Kingdom Hearts is a game that basically oozes appeal to people like us. Essentially the product of an almighty collision between the worlds of role playing game giant Final Fantasy and Disney, it sounds like a match made in heaven - but it's also the proud owner of one of the most impenetrable storylines in gaming history. At least, if you haven't started from the beginning. At it's most basic, the series tells the tale of the big-footed, spiky-haired Sora who travels through worlds based on popular Disney films in search of the friends he lost when the Heartless invaded his home. Dark, shadowy beings who are the living manifestations of the darkness in people's hearts, the Heartless invade the worlds of Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid (among others) and cause all sorts of chaos. With the help of King Mickey, the peaceful (but clumsy) knight Goofy and castle magician Donald Duck, he battles the heartless with his Keyblade, a unique weapon with the power to eliminate the heartless, protecting each of the Disney-inspired worlds.
If you've had even a passing interest in the Kingdom Hearts series, or just fancy a role playing game with some added Disney character, this new, remastered collection, known somewhat awkwardly as Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix provides a great starting point. With the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III on the horizon, the folks at Square Enix have put together a definitive collection of the first half of the Kingdom Hearts tale, giving each of the games a new lick of paint, before sealing the deal with a more budget-friendly price. The mega 'Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix' aggregates the definitive versions of the original Kingdom Hearts game, in it's expanded previously-Japan-only 'Final Mix' form (effectively a Director's Cut) and Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, what was a PS2 remake of a Gameboy Advance game that's effectively Kingdom Hearts 1.5, rounding the package off with the cutscenes and events from the DS's 358/2 Days, whose story begins towards the end of Kingdom Hearts and runs alongside Chain of Memories, fleshing out the story of the main antagonists and setting up the story for Kingdom Hearts II. As you can see, it's all become a bit confusing - but this is a perfect place to start. With all three squeezed onto a single disc, it's probably easiest if we take each of the three games in turn:
Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix
This is the game where it all began. It follows the story of Sora, who's been gifted with the use of the Keyblade, as he travels the world battling Heartless to find his friends Riku and Kairi after they disappeared during a Heartless attack on their home island. Kingdom Hearts is technically an action role-playing game, albeit a rather 'lite' one - although that's not necessarily a bad thing. In each of the Disney-inspired worlds, you'll find yourself getting into scuffles with plenty of Heartless enemies, earning experience points for each one you defeat, and levelling up when you earn enough, getting stronger in the process.
Disney characters new and old, bad and good make appearances in both games.
When you're not battling Heartless, you spend your time exploring the varied Disney worlds, where the stories you thought you knew have been altered by the heartless - and it's up to Sora to put things back to the way they were. It's at this point the game ends up playing a bit more like an adventure game, more akin to the likes of Zelda, as you'll often need to explore, chat to people and collect up people's misplaced objects for them. For example, the Alice in Wonderland world kicks off with Alice standing trial for the attempted theft of the Queen's heart - of course, we all know who's really done it (clue: the Heartless), but in order to make the Queen take notice we need to hunt down some evidence to prove Alice's innocence. Exploring the forest and the bizarre 'Unknown Room', which seems to be a different way up each time you enter, you hunt down the four pieces of evidence, such as footprints, an antenna and claw marks.
While the Alice in Wonderland world focuses more on exploration and collecting, the Hercules-themed Olympus Coliseum is much more action-oriented. Meeting up with the podgy satyr Phil, it's up to you to prove you're a hero by fighting your way through wave after wave of heartless. After defeating the last wave, you're thrown into a boss fight against a humongous, shadowy Cerberus, in what's probably the hardest boss fight of the game so far. With three heads, a deadly biting move and the ability to launch huge fireballs, he can be pretty tricky if you don't have a decent strategy, as there's a lot to think about in the real-time battles - we'd recommend targeting one of the outer heads and attacking in short bursts before rolling out of the way of his jaws with the square button, and healing with items whenever you get down to around a third of your max health. Look out for fireballs and his smoky purple deadly-holes-in-the-floor attacks too - making sure you're always on the move and mostly standing behind him can help you avoid the majority of them.
There's loads of little touches too that help make the ride worthwhile - for starters, the voice acting for many of the Disney characters is spot on, and instead of collecting useless trinkets you're rounding up 99 lost dalmatian puppies spread throughout the game. There's also the strange Gummi Ship sections shoe-horned in between worlds, where you pilot your little ship down a corridor of space, shooting at enemy space crafts, giant space-boulders and weird panel-y things to clear yourself a path to the next planet. While it's a bit at odd with the rest of the game, it's a nice diversion, even if you do have to replay the exact same stages every time you want to pop to the shops in Traverse Town - fortunately you can get through most simply by holding down the fire button for the few minutes each one lasts.
Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories
This remake of what started out as a GameBoy Advance game is... odd to say the least. Lured to the bizarre world of Castle Oblivion by a mysterious organisation for reasons that aren't immediately clear, Sora, Mickey and Donald end up re-entering many of the worlds they put straight in the first Kingdom Hearts game, except with a difference - they're all technically Sora's memories, but warped by those pesky heartless in a way that manifests itself as chronic memory loss for everyone involved. For example, when you enter Wonderland, you find Alice is still on trial and the Queen of Hearts is still mad - but this time round the Queen seems to have lost her memory, which Alice has apparently stolen. What follows is an exercise in avoiding the raging Queen whilst trying to rid the world of the memory-stealing Heartless, who turns out to be the same boss we fought in Kingdom Hearts I, just in a slightly different outfit.
All together now - boooo!
While you may be revisiting the same worlds as in the first game, often with fairly similar stories taking place, Re:Chain of Memories is actually a completely different game, that puts a somewhat unique spin on the Kingdom Hearts formula - by turning into a card game, and we don't mean like solitaire or snap. Instead, over the course of your adventure you'll accumulate different types of cards for use in battle or to open up the different maze-like rooms of Castle Oblivion. For the latter, each of the locked doors requires a 'map' card of a certain numerical value to open, with each card giving the room it creates different effects - perhaps all the Heartless waiting inside will be asleep, maybe the room will be filled with fewer enemies than usual or you'll find more treasure chests waiting for you inside. Certain doors will have a picture of a crown on, and require special 'Key' cards to get through - behind these doors you'll find the story gradually unfolds, mostly through cutscenes taking place in the familiar places of the Queen of Hearts courtroom or the Olympus Coliseum.
Battles are a strange mix of traditional fast-paced Heartless-whacking from the original Kingdom Hearts game, but with each one of Sora's moves, be it Keyblade swings, magic spells or healing items being represented by a card in your deck. The other difference is that inside Castle Oblivion, Sora fights alone - Goofy and Donald are no longer there fighting alongside you, although you can summon them as a special move by choosing their cards from your pack. During battle, you need to scroll through your deck of cards to the correct command and press X, after which the card is used up temporarily - the only way to get it back is to highlight the special 'Reload' card, which makes you hold down the X button for a specific amount of time before giving you all your spent cards back. For each battle, the more times you use the Reload card, the longer you have to hold down the X button and the longer it takes for the cards to come back, encouraging you to be a bit more strategic and careful with your moves, rather than simply hammer the X button and spam your entire deck in a few seconds. We promise you, it's not as confusing in practice as it sounds - and you can still get through most of the battles simply by mashing buttons if you like (we know - we tried).
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
Even some of the less well known, but huge fan favourites, like Jack Skellington make an appearance.
The oddest inclusion in the package, this actually isn't really a game so much as Kingdom Hearts TV. With getting on for three hours of cutscenes and videos taken from what was originally a DS game, the whole purpose here is to help flesh out the story of the bad guys that crop up towards the end of Kingdom Hearts I, as well as giving you a better idea of what's really going on inside Castle Oblivion in Re:Chain of Memories. The problem is watching hour upon hour of Kingdom Hearts cutscenes about angsty teens eating ice-creams on rooftops isn't exactly the most thrilling experience in the world - personally, we'd rather hunt down the DS game and play through that instead.
Overall
While each of the games is it's own self-contained adventure, there are a few issues that persist across all of them. At times the sound can be a bit choppy, with the background music and voices occasionally stuttering in some areas - it seems to be more of an issue on the Final Mix game than Re:Chain of Memories though, although that could simply be by virtue of it having less audio to begin with. Our other issues are more little niggles than anything, and they're the sort of things that were present in the source material too - we find the camera can often throw a bit of a wobbly at times, swivelling to some awkward angle at inopportune moments and getting caught on walls and objects in cramped space, whilst Sora's jump can seem weirdly floaty and hard to control when you're starting out, making the initial race against Riku in Kingdom Hearts I a bit more of a challenge than it was probably intended to be.
Meanwhile, the card-based battles in Re:Chain of Memories are a bit of a Marmite thing - they're not as awkward as they initially sound, but you do find that battles can end up dragging a bit, with some boss fights seeming to go on forever. We often found ourselves spending a lot of time running away and hiding to reload our cards before emptying our entire deck on a boss in a matter of seconds, with him mostly blocking all but one of the attacks. But that being said, the battles are still a strangely compelling change of pace from the hacky-slashy button mashing of the original game - if you can get on with it.
But still, a few technical issues aside, you're still left with an entertaining a jaunt around the Disney lands as it always was, with Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix being the stand-out game in the package. All in all the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix is a pretty solid collection of the first couple of Kingdom Hearts games, making it a great starting point for those who want to get into the series - particularly with the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III on the horizon. Now we just need a Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix and we'll be all set...
Format Reviewed: Playstation 3
