Well, I had to replay it three
times to get the pesky platinum trophy, so I feel I can say this with
certainty: everything bad that happens in the story of the first Kingdom
Hearts is the fault of Donald Duck.
Why? Because when Riku and
Sora are reunited, Sora asks him to take Riku into their gummi ship. For no
reason other than that he’s a goddurn stubborn nitwit (that IS what he called
Daffy in Roger Rabbit, right?), Donald Duck flat-out refuses. When Riku
slinks away and Sora doesn’t flat-out abandon his new friends, Maleficent is
able to use this apparent betrayal as the leverage she needs to start
manipulating her new protégé. If Riku had gone with Sora and co, it would have
been far harder for the incompetent baddies to kidnap the princesses, Ansem
wouldn’t have had his access to the world and any alternate plans could have
been easily foiled by Riku and Sora together. So…well, yes, it’s mostly Riku’s
fault for being a sensitive little priss who has such a hissy fit over not
getting his way that he ends up doing the bidding of evil-doers, but without
Donald acting the way he did, none of what happened would have happened – at least
not in a way so difficult to stop. That darn duck.
Anyway, yes, I was very happy
that Square decided that to mark 10 years since the release of the original game, they would re-release these HD remixes. I have the original Final Mix – and the
second game’s – but never got around to playing in Japanese, and now I don’t
have to!
It’s true that this is quite a
lazy port, despite the protestations from Square that they had to rebuild a lot
from scratch and used models from the other games. There have been pretty
comprehensive lists of the things that they should have done – put the more
complicated, far better-looking hi-res models into all cutscenes rather than keeping
the original game’s usage of the in-game model when they could get away with
it, chiefly. But also they should've added a theatre mode to watch all the extra-good-looking cutscenes
– including good ole Another side, another story, the lovely CG
animation they made as a fun contrast to the colourful game and then had to
painfully spend 3 more games trying to force into the actual story.
Yes, it’s a story that gets
incredibly convoluted, so it’s quite nice to go back for a refresher. Even
leaving aside the things we know from future games – that there have been
countless keyblade masters, many hundreds of them at once; that within Sora’s
heart there’s already the fragment of Ventus’, stuck in there fast enough that
it didn’t show when Kairi’s heart came out along with the six other fragments apparently
in Riku’s keyblade; that Ansem isn’t Ansem after all – it’s worth recapping
what actually goes on in this game, before things get really convoluted. And
also to remember some of the things that have never really been resolved – what
do Sora and Riku’s parents think about their absence of a year or longer? What
exactly is Kairi’s background in Hollow Bastion? What exactly were Maleficent
and ‘Ansem’ planning to do with their power from Kingdom Hearts, given that it
would essentially rip apart everything else in existence? Given what happened
when the Door to Darkness was actually opened, was there any point at all to
Sora’s quest? Since the same result would have come about given the true nature
of Kingdom Hearts…
Beyond the untangling of the
of the overcomplicated plot, though, this is a simple story of a sweet young
boy named Sora – somewhat jarringly little in this game compared with his KH2
incarnation – who when his world comes to an end is chosen by a mysterious ‘keyblade’
to seal locks through which monsters come, and to defeat the evil masterminds
behind the plot. Usually by hitting them a lot. The real hook was that his
adventures brought him into contact with not only Disney characters, but also
characters from Square’s Final Fantasy series. The choices are somewhat
limited – the Disney films are mostly old-classic or renaissance, emblematic or
from way back at the start of Disney’s feature film production, and except with
Vivi in Kingdom Hearts 2, the only FF characters we get are ones
Nomura designed, limiting us to VII, VIII and X, which is a real shame. I’d
love to see more obscure Disney and a much wider Final Fantasy net. I’d
be thrilled to see Sora fight with Taran, and hey, in a future KH we could see
Hope tagging along with a bossy Larsa, hooking up with Bartz and the Dissidia
Onion Knight to take on a rampaging Kefka. But I suspect these things are all a
pipe dream.
Yet I will continue to suck up
anything Squeenix gives me under this banner, because the games are not only
fun, but challenging. Honour binds me to get the challenge trophies on Proud
Mode rather than beginner, and I wouldn’t rest until I got 100 hits on the Pink
Agaricus despite now having to get Donald and Goofy stuck somewhere. Plus I saw
things I’d never seen in the original to get this platinum – largely because I’d
never otherwise bother with Gummi missions and completing Synthesis. And hey –
I’d until this run-through never even noticed Gepetto opens a workshop in Traverse
Town
Nostalgia, affection for the
characters and a fun world made this a game I was very happy to replay in HD.
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