ALRIGHT FOLKS TIME TO LISTEN TO DEARLY BELOVED AND CRY

dream job

I think I can confidently say this game is a legit masterpiece separate from my own nostalgia for it

there's a lot of absolutely phenomenal design work that I'll be yelling about

but also like... oof, nostalgia levels absolutely off the charts here lol

the thing is like... I was 17 in 2005, so right at this moment of like not a kid anymore but definitely not an adult, starting to like... *become* the person I would eventually grow into

and uh WOW do this game's themes just BLAST their way through a person's brain at that phase

and like it hit everyone I knew in the same way at the same time. yall remember deviantart in 2006??

individual and collective consciousnesses just utterly *suffused* with impossibly skinny trench coats and giant zippers and galaxy-brain existentialist revelations

like hi we're all teens on the internet just sort of trying on identities and performing them through art and xanga posts; here's a game with everyone swapping minds and bodies and bodies without minds and where do thoughts reside and who will remember me and holy shit two boys??

also the combat system rules

HELLO EVERYONE MY NAME IS THEW AND I AM HERE TO INFORM YOU ALL THAT THE FIRST THREE HOURS OF KINGDOM HEARTS II ARE GOOD ACTUALLY

CHECK THIS TAKE OUT: ITS BORING AND SUCKS ON PURPOSE, SPECIFICALLY TO MAKE THE PLAYER CONFUSED AND UNCOMFORTABLE AND ANGRY IN ORDER TO PLACE THEM IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT HEADSPACE FOR THE ABSOLUTELY *BONKERS-ASS* AXEL FIGHT WHICH IS ONE OF THE GREATEST BOSS BATTLES IN GAMING HISTORY

I love how you're just like utterly confused by everything going on and trying to figure out who these characters are, and then Roxas gets the keyblade and IMMEDIATELY jumps into Sora's goofy combat pose

also there is SO much dank lore going on in this section that makes zero sense at the time lol

the keyblade appears with this weird data effect, presumably because DiZ just like... spawned it on him so he could deal with the Nobody

also this is the third time I've played this game and the first time I've understood this line lol

the Nobodies are trying to take Roxas back to Org XIII, but they can't distinguish digitized Roxas from Data of Photos OF Roxas because everything's Data in Data Twilight Town

I know KH's whole reputation in 2020 is "insanely complicated lore" but IMO it's actually really fun and works well in KH2

It's totally out of hand now that there's like 15 games, but KH1 was v straightforward so 2 going "EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW WAS A LIE" actually owned

the fixation on memories shared in photographs and "the end of summer vacation" as metaphor for the end of adolescence itself and the subsequent changes in relationships aaaaa

please look at this skateboard

please look at the UI for this skateboard

so a thing I adore about Square, even to this day, is that somehow they have basically infinite money and some of the highest-level art talent in the industry, but just absolutely no concept of restraint or self-control whatsoever

nobody at this company knows what a producer is

like FFVII doesn't have "art direction", it has "every single asset created by 100 incredibly talented artists learning 3D modeling in two years, thrown into a giant pile"

they did learn art direction later but absolutely never learned "how do we make the artists stop"

when this works you get an insanely high-effort masterpiece like KH2

when it doesn't work you get FFXV, which is missing the entire second half of its plot but has a wildly sophisticated in-world AI photographer and like 120 of the most spectacular 3D models of food ever created

both of these outcomes rule

so like back to KH2

that skateboard?

you can ride the skateboard, you can grind ledges, you can do MULTIPLE tricks, and it serves *literally no purpose except to be rad*

like a whole custom movement system with a whole set of animations, for one throwaway asset in the prologue

VFX artist to his team lead in 2003: YOU CANNOT STOP ME FROM MAKING A CUSTOM PARTICLE EFFECT FOR THE ACT OF HITTING THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE WITH A SKATEBOARD THAT IS DOING A HEELFLIP

there are a bunch of minigames at the beginning whose explicit purpose in the plot is to waste time

one of them is hanging posters

they could just cut, or hide it with particles, BUT NO

roxas pulls out a poster, *in his actual hand*, does a sick spin jump and SLAPS it on there

look at the particle effect where it hits the wall; it's just a starburst and a ring but it's so subtle and punchy and aaaa

and like the slowdown/anticipation in the hangtime before his hand connects

it is COMPLETELY UNJUSTIFIABLE for this to be this good

i love it so much

anyway this is where I point out that there are SEVENTY animators credited on this game

Twilight Princess and Kingdom Hearts II are two of my favoritest games ever and they both make the same bizarre error of confusing "twilight" with "sunset"

twilight is specifically the brief period AFTER sunset where the sun is gone but everything's still lit a dim blue/purple from sunlight scattered by the atmosphere

it's not orange

look this is important okay

tfw

odd rendering thing in this game that's always fascinated me:
Any "foreground" geometry leaves these really nice-looking dark halos on the sky, almost like weird AO

It seems related to how bloom works but I'm p sure it's a deliberate stylistic effect rather than an artifact...

I can think of a handful of ways this COULD be done, but no real way to find out for sure

I guess I could conceivably run the game in PCSX2 and hook up RenderDoc, but that would probably say more about how PCSX2 works it than how it was accomplished on actual hardware...

I love how everyone's faces can switch between textured eyes/mouths with flipbook animation and fully modeled/rigged features depending on the shot

AFAIK most of Square's PS2 games do this and it's a really neat trick

FOLKS

THE VFX

ARE HERE

kingdom hearts dot png

I thought these were flipbooks and then I stared at them for way too long and I'm like 90% sure they're literally just scrolling UVs along wavy or spiral-shaped ribbons of geometry, and then scaling/rotating the geo

essentially still particles but with v carefully-shaped meshes

kingdom of hearts

honestly "Kingdom Hearts" is WAY up there on the list of "incredibly good English titles that no native English speaker would ever think of"

(#1 on this list is of course From Software, a grammatic landmine of a name which detonates any sentence that attempts to include it)

huh I still don't actually know what game Seifer and his crew are from

is... is this supposed to stand for TwiLight ToWn

Really neat forced perspective on the background here

the ground's only like a few meters away but little tiny trees and color shifts and thin clouds make it look like we're on top of a huge cliff

the train tracks are like, right over there, but the columns seem monolithic

literally me rn

honestly even knowing the plot ahead of time, this whole first act sets up a REALLY powerful mood. Roxas's whole arc of just trying to spend time with his friends and getting so isolated and confused by the simulation breaking down around him, finally turning to anger at Axel/DiZ

it perfectly aligns with the player's feelings at this point, where you have no idea what's going on or who any of these characters are, and nobody explains anything, and there's all these weird pointless quests and you're just like WHERE'S SORA I THOUGHT THIS WAS KINGDOM HEARTS

THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS

SO LIKE

gameplay-wise you're confused and annoyed

plot-wise Roxas is disoriented and pissed off

You're doing essentially KH1 combat at level 3: you move slow, attack slower, have no dodge and no distance-closers, it's just generally stodgy and frustrating:

and then this dude who's been messing with your head the whole time shows up again and Roxas pulls TWO KEYBLADES OUT OF NOWHERE AND NOW COMBAT LOOKS LIKE THIS

the whole preceding 2+ hours of confusion and tedium turn out to have been setting up this moment, where Roxas basically does a limit break and unlocks Kingdom Hearts Combat

and it's accomplished through this incredible fusion of writing and scenario design and combat design and Game Feel

in terms of videogames as pure spectacle/adolescent power fantasy it's one of the hypest moments I've ever seen

This also demonstrates the secret sauce of KH combat design (and ties into the whole "seventy animators" thing): Leveling Up doesn't just make numbers bigger, YOUR ACTUAL MOVES GET COOLER

You move faster, swing wider, and start getting more and more acrobatic attacks built into your combos. You still BASICALLY just mash X, but the stuff that happens when you hit X gets more and more elaborate until you're just wasting swarms of mooks while flying all over the map

you could LITERALLY fly by the end of the first game, and after a brief disempowerment at the beginning to establish contrast, KH2 keeps pushing so much further you'd think it was a Trigger anime or something

It's the only RPG I know of that takes the "ever-increasing power levels" concept that's always a part of the genre, and makes it DIRECTLY tangible both through its aesthetics and actual combat system

(also you need seventy animators to pull it off, which makes my no-budget indie heart sink lol)

❤❤❤

oh right there are disney characters in this

the disney stuff in the first game made sense because the whole pitch was "what if we somehow made a really good RPG out of an absurd fanfic AU" and like the weird juxtaposition of franchises was part of the point

but then for 2 they were just like... okay we're making a wild-ass shounen anime about existentialism and Feelings but wait whoops we are contractually obligated to include Donald Duck in every cutscene

remember when the pitch for Versus XIII was the kingdom hearts team basically making a KH game without disney and then they spent nine years making 3D models of croquettes

sora's outfit from the first game being way too small is such a great detail

yoooo that weird dark halo effect I was mentioning? They're legit using it as some kind of wild fake AO trick aaaaa

Here's some video; you can clearly see the darkening effect around the doors and those half-moon pedestals, and occasionally the characters. It only applies to geometry that overlaps the walls, specifically. There's no darkening around e.g. Sora's feet

It *seems* to be a part of however they're implementing bloom; the halo radius is the same as the bloom radius, and everything I've seen these halos on ALSO always glows (see: the glowy stars on the walls in this case)

Originally I thought it was just skydomes but it seems like they can tag any arbitrary geometry to give it this effect. It gets all soft and bloomy, and any opaque geo that draws in front of it gets a dark halo (regardless of depth, notably; it's not *actually* SSAO)

alright screw it

practicing social distancing by ripping my KHII DVD to an iso so I can run it in PCSX2 so I can hook it up to RenderDoc so I can figure out how they're drawing bloom

wow turns out if you skip all the cutscenes and run the emulator at 400FPS you can get through the first 45 minutes of tutorials in like 30 seconds

renderdoc captured.... one draw call that just spits out a textured quad that already has the entire game drawn on it

:(

okay giving up :(

can't figure out how to make renderdoc actually capture useful things. If anyone's gotten renderdoc working with pcsx2 hmu I guess lol

this game's font has a custom ligature for XIII

ever see a VFX sequence so good you dedicate literally the rest of your life to the craft of game development because uhh hi

also shoutouts to the sound design in that sequence. The whole game has this really distinctive treble-heavy bell-like crystalline sound running through everything. UI sound effects, combat impacts, etc all have a really consistent audio aesthetic across the board

Also interestingly, it's much more pronounced in KH but these sorts of ringing bell/chime timbres are present in most of square's audio work from the PS2 era, particularly for UI effects. IMO roughly from FFX to XIII there was very much a distinct "final fantasy sound"

This has always struck me as interesting because I can't really think of other cases where a particular studio has developed a signature audio style like that? Studios have distinctive game-design choices and art direction, but rarely for audio apart from music...

I'm not an audio guy so maybe there are good examples I've just never noticed...

only other example I can think of offhand is probably the Myst series (Woody Thunks: The Videogame)

intense PS1 Kiosk Demo Disc energy on the gummi ship menu tbh

The Gummi Ship Respector has Logged On

well this explains literally everything

why is auron in ancient greek hell

Oh yeah you know that Videogame Thing where characters just like walk to specific locations and then play a generic Gesturing Animation while speaking?

KHII... mostly doesn't do this

Just about every voiced line has completely bespoke animation, and usually custom facial animation (with lip-sync redone for english!)

The cutscenes in this game are full-on animated movies, like they wanted to make a realtime pixar film on a PS2

This means even relatively minor scenes have room for neat character acting or physical comedy. Characters TOUCH EACH OTHER!

Nobody can afford this! If you're doing "every cutscene is a fully-animated performance" in 2020 it's AAA photorealism facial capture, not ten hours of hand-animated pixar faces

hell, characters *hand objects to each other*

remember how much effort Death Stranding spent to avoid ever having to show that lol

anyway square is bonkers and put seventy animators on a PS2 project in 2003

(I should note that they DO still do the canned-animation puppeteering thing for text-only dialogue. There's just not a whole lot of that, and it's usually restricted to short, informative stuff like telling you a door unlocked or whatever. Anything emotional is voiced/animated)

I'm like four hours into this game and my save file says 15:33 because I keep leaving it paused to edit video captures and tweet about it lol

I love how like half of Organization XIII aren't actually particularly evil and are just like... 9-to-5 villains. Like their job is villainy, but their job sucks and they hate it

more good vfx

re: earlier comments about combat design

so all you really do is mash X most of the time, but leveling up makes X do ever more exciting things

Just got an ability so that when I push X and there isn't an enemy in range, it just rockets me across the stage into the nearest dude

As you level up and gain more abilities like this, combat slowly transitions from "walk up to an enemy and hit them until they die" into "wade into a swarm of like 30 enemies and just BLAST your way all over the screen, pinballing from one to the next while everything explodes"

This description of KH combat from a Tim Rogers piece in 2009 has honestly remained near the forefront of my mind for the past decade

Also: Every combat ability needs to be equipped, and consumes Ability Points. Even basics like blocking must be equipped, and leveling up increases your AP so you equip more stuff. Character builds are thus accomplished by fitting different sets of Abilities under the AP cap

If this sounds familiar it's because it's literally the chip system from Nier Automata.

This is because Nier Automata is in fact the real Kingdom Hearts III

Here is a thread detailing how absolutely correct I am about this:

scenario designer: "Okay so this door is locked until after combat"

vfx artist, levitating: ＦＥＡＲ ＮＯＴ

Cuphead (2017)

still laughing that The Rules of Time Travel are an incredibly overwrought and prescriptive section of KH lore, except for the Steamboat Willie level which is canonically somehow a different kind of time travel that doesn't count

lol no thanks

hypothetically maybe Wisdom Form isn't worthless if you don't pick the sword at the beginning?

but like what kind of complete weirdo doesn't pick the sword at the beginning

wh-

they do the scene where Orlando Bloom threatens to kill himself, but apparently showing him holding the gun to his head would've been too much for an E-10+ rating, so we got.... this lmao

rail-shooter boss design is my passion

with the amount of time I'm putting into the gummi ship levels maybe I should just stop and go play that Panzer Dragoon remake instead

or..............................................
.........

ᵈʳᵃᵏᵉⁿᵍᵃʳᵈ

speaking of 2000s deviantart I still think about this comic a lot



also happens to be extremely Me Irl at the moment

I did place some engines and a cockpit vaguely in the general vicinity of guns but the ship budget is like 85% consumed by four guns

lmao I did some googling and apparently the most optimal gummi ship is a giant ring made of power boosters and guns

apparently hit detection uses the actual ship geo, and the enemies aim at the origin, so if you build The Donut Ship they just shoot through the hole in the middle

now this is podracing

yall the skateboard in post-Roxas Twilight Town has a DIFFERENT 2000s tribal pattern and UI

alright we're starting to get to the good stuff

the idea that the Nobodies don't possess hearts but recreate emotions from a reflexive memory OF emotions... leading immediately to the question "does that distinction actually matter, or even mean anything at all"

somehow this type of thing is just, like, perfectly shaped to just lodge itself in my brain forever

I read some Camus for an intro philosophy class around the same time and also Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and it was just full-on teen galaxy brain for a while there lol

this is of course one of many reasons why I also love Nier Automata so much

YOOOO there IS a minigame that uses the skateboard tricks!

I had to play the game three times to even find this!

It's just a random unmarked NPC that you might happen to talk to in the middle of a bunch of plot stuff

aaaaa this is so good

I get why we don't but maan I wish we had more games with this level of facial animation

EMOTIONS

Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)

SAY FELLAS, DID SOMEBODY MENTION THE DOOR TO DARKNESS

on a related note, 2009 was a really good year for youtube shitposts

when the lore dump finally drops

it is a good day for Tifa Content

kingdom hearts dot png

tfw renderdoc sometimes captures the game and sometimes doesn't for no discernable reason

thanks to @Sharlock93 for the discovery that running it as Administrator raises it from "never works" to "arbitrarily works like 15% of the time I guess"

so yeah remember I was talking about the weird/pretty dark halos in the game's bloom effect? Think I got it figured out

So I'd figured out earlier that bloom isn't applied globally; the level artists can choose whether any given surface contributes to bloom or not. Often it's just the skybox, but it can be any surface they want

for example: the brown walls in this room

An aspect that confused me a lot is that sufficiently bright lights DO bleed over top of the foreground. Meaning, the dark halo can be seemingly overwhelmed by bright-enough bloom

for example, the sun bleeding over Roxas's pant leg in this image

So here's how it works:

Bloom is done just before the UI, after everything else in the scene has been drawn

so first it just draws the whole scene, including transparent and additive materials (note how dark the sky appears)

The whole screen is then copied to a half-res buffer, using stencil test (I think) to black out everything that isn't "bloomable" (here, everything besides the skybox)

I don't know 100% if it's stencil based (PCSX2 didn't actually enable stencil), but the effect is the same

This masked copy is then blurred, and then additively blended over top of the original image

that's it; that's the whole effect

doesn't even do any thresholding or anything; it's literally just masking out the Bloom Zones, then blurring and adding them over top

So it turns out the reason this looks great is mostly down to the artists. It's not a global effect with a brightness threshold, like later LDR bloom implementations; it's based on tagging specific geometry to contribute, and authoring textures accordingly

i.e. the skybox is intentionally v dark, because the artists know it's going to get additively blended over top of itself, dramatically increasing its brightness

so instead of blown-out X Box Three Sixty bloom, it's carefully controlled to just give a nice softness to the scene

The dark halos, then, obviously just come from the fact that everything besides the sky is BLACK, so when blurred you can see the original much darker sky color bleeding through around the edges

But what about the thing where the sun and other bright objects DON'T have dark halos, and actually bleed over the foreground?

Turns it's not bloom at all lol; the sun glow's literally just a big additive flare particle drawn on top, BEFORE the bloom effect is rendered

Me, shader dev in 2020: *brainstorming absurdly complex techniques for LDR emissive bloom*

Environment artist in 2004: "I will place a big additive flare particle on each light in this scene, because it looks good and we've been doing that since like the N64"

An interesting side effect of this technique is that none of the rad glowy particle-based VFX can actually make use of bloom

alpha and additive geo don't write to the stencil buffer (or whatever the PS2's equivalent of stencil was), so they mostly can't control their own bloom

Whether a particle effect gets bloomed or not simply depends on whether it happens to draw ON TOP of geo that has already set the stencil bit for bloom

In this case, only the one blue particle that overlaps the sky gets bloomed:

This even goes for big huge hero effects

Was wondering if they'd employ opaque geo in VFX specifically to enable bloom on certain parts, but nope. Just the bits that happen to overlap the existing bloom geo gets bloomed

no fancy tech stuff required, just Good Art

also this game taught me my #1 VFX rule, which is to always spawn a big black blob behind anything additive so it has something to contrast against

also there's SOOO much beautiful movement going on there that isn't visible in a single-frame capture

I love how the jagged Nobody lines shift between black and white so they're always guaranteed to contrast against whatever's behind them

Another cool thing while I've got renderdoc hooked up: How'd they do gaussian blur on a PS2?

It didn't have programmable shaders, so you couldn't just sum multiple texture samples

It COULD render to texture though, and it had really sophisticated fixed-function texture blending

So they copy the blur mask to a half-res target, as mentioned above. They then copy that to ANOTHER buffer, and draw it back over the original, offset by a few texels, and ALSO slightly stretched on both axes

It then iterates: The result of that offset blend is copied out and blended back over itself, with the offset vector rotated a bit and UV stretching modified slightly

After 12 passes, the result is a nice, smooth, wide-radius blur

(hopefully twitter doesn't ruin this too badly)

I don't know if the exact offset and stretch values are some super-clever approximation of a real gaussian kernel, or if they just played around with the values until they got a nice soft result with no obvious sampling artifacts, but it sure looks great

"Copying and redrawing the entire screen overtop of itself 12 times per frame sounds insanely inefficient"

ah, but remember, this is a PlayStation 2

FILLRATE OF THE *GODS*

also who knows; they could be doing some sick-ass bare-metal hyper-optimized hardware tricks to make it fast; renderdoc hooked up to an emulator won't actually tell us anything about how this was implemented on real hardware, beyond "what geo draws to what targets in what states"

anyway back to actually playing KHII

so a thing that rules about this game: it's the only JRPG I know of that completely acknowledges how absurdly OP the protagonist is

part of it's in the gameplay, i.e. earlier tweets about how combat becomes More Awesome as you level up

but it's also deeply written into the plot and characters. Sora KNOWS he's absurdly overpowered. He already HAD his Hero's Journey bildungsroman and saved all worlds in the first game, and now he's literally just trying to locate his best friend so they can go home and chill

So while he's still, like, the world's nicest dude, when the villains start showing up he goes into this snarky self-confident asshole mode because he KNOWS Boss Battles are things that he always wins

*MAD SPOILERS OBV*

this culminates in an All-Time Top Videogame Moment, where a *literal army* marches on a city full of his friends

Sora's immediately just like LET'S GO and then the game turns into dynasty warriors while you SINGLEHANDEDLY DESTROY AN ENTIRE ARMY

it rules so hard

you know the JRPG trope where like four basic mooks appear in a cutscene and the heroes are like "oh noes we're surrounded"?

that happened a lot in the first game and I kinda feel like this was a deliberate subversion of that lol

this fight happens around the halfway point in the game, and you DO eventually meet villains who actually pose a real threat, but by that point the game has done such a great job of characterizing sora's shounen-ass power levels that fighting those dudes feels incredibly dramatic

I do think this was very intentionally designed into the game too. Nomura was working on Advent Children at the same time, and in interviews he talked about AC asking "what does Level 99 combat *actually look like*"

so like this stuff was def in a lot of ppl's minds at square

yeah also this

I didn't grab video of the fight itself but the execution is extremely smart

I'm not even sure where the transition from billboard to 3D happens; as far as I can tell there really ARE one thousand enemies on that field, just v careful LoDs

the handful of 3D ones are the only guys with full AI, but your big AoE attacks can easily take out like 50+ at once

shoutouts to this Microsoft GS Wavetable-ass rendition of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme that Yoko Shimomura clearly found in giant zip file downloaded from the "free assets" pinned topic on an RPGMaker 2000 invisionfree forum

whenever the Organization XIII guys are sneaking around causing problems they use this ridiculous looney tunes run animation

it's so good

Winnie the Pooh and the Purgatorial Minigame Dimension of Torment

lmao

mfw

it's great how after like 14 games and multiple entire villain plots revolving around it, it's still entirely unclear what Kingdom Hearts actually is or does

like even the first game was incredibly vague about what "kingdom hearts" is supposed to be, and then they had to spend multiple games trying to tweak/retcon their way around the fact that the ending of KH1 makes literally zero sense lol

- kingdom hearts is a big door
- villain thinks opening it will fill him with The Power of Darkness
- sora says no kingdom hearts is Light
- villain opens kingdom hearts, gets owned by light
- the end

EXCEPT hold on it's literally just a door, there's just some stuff back there

- okay uhhhhhh hold on that door wasn't Kingdom Hearts, it was the Door to Darkness
- ansem is just a huge dumbass who thought a big door was kingdom hearts, somehow
- by opening The Door To Darkness, he got blasted by.... light
- mickey mouse's shirt came off

- okay okay we can make this work hold on
- kingdom hearts is somewhere else, who cares whatever
- dunno what's with ansem and the big door but boy he sure was wrong about it being kingdom hearts
- okay: ansem got owned to death by how wrong he was

- yes okay this works
- technically this means sora didn't actually do anything but whatever, everything fits except for one final detail
- we need to senran kagura mickey mouse

re: the absolutely staggering quantity of animation work in this game

the lion king level turns sora into a lion, which means remaking hIS ENTIRE COMBAT MOVESET FOR A QUADRUPED RIG

hell just running down a mental list of the number of allied or playable characters that have full sets of combat animations, IN ADDITION to all the regular enemies/bosses:

- sora
- donald
- goofy
- lion sora
- bird donald
- turtle goofy
- wisdom sora
- anti sora
- mickey mouse

- roxas (some shared with sora)
- riku
- mulan
- beast
- auron
- jack skellington
- jack sparrow
- aladdin
- simba
- tron
- seifer
- vivi
- squall
- cloud
- tifa
- yuffie
- a bunch of summons I've never used
- probably more I'm forgetting

according to the internet there are also 99 enemy types and 49 bosses

in addition to their regular combat moveset, every enemy has at least one Reaction Command, i.e. unique QTE animation that involves both the enemy and sora

full on pixar-ass facial animation with localized lip sync for this lion

her ears are rigged

how did this game get made

I mean the answer to "how did this get made" is of course always "brutal exploitation of labor" but like.... even then the results aren't usually THIS elaborate

it was honestly wild playing the FFVII remake in the middle of this thread and realizing most of the character animation is actually a big step DOWN from KHII

like obviously the cutscenes with bespoke facial animation are all great, but it has FAR fewer of them

most of the dialogue in FF7R is the usual puppetry thing where a character just faces a scripted target and plays Gesture X and VoiceClip Y

which is *fine*, to be clear. Most games do that; it works well and saves dev resources. It's just crazy that KHII usually DOESN'T

NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS INGONYAMA

lmao this is such a great detail

Nala thinks Simba is dead, because like, The Plot of The Lion King, and then Sora's like "oh that dude? he was a summon in the last game; he's fine"

more pretty forced-perspective environment work

also just gonna RT this instead of making the same joke

lmao I was like how on earth did they actually get james earl jones for this

apparently it's just recordings from the original movie

Landing a finisher on a boss is always so ridiculously satisfying

whole screen is explosions - super bullet time - rad punchy camera cuts - gigantic popups going LOOK AT ALL THE COOL STUFF YOU JUST UNLOCKED

A cool trick: you gain new abilities (i.e. new combat animations that make everything cooler) when you level up. BUT instead of trying to balance XP and ability progression for specific bosses, the devs actually just added a SECONDARY level system that increases with boss kills

I didn't even realize it works this way until earlier in this playthrough lol, but that's why you're always guaranteed to get Cool New Abilities from boss kills

that's why it says BONUS GET; I didn't actually gain enough XP to level up, but killing bosses raises Bonus Level

another extremely rad game-feel thing is how finishers work

you mostly only really mash X, but mashing X does a combo chain of a bunch of fast weak attacks and then one big heavy attack at the end

unlocking abilities makes this combo longer and flashier

this grants even basic combat this really satisfying cadence of, like

bonk bonk bonkbonkbonk BAM

ridiculously punchy sense of anticipation and impact, just repeating forever as long as there's targets to clobber

you know how every videogame has that thing where you use your biggest coolest moves and the boss is left with like 9 HP and then your next generic auto-attack just like, pokes him and you win in the most anticlimactic way possible

KH bosses can ONLY be killed by combo finisher

this... has some tradeoffs; it's possible for a boss to be sitting at 1HP but still moving/attacking too fast for you to actually land a finisher on him

but the advantage is you always win big fights with that final WHAM that sets off the aforementioned slomo/fireworks

it owns

this even extends to the final boss, which I'll tweet a ton about later lol

but you wreck the last 30% of his last healthbar in History's Raddest QTE and then it still cuts back to gameplay with him stunned at 1HP so you can manually land the final combo that ends the game

lmao I forgot they short-circuit like half of the little mermaid's plot because sora's just like "we should beat up ursula"

observe: this boy

rail-shooter boss design is my passion

so that pattern's literally impossible to avoid and the only approach is to find the least-damaging part of the screen and just sit there and tank it because the game makes an abrupt face-euroshmup turn at the last possible minute

normal resource allocation

heartless printer go brrr

it's pretty cool/weird that a casual playthrough is almost guaranteed to miss Hollow Bastion's third act, which means the vast majority of players never found out about the heartless machine or the Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden thing

It's a total Nomura move, dropping mind-blowing Lore Reveals that won't matter for like ten more years

but again this was early enough that he hadn't done that 30 times before, so it felt genuinely unexpected and awesome

IIRC if you're a giant nerd and read all the journal entries this is also where you find out that Kairi was actually born in Radiant Garden, not Sora's world, which explains the weird flashbacks of her in Hollow Bastion in the first game

it's also remarkable that the lore puts SO much effort into distinguishing Pureblood and Emblem Heartless, when it's completely irrelevant to both gameplay and anything in the plot

like they could have just gone "there's a machine that makes heartless" and then stopped there, but instead they had to be all extra and go "they look slightly different from natural heartless, and now every enemy in the game needs to logically fit into one of these categories"

also while I'm talking about heartless: There's a VERY short list of games that have truly unique enemy designs IMO, and kingdom hearts is definitely one of them

like I think the fact that every videogame needs like a million different enemy designs leads to pretty much everyone falling into fairly similar categories. Not even a criticism; just practicality

like play FFX or the Xenoblades or Tales or any 3D Zelda or whatever and ultimately most of the enemies are like, Lizard Dude, Flame Dog, Large Wasp, Violent Statue etc etc etc

all just kinda blends together after a while bc you need SO MANY that you can't avoid tropes easily

KH enemies look like absolutely nothing else and are instantly recognizable, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment tbh

Other good examples I can think of:

Bayonetta

Nier Automata's fully-modular windup robots

Parts of FFXIII? Lots of generic designs but then it absolutely goes hard on like 31st century gold/porcelain/quartz catholic icons made of living motorcycles

axel's model is kind of incredible

like his proportions are so perfectly stylized they can put him in basically any pose viewed from any angle and he's always got this INCREDIBLY strong and distinctive silhouette

like man I can't even DRAW sleeves that awesome and they did it in 3D with a few hundred tris and full rigging

really nice static lighting

suddenly realizing the X motif all over sora's clothes is almost certainly nomura doing the ꭓ thing, years before that actually entered the lore

our dude's Latin fetish stops at nothing

Reminder that official Kingdom Hearts lore states that wearing a black trenchcoat lets you teleport

so KHII's Reaction Commands are probably one of the best implementations of quick-time events, and it's always seemed odd to me that it wasn't cloned

God of War came out of a few months earlier, so this was basically the early days of the Press X To Not Die era of AAA design

key differences compared to most QTE systems of the era:
- They always use the same button
- You can't fail them
- They're optional

(yes I know there are some exceptions don't @ me)

Effectively this means they aren't "challenges", but rather opportunities to do something cool if the situation is right

If the goal of QTEs is to let the player do something Rad and Cinematic that's too complex to happen organically, KH accomplishes that without the downsides

Every enemy has a unique Reaction Command that does a bunch of damage and usually hits multiple targets. They're situational; you learn where they're most useful, and how to bait them out

The key is that the player chooses whether to use them at all, and they can't be failed

In actual practice they function a lot more like the Counter button in the Batman/AssCreed combat systems a few years later, but with the "cinematic" choreographed animation flourishes of a QTE

(although even then, the counter button itself rapidly became monotonous as those games started introducing enemies that REQUIRED their use 100% of the time)

the reference this quote again "press X to not die" is so much less interesting than "Press the Awesome Button to make Something Awesome happen"

Its not perfect obviously (there are like four of them that you CAN fail for some reason, which is utterly disorienting), but if you were gonna make a game with QTEs for the Cinematic Action Moments, "one button, optional, no fail states" is clearly the best way to do it imo

(also telling me to press X in an instant or suffer consequences is a huge asshole move when X is in a different place on every console lol)

okay I'm in trouble because I have a lot more things I wanted to tweet about kingdom hearts II but I have also nearly run out of kingdom hearts II to play

I like how the first game was a success despite its absurd premise bc it actually managed to mash up disney and final fantasy in an interesting way

and then KHII's pacing is
- 5 hours of anime
- 25 hours of totally irrelevant disney churn
- 10 more hours anime

this isn't a criticism of course, "maximum anime with some lip service paid to the existence of disney" is exactly what we all wanted from a sequel to Kingdom Hearts

oh yeah this tweet probably belongs in this thread somewhere

you know for how large Axel looms in my memory of this game, he's not actually in it very much

thinking about deviantart circa 2006 and it's just the sherlock mind palace gif with ROXASXAXEL flying around everywhere in different fonts

The World That Never Was is such a cool environment

WHAT IF ACTUALLY THOUGH

gonna make my own kingdom hearts 3 that's just kairi and axel with keyblades kicking every ass in the universe

it's the only option at this point

animator showing off

YOU'RE XIGBAR

I realize that You're Xigbar isn't actually a meme but I'm determined to make it one

It's actually been really weird replaying KH2 after 3 came out because like.... 3 was FULL of awkward "translated JRPG" dialogue weirdness with like five-second pauses between every line and voice actors clearly not knowing the context of anything

KH2... doesn't have that?

FFXII came out only a few months later and that game has probably the highest-effort localization in history lol

I guess in later years square just decided "good enough" localization is WAY cheaper than "spectacular" and the extra cost prob doesn't directly translate to sales...

lmao

sora crying for riku super weirded me out when I first played this, because the writing keeps telling you that sora and kairi's relationship is the thing that matters, when that's CLEARLY NOT what he actually cares about the most

the surface-level writing's sort of weirdly at odds with itself, but it makes so much more sense with the understanding that sora/riku's relationship, and its mirror image in roxas/axel, is THE central force of the whole story

I don't need to tweet at length about this because thankfully a much better writer already wrote a literal book on it lol. Really good except here:

I'm not toootally sure I agree with the author's assertion that there ISN'T a romantic component to either pair's relationship (particularly in roxas/axel's case)

but also like... absolutely nobody in kingdom hearts knows what sex is lol

"nobody in kingdom hearts knows what sex is" isn't even half of it tbh; the real take is "nobody in kingdom hearts even knows what having a crush is"

there are exactly two relationships in kingdom hearts:
"best friends, with such overwhelming love that you would literally die for each other without an instant's hesitation"
and
"we COULD be best friends if you would just stop trying to murder me and my other friends"

hey I actually got Final Form for the first time lol

kiiiiinda want to level it because I really want Glide but also Glide is useless when there's like three boss fights left in the game

man this boss sucks so bad lol

it's a gimmick fight and the gimmick makes zero sense and it suddenly introduces reaction commands THAT YOU CAN FAIL in middle of like 20 other new unexplained mechanics

Discovered recently that there are actually Nobodies earlier in the game that are supposed to teach how the card thing works, except they only spawn in really out-of-the-way places

and also anyone who found one would just hit triangle, turn into a card, and go "welp nevermind"

thankfully the next boss totally rules

dude goes into a super-powerful berserker mode but then you can steal his weapon and interrupt and wreck him with it

also mad vfx

haha remember when they made kingdom hearts 3 but didn't put reaction commands in kingdom hearts 3 and then they made you fight this guy again but with the entire central mechanic that made it fun removed

Nier: Automata (2017)

This flowing fluid-y stuff is a really cool low-complexity effect. It's just scrolling UVs on a bunch of overlapping alpha geometry, shaped to conform to the underlying level meshes

it's overdraw city, but again, PS2 fillrate

the way it flows around the spikes is really slick

If you get the camera in the right spots you can see it's alpha shells surrounding the base geo, slightly offset so it doesn't z-fight

this'd be really fun to look at in renderdoc but there's no way I'm playing the entire game in an emulator just to get here haha

I'm at the final save point but I just discovered I'm only two materials short of crafting Ultima Weapon so I guess I'm gonna do that

esports

ＧＥＴ！

also wow that item description is some serious JRPG Translation

bizarrely out of place given how flawless all the other text is...

long keyblade is long

peter pan magic cheese

neat

all-time great "final save point before the point of no return" room title tbh

BIG
BUTTON
PROMPT

IT'S ANIME TIME

I wrote a bunch already about how this game is fully invested in portraying sora's ridiculous power levels. Even with all of that, the final boss is a MASSIVE, ridiculous escalation

"sora defeats an army" is the midpoint of the game, and the final boss STARTS at "this dude is hurling literal skyscrapers at sora and he's just smashing them apart like they're softball pitches"

it rules so hard

(I'm not gonna post a ton of captures of the ending bc like, you should play this game)

(also, the impact of all the ridiculous shounen-ass anime heroics is lessened when it's just, like, a clip attached to a tweet completely out of gameplay context haha)

what I can't convey is there's like several minutes of cutscenes in between the last two panels there

this is 100% my sister's joke; she yelled that right when the robot dragon appeared and I've been cracking up about it for years since

delighted to share it with you all now

LASER DOOOOOOOME

no teenaged weeb in 2006 experienced laserdome and walked away unchanged

also it rules that donald and goofy are just, like, removed from the climax lol

like sure they're important to the series or whatever but what REALLY matters here is they spent two whole games building up to a sora/riku team-up and now that's the only thing that really matters

honestly if you want to use gameplay to pump up player emotions for plot-critical moments there are few tricks more powerful than "constantly changing which character is player-controlled during a fight"

switching back and forth between sora and riku to pull each other out of danger or team up with rad combo attacks feels INCREDIBLE, and it's just absolutely perfect for the character arcs at that point too

(this is yet another Truth in support of my "Nier Automata is the real Kingdom Hearts III" thesis btw. Automata employs it EXTREMELY carefully and every time they do it it hits like a truck)

that scene at the end with sora and riku on the beach is still really good, wow

beat the final boss in ridiculously hype anime action and then it slows WAY down and finally gives you this really quiet, zoomed-in scene about the relationship that's been guiding everything

like it sets aside all the dank lore and existentialist takes for a bit and just becomes this really long, earnest, personal conversation between these two friend that have spent the last two games' worth of plot trying to save each other

and like, sure, they get deus ex machina'd back to the island for a big happy ending, but the point is they don't even need that

Riku saying "we'll be the darkness" and then sora calmly agreeing isn't teen edgelord irony, it's... peace

like they both understand that as long as everyone else is safe, and the two of them have each other, they're genuinely content to just sit on a dark beach together for the rest of time

it's unfortunate that the later entries went so far down the Lore Hole, because II does a really good job of knowing when to pull the focus way in on just conversations and relationships

...and like, sure, we're still talking about Videogame Writing here; it's not all THAT deep, but it nails what it needs to to leave a lasting emotional impression

and that's def an accomplishment worth talking about, particularly in the space of huge expensive action games

in other news, Prerendered Goofy's Realistic Mouthflesh has haunted my nightmares for fourteen years

honestly as far as my brain is concerned, this is how Kingdom Hearts ends

it's perfect, all the character arcs work, some people died to save their friends, some people live on in memory, the three kids are home and it's all okay

there's not any real reason to make sequels

like sure you can still make Birth By Sleep and go wild exploring the wider lore stuff, but making Sora go on more adventures just feels kind of... mean

certainly unnecessary

ANIMATOOOOOOORRS

Also shoutouts to Daisuke Watanabe, who's been a scenario writer on a majority of Square RPGs for like 20 years, but who somehow never gets talked about in western games circles

scenario writer being the person who converts a "story" into "80 hours of JRPG dialogue and moment-to-moment gameplay plotting"

so

I finished Kingdom Hearts II

I think I finished typing all the things I intended to type about Kingdom Hearts II

I suppose this means we have reached the end of The Kingdom Hearts II Thread

In conclusion, Kingdom Hearts II is a videogame, that you should play because it is very good

Ideally you should find a way to play it as a teenager in 2006, but it remains very good in most other circumstances