![]() ![]() I did not have to look up to observe the battle, I did not have to target the enemies, I did not have to employ basic tactics or abilities other than the miles of abilities chained to my attack even by midgame. My past experience with the game was a non-factor, because I was playing one-handed, with one button, while not watching the screen. Fast forward to my Critical Mode playthrough for the Retrospective, and the game let me henpeck long paragraphs of notes, one-handed, on its hardest difficulty while I was still somewhat behind the level curve. I should have realized something was wrong. ![]() During my first ever playthrough of KH2, I skipped two worlds to rush into the Battle of Hallow Bastion, and only Demyx could touch me. In the KH1 Retrospective, I said KH1 will just give up if the player has the gall to grind ahead of the level curve, but KH2 gives up if you come to a world a few levels below the level curve. KH1 can become brainless if you abuse Thunder, but KH2 is brainless without using any strategy at all. ![]() Now, KH1 can become nearly as brainless as this with the right strategy, character build, or by grinding (especially grinding), but KH2 didn’t require that sort of preamble. This isn’t true in all situations, I’m not saying KH2 can be played blindfolded at all times (at least not on Critical), but the fact that it can be done so frequently…! Without realizing what I was doing at first, I turned away from my Critical Mode playthrough to make notes for this Retrospective, and started hitting X without looking at the screen, and I continually won fights while doing it. In my younger days, I was hostile to this idea, thinking it was just some empty argument people who didn’t like Kingdom Hearts were using to discredit the series – and besides, it was Standard mode! But during my Retrospective playthrough, something startling happened in Olympus Coliseum. In the past, others have said that KH2 could be played by errantly pressing X and not even looking at the screen, including one infamous contemporary review. Except on Critical mode, KH2’s difficulty is so shallow that many of its enemies may as well not even be there. ![]() But there’s easy, and then there’s shallow, and now that we’re in the deepest end of the game, it’s clear it’s… not very deep (though note that depth of challenge is not the same as depth of mechanics. I’ve played kids games for years, much longer than the average person, thanks to younger sibilings. I don’t consider easy combat to be a bad thing, as I’ve said. What was the design aim here? If anything, they’re exposing how shallow KH2’s combat can be by taking away the shallow exploration in between, or the gimmicks of the actual tournaments! You enter, you win twenty seconds later, and the plot moves on. No extra effort was put into making the battles special. Instead, it’s a classic tree structure, with only three rounds! The first two aren’t even very remarkable battles, except for the part where an exhausted Hercules fights by your side. This tournament isn’t going to be seed-style like all the tournaments since KH1. I’m sure Hades would still let Hercules die, and I get what the devs are doing: they’re trying to say: “As far as you need to be concerned, this mandatory, story tournament is a normal tournament.” I understand all of that, but it still results in them saying: “Hercules is going to die” followed by “Nobody is going to die!” For that matter, this isn’t a traditional tournament and the fights are incredibly short-lived, so they probably could have kept death in and had no measurable impact! For some reason, this threat – and let’s repeat: Hades is trying to get Hercules killed in the arena! – is immediately followed by Pain telling you that Hades is going to rescind death during the tournament. ![]()
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