The beginning
The epic saga starts with three friends Sora, Riku & Kairi building a raft that they want to use to travel off their small group of islands to see what's beyond the horizon. Before they can do that, darkness starts to engulf their world. Kairi seems to disappear and Riku is swallowed by darkness, which leaves Sora alone to fight off dark creatures called the Heartless. Luckily he has just gained the skill to summon & use a weapon called Keyblade to ward off the shadowy beings attacking the islands. While he succeeds in fighting off a big Heartless monster, Sora can't escape the darkness completely and as the Destiny Islands disapper into the darkness, Sora gets thrown into a world called Traverse Town where lost souls gather when their worlds are overrun by the darkness. Here Sora begins to learn about the nature of the Keyblade and sets on a journey to find his friends with help from Donald Duck & Goofy. They travel through a dozen or so worlds looking for Kairi, Riku and King Mickey, all the while sinister forces have their own plans behind the scenes.
The first thing you'll notice when starting to play Kingdom Hearts is how well it has aged from a visual point of view. Even though it doesn't sport the latest graphical techniques, with just a bump in resolution it's still quite the pretty game to look at. The colourful cartoony style is probably to be thanked for that, but the original development team's mastery of the PS2 hardware should not be forgotten either. What these people got out of PS2 is nothing short of amazing.
Kingdom Hearts is a long-running series and while the franchise mostly appearing on handhelds in recent years has meant there have been no advances in the visuals (and the DS games naturally looking much worse), the games have taken great steps forward in certain aspects of gameplay. Kingdom Hearts 1 is a bit clunky by today's standards, but the fast-paced combat, decently challenging battles and worlds packed with secrets to find & stuff to do still make it entertaining to play. Still, there's no denying that the first game is a bit dated on the gameplay front. While it's one of the better games in the franchise when it comes to offering interesting locales and rewarding exploration in imaginative environments, a lot of fun optional things to do and a straightforward story, the basic gameplay could be tighter. Precision jumping, which is needed at certain parts of the game, is particularly annoying and the camera isn't the best of 3d action games. It's nothing you can't get used to if you enjoy the experience otherwise, but that doesn't mean the problem isn't present and it can annoy some more than others. Personally I've played the game so many times that the camera isn't much of an issue anymore, but I understand if it frustrates some.
All in all there are a lot of games that have aged far worse than Kingdom Hearts 1 from the PS2 era. It's still the heartfull, fun, exciting action RPG that made millions of fans in 2001 and can still enthrall people today. The biggest fault I can muster about the collection, as far as its nature as an HD remaster goes, are the trophies, which applies to both the first game & Chain of Memories. Both KH1 & Re:CoM have the worst designed difficulty trophies around. You have to play KH1 through at least 3 times on each different difficulty level and Re:CoM is even crazier because you have to play the game through on all difficulty levels with both Sora and Riku. This makes the platinum trophies extremely time-consuming & tedious to get. So these aren't the ideal games for trophy perfectionists. But that's about as bad as these HD remasters get.
A memory of cards
Sora's journey to find Riku & Mickey takes a slight detour in Re:Chain of Memories. This PS2 3d remake of the original GBA game takes Sora and his friends into Castle Oblivion, a mysterious place filled with people dressed in black-hooded leather coats and filled with memories of places visited & people met in the past. These people seem to have some kind of plan for Sora, who only wishes to see his friends again. The story introduces some new, long-lasting characters like Axel and Namine, who have major roles in many of the future games. It also gives us our first experience of playing as Riku, who is still haunted by the darkness he succumbed to in the first game and has to redeem himself if he ever wants to see his friends again.
As a game, Chain of Memories is very divisive, which is mostly due to its gameplay & structure. The combat is done with cards and if you don't learn the ways of exploiting the system, it can get a bit annoying with enemies & bosses interrupting a lot of your moves. Basically, you have a deck of cards that you can build with the cards that you get throughout the game. Each card has a numeric value that decides its strenght against enemies' cards. If it's higher than the enemy card, you'll manage to attack. If it's lower, your attack is blocked no matter what. If you don't know how to build an effective deck of cards, you'll have to get used to tons of attacks blocked by enemies. You can also do a combo of three cards that will launch different kinds of destructive special moves depending on what attack, spell & other special cards you use in the combination. The catch is that the first of the three cards will be eliminated from your deck until the end of the battle, so you can't abuse the system too much, although certain powerful special moves make that limitation somewhat obsolete.
Another flaw of the game is that it's very much a retread of the first game when it comes to the Disney worlds, stories & bosses as well as basic enemies. That wouldn't be too bad, but it's not even a very good one in the sense that the overly simple rooms that Chain of Memories consists of are quite boring in comparison to the lively, varied worlds of the original. It feels more like a randomized dungeon crawler with Disney world skins than the kind of romp through (more or less) fun worlds with distinct locations & actual exploration.
I personally like Chain of Memories, though it's far from my favorite overall game in the franchise. The card combat isn't all that bad if you get the hang of it and aren't annoyed by the interruptions to your attacks by enemy cards, and the story is easily the strongest in the franchise. The worlds are a bit boring, but the intriquing story pushes you to go forward and collecting cards & leveling up can be quite addictive. While ultimately the things that are introduced in Chain of Memories do lead to some of the more crazy aspects in the franchise's storyline, as a self-contained story Chain of Memories is the best one in the series. Organization XIII messing with Sora's memories is an intriguing concept and it's handled surprisingly well with enough complexity to have some real surprices yet not too much so that it becomes needlessly convoluted. All the plotting, backstabbing and manipulating within the Organization XIII's ranks is entertaining to watch unfold. On the other side of things, Riku's story of redemption & learning to control his darkness starts in a well done way in Chain of Memories and it's what made him a long-lasting favorite of mine and a lot of other KH fans.
Another prequel-sequel-interquel
The last of the "games" in this collection is the movie recapping Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days' story. Days is another interquel taking place between the first and second mainline entries in the franchise, taking place prior to, in parallel AND after the events of Chain of Memories. The main gist of the story is to tell about Roxas' time as a member of the ominous Organization XIII, showing how he got there, what he did during his time there and what eventually lead to him leaving the organization. It also gives a slightly deeper look of the other Organization XIII members, their interactions and what they were doing at the time.
Outside of ReCoded, Days is perhaps the most pointless entry into the franchise from a story perspective and not all that special from a gameplay point of view either, so it's perhaps best that a lot of people can just experience it as a 3 hour movie instead of slogging through the repetitive gameplay badly paced story of the original. It's a game/story for the Roxas & Axel fans, but its significance in the bigger picture is pretty small. It doesn't really take the story forward, but its function is merely to fill some of the blanks in the timeline of Roxas, though it does hint at some still untouched storylines such as Saix & Axel's connection and some kind of secret plans that are somewhat separate from Xemnas & Organization XIII's.
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| Be prepared to see a lot of sea salt ice cream eating. |
It goes through the story much in the same way the original game did. You go through Roxas' days in the Organization XIII and can see the passage of time as the day counter counts towards Roxas' inevidable last day (#358) at the Organization XIII, right before the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II. While you could say that it does a decent job at telling the story of Days, all-in-all the movie is boring because they haven't really added any action scenes into it to bring some variety to the watching experience. And since pretty much all of the action in the game was in playable form, there's not much of it in the movie. This means you will see characters standing around and talking, sitting and talking, eating sea-salt ice cream and talking, and doing all of the above and talking.
Final remix HD superiority
Kingdom Hearts 1.5 is a very good remaster. It runs at 1440x1080 resolution with a decent 2xMSAA to smoothen some of the edges. It could have done with a bit better anti-aliasing, but the image quality looks really good otherwise. It runs at a smooth locked 30fps and I don't remember too many instances of it dropping below that.
The KH1 in this collection is the Final Mix version of the game. While it's not nearly as big an improvement over the version we got in the west in the first place, there are still some things that western players will have missed because it was never brought outside Japan, most notably the optional, hard-as-balls Xemnas fight and the cool extended secret ending. The recoloured enemies are a bit of a hit & miss, but even the worse ones aren't too bad, except a select few.
There is one thing that I haven't talked about at all in this review yet, and that is the music of the package. And what glorious music it is. Square Enix hasn't done the bare minimum with updating the music, no, they have orchestrated every song that wasn't orchestrated before. The new orchestral arrangements sound absolutely amazing. There are a few where it's a bit uncertain if the new one is better than the original, but most of it is a big improvement over the already great midi sounds. Some purists might have preferred an option to choose between the original and the new arrangements, but personally I don't ever want to return to the originals, the arrangements are just that good.
Verdict: GREAT. Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMix is one of the best HD remasters around. They've updated it to look & sound amazing, brought the previously unreleased version into the west and done everything to make the collection worth every penny for both people new to the franchise & returning fans who want to relive the past. While the games themselves do show their age in some aspects of gameplay and the intro to KH1 is a bit too long & boring, they can still offer plenty of enjoyment if you can get past the somewhat clumsy controls & slow start of the first game and the unorthodox card battle system of Re:Chain of Memories. Outside of completely remaking the games and/or their graphics, this is pretty much the best possible way for Square Enix to re-release these games.
INFO BOX
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer(s): Square Enix Osaka Team
Platform(s): PlayStation 3
Release
Date (Europe): September 13th, 2013
Number of players: 1
