Kingdom Hearts Re:coded

A question I often get involving the "Kingdom Hearts" franchise's newest trilogy of spin-off titles is "do I have to play this game?"  You see, Square Enix utterly refuses to make a "Kingdom Hearts III" - the game we've been waiting for since 2006 - and instead has been releasing relatively inferior handheld side games for the last five years.  However, the last two spin-offs were very good games and were very much worth playing.  "358/2 Days" for the DS might have been a bit monotonous and had a silly name, but it had the best storyline of any Kingdom Hearts game yet and had some really good gameplay ideas.  "Birth by Sleep" for the PSP was a technical marvel of graphical power, a fully fledged Kingdom Hearts game on a handheld, but had a few niggling faults such as a rushed storyline.  They both are worth your time.  As for this game, "Kingdom Hearts Re:coded", its not.  It just isn't worth playing.

"Kingdom Hearts Re:coded" is now the sixth entry into the series, and is a remake of the underwhelming Japanese cellphone game called "Kingdom Hearts coded".  Originally it was a cellphone game, so it was never released outside of Japan because for whatever reason Square Enix cannot figure out how to export those things.  Same problem with "Final Fantasy VII -Before Crisis-", which you will never play thanks to your awful sin of not being Japanese.  Eventually Square Enix realized their mistake with "coded" and so brought it over to the DS using "358/2 Days"'s engine and slapped a "Re:" in the title, giving us this.  Unfortunately, as it turns out, both of these games are short stumps of games lacking in pretty much all the epic expanse of any of the other titles in this series.  Every environment, enemy, character, and at least half the dialog is unoriginal.  This is as bad as a Kingdom Hearts game can be.

This isn't a clever experiment, or a wild departure from the standard formula.  It doesn't do anything in particular different.  Its just the same old thing... in fact even less original than the standard title.   If you desperately need a Kingdom Hearts fix before the 3DS game comes out, replay "Kingdom Hearts 1", because that's all this game is - a replay of the first game in the series.  And everything about it is quite simply inferior.

The plot this time is utterly bizarre.  Jiminy Cricket, one of Sora's companions in the main series, is hanging out at Mickey's magical castle looking at the Journals he's written over the years.  Previously the Journal was just a glossary of enemies, character bios, and assorted quests - totally optional extra stuff, but now for whatever reason they've decided it should be a major plot point.  Jiminy finds a weird message in Journal 1 (the one that got erased during the confusing events of "Chain of Memories"), that says "Their hurting will be mended when you return to end it"*.  Nobody wrote that down, so King Mickey decides the best way to uncover the mystery is to digitize the Journal... which somehow creates an artificial "Tron" datascape which contains all of "Kingdom Hearts 1".  Only one problem:  its filled with block puzzles and other weird glitches.  To solve this problem, they create a Data Sora with a Data Keyblade who can destroy the glitches and save the day... all so that they can figure out one cryptic sentence.  Then things get weirder when the Journal comes alive and creates an avatar of itself in the form of Riku, choosing the most bishonen form possible to keep the fangirls happy. 

How come Kairi wasn't invited to the party?  Are they slowly writing her out of the franchise?  I'm pretty sure that Jiminy mentioned her once or twice in his Journal, considering she's one of the three most important characters in this series.  If anything she should be getting more screentime now that she has a Keyblade or her own, but no.  In "Kingdom Hearts 3D" she should get her own story along with Riku and Sora.

Ultimately what this means is that basically everything that happens in this game has little to no relevance to any of the rest of the Kingdom Hearts storyline.  Everything you do is just to uncover a single sentence... and the great mystery turns out to be things you should know already if you played "Birth by Sleep" and "358/2 Days".  The real world Maleficent does show up with her moronic side-kick Pete in order to conquer the dataworld and somehow conquer the universe(?).  Its not well explained.  There is one good twist when the enemy behind it all turns out to be Sora's Heartless... but its never made clear why defeating him is all such a big deal.  Can computer things affect the real world?  "Re:coded" never seems able to decide.  I mean yeah, it would suck if Mickey's computer got a nasty virus from all this, but its nothing installing McAfee Security Center won't fix.

Worse the fact that we're playing as a fake Sora is an utterly bizarre plot point whose implications the game seems to go completely out of its way to ignore.  Data Sora doesn't seem to even care that his world is completely imaginary.  Shouldn't he be a bit unhappy that he's only a copy of a real person?  Riku Replica had a few issues, Data Sora does not.  On the other hand, I am touched by the fact that Sora is such a pure heart that he doesn't care if his life is a lie.  He just likes helping people that much.  But his motivations in this game are completely meaningless, since I doubt Data Sora will ever come back.  It would be kinda confusing to have two Soras along with Nobody Sora, Unversed Sora, Girl-Sora, and Old Sora, so its not like giving Data Sora any original character traits is worth this game's time.  The entire plot is just a waste of time - a thin excuse for the game to exist at all**

But that doesn't really explain it either, considering how short "Re:coded" is.  The entire thing is just a strange sort of remake of "Kingdom Hearts 1" where the normal course of events are interrupted by glitches and other weirdness.  Now that does sound like a cool bit of metafiction, perhaps even a good opportunity to parody this series' more ridiculous parts, its wasted.  All that happens is that a bridge disappears once.  Plus half the worlds are missing.  There are no new Disney films at all to be found, and as for the ones that are in, you've seen them all at least three times before.  "Aladdin" was a wonderful movie, but I don't need to play through its events four times, do I?  Since this game is so linear I can't really call these worlds "worlds", they're levels.  That means a lot.  Every enemy is made from boxes of copypasta as well.  This is just lazy game design.  At only twelve hours, "Re:coded" is also the shortest Kingdom Hearts ever.  I blame these faults on "Re:coded" beginning its life as a cellphone game, thus proving that cellphones are not gaming platforms that can handle a series like this.  You'd think they would have added more worlds for the DS remake - you'd be wrong.

Also I'm angry that they didn't include a "Tron" world.  Considering this is a cyberpunk (kinda) game, they should include the cyberpunk world!  Maybe we can link up with "Tron: Legacy", I know David Bowie would make a great boss.

Curiously for this game's short length, the battle system is weirdly complex and deep.  SE brought back "Birth By Sleep"'s command slot system and then combined it with the panel system from "358/2 Days" with a little mix of the Sphere Grid from "Final Fantasy X" for good measure.  I didn't like the Sphere Grid personally, but the way its done here is easily its best incarnation thanks to vast amount of freedom you're given.  Unfortunately the game is over so fast you only cover about half the board, making it all pointless.  Maybe if you want to level grind to 100 you can finish it - but there's no point because there's no real superbosses to be found.  Then there's a bizarre complicated Overclock system that does something... God knows what.  I didn't read the manual on that one, sue me.  It looked boring, I got lazy.  Of course, by throwing in "Birth By Sleep"'s camera system, it means that the already frustrating platforming is twice as bad.  The regular battles against Heartless are the best part, and it is fun... but its all ruined by the fact that the game plays exactly like the other Kingdom Hearts game AND THOSE WERE BETTER.

I'm amazed that this game so wastes its own plot's potential.  You're inside a digital world, anything is possible.  Even for Kingdom Hearts, a series that's hardly grounded, things have the possibility to go crazy.  The graphics should have gone crazy, the color should have inverted, enemies should have acted weird.  Maybe Sora at one point starts arguing with his own text bubbles with voice acting.  You could do all kinds of wild things here!  This is a game that should have made me ask the question:  "is this supposed to be happening, or is my cartridge actually broken?"  Square Enix is was given a LEGO set full of blocks, they could have made anything with them, and instead they just followed the instructions and built a boring house.  Is this series losing its own creativity?

Then, just in case everything wasn't done poorly in this game, most cutscenes aren't even fully animated - they're done in the same awful "Persona 3 Portable" style of static character portraits talking.  The character portraits are slightly animated but its still a terrible way of presenting this storyline.  As for the main cutscenes with voice acting, they're far too infrequent, but still very well acted.  Its a waste of these actors' talents.

What is supposed to be the main selling point here is the shifts in gameplay to totally different styles.  Suddenly you might find yourself in a sidescrolling platformer, then it turns into an on-rails shooter, and then its a turn-based RPG.  In the RPG area, Cloud Strife from "Final Fantasy VII" joins you for some rather effective fanservice.  Yes, Cloud, we aint getting off this train we're on, we aint.  He's the only "Final Fantasy" cameo, by the way, which is disappointing in its own way.  For the first three levels you do get a new gameplay mode at the end, but then suddenly the game stop doing them.  And this is one of the few places where the game really shines.  The 2D platforming portion is so well done I wish the whole game was done this way.  I bought this game because the shifting gameplay styles looked interesting, but it just wasn't used enough to make it worth it.

The gameplay shifts bring forth an interesting concept though.  "Re:coded" could have been sort of recount of  the history of gaming itself, with the early levels having Atari graphics, while the later levels turn into NES graphics, and then we go to SNES, and finally end at DS/N64.  Along the way the gameplay could have slowly evolved as well, starting with platformers and moving to turn-based RPGs like "Final Fantasy I", then reaching "Chrono Trigger" levels, and finally reaching the wonderful action RPG gameplay I've enjoyed for seven years now with Kingdom Hearts.  The game has a built in explanation: by fixing the glitches we're making Kingdom Hearts better.

At the end you fight Roxas for an unexplained reason and then the game just sort of... ends.  Even for a game that's only twelve hours long, this thing is still an hour too long, wasting your time with a boring easy Castle Oblivion portion.  If you really must know where Kingdom Hearts' storyline is going, just go to Youtube and watch the ending.  That explains two or three things.  One of the twists this game introduces about the regular Kingdom Hearts plotline is the STUPIDEST thing I have ever heard, and its too infuriating for me to even talk about.  Find out about it yourself if you must know.  Actually don't bother.  "Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance" will probably re-explain everything that happened in this game anyway, so this is totally pointless.  The gameplay is good enough (the last boss is awesome at least) but its just not worth it.

Play "Kingdom Hearts 1" again, don't play this.  What a waste of time.

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* The original version wasn't written with nearly as much idiotic phrasing:  "We must return to free them from their torment".  The new version seems like some kind of weird bowdlerization, as if "torment" was too strong a word for a kid's game, so they put in "hurting".  Why not just say "Their owies will go away when we kiss their boo boos"?  Also there's something just fundamentally wrong with the way the English version's message is phrased, its backwards.  "When you return, their hurting will be mended" is better.  Of course, no sentence in the entirety of the English language that uses the word "hurting" can ever flow properly.

** The storyline would have been far better served if they didn't tell you it was a digital world until the very end.  That's your final act twist right there, how do you blow it?  They should have advertised this as a straight remake of "Kingdom Hearts 1" and then slowly revealed the weird changes along the way.  Like you're fighting the wrong boss at the end of Traverse Town.  Next thing you know Kairi is acting all wrong, and then the game completely goes off-the-walls insane with random glitches.