So Kingdom Hearts dropped a couple of rapid fire bombshells over the course of about a day, while I wasted my time trying to play a low-quality handheld port of a pretty good game.
Since I know most people don’t have Playstation Vita handhelds, I can be fairly confident that you’re not going to be playing its World of Final Fantasy port, but for those of you that do, I’ll explain how bad this port really is, before I review its main PS4 version next week.
If you have a Vita, do you remember the port of Borderlands 2 that got packed in with the Slim model? That bizarrely bad handheld train wreck that only barely functioned like the normal versions? Well, World of Final Fantasy on Vita is in a similar boat. It’s taken a heavy graphics hit, but with none of the performance stability that we’d get in trade-off.
The game looks worse than what the 3DS could handle in Kingdom Hearts 3D, but doesn’t run nearly as well as that game did. Keep in mind that the 3DS is a much weaker piece of hardware than the Vita, and WOFF has far fewer complex models thanks to most of the non-playable characters being small and chibi-themed. What’s more, this game also has less fancy graphical effects than KH 3D what with this new game being a turn-based RPG instead of an action game. Logically, the Vita should be able to handle this, but it can’t. So I very swiftly kicked my saves to the PS4-Vita cross-save cloud, sold my Vita copy on eBay and the PS4 version is shipping in. Next week is the review.
In the meantime, Kingdom Hearts...
Dropping the bomb that the entire, infamously fractured series is headed to the PS4 sent a shot of relief into my spine. See, I’d never gotten a PS3, so I was never actually able to play the 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remixes with all the Japanese exclusive content that came out for the thing at the very end of its life cycle. I’d been stuck with an Xbox 360 and all its lame exclusives when the PS3 was getting cool stuff more often. I was a poor teen during the 2008 recession. I had to take my timed exclusive Skyrim Downloadable Content and deal with it.
Talking about the games proper, they’ve all aged very well, and going back to even the original PS2 versions isn’t as jarring as doing the same for older games aiming for realism. As anyone who’s played Okami can tell you, unique visual styles can act as anti-aging cream for just about any medium on the planet, more so than a graphics budget can. That’s why the Star Wars Prequels look so much worse than the Original Trilogy after so many years, since the prequels were all about spreading pretty CGI all over the screen first, and characters second.
They also dropped the intro sequence for the incoming Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, a thing that my roommate legitimately thought was a joke. Actually, I lied. It’s more like the intro to "Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep 0.2, A Fragmentary Passage." The intro sequence itself likely only makes sense to people who’ve been following this plot since it got stupid.
Also included is an HD remaster of Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, formerly of the Nintendo 3DS, and Kingdom Hearts Unchained X, a movie of the mobile game of the same name.
If your eyes aren’t bleeding yet, you’re clearly just as used to this runaround as I am.
That being said, I do extract a sense of enjoyment from plots that completely cease to care about our petty human logic, see also Metal Gear Solid 2 for a similar experience, and Kingdom Hearts offers that, along with some rather affecting emotional high points and some pretty good gameplay. Video games are stupid, and that’s alright by me.
Logan Graham is a junior studying media arts with a focus in games and animation at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. How do you feel about the Kingdom Hearts franchise? Let him know by emailing him at lg261813@ohio.edu.
