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Another week, another review. This time it's game I love but haven't played up until a few years ago. And I'm glad I did.
Continue reading Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories l Review The PS2
When it comes to the world of video games some of the biggest and most influential names all come from the male gender. You got your Nolan Bushnells, Yu Suzukis, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nobuo Uematsu, Yuzo Koshiro, Warren Spector, the list goes on and on and seems nearly endless. So, I wanted to start putting the spotlight on video game music, something that most of us love and can quite easily make or break an interactive experience.
To start this series off I wanted to avoid the overdone artists, it does not take much time to find any information on Nobuo Uematsu or Koji Kondo for example, and what better way to start than with the rare female composer who has worked on many popular titles but still exists largely in the shadows?
Without further ado, the Compendium opens and begins reading an entry on Yoko Shimomura.
Yoko Shimomura graduated from Osaka College of Music in 1988 and quite quickly found herself working at Capcom during its Golden Years in the arcade. It would take her a year before she ended up working on music for an arcade game though. That game? Final Fight. She only did one song and was uncredited for the work however.
She went back to the Famicom World where she created the soundtrack for Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, and it turns out that she has quite the affinity for Disney! The next game that she did most of the songs on that the Western World saw was the NES game Code Name: Viper.
She would soon find herself back in the arcade realm where she composed the music for the beat'em up The King of Dragons and finally moving onto a little unheard of game called Street Fighter II. You have probably never heard any song in this strange, quirky, and stereotype ridden fighting game, but least of all this one.
Go home and be a family man!
For the rest of her years at Capcom she was mostly just a member of a large composing team for such games as Mega Man 5 and Breath of Fire before she left Capcom in 1994 and began working at a totally non-influential fringe developer Squaresoft.
When she first started at Square all of her work (like the entire company) was limited to the Super Famicom with the games Live A Live, Front Mission, and a game that no gamer could possibly dislike, least of all its music, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.
That's right, in less than 10 years Yoko Shimomura found her music gracing arcade fighting tournaments worldwide and also the most beloved Mario games not made by Nintendo. Quite a resume is building up so far.
She would continue working at Squaresoft through the rest of the 1990s. Her list of games continue to build and her credentials grow higher and higher with games like Parasite Eve, which shows a more suspensful part of her writing range. She ended the decade composing the mixed PS1 release of the Mana series Legend of Mana.
And that foreshadowing I blatantly threw in your face back at the beginning of this text comes back to finally pay off! Yoko returned to the world of Disney to compose the soundtrack for Kingdom Hearts, every game in the series.
After the release of Kingdom Hearts she broke away from Squaresoft to work as a freelancer and was hardly alone at this time since the mighty RPG giant merged with Enix and bled talent for a few years. But, Square-Enix kept her on the staff for the Kingdom Hearts series where she enjoys success to this day.
Kingdom Hearts is not the only series that has been built up by her music. She returned to the Mushroom Kingdom to work on one of the spiritual successors to Super Mario RPG, the Mario & Luigi series. She has done the music on all of them so far, but no word that I can find if she returned to work on the upcoming Dream Team.
She also returned to the Mana series with Heroes of Mana, but we all forgot about that game.
In recent years she has worked to build musical scores for another new series, composing the music for the Wii classic Xenoblade Chronicles alongside her fellow Square alum Yasunori Mitsuda and returned to the world of Aya Brea in The 3rd Birthday alongside one piece of the talent that Square did not bleed, Tsuyoshi Sekito.
Gamers will also be treated to her music in her first foray in the Final Fantasy series with the soundtrack for Versus XIII whenever that decides to come out, until then we will probably play some more games that she had her hand in, hopefully a few more of us will be able to find out if Yoko Shimomura put her stamp on it.
[img align=right width=200]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/games/E-072/bf/E-072-S-00730-A.jpg[/img]What would happen if we put many of Disney's famous characters, some random evil guys, a couple of Final Fantasy's greatest heroes and some new spike-haired kids all in one game? That must've been the question Squaresoft and Disney were asking themselves when they were creating the concept of Kingdom Hearts. What made them came up with such a crazy question? I have no idea. Does it make for an enjoyable RPG? It sure does.
No matter which way you look at it, Kingdom Hearts (2002) is a pretty unique game. It shares some common points with the Final Fantasy series, but it's profoundly different otherwise.
At the start of the game we meet Sora, Riku and Kairi. These three friends are simply enjoying the little tropical world they live in and spend their days playing, talking or staring at the ocean. One day changes everything when the Heartless, a purple army of toy-like bad guys, attack the island. Both Kari and Riku disappear and Sora decides to go and look for his friends, with the help of his magical Keyblade.
Before the main story takes off, you're placed in a church-like darkness, with only glass windows displaying sleeping princesses to walk on. This area serves as a tutorial for basic combat action as well as facing you with a choice that'll decide your "destiny". Destiny may be a big word, but it comes down to you having to choose a strength and weakness with "attack", "defense" and "magic" as your options. This will later influence the way your character (Sora) levels up, what abilities he'll get first and even how fast he'll level.
Soon after embarking on his quest, Sora will meet up with Donald and Goofy, who will accompany you throughout the rest of the game. You stumbled upon the hilarious duo because they are on a quest of themselves: to find King Mickey, who has given them instructions to assist the Keyblade wearer, which just happens to be Sora.
Although the plot may seem quite heavy, it is treated pretty lightly during most of the game, mainly because you'll be working to get all the sub-plots in the different Disney worlds settled out. There's more to say about the main plot but revealing any more story feels like spoiling to me, so I won't. I'll just say that even though the story has its depth, it's clear to see that Square wanted to make this a lighter digestible plot than the average Final Fantasy; a decision that's also reflected in Kingdom Heart's gameplay - but more about that in a minute.
You'll meet many famous Disney characters on your quest to find Riku and Kairi, all living in their specific world based upon their movie counterparts. Funny is how these Disney characters (except Donald and Goofy) don't know anything about the major story, but are preoccupied with their own little problems. Along the way you'll find yourself playing alongside characters like Alladin and Jack Skellington in worlds such as Wonderland, Agrabah, the Hundred Acre Wood, Halloween Town, etc... Next to that there are some new worlds designed specifically for this game such as Traverse Town and Hollow Bastion.
Now for one of the most irritating aspects of the game: travelling between all these worlds. Rather than just having your party "teleport" to a world, you'll have to play a minigame each time you'll travel to a new world. Your ship, called a Gummi ship, travels along a determined path until you reach the next world. While flying around you'll have to shoot (often unidentifiable) enemies. This is clearly a Star Fox rip-off, and a bad one at that. By defeating enemies you'll receive "Gummi blocks" which you can use to upgrade your ship. Instead of making this easy, Square decided to put in an awkward ship editor in the game that allows you to make your ship stronger by adding parts or even create a new one. This sounds better than it actually is because there isn't any point in doing so. The Gummi levels are so easy, you'll just want to get them over with quickly to advance to the next world; so what's the point of upgrading the basic ship? The whole feature could have been left out of the game for me, but I guess Square found it necessary to let players "experience" how the party travels between worlds.
Luckily, the game is a whole lot better when inside one of the worlds. Unlike the (until then) Final Fantasy series, Kingdom hearts is an Action RPG. This means all combat happens directly in the main environments, without "going" into a turn-based combat area. Your main weapon is Sora's Keyblade, with which you can use to hit the enemies one time or in combo's (depending on the abilities you have). You can also cast traditional FF-style magic such as fire, blizzard, thunder, slow, etc... These can be selected in the "Command menu" in the lower left corner of the screen with either the D-pad or the right analog stick. You can also assign up to three magics to the cross, triangle and square buttons that allow for easy-casting in combination with L1. Lastly, you can summon Disney characters that'll temporarily help Sora out, giving Donald and Goofy a break. The camera can be moved only to the left and right by holding down either L2 or R2, which feels quite restricted. In fact, it's the main thing that bothered me while playing Kingdom Hearts; I find the camera much too close to Sora's back to give a overall perspective of your environment. Oftentimes you won't even see the enemies you're fighting, with the camera struggling to get them into view. If it wasn't for the lock-on function (activated with R1), Kingdom Hearts would be almost unplayable.
Combat happens frequently, with enemies spawning almost everywhere on the map. Sadly enough the limited tactical options will make fighting the hordes of Heartless a rather boring venture, and feels like "something you have to do" instead of being a source of fun. It isn't so irritating that it'll make you stop playing, but it could've been done a lot better. As I said earlier, Donald and Goofy will accompany you on your quest, so they're also with you during combat; helping out by attacking enemies, using magic or throwing a potion your way when your health is low. You can also opt to temporarily exchange one of the two by an optional character, depending on the world you're in. On a positive note I can say that the boss fights are much more fun than the random battles and can be quite challenging, too. (if you haven't leveled up your characters too much, that is)
Besides the fighting, there's the traditional RPG action to be done such as talking to characters, buying items and weapons in stores and saving your game at save points. There's also a bit of platforming included, which is a nice distraction from the combat but suffers from the same camera problems as well as the not-so-fluid jumping animation. Kingdom Hearts clearly is an RPG with some platform elements rather than a platform game with RPG elements.
In the main menu there are the traditional "item", "equipment", "status" and "abilities" menus as well as a "customize" and "journal" menu. In the customize menu you can set the quick-access magics for Sora and determine Donald and Goofy's combat behavior by selecting if they have to do certain things "constantly", "frequently" or "occasionally". The journal menu serves as a log in which a summary of the story is kept, next to character and world descriptions.
Graphically, Kingdom Hearts is a feast for the eyes, especially if you're a Disney fan. Both the worlds and characters accurately resemble their traditional animation counterparts, something Square can be proud of. You can also enjoy the colorful scenery in first-person view when pressing the select button. Once again, the restricted camera is the only thing that keeps this game from being a sightseers' dream.
Vocally, Square has done their best with much of the dialog being voiced over by an excellent cast of voice actors. Most of the actual Disney voice actors have lent their voices to their respective characters and Haley Joel "I see dead people" Osment gave his voice to Sora. Sound effects are average but just like in most of Square's RPG's, music is excellent. Each world is accompanied by its own theme (often a variation or adaptation of the famous Disney themes) that either sets a happy tone (in the Disney worlds) or a more serious tone (in the non-Disney worlds).
Despite its flaws, Kingdom Hearts is a unique game that successfully merges the worlds of Disney and Square into a unique experience. Whether you're an RPG fan, Square fan, Disney fan or action fan; there's a little for everybody in Kingdom Hearts. 8.4/10
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