Kingdom Hearts: Boredom By Stodgy

I don't understand why people like Final Fantasy.

Seriously, I honestly don't. I can understand that it might have been good at some point in time, but I care so little about the state of the franchise as it is now that I couldn't honestly care if it was good at any point in time. Call me a jaded, instant-gratification scrub if you will, but I don't see the appeal in games that are 15% gameplay and 90% boring spectacle - surelyb the whole point of a game is to be played, not watched. That's why I usually steer clear from JRPG's in general - to me, they're all full of the same blocks of grind and exposition that I don't find appealing.

At one point in time, however, the planets aligned and I tried to play Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.

FUCK YOU, DEMON TREES, AAARGH!

I tried to like it. I really did. But it wasn't long before I discovered that the game didn't like me very much, and I had to just put it down before my body absorbed my gentials. On a related note, I also don't understand why people like Kingdom Hearts. How crossing something I don't like (i.e., Final Fantasy) with my own childhood (i.e., Disney) suddenly equals loads of money is beyond me. But Kingdom Hearts shares quite a lot of similarities with Final Fantasy, so by playing a game that is only remotely similar to the product I have the true beef with, I can finally pin down what it is that turns me off Final Fantasy, and indeed, most JRPG's in general. (Dragon Quest doesn't count, for reasons I'll elaborate on later)

So here's a list of things I noticed while playing Birth by Sleep that could pretty much apply to Final Fantasy as well.

1. Cut Down On Cutscenes
Movies can be good. Yes, Square-Enix, I'm glad we've finally found some common ground. But there is one big difference between movies and games, and that is that you expect to do something in games. When I buy a game, I expect to jump right in and start playing it. I do not want to be pre-empted by approximately twenty minutes of cutscene, pre-rendered or otherwise, that forces me to sit and listen to a bunch of people I care nothing about talk about things I could care even less about. As a person who plays Zelda games, this might seem wierd coming from me, but at least Zelda doesn't have pre-rended FMV's up the backside.

Allow me to expand. Birth by Sleep starts with a pre-rendered AMV intro with a song by some Japanese band I don't even know and expect never to encounter ever again. Then there is another custcene ivolving some shadowy figure on a desert island, another featuring Mickey Mouse surfing on a book (which is admittedly awesome), and ANOTHER where Ventus (the character I picked only because he kind of looks like me if I went on a starvation diet and dyed my hair blonde) looks out of his window to see shooting stars- Whoops, too late, I've already put the PSP down and gone to make a hot chocolate.

At least mugs don't whine about their purpose in life.

See, there came a point where quite a lot of developers in Square-Enix suddenly forgot that they were making video games, and decided they were trying to make movies instead. Unfortunately, this means that most of the time every significant action you perform in this game is bookended by lengthy videos where you sit and listen to the characters exposite until your ears turn black and drop off. No-one should expect to go into a game to sit still and watch things happen - that's what movies are for. Games, despite what some eccentric people may tell you, are not movies. Games are interactive, meaning you pick up a controller and do things with them. Trying to make a game more like a movie just results in bad design choices, like the aformentioned cutscene binge, or bad camera controls.

Sadly, it's a trend that's cropping up a lot in video games, and consequently there are few games that don't make you wait until allowing you to do what the game is supposed to let you do - i.e., play it. The Zelda games have this problem, but at least you get to press a button to make the text zoom by as if you were on speed, and Dragon Quest IX (one of the few JRPG's I actually like, shock and horror) pretty much throws you in aside from a few bits of dialogue and exposition. Birth by Sleep straps you to a chair and forces you to watch it recite its latest theatrical masterpiece - which is both unneccesary, seeing as I would gladly sit down and watch if it asked kindly, and boring, because it drones on for ages in monotone until I fall asleep in the chair.

Which brings me neatly to...

2. Show Some Emotion, People
Birth by Sleep lets you pick one of three characters to play as, and by playing all of them you can at least attempt to untangle the snarled mess that is the game's story. The characters you pick are Ventus the aformentioned blonde dude, Terra the tall man with a skirt and Aqua, the only girl in the room. Already it sounds as if I'm talking about a strange Japanese webcomic, like Kontorōru-Aruto-Dereto or something. Anyway, the manual tells us that Ventus is outgoing and inquisitve, Terra is disciplined and quiet and Aqua is kind and righteous.

And that's it. That's all they've got.

Now, I'm not a proffessional writer, but I'm pretty sure that there has to be something wrong with a game where your characters have one, and only one, personality trait. See, whenever you play a video game that involves you controlling a character of some sort (i.e., all of them nowadays), then you want to be able to relate to them, to sympathise with them as you take them on their journey through the magical land to save the world or whatever. Already on the second hurdle and Birth by Sleep has tripped over again - how do I relate to someone who has all the personality of a cardboard cutout?

Even a Jack Sparrow cutout has more character.

It seems to me that JRPG's are nowadays populated by the same shallow stock characters you can find in any Shonen manga, all completely unlikable for the wrong reasons - they may be too cheerful and grate on your nerves, they may whinge about something or someone that went wrong, or they may be smug gits who have their brains where their crotches are. It's like they were all made with a biscuit cutter - swap Cloud Strife for Squall Leonhart and I bet you the average joe wouldn't notice the difference, not that there was one in the first place. And it makes playing the games much more difficult for me - telling us we have to control this guy is all well and good, but what's the point if we can sympathise with the hero's problems?

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit racist here - unintentionally, I hasten to ad. Western games, too, often lumber us with protagonists who suffer from a compelete lack of emotion. Take Kratos from God of War - his answer to everything is to ram a blade into it's face, and the whole dead family and retribution against the gods thing rings a bit insincere when you consider he cuts apart minotaurs for a living. But at least the Ghost of Sparta doesn't have terrible dubbed dialogue or a bad haircut to go with it. Listening to half the drivel spouted by the characters in Birth by Sleep makes me thankful for games with a silent protagonist like in Pokémon, where I can at least pretend my avatar character is singing "On the Open Road" from The Wind in the Willows as he trots down a route with his Cyndaquil.

And it's these characters who are driving the story, not me. This ought to go in a separate topic, really, but they're so closely linked it bears a special mentioning here. The whole time I was playing the game, I felt like I was contributing nothing to the story, merely wheeling Ventus and his stupid hair from one boring dialogue to another. He was the one doing all the work, while I was simply sitting at the back of his mind tugging on nerve endings to try and get him to earn a few IQ points. This is why everyone picks the created characters on Soul Calibur - smashing Algol's face in feels so much better when it's your glorified self-insert character doing it, and not some girl in a miniskirt.

Or your terrible recreation of a bonus character who hasn't been seen in ages.

Speaking of gameplay...

3. Make Your Minds Up!
Seriously. One the one hand, Birth by Sleep had the most repetitive combat mechanics I had ever come across. On the other hand, it had more confusing and unnessecary features than anything Billy Mays tried to sell, and considering that he once pitched a multi-purpose kitchen tool with interchangeable blades, that's saying something.

When you do finally get to shred some blue demon face, there's only one button you need to press - X. Keep pressing that until the enemy dies. That's it. Oh, sure, sometimes you have to jump before you press X to hit an airborne enemy, and you can press triangle to cast a spell before you get back to pressing X, but other than that there's no real variation to basic combat. Every once in a while, the Attack prompt changes into a finishing attack, which you pull off by... pressing X.

Where's my banana, you spiky-haired jerk?

See where I'm going with this? Relying on just one button to pull off an attack is all well and good, but it gets boring and monotonous after a while, and you start to feel as if you're not putting any effort into it - Darksiders has this problem, too. Fighting games have all those buttons for a reason - each one corresponds to a different type of attack, and that adds a bit of life and variety to the game. No-one wants to play a fighting game with only one attack button - your attack options are limited and it gets dull and repetetive very quickly. And that finish command that suddenly pops up every now and then simply breaks the flow of combat like an axe to a glass window, doing the complete opposite of what itss supposed to be doing in the first place.

But on the other end of the spectrum are mechanics that are look as though someone on the game design team said "Fuck it, we have to put something in there, if only to compensate for our bare-bones combo system". Shotlock Commands, which let you target and attack multiple enemies vat once, sound fine on paper, but the fact you have to manually target every enemy defeats the whole point of trying to attack multiple enemies in the first place - it breaks that flow of combat you were working on, and you have to wrestle with the control nub just to keep up with the swiftly-moving enemies. And you're standing stock still while you're doing this, so in trying to attack the mob in front, you leave your character's backside vulnerable to a swift kicking from the back.

Yeah, you wish  it was a velociraptor doing the backside-kicking.

Then there's the Action Commands, a menu-driven spell-casting system which can be customised by swapping out abilities with ones you collect from opening chests and whatnot. That's all I understand of it, really, because in order to find the best combination of spells for every situation possible you need a strategy guide across your lap, and the only thing I like on my lap is a tray with some pizza. Meanwhile, Dimension Links, as far as I know, are one of those things that you save for boss fights in a textbook case of what Yahtzee Croshaw calls "But I Might Need it Later Syndrome", and the Fever Pitch mode only really works if you're going up against the Ten Thousand Demons of Demon Mountain, as Jack Black would say.

The mechanics I have the most beef with are the Fever Pitch and the Finishing Moves. They are an example of what I like to call "Wild Mechanics" - a gameplay mechanic influenced by a random number generator to some degree. The big, raging issue I have with these is that they are to strategy what a slegehammer is to a wall made of breadsticks - a game becomes less about skill and more about luck as you hammer away at foes, desperately hoping that the enemy you kill now, and not the last one in the room, will grant you the random power-up you need to take on the real beefy lad over there. If the mechanics employed some kind of meter that was filled over the course of a battle, I wouldn't gripe, because at least there is some indication that you're working towards the awesome energy attack you need. Fever Pitch comes when you least expect it, and that's often a bad thing.
Birth by Sleep couldn't seem to make up it's mind if it wanted the combat to be nice and simple or deep and flashy, and in trying to do both it gave me a bulky, top-heavy mess. I don't know if Final Fantasy suffers from a similar problem, but the game designers at Square-Enix need to pull themselves together, because half of the stuff the game gave me would probably never be used in the average combat situation. I'm not a man to advocate ripping off the other games, but Birth by Sleep could have taken a tip from God of War - less menu-driven commands, more variety with basic attacks, have the spells and blade-swinging merge seamlessly.  Or at least have puzzles that involve using the spells, like that bit in Ocarina of Time where you used Din's Fire to light all the torches in one go.

4. The Fans
My opinion of Kingdom Hearts, and indeed Final Fantasy in general, was heavily coloured towards the negative before I even picked the game up. This was because I encountered most of the setting and characters via that wonderful medium called Fan Fiction, which, as moves go, is as smart as dipping your head into a bucket containing an angry tarantula. I emerged from that bucket with a sorely bitten face, the only thing learned was that Kingdom Hearts has some of the creepiest fans ever. Not even the ones that bray Portal memes can compare.

The impression I got from reading half the content on the sites I visited was that the fandom is as clueless about the setting and characters as I am, because they delight in taking huge liberties with the world that Square-Enix has built. When the cast of spiky-haired, androgynous teens isn't trapped in an alternate high school where Goofy is the dorky but likeable history teacher ("William the Conqueror was a bad man, a-hyuck!"), they're boning each other at the slightest provocation, and believe me whan I say that's only the male half of the cast, because according to the fandom heterosexual relationships are second only to baby-eating in the list of cardinal sins.

That, or they're trying to pair Sora off with the Disney princessesAAAAAAAAaaAA sanjgbmje rkjthjrtlhjh kgkgkglglglglglglglglhj

Okay... okay, I'm calm. I can do this.

Now, I know that it's not really a good idea to judge a game soley on it's fanbase - really, I tend to ignore the fanbase of anything in general, because it will almost always turn out horrible somehow. But if Portal's fans are mindless parrots that squawk out dead memes the moment someone mentions cake, then Kingdom Hearts fans are parasitic nematode worms that feed off the sludge at the bottom of the interweb and do nothing apart from stink up the place. I suspect that many of them also like to think that Twilight is a masterpiece and Justin Bieber has the voice of an angel. When a game like that attracts fans of that sort, you know something is fundamentally wrong.

This will sound really redundant, considering that most fandoms have the same problem, but when your first encounter with a series is from shamefully explicit erotica, then it's probably a good idea to steer away from the series until you manage to form a better opinion though exposure to more tasteful and appropriate material. Sadly, I was young and naive, and my expectations were already poor, so when I got my mitts on Birth by Sleep I wasn't too surprised to find that I didn't really like it. But then again, that's the price I pay for being an impressionable nerd.

About £40, to be precise.

I guess this isn't really Square-Enix's fault - there was no way that they could predict what the creepy fangirls would do. So I've no real reason to blame the series for this, but I guess it deserves a mention here for helping to build by poor view of the company's franchises as a whole.

And finally, the coupe de grace...

5. Demon Trees
The following is an actual account of something that actually happened in the game, and needs no explanation as to why it sucked a polar bear's funky ass.

So I get to the bit in Birth by Sleep where Snow White is, and I'm expected to help her get to the Dwarve's cottage, thereby kicking off the movie's plot with the least amount of time paradoxes or something. Unfortunately, almost everything in the forest suddenly decides it wants to slightly menace our poor princess, and a host of blue demons rise up to bother her. This includes - and I wish I was kidding here - the demon trees that appeared in the movie. You know, the ones that were meant to be hallucinations that reflected the terror and fear that Snow White was expereincing? Yep, they decided to go all Evil Dead on our protagonist. "Subtlety? What's that?" crow Square-Enix as they wipe their greasy jowls with a Cloud Strife flannel.

So off went Ventus, hacking apart demons and keeping the princess safe for completely platonic and good-natured hero reasons, so close the word document at once. Unfortunately, whenever a demon tree came too close to Snow White, the camera focused soley on its grinning, wooden visage while the gamera grew all blurry, as if Ventus was on some bad acid, and our spiky-haired hero had to run over and bludgeon the crap out of them with his giant key to get them away. It didn't help that there was a boatload of blue demons running about trying to get a piece of that action, nor did it help that Snow White had the constitution of a pigeon with acrophobia.

Eventually, Snow White gave up and sank to her knees, weeping, despite Ventus' best efforts to keep her safe. And the game then had the gall to make me attempt this pathetic excuse for an escort mission again.

THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER IN THE WORLD BIG ENOUGH!!!

So there you have it. An itemized list of why I don't like Kingdom Hearts, and by extension, Final Fantasy. I take back nothing I said during this rant, because it was all true, and if disliking this sort of a game makes me stupid, then call me Retard McShitforbrains, but I'd rather be stupid and having fun then intelligent and bored. Now, if you excuse me, I have to play some Tekken before my stomach crawls out of my throat.

I'd love to see how long Squall would last against Heihachi. Maybe all of five minutes.