I experienced the story of this game through videos after playing Nier Automata, so I'm looking forward to experiencing the full game first-hand with this version. I wish this re-release allowed you to choose which playthrough to start on though. I understand why they want first-time experiences to be the basic story, but as someone who knows that part, I'd prefer to jump to the playthrough with the hidden information revealed.
I love this series so much I watched it live and watched the recording. I'm so happy Vinny is finally getting to find out what the Kingdom Hearts series is after being intrigued for years. Keep it up Jan!
I love you both and I love Kingdom Hearts. What a joyful surprise this video was. I hope one day, Vinny gets to finally find out what makes people love this series.
If Vinny is looking for a self-contained story that instantly gets into the nuts Kingdom Hearts lore, Birth By Sleep is the one the play. Kingdom Hearts 2 from a mechanical perspective has aged the best (but it has by far the longest intro). Kingdom Hearts 1 had clunky controls on release and its especially noticeable now. That said, it's a sincere and charming game if you choose to stick with it.
Compared to their other games, this seems like quite a traditional platformer. A lot of the co-op mechanics remind me of playing co-op children's games on the PS2 (for instance, I remember a tie-in game for one of the Shrek films with similar ideas).
A story focusing on the magical wishes of a child to save their parents marraige (causing the parents to be thrust into a crazy scenario) isn't particularly unique plot for other mediums but I can't think of many video games that try it. Finally getting actors who are good at their job makes it at least bearable. Anyone that can tolerate the "saving a marraige" tropes of Christmas movies or other family films would probably be okay with this. Clearly that's a personal annoyance for Alex though.
This is maybe the clearest example of how this studio takes cliches from other mediums and turns them into co-op games. It's more embarressing for the video game industry as a whole that there is some novelty in that approach. This game seems pretty good all things considered.
Edit: I came back to this after listening to the audio version just to make sure it was indeed Vinny. For a while I thought it was Jeff Gerstmann's weird deepfake voice box thing from the hotspot a few weeks ago. Hope Vinny's voice returns to normal soon and feels fantastic <3
Since @brad was wondering why this game uses the Fire, Fira, Firaga etc... terminology, it bears reminding that Bravely Default is technically a Final Fantasy spinoff game as it began development as a sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light on the Nintendo DS. The original title's name references the Final Fantasy lineage in it's full title: Bravely Default Flying Fairy (BD FF).
Also, Claytechworks wasn't the developer for the previou two games. The first two games were developed by Silicon Studio whose primary focus is technology development so they passed the third game onto Claytechworks while SIlicon Studio was busy with their current technology development. Many of the original development team moved over to Claytechworks. Square Enix is in charge of greenlighting these games and only did so after the success of Octopath Traveller.
Some parts of Duel Links have a lot more polish than other free-to-play mobile card-games but it's been overwhelmed by years-worth of mechanics that make it daunting to use. The microtransations are intense too. Yu-Gi-Oh decks are generally extremly archetype-driven so you need to pull A LOT of times in a given box to get enough cards to use them effectively together. This makes the times you open packs far apart (unless you pay) or you won't be able to use most of the cards from a few packs each time. There are often a few strictly-good cards that can be used in many different decks, but their usually the rarest. Ultimately, I gave up on the game over a year ago because it was too much (despite enjoying the card-playing UI over alternative Card-games). I don't know if this game is what you're looking for, Jan.
I've put off watching this until now because I had more Abby videos I hadn't caught up on - now I finally watched it. Missing you lots, Abby! (although, yes I follow her YouTube channel haha)
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