Kingdom Hearts could have been something really cool, but the Square Enix elements in everything make it not.

(to me)

If you don't love a good helping of Disney, you're probably an entity of pure malice from another dimension. I've always thought all things Disney were the greatest, especially when I was a kid. Toy Story's a masterpiece, The Lion King is fantastic, Mickey's pretty cool... I could go on. This is not news to anyone.

One day, my mom got some comic books with Disney characters on the cover from the local library. However, these books were not what met the eye. They were actually part of an elite class of graphic novels known as "magnas" that played by Hebrew rules. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, and I was very confused as I tried to make sense of the alien order of the panels. I think I may have figured it out, but looking back I can't say if I did with 100% authority. Not helping matters was the issue of only having, like, parts 2 and 4 of the series.

More vexing than this was the actual plot. It concerned a spiky hair kid named Sora, who wants to find his friends who went someplace (remember I did not know the setup of the story). There are these dark creatures known as Heartless that go around being evil, and there's also this guy named Ansem who wrote a journal about them and Sora maybe needs to find him too. So Sora gets a big key and starts purging the darkness and whatnot. Give me that description and the character designs and I don't think I could have been less interested. Wasn't this book supposed to be about Disney?

Aha! Sora's now traveling with Donald Duck and Dippy Dawg, alias Goofy. And all the places they need to go are whimsical Disney worlds, where the movie plots loosely happen! We get to hang out with Aladdin, Ariel, and Jiminy Cricket and see what they're up to. Give me THIS description and I would be all over this book. Do you see how Kingdom Hearts is bipolar for me? And this was all before I ever knew it was actually a video game!

Unfortunately, these problems stick with me to this day. On the one hand, you have these iconic, creative, and magical Disney characters meeting each other and teaming up, like... I don't know, House of Mouse, if anyone remembers that show. on the other hand, you have all these stupid-ass boring anime characters that I couldn't care less about! They're the ones the story revolves around. They get all of the important character moments. Comic or game, this has always been what has stopped Kingdom Hearts from being one of my favorite things of all time.

Let's fast forward to when I've seen full playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts I and II, and have solidified my gaming tastes. Every complaint I had reading that manga applies to the story of the game (except maybe the weird ordering). I can't comment on the gameplay, but the story's the same it's always been. When you get down to it, you have the conservative Disney licensing its properties out to a game that so lovingly recreates them, more than any other at that point in history... as the blurry background of a stupid-ass boring anime plot.

Every Disney world looks like this:

• Sora shows up.
• The main conflict of the movie is happening.
• Oh, it turns out that it's actually the Heartless.
• The main character of the movie teams up with Sora because he is just the most likable guy in the multiverse
• Sora beats the Heartless/Disney villain in an abrupt approximation of the movie's events.
• In the process, he steals the spotlight from the actual Disney character (ex: putting Jafar in the lamp)
• Sora usually gets a clue towards the greater mystery and then leaves.

When there are no Disney characters around except Donald and Goofy hanging in the background, things are much longer-winded. Sora and Riku can't decide if they're friends or not. The world ends. Everyone loses their memories and has to do everything all over again. Organization XII happens, and someone finds out he's Sora's alter ego, and three or more hours into the game we see the first Disney character. And that's not even getting into the Final Fantasy cameos, a series people like for literally no discernible reason.

In some ways, it's the perfect representation of the contrast between the two companies. Disney is light-hearted, has colorful characters and worlds, and stories that are a concise ninety minutes. The typical Square Enix joint is dozens of hours long, has a plot you need a flowchart to understand, and stars characters about as memorable as a bale of hay.

It's such a strange chain of events to me. Why did Disney look at this series of light-darkness-key-door mumbo jumbo and think it was a good fit for their properties, when they characteristically never do that? Why were they okay with their characters and stories being pushed to the background? Actually, screw that. How were the SQUARE ENIX people okay with doing that? This is the goddamn holy grail of licensing opportunities! You have free reign to do whatever you want with all of Disney, why in hell would you ever decide this was the best way to utilize that chance?

jesus christ

Now that Johnny V's out of the picture, Kingdom Hearts is the only mass Disney crossover game out there. Is it a good representation of the company? Well, what little is in there is enjoyable. The characters are all lovingly modeled and most their voice acting is very well done. Heck, their writing isn't that bad, either. I look at that and I see evidence of developers who love Disney just like everyone else. That's why it's so disappointing that they took the direction they did. What if they stripped out all of the dumb stuff? What if you played as Mickey Mouse, who would actually do stuff he's supposed to instead of this?

I don't know. I'm sure the game is fun enough, if you're into that style. And I won't deny that the series has a ton of fans who presumably enjoy this stuff. But to me, Kingdom Hearts will remain as a marker of one of the biggest missed opportunities in games.

(to me)

I fight battles with my inner completionist much like Dr. Jekyll struggled to keep his evil alter ego at bay. Especially in my earlier gaming days, I had a burning desire to get every last tenth of a completion point in my favorite games. In the process, however, these checklists of objectives would often turn into chores, and the sense of reward I would get at the end of the long journey would be really poor, considering how many literal cumulative days it took from my life. I think this behavior comes largely from my entirely separate unhealthy gaming habit: the pathological fear of spending money on bad games. I can tell you that dumping that much time into a game really makes you feel like you got your money's worth.

So while I was eventually getting okay at keeping the beast at bay, another factor came to contribute to feeding the completionist when I bought a PlayStation 4 a few months ago. As many users of this site may know, the storage unit of the console has quite a low capacity considering how much space games these days take up. It's inevitable that once you start to hit that limit, you'll have to delete a few of your games. The thought of losing all that progress in my games is really not appealing. On the other hand, keeping games around that I don't plan to play anytime soon isn't a good solution either. There is a way for me to keep a record of my accomplishments, though, and that's with trophies. Platinum-ing a game means I've done everything the developers could conceivably think of, and I can erase the ones and zeroes from my system with a clear conscience.

Games I've had to delete thus far are Ratchet and Clank and The Last of Us Remastered. The trophies for Troy Baker's Zombie Roadtrip are fucked. After struggling through that game and not really enjoying any of it, I had a solid 3% trophy completion. I deleted that game without too much concern, pretty positive I would never feel the need to play it again (that's for a different post, maybe!). Ratchet, then, was the first game I Platinum-ized. I ended up playing through that game about 2.9 times. It's alright though, because the lovable lombax and his robo pal are in a really fun game that made me want to check out the rest of the series. That hoverboard one was pretty rough though

Square Enix had some sort of random sale a few weeks ago, and I got Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs for $5 a pop, which was real crazy. Disrespecting ancient Japanese Weather Queens and shooting wacky cultists was brief, however. Tomb Raider tracks your completion rating for individual areas and collectibles, which is usually a big trigger for the crazy completionist to take over. When I saw that some trophies were multiplayer-only, though, I decided against it and saved myself a few more hours of searching for five types of lore I wouldn't read.

With the time given to me as Amazon couldn't figure out what happened to my DOOM delivery, I popped in Sleeping Dogs and was transported into a world of undercover cops, brutal gangsters, and action hijacks. This game is real good. The story is even better. I decided to Platinum-inate Wei Shen and his merry men once I saw that none of the trophies in the game are missable or require additional playthroughs. And with that, my book-length introduction came to a close and the real post could begin.

STUFF IN SLEEPING DOGS

• Get all the health shrines
• Get all the lockboxes
• Get all the jade statues
• Do all the open world stuff
• Get all the upgrades
• Buy all the stuff
• Get a net $1 million from gambling
• Get (almost) all the stat awards

Let's go down the list!

HEALTH SHRINES / LOCKBOXES

Health shrines are probably the most immediately useful of the collectibles in the game. You get 5 of them, you get an added 10% health and then you die less. Lockboxes are more plentiful but less useful, offering a small sum of Honk Kong Dollars or some clothing, in exchange for an occasional minigame (I hate minigames in open world games). Jade Statues are much smaller in number, and were stolen from Wei's kung-fu master in a way that makes you doubt his credibility as a martial artist. They can be found in random people's houses and returned for a new move. Fortunately for everyone involved, the developers were kind enough to include these collectibles on the world map. Wei can sleep with half of the women in the city in a very Persona-like fashion, and in exchange they will give him the knowledge he needs to get those pesky collectibles. I was able to just knock all of these out in one go. I wouldn't say it was fun, but it wasn't annoying either.

OPEN WORLD STUFF

Like most games of its kin, Sleeping Dogs has a healthy amount of side missions, including races, drug busts, and stealing vehicles. These are not as simple. The typical side quest is not anything too hard most of the time, though you have to wonder how Wei is so dumb to keep falling for obvious thieving attempts. Races are also usually okay, except for Enduro, which takes you on a tour through the entire world on a bike that's more fragile than a sheet of glass. That one still gives me nightmares.

Drug busts force you to go around beating up some thugs, hacking a nearby camera, and then going back to your apartment to bust their drugs. Why the thugs thought it would be a good idea to return to that location for their drugging, I have no idea. The best approach is to, when possible, run all the thugs over with a car, because realistically five guys just aren't gonna cut it against a car, even if one of them has a knife. A few of them, though, require you to swim into the Hong Kong sewers and engage in some shooting. The sheer number of thugs combined with the admitingly weak gunplay of Sleeping Dogs means that I died a lot, had to pay the hospital bill, and threw myself at the task again, over and over. Yeah.

Now all that's fine and dandy, but the real issue I have with the open world stuff is the "random" events. These yellow !'s only appear on your minimap when you're in proximity to them. There are about 3 types of events, but around 11 in total. Some of them only spawn in the daytime. There is no way to keep track of which ones you have done. Suffice to say, this is terrible, and the actual events are under a minute long, compared to the many of those you will spend trying to hunt down that last one you need. Why the developers had the foresight to put the main collectibles on the map but not these, I will never know.

UPGRADES

How about all the upgrades? There are three types of experience in Sleeping Dogs: Face (being badass), Triad (being badass, violently), and Police (being badass, but simultaneously respecting the law). Face is given out like candy for open world events, which is good because at the end you get a 40% discount on all purchases. Police and Triad experience is tracked throughout missions. Whereas Triad builds up as Wei is increasingly brutal towards his enemies, Police XP starts at maximum and counts down as you do illegal things. The problem is that it only counts in full intervals. That is, if you have 3 full blue police shields at the end of the mission, you get all the possible XP. However, if you have 2.9999999 police shields from say, accidentally nudging a lamppost with your car, you get the same XP that you would if you had gotten 2.00000 police shields. This means that once you nudge that lamppost, you can go ahead wrecking cars and running over civilians until you get to the next shield. Also, doing parkour poorly will give you a five point deduction for being "clumsy." The HKPD cares about their image, dammit!

This might be annoying, but apparently sometime between the original game coming out and the definitive edition, the developers decided to make it easier by throwing in some bonus cop missions that give you assloads of Police XP. So, what could have been a headache instead became really easy. Thanks, guys!

What they didn't help out with is Triad XP. You get that by switching up your moves... or... something? I get a lot when I blow up cars... look, here's the deal. I don't really know the optimal strategy for maximizing Triad XP. All I know is, playing normally, the game doesn't give you nearly enough. That means that you grind out mission replays in the postgame until you finally have all of the XP for an upgrade you don't need anymore. Even with the special outfit that gives you bonus Triad points, I still had to replay around a third of the missions in the game, which is downright silly. So in short, that part sucks.

BUY SHIT

To truly get into his red pole role, Wei decides he needs to own everything in Hong Kong. Every auto dealer and clothing store is marked on the map (thank god!) and you can take a taxi right to them. The challenge comes from remembering all the garbage you had to buy. There is no indication on the map of a sold-out establishment, meaning that if you forget you have to go around checking every store. Fortunately, my memory largely held on this one, or maybe it was just my luck. You will need to spend multiple millions of HK$ on these products, so you best get to saving until that Face discount. Well, with a few exceptions. The temptation is too strong to dress Wei up like Agent 47 and have him do decidedly non-Agent 47 activities.

GAMBLE YOUR LIFE AWAY

According to my source, the best way to make money is by engaging in some cockfighting. The strategy is to go and throw a hundred grand at the guy, and hope your chicken brings home the results. It rarely does. It's a lot of watching the two duke it out, having your bird collapse on the asphalt, getting furious, and either betting again or reloading your save, running back over, and then betting again. If Sleeping Dogs was secretly pushing an anti-cockfighting agenda, I'd say it made its point pretty well.

"But wait, insane person!" I hear you saying. "According to this trophy list I had to pull up because you are making no sense, you only need to win $50,000 Hong Kong Bucks in a cockfight to get the trophy! What are you on about?" Well, my friend, that's because this gambling charade is just one of many...

STAT AWARDS

Apparently, it wasn't enough for the developers to use the preexisting trophy system. They had to create their own, and then make the normal-ass trophies require that you do those. These are pretty much nothing but busywork. All of them are just high score challenges in one way or another, tracking how much garbage you did in your Hong Kong Vacation. Some of these complete themselves (kill so many guys) while some require a great deal of dedicated effort (the gambling one, or drive thirty minutes in a really fast car). Two more were added in a DLC, meaning you don't need to do all of them to get trophy, just 30 of the damn things. These goals sucked away I don't know how much of my will to Platinum-ify Sleeping Dogs, but you know what? I did it anyway! I got 30 of them, even if some grinding was required towards the end. And in the end, I got the platinum trophy on the video game Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition for Sony's PlayStation 4 console!

CONCLUSION

I don't know how many hours I spent doing everything there is to do in Sleeping Dogs's main story (I forgot to look it up in-game and do not know if you can find it on the PS menu). The quest is still not over. I still have to get stat awards for the Nightmare in North Point DLC, and then move onto Year of the Snake. These will also probably give me some grief. But what started as a way to get more enjoyment out of a good game became a weeks-long obsession to conquer all of Asia. But now that the completionist is dying down, I want to play Zelda, when it comes out, my own way, without a guide, and see how it compares to this experience.

But for now, it's almost time to let these Sleeping Dogs...

Lie!

Good night, everybody!