very easily with almost no patience at all. Players of the Final Mix version who pick the Dream Rod in the opening tutorial should by now have access to Ripple Drive, an area-of-effect combo-finishing move with power tied to Sora's maximum MP. For some reason, this attack triggers a major knockback effect on Sabor, seemingly breaking whatever action he might be in the middle of and sending him hurtling across the Bamboo Thicket. His recovery time from this knockback is, roughly, the amount of time it takes Sora to unleash his standard three-hit combo. This means you can essentially stun-lock Sabor for significant periods of time with a constant barrage of combos ending with Ripple Drive. Using this strategy I had no problems putting the big bad kitty down and claiming my White Fang accessory reward.
After the fight, a brief cutscene from Terk's perspective shows her racing to Jane's tent, past an army of Heartless that have gathered at the campsite. The two characters cower as a dark shadow looms over them. The team arrive to find them missing, and Tarzan senses that they've been taken somewhere near the Tree House (honestly, this little bit of player direction feels like a small mercy after everything that's happened so far). This means another trip via the Hippos' Lagoon and the irksome vines to the Climbing Trees, where Jane and Terk have been trapped behind a plant controlled by the power of darkness. Much like the initial fight with Sabor, this encounter isn't worthy of a mini-boss annotation. The game straight-up tells you that the black fruit hanging from the tree is your target, encouraging you to whack it with your Keyblade from the get-go. The fruit is defended by a team of constantly-spawning Powerwild Heartless, but provided your allies can stay alive long enough to draw their attention, the fruit is easily dealt with.
After being freed, Jane tells Sora and Tarzan that it was Clayton who abducted them and brought them here, and that he must have gone to hunt down the rest of the gorillas. Guess we need to hurry over to where the gorillas are and save them, huh? Except, once again, Kingdom Hearts doesn't tell us where our next destination within Deep Jungle is. Instinctively, players might head back to the vines, up towards the Tree House, or perhaps even the Treetop section, since these are the zones closest to where they saw Tarzan speaking with Kerchak earlier. The actual destination, however, couldn't be further away - the Cliff, past the Bamboo Thicket where we just fought Sabor, at the complete opposite end of the world. Frustrating gameplay logistics aside, this begs the question - how did Jane and Clayton not find the gorillas if they were hiding out just a short walk away, in one of the easiest areas to reach from their campsite? It's certainly something to ponder as I head over there.
On arrival, Clayton has the gorillas hemmed in up against the cliff, pointing his shotgun at them. The arrival of Sora, Donald, Goofy and Tarzan buys them just enough time to escape. Wordlessly, Clayton turns his gun on the team. "Not Clayton!", Tarzan says, repeating his gorilla-speak from before.
BOSS - Clayton/Stealth Sneak - This fight is split up into two distinct stages. The first pits the party against Clayton and a small entourage of Powerwilds. These support Heartless don't respawn and are fairly quickly dealt with, so it's worth getting them out of the way for a little extra experience. Clayton himself doesn't really boast much in the way of attacks. He can shoot you, dealing a moderate amount of damage, but his gunfire is pretty easy to avoid providing you make use of Dodge Roll. As with Sabor, Clayton seems very susceptible to the knockback power of Ripple Drive, making it a good choice for this fight.
After chipping off about a third of his HP, a brief cutscene will play. The cliff crumbles as an invisible monster enters the arena. Clayton hops on its back, and now the real fight begins. Stealth Sneak is, quite literally, a different beast altogether from any other Heartless fought so far. For a start, it has chameleon-like camouflage, enabling it to turn invisible in battle. Mercifully, you can still use the lock-on feature to target Stealth Sneak while it's invisible. It has a variety of attacks that it will unleash while Clayton unloads his shotgun on you simultaneously. Its primary physical attacks are a forwards lunge, which is obviously telegraphed when visible but nigh-impossible to predict when invisible, and a backwards leg kick, which has a less obvious tell and could easily catch players off guard if they try to flank the Heartless. Stealth Sneak can also fire energy balls from its eyes when they begin to glow - these home in on Sora like Trickmaster's fireballs in Wonderland, but thankfully don't travel anywhere near as quickly. Rounding out its attack moves is a wave of fast-moving energy unleashed when it claps its hands together, but which is telegraphed quite openly by its glowing mitts in advance of the attack. Stealth Sneak is a threat from every conceivable angle, and represents the first time I suffered a Game Over in my own current playthrough.
Landing combos on Stealth Sneak will weaken it, eventually causing it to stagger. At this stage one more successful combo will cause the Heartless to throw Clayton off its back, providing an opportunity to land some hits on our actual target. The principal danger here is having to worry about attacks coming from two different angles, since the limitations of the camera make it very difficult to keep an eye on both enemies at once. Clayton will periodically try to heal himself with Potions, but his healing animation can be broken with an attack to keep his HP in check. When his HP drops down to about a third of its total, he'll hop back on the Stealth Sneak once again - simply adopt the same strategy as before to dislodge Clayton again and chip his health down to nothing. It should be noted that focusing on the Stealth Sneak to take it out first is an equally valid option, with the pro of removing one threat and earning some bonus experience countered by the con of spending extra time doing so.
However you choose to end the battle, a concluding cutscene will play showing Clayton being crushed by the collapsing Stealth Sneak. Sora's reward for this is the Cure spell, providing an alternative means of healing to using Potions and Hi-Potions. It has a pretty lengthy wind-up animation that can be interrupted, cancelling the spell, but this negative can be cancelled out in the Final Mix version of the game by equipping the Leaf Bracer ability. This passive ability actually turns Cure's wind-up into a positive, making it uninterruptible and granting Sora a whole bunch of invincibility frames to play with, which can be a total god-send in stressful combat situations. Cure is a very valuable spell, and I'd wager it spends a significant amount of most people's playthroughs loaded permanently in their L1 quick select menu. I'm guilty of over-reliance on Cure myself, and it's a habit I'm keen to try and break in favour of other strategies for this playthrough. For now though, it's going to take Blizzard's place in the quick select, mapped to the L1+Square combination.
Following the fight, the gorillas return. Kerchak has a slightly bizarre way of thanking Sora, throwing him skywards and up onto a ledge newly created by the Stealth Sneak demolishing the cliff face. This new part of Deep Jungle leads to Tarzan's home, the Waterfall Cavern. This one zone causes more problems for Kingdom Hearts' early-2000s camera than any other location in the game up to this point. A narrow corridor behind a waterfall, with awkwardly spaced ledges that demand as much vertical movement as they do horizontal, I fought more with the camera in here than I have with any enemy in the game thus far. It gets stuck under ledges, it gets stuck on top of ledges, it refuses to pass through the waterfall, it shifts perspective without warning as you attempt to make already-awkward jumps... It is appallingly bad. I found the best way to navigate this abomination of a zone was to make frequent use of the first-person camera to adjust my perspective between jumps.
At the deepest part of the Waterfall Cavern, Tarzan leads Sora to the Keyhole of Deep Jungle, the heart of this world. It's here that Jane finally decodes Tarzan's gorilla-speak - he's been trying to say "heart", and that Sora's friends are always with him, in his heart. If he loses his heart, like Clayton did to the Heartless, then he will lose his friends as well. Sora is understandably disappointed by this anticlimactic revelation, but it does teach him a lesson. He and Donald apologise to each other for the way they've been acting since they crashed on this world, and Goofy forces the trio together in a hug of camaraderie. It's a moment that serves to further develop and strengthen the bonds between these three new allies, making their growing friendship more believable to the player, and in that respect it's important for the overall story of Kingdom Hearts, too. Sora seals the Deep Jungle Keyhole, and just like in Wonderland, it releases another strange Gummi block. The scene closes with a slightly awkward suggestion that Terk has a crush on Donald, which is perhaps a little bit more inter-species romance than my mind is willing to take in a post-Sonic '06 world.
Back at Villain HQ, we're treated to another story-progressing cutscene. It seems Maleficent and her circle of bad guys have been keeping an eye on Sora's antics in the jungle. Apparently the Heartless were drawn to Tarzan's world by the darkness in Clayton's heart, and his weakness allowed them to consume him. One of the villainous troupe, revealed to be Jafar from Aladdin, expresses some concern about Sora finding the world's Keyhole, but Maleficent doesn't seem too concerned. She's more preoccupied with their "other plan", one involving "the Princesses". A final cut reveals that Wonderland's Alice is now in their custody, before the action cuts back to our protagonists in Deep Jungle.
As is becoming tradition upon completing worlds, the local inhabitants have some parting gifts for Sora and co.. Tarzan bequeaths the Jungle King keychain to Sora, an attachment for his Keyblade that allows it to take on a different form and new properties. Replacing the Kingdom Key with the Jungle King gives Sora's Keyblade a slightly longer reach and a bit more raw attack power, although it comes at the expense of landing less critical hits. For now, the extra strength is a fair enough trade-off for me to equip it right away. The trio also learn a new Trinity move - Trinity Charge, denoted by Red Trinity marks. This move enables Sora, Donald and Goofy to collectively charge their way through weak walls and other obstacles. There aren't many opportunities to use it, but some are story-critical.
The only thing left to talk about before we re-board the Gummi Ship and leave Deep Jungle behind are the two mini-games located here. The first, which I've already alluded to, is the Jungle Slider mini-game. Once the Keyhole has been locked, it's possible to attempt tree-sliding runs which task you with picking up a number of pieces of fruit along the way. Picking up all the pieces of fruit on one route unlocks the next, and so on, up to a total of five routes. Each of these routes is also timed, and although there's no limit, it does add the optional challenge of trying to beat your best times. Finally there's the Vine Swinging mini-game, which (unsurprisingly) tasks Sora with making it from one end of the vine-filled canopy to the other in the quickest time possible. There are four different "courses" here, although I use the term loosely since all four take place in the same space. What differs is the configuration of vines, with some being replaced by snakes that you can only hold onto for a few seconds before they fall out of the trees, taking you with them. It's a frustrating fail state that forces you to climb all the way back up to the vines for another attempt. While I enjoy the Jungle Slider mini-game for its different approach and moderate challenge, the Vine Swinging isn't worth engaging with beyond adding entries to Jiminy's Journal.
Having exhausted all possibilities here for now, I head for the nearest save point and return to the Gummi Ship. Goofy and Donald have no idea what these strange Gummi blocks might be used for, but they seem to think Leon might know more. Back to Traverse Town we go!
DEEP JUNGLE Thoughts - In terms of fidelity to its source material, I think Deep Jungle is the most successful example of a Disney world being integrated into Kingdom Hearts thus far. Having recently re-watched Tarzan, the first clear indication of this is the visuals. Deep Jungle's environments and vistas are strikingly faithful to the film, with the standout example of this being the gorgeously detailed Tree House environment. The colour palettes are great too, mixing vivid greens, earthy yellows and browns, and brilliant blue skies and waters to evoke the same visual style as the film. The soundtrack is less on-point with that of the film, although that might be for the best given most of Tarzan's original music consists of 80s-sounding pop rock with Phil Collins on singing duties. Yoko Shimomura's original music fits the jungle aesthetic well, with plenty of tribal drums and pan-pipe melodies driving things along. Deep Jungle is without a doubt one of the best worlds in Kingdom Hearts aesthetically, which makes it all the more heartbreaking that it's one of the worst to play.
Tarzan is also a pretty great fit story-wise for the Kingdom Hearts canon, since the film's core themes overlap strongly with those of the game. Both explore themes of identity and friendship, and those parallels are used to drive the world's story, particularly in reference to the growing friendship between Sora, Donald and Goofy. The film also features a touching monologue from mother gorilla Kala about how our hearts are what make us similar, a speech semi-echoed by Tarzan when he talks about the friends in our hearts near the end of the world's storyline. It's a shame more of the film's characters aren't present here - while the core trinity of Tarzan, Jane and Clayton are here, it would have been nice to see Professor Porter too. While I understand the reasoning behind it, since none of the animal characters in Deep Jungle are heard to speak, it's a real shame that Rosie O'Donnell wasn't on hand to provide some VO for Terk.
Deep Jungle marks the first instance of a world having tailor-made Heartless to suit its theme. I pointed this out earlier so I won't regurgitate the specifics, but I do appreciate that extra bit of effort on the designers' part to commit to the theme of the world they're recreating. As a final note, I do think it's a shame that Deep Jungle has never been revisited over the course of the franchise since its appearance in the first game. I understand there are licensing issues between Disney and the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the book on which the Tarzan film and Deep Jungle world are based. I just feel like there was a lot of potential in this world that was never fully realised, and it's unfortunate the developers never got another crack at the whip. Deep Jungle is rightly remembered as a pretty terrible world, but that doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to be something much more.
Part 11 - Old Town, New Horizons
Returning to Traverse Town, the team begin their search for Leon. A quick chat with Yuffie, who's standing by the postbox in the town square, reveals that he sometimes likes to train in a secret waterway underneath the town. This cryptic message doesn't tell us exactly where to find him, but it is a start and gives us an excuse to re-explore the town. The spawning Heartless have changed slightly, with the introduction of both Large Bodies and several of the mage-type Heartless, including the Thunder-wielding Yellow Opera and the enemy-healing Green Requiem (which need to be prioritised to stop fights becoming drawn-out Cure-fests). While exploring, I decide to pay a quick visit to Pongo and Perdita in the Second District. We've managed to rescue twenty-four of their ninety-nine pups, earning us two generous rewards that turn out to be additional parts for building Gummi Ships.
This latest pass of Traverse Town gives the team their first chances to use their new Trinity Charge ability. There are three Red Trinities up for grabs in town, with one of them being required to open up the Secret Waterway and progress the story. The Trinity mark is situated in some shallow water next to a grate in the Alleyway behind the Dalmatians' House, one of the few bodies of water in Traverse Town and sure to pique the player's curiosity given Yuffie's clue as to Leon's whereabouts. While most of the game swings wildly between explicitly directing the player and leaving them completely stranded, this strikes a rare middle ground between the two, giving the player some helpful clues and allowing them to intuit the solution.
Inside the Secret Waterway the team find not only Leon, but Aerith too. Sora talks to them about the keyholes he encountered in Wonderland and Deep Jungle. Turns out these Keyholes are important enough to warrant proper noun status - every world has one, and it leads to the heart of that world. It's these Keyholes that the Heartless are seeking in each world - by entering the Keyholes, they can penetrate to the core of each world and corrupt it with darkness, just like what happened with Destiny Islands at the start of the game. Leon and Aerith both stress to Sora the importance of sealing these Keyholes while travelling to other worlds. On the subject of the Gummi blocks, however, they're less talkative. Aerith suggests speaking with Cid over at the Accessory Shop in the First District. Before Sora leaves, Leon gifts him Earthshine, a mysterious stone. He's not sure what it's for, but hopefully its purpose will become clear soon enough.
Back at the Accessory Shop, the team show Cid the Gummi blocks they've found. He identifies them almost immediately as Navigation Gummis, special Gummi blocks which will enable their ship to travel to new worlds beyond even Deep Jungle. I've always appreciated the way Kingdom Hearts accommodates Cid's existing history as an airship pilot in Final Fantasy VII by making him an expert on Gummi ships in this alternate universe. It lends a consistency to his character, making him even more recognisable to Final Fantasy fans. Cid offers to install them on the ship in exchange for a favour. Cid has recently finished restoring a tattered old book for one of the Traverse Town residents, and wants us to deliver it. His directions point us towards a door with a red flame on it, somewhere in the Third District. Sora is only too happy to oblige. From fetch quests to delivery boy - at last, we're moving up in the world!
The flame-adorned door in the Third District won't budge at first, but using a Fire spell on it will grease the hinges and allow Sora to pass through. Behind the door is a cave filled with water, and on an island in the centre stands an odd little cottage. Presumably this is where we're supposed to deliver the book, but there's nobody home right now. Sora starts hearing Kairi's voice, saying the empty room reminds her of the Secret Place back on Destiny Islands. Goofy snaps him out of his hallucination, just in time to see a blue-robed wizard arrive. This is Merlin, and it sounds like he's been expecting us. It turns out Merlin has been in contact with the King, who asked him to train the Key Bearer in the art of magic. Before any training can begin, however, the cottage needs furnishing! In a knowing nod to The Sword in the Stone, a cutscene plays showing Merlin conjuring all of his furniture out of his travel bag. In no time at all, the once-empty room is fully furnished. It turns out Merlin's not the only one here, either - the Fairy Godmother from Cinderella is also residing in Traverse Town, and offers to help the team on their journey as well. Quite what she's doing hiding in Merlin's travel bag disguised as a model carriage is anyone's guess.
With the niceties out of the way, Sora hands over the book to Merlin, who accepts it gratefully and places it on a lectern at the edge of the room. He explains that he doesn't know where the book came from, or what it's about, but he's sure that it holds a great secret. Unfortunately, nobody knows what that secret is, because most of its pages are missing (clearly Cid's restoration work wasn't comprehensive). Maybe if we can find all the missing pages, we'll be able to unlock the secret of the book? I smell a side quest!
Merlin directs us over to the Fairy Godmother, who seems to know something about the Earthshine stone that Leon gave to us earlier. It turns out it's a Summon Gem - the residual spirit of a strong-hearted individual whose world was consumed by darkness. The inconsistencies here have bothered me in recent playthroughs - if this is the fate of strong-hearted people whose worlds are swallowed by darkness, then why didn't Sora become a Summon Gem? Why isn't anyone else in Traverse Town a Summon Gem? How did all of these people escape their worlds with their physical forms intact? One of many questions I'll likely never learn the answer to. With a wave of her wand, the Fairy Godmother releases the spirit trapped inside the stone, giving the team access to their first Summon spell - The Lion King's Simba.
I'll admit up-front that I've never really engaged much with the Summons in Kingdom Hearts. They've always felt more like a novelty to me, an expensive waste of valuable MP to achieve something I could otherwise do much quicker with an attack, spell or item. The fact you have to sacrifice having other allies on the field to make use of them is a major turn-off for me, and since most of the game's biggest combat challenges happen in an environment where you're not allowed to use them, they're never really viable as a crutch either. As with alternative allies, though, I'm determined to immerse myself in every mechanic of the game this time around, and so I'll be making a conscious effort to use Summons more often. Simba is an offensive Summon, costing 2MP to activate and dealing area-of-effect damage with his Proud Roar attack. The damage dealt is determined by a Charge gauge which fills while the Triangle button is held down and empties when Simba roars. It's a useful attack that I could see being useful for crowd control in confined spaces.
As the team leave Merlin's house and return to the Third District, they're beset by another Heartless attack. Before Sora can even think about attacking, the enemies are wiped out in a flurry of swordplay, and standing in their place is none other than Riku! Sora is thrilled beyond belief to see his old friend from home, and Riku seems pretty pleased too. Sadly there's still no sign of Kairi, but Riku seems optimistic that she made it off the island too and is probably looking for both of them as they speak. Riku is clearly keen to re-establish himself as more senior than Sora, but there's too much going against him in this situation - not only is Sora travelling with new friends, he has also been chosen by the Keyblade to be its bearer. When a genuinely thrilled Sora invites Riku to join them on their world-hopping quest, Donald is quick to shoot the idea down. In the argument that ensues, Riku disappears. Sora is disappointed that his friend took off without joining them, but is also glad to know that he's doing okay.
This cutscene is another of my personal favourites as it displays a lot of shifting character dynamics - first Sora's disbelief at being reunited with his friend, followed by more of the established rivalry between them, and the first traces of jealousy forming in Riku after seeing Sora wielding the Keyblade. This seems like the perfect time to mention that although I don't dislike Sora as a character, I do vastly prefer Riku's character arc in this game, and this is the first hint as to why. His position within the narrative, and consequently his feelings and his development as a character, are much more complex than those of Sora. It's these flaws - his jealousy, his pride - that ultimately send him down a very different path from Sora, and while I don't want to get too deep into it right now, I at least want to acknowledge it for the time being. I'll certainly be referring to it again in future episodes.
With nothing else to do, Sora heads to the previously vacant house in the Third District where he agreed to meet Cid after delivering the book. On Sora's arrival, Cid asks if he's ever heard of Maleficent. She's a witch, and apparently the one responsible for the current crop of Heartless attacking Traverse Town, as well as the Heartless invasion that destroyed the Final Fantasy characters' home world nine years ago. Cid reveals that he managed to escape with Leon, Yuffie and Aerith on his Gummi Ship before their world was completely consumed. Leon explains that the ruler of their world, a man named Ansem, had been studying the Heartless and compiled a report from his findings (this, of course, is nothing new - Aerith revealed this on our first visit to Traverse Town). Cid theorises that the report might contain information on how to stop the Heartless for good, but fears that most of its pages are in the clutches of Maleficent.
Meanwhile, the camera cuts outside, where Riku is looking in through the window at Sora. At his side is Maleficent, the very witch we've just been warned about, whispering corrupting ideas into Riku's ear. She tells him that Sora has abandoned him in favour of new friends and invites him to join her, promising that she'll help him to find what he's looking for. As an extension of the previous cutscene, this moment is instrumental in the path Riku is going to take from here on out - full of jealousy and frustration towards Sora and desperate to find Kairi, Maleficent's offer appeals to the weaker part of his heart. Couple this with Riku's willingness to be consumed back on Destiny Islands and it doesn't take a genius to work out that perhaps our silver-haired friend isn't going to prove quite as resilient as Sora in the face of the allure of darkness.
Back indoors, Cid tells the team that the Navigation Gummi is installed and ready to go. He's also installed a Warp Gummi, permitting fast-travel to any previously visited world without needing to re-complete the Gummi Ship route. Before he leaves, Aerith and Yuffie ask Sora to check out the bell on top of the Gizmo Shop - there's supposedly a legend related to ringing the bell three times. Since we're here, we may as well investigate. The Gizmo Shop is located in the Second District - a brightly-coloured indoor environment filled to the brim with waves of Heartless, it's another location in which the camera does not perform well. There are a lot of alcoves and ledges that it can get caught in, on and around, making clearing the enemies within a pretty frustrating exercise (but also a very lucrative one in terms of experience).
Through the other side of the Gizmo Shop is a ladder that leads to the roof. The bell is boarded up, but can be accessed with a Trinity Charge. Ringing the bell will cause the mosaic behind the water feature in the Second District to rotate, and doing so three times will reveal the Keyhole for Traverse Town. Sora hops down from the roof of the Gizmo Shop and prepares to seal the Keyhole, but a nearby Heartless has other ideas...
BOSS - Opposite Armor - After an initial fake-out battle which makes you think you're fighting Guard Armor again, its hands and feet switch places and change shape, creating something altogether more terrifying. While Opposite Armor looks like nothing more than a reconfigured Guard Armor and the concept of the fight is very similar, the specifics are changed up just enough to make this feel like a whole different fight. Opposite Armor's movements are much more unpredictable than Guard Armor's, with much shorter wind-up animations and much more damage output. New to its arsenal for this fight is a devastating flying charge attack, which can quickly turn things sour if it connects with our fragile Sora.
As I said, the basic concept of this fight is very similar to the Guard Armor battle - each individual part of the Armor has its own HP gauge, with the most important one being attached to the torso. As before, it's best to go for the "hands" first, since they have the lowest HP reserves. Once they're out of the way, the "feet" can be focused on. After losing some of its parts, the Opposite Armor will adopt a new strategy - turning its torso into an energy cannon and firing huge homing balls of darkness at Sora and co.. These are difficult to dodge but won't travel through cover, so the two-tiered environment of the Second District can be used to your advantage (one of the few instances in Kingdom Hearts where the environment plays a meaningful role in combat). Flanking the cannon-torso will enable you to wail on it and finish the fight in relative safety.
Our reward for defeating this pile of rust is a new spell - Aero. As a kid, this was a spell I never used, likely because my familiarity with Final Fantasy spells probably led me to expect offensive magic. Instead, the Aero spells in Kingdom Hearts are more akin to Protect, Shell and Reflect, putting up a barrier around Sora which reduces the damage he takes from enemy attacks. Now, as an adult with a much better understanding of strategy in Japanese RPGs, I can see the merits of the Aero spell. Being able to take more punishment from hard-hitting opponents will be a major factor in improving my survivability in this Proud difficulty playthrough. It still kind of sucks that it costs a whopping 2MP to use, though.
With nothing else to stand in his way, Sora seals the Traverse Town Keyhole. Another piece of a Navigation Gummi lands at his feet, and... we're kind of done here for now, I guess? There's no real come-down from this, no world-concluding cutscene in the style that the player has probably come to expect by now. We're just dropped back in Traverse Town to either run around or leave. The Final Fantasy crew don't even have anything nice to give us for all the trouble we just went through. Given we have that new Navigation Gummi installed, we should probably head back to the World Select screen. Before that though, I've got a spot of light reading to do.
Part 12 - In Which Sora Meets a New Friend
Instead of leaving Traverse Town right away, I head back to Merlin's Study in the Third District. My objective is the repaired book that we delivered earlier. On opening the book, Sora finds himself shrunk down and transported onto its very pages! I'm now in a world that's very unique in the context of Kingdom Hearts - the Hundred Acre Wood. It plays very differently from other worlds, in that the gameplay is centred much more on mini-games than conventional exploration, and there's no combat at all. Sora is free to run across the book's pages, although right now most points of interest are completely blank - these represent the missing pages that we're probably going to end up finding at some point. There is one place we can go to right away, however - a clearing, with a log right in the middle of it.
It's here that Sora meets a stuffed toy bear, who's sitting on the log and thinking hard about something. When Sora asks him what he's thinking about, the bear says that he's trying to work out how to say goodbye to Pooh. It of course turns out that Pooh is the bear and the bear is Pooh - Winnie the Pooh, or Pooh for short. He explains that all of his friends who live in the Hundred Acre Wood have disappeared, and are nowhere to be found. This leads Pooh to believe that he will likely disappear as well, and before he does, he needs to work out how to say goodbye to himself. Still thinking, he wanders off in the direction of his house, looking for a small smackerel of honey to eat.
Following Pooh to his house, I have the opportunity to pick up a few useful healing items. Unfortunately I don't have the opportunity to move the story along here any further right now - Pooh's friend Owl arrives on the scene to explain that in order to read what happens next, Sora will need to recover the book's missing pages. Much like the ninety-nine dalmatian puppies, these have been scattered across multiple worlds, and it's going to take a bit of leg-work to find them. Since I don't currently have any of these Torn Pages, it looks like I won't be returning to the Hundred Acre Wood any time soon. Back on the open pages, I use the nearby save point to leap out of the book and return to Merlin's Study.
I realise there isn't a great deal to say about the content of the Hundred Acre Wood world at this point, but I wanted to include it in this week's blog all the same. There's a real aesthetic charm and authenticity to everything about it which I can't help but love. It stays remarkably true to Disney's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, with the world being accessed through a book in much the same way that the Disney films use books to frame and accentuate the presentation of their stories. Pooh is written with the same child-like charm and innocence of his on-screen counterpart, and the world's music is a bespoke arrangement of the classic Winnie the Pooh theme song (from the 1977 film, not from the Saturday morning cartoon series, although that would be equally fantastic). This world is so beautifully curated that I couldn't wait another three or four weeks to acknowledge it.
Now having truly exhausted all the possibilities open to us in Traverse Town, it's time to move on to new worlds...
Part 13 - Trials of the Hero, Pt. I
...or at least, it would be if Chip and Dale didn't pop up over the World Select screen to announce the start of a tournament being held at Olympus Coliseum. This gives us a perfect opportunity to test out the new Warp Gummi from Cid, bypassing the Gummi Ship route between Traverse Town and our next destination.
Over the course of Kingdom Hearts, Sora and co. will be summoned back to the Coliseum at regular intervals to participate in various tournaments. These tournaments make up a significant chunk of Kingdom Hearts' side content and are pure combat challenges, pitting the team against successive groups of enemies in arena-based fights. The vast majority of these will take place in a featureless square zone, although a couple of fights against larger enemies will utilise the whole arena including the seating on either side. While use of magic and items is permitted, no Summons can be called within the Coliseum. If Sora gets knocked out at any point then the challenge ends prematurely, and the player must start over from the beginning, although there is no Game Over or any other penalty imposed. Winning the tournaments rewards the player with useful items and new abilities, so it's worth returning to Olympus Coliseum whenever a new tournament begins to pick these rewards up. That's the approach I'll be taking with this playthrough.
The first tournament is the Phil Cup, an entry-level challenge consisting of nine consecutive fights against various groups of Heartless. Their rosters consist of familiar types of enemies from the worlds we've already been to - mainstay Shadows, armoured Soldiers, rotund Large Bodies, unpredictable Powerwilds, and the four main types of mage Heartless, all in various configurations. In some of these fights, Sora will also have to face off against different parts of the Guard Armor - Hammerlegs (the feet), Gauntlets (the hands), and in the final battle of the cup, Armored Torso (the head and body). Ultimately none of these enemies pose any great threat, partly because I'm familiar with them all by now, and partly because I've levelled to a point where most of these early Heartless are fairly quick to fall.
My reward for beating the Phil Cup is a new spell, Gravity. Similar to the Demi and Gravity spells from the Final Fantasy series, the damage dealt by this offensive spell isn't determined by Sora's magical strength, but as a percentage of the total HP of the targeted enemy. Simply put, the more HP an enemy has, the more damage it will deal. This makes it particularly effective against Heartless with sizeable HP bars like Large Bodies. In Proud difficulty, where Sora's attacks do less damage per hit, being able to score a reliable chunk of damage on these kinds of enemies is going to prove invaluable, especially when we move on to the next world. Sadly the spell doesn't have any effect on bosses or boss-like enemies, whose mammoth HP bars must be whittled down fair and square.
Beating a tournament at the Coliseum isn't the end of the challenge. Clearing a cup for the first time will unlock a solo challenge, tasking Sora with battling through the same sequence of fights alone, without the support of Donald and Goofy. Most of the extra difficulty in this mode comes from a greater barrage of enemy attacks, since Donald and Goofy aren't present to draw the attention of the Heartless away from Sora. It takes me a couple of attempts, but I'm able to beat the Phil Cup solo and earn a Combo Plus ability (which extends my basic combo from three hits to four) for my trouble. Those who master the solo challenge will unlock a time trial challenge, which reintroduces Donald and Goofy to the mix but places a three-minute timer on screen and tasks the player with winning all nine battles of the cup before it runs out. This proves too much for me at this relatively early stage in the game, and I step away from it after three failed attempts. Something to attempt the next time we come back, I suppose. It's worth noting that once the time trial challenge is beaten, players can choose to re-battle any individual group of enemies from the tournament's nine rounds.
With the Phil Cup cleared, it's time to load up the Gummi Ship with our spoils and finally set off to one of the new destinations revealed by the newly-installed Navigation Gummi. What lies beyond the swirling portals that have appeared on the World Select screen? There's only one way to find out...
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And so another episode of the Keyblade Chronicles comes to an end. Once again, apologies for the delay in bringing this one to you, and as always, thanks very much to those of you who are reading this series. Putting together Episode Two last week caused me to have some serious doubts about the sustainability of this feature going forward, but the positive feedback left me feeling a lot better about it and I'm looking forward to continue sharing my experiences of this crazy franchise with all of you. If you have any thoughts of your own to share on this part of the game, or indeed about Kingdom Hearts in general, please sound off in the comments below. The Keyblade Chronicles will be back to its regular schedule next Monday with trips to a desert city, a wondrous cave, and even the belly of a whale. Until then, take care folks, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - Kingdom Hearts Final Mix (PS4)
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