Game Mechanics

Closed.

 

You're keeping something from us aren't you. :0

I'll start by listing which games did the best and worst in each of these categories in my opinion.
Be prepared to see a lot of KH2.

Enemy Design (looks wise) split this into two for looks and for functionality.
Best - KH1. Invisible. AMAZING design.
Worst - It's a toss up between Days (Cause pretty much everything was a pallet swap) and DDD. I just felt like the Dream Eaters were... generic.

Enemy Design (functionality wise) split this into two for looks and for functionality.
Best - KH2 I felt like at the time it was really unique that almost every enemy had interactivity with them in the form of unique reaction commands.
Worst - Eh... probably BBS. Just felt like there wasn't much variance in the way you fight them. I do like the status ailments in BBS, but they weren't used to their full potential.

Boss Design
Best - Definitely KH2. Revenge values keep you from stun-locking the boss infinitely, and also reaction commands are pretty cool.
Worst - Days... Giving everything 1,000,000 HP does not substitute for a well designed difficult boss.. Also the final boss (Riku not Xion) was a let down.

Combat Flow
Best - KH2.. obviously. Everything is useful. I can't think of a single ability/summon/drive/whatever that doesn't have a use.
Worst - DDD I HATE the combat in DDD. The game makes normal keyblade combos completely useless. The only applicable fighting style is to spam Flow-Motion. Also very many commands are completely useless. Did you ever use fire, blizzard, thunder, ect? I didn't.

Character Abilities
Best - I have to say KH1 because many of the cool abilities in the series stem from KH1, but I think KH2 uses them better and makes them more applicable in a pinch.
Worst - DDD.. Everything is useless except Flow-Motion and Balloonga.

Character Progression
Best - KH2. I love the way you get stronger from defeating bosses/scripted encounters instead of endless grinding. I can play KH2 and not grind at all.
Worst - Probably BBS.

Difficulty
Best - Okay I have a split opinion about this one..
KH1 probably has the best difficulty settings in terms of actual difficulty.
Beginner is very easy, Standard/Final Mix is.. Standard.. lol, and Proud is a challenge.
In terms of which game is the most balanced on the hardest difficulty however.. I have to say KH2 lvl 1 critical.
It's so balanced that you NEVER feel like dying is cheap. It all comes down to pure skill.
A runner up to KH2's lvl 1 critical is Re:Coded. It was pretty balanced too. All other lvl 1 modes are ****.

Worst - Days. Like I said previously, taking a million hits to kill a boss is not a substitute for difficulty.

Integration of Magic in Combat
Best - KH2 obviously. Combos into everything because of the finisher system.
Worst - Honestly I have to say KH1 sadly. Not that it's useless, just that except for enemies of certain elements, it's just a stronger single attack instead of something for different situations like KH2.

Guarding and Dodging
Best - KH2. Dodge Roll isn't overpowered with I-frames, but you can still dodge or block everything depending on the situation.
Worst - BBS for Ventus mash square and never take damage, for Terra.. die constantly.

NPC Interactions
Best - Days the games have never done too well in this department, but at least in Days the characters had some actually funny or meaningful things to say.
Worst - DDD, BBS, and Re:Coded are all equally bad here.

Sidequests
Best - KH1. Just had lots to do.
Worst - DDD almost no post game at all.

Arena/Colosseum
Best - KH2 did it really well. Especially if you consider the data rematches as sort of part of the "arena."
Worst - Mirage arena.. Just overpowered if you're playing single player.


I'll add more thoughts later when I'm not busy.
TL;DR - Mostly KH2 is the best well-rounded game, gameplay-wise.

 

I dont know what this is about but sure.

Enemy Design
Best: KH1 - Invisible, Angel Star, Defender, They are all unique in a certain way
Worst: Days - Pretty much recycled and recolored

Boss Design
Best: KH1- Dinsey villans along with the secret bosses. (Kurt Zisa)
Worst: BBS - the Wheel master and Symphony Master just didn't feel right

Combat Flow
Best: KH2 - Perfect. Very smooth and fluent
Worst: BBS - God awful. Extremely stiff and slow and recovering is not easy.

Character Abilities
Best: KH2 - Amazing abilities that helped a lot in battle and made the game fun. Very Balanced
Worst: BBS/DDS - Both the same. Awful stiff combat. (DDD got better) Too many strong commands that makes game play have no climax. Cannot keep all abilities in DDD and both BBS and DDD combo system just repeated the same animation combo.

Character Progression
Best: KH1/2 - Had the best leveling system. Everything was balanced and got a great amount of experience to earn abilities and HP/MP etc. Also upgrading magic.
Worst: BBS/DDD - BBS is the worst. You will be at level 15 by the time you reach the final boss for each character. Experience gave off by BBS enemies were very low. Both don't gain abilities from leveling.

Difficulty
Best: KH1/2/Days - Both had very balanced difficulties.
Worst: BBS It may be the combat that screws me over but it seems like boss give way more damage than they should. That also seems about the only difficulty change.

Integration of Magic in Combat
Best: KH1/2 - Shortcuts helps a lot
Worst : BBS/RECODED/RECOM/DDD - To many magic commands that were useless unlike KH1/2

Guarding and Dodging
Best: KH2 - So perfect. Where ever or what ever you wanted to block you can. Sliding dash and reflect helped a lot too along with the great aerial recovery.
Worst: BBS - You couldn't use block one of another. I mean you can but you could still get hit by projectiles. Dodging was awful. Too much spamming with VEN and AQUA and TERRAs was just awful. Aerial recover was also bad because it didn't seem to work like it did in KH2

NPC Interactions
Best: KH2 - I think it the only game that had that much intractable NPCs.
Worst: DDD - I honestly think it had no NPC

Sidequests
Best: KH1/2 - Had a lot of bosses and synthesizing including Winnie the Pooh.
Worst: DDD - it had none besides weird mini games.

Arena/Colosseum
Best: KH1 - I really like KH1s because you seem to get items and abilities when you progressed
Worst: BBS - Just wasn't fun. I think the gameplay ruined it for me.

I just want a game to feel more like KH2 again.

 

Posting again because I believe I answered this one incorrectly

You were asking for opinions on combat FLOW not the combat system in general, and using this as a basis I can't really classify DDD as the worst in this field because I will admit the first 50 or so times you see them, flow motion combos are at least somewhat cool, and string together fairly nicely with SOME commands.


Updated opinion

Combat Flow
Best - KH2.. obviously. Everything is useful. I can't think of a single ability/summon/drive/whatever that doesn't have a use. Every attack you have strings together perfectly. For example you can do a combo of - Sliding Dash > Attack > Firaga >Attack > Finisher >Thundaga Finisher. You can string together anything you can think of, and even mix it up by pressing square in the middle of a combo or instead of a finisher, Although ideally the square attacks shouldn't act as finishers because it's kinda cheap that you can finish bosses while berserk.

Worst - BBS because everything was treated as a single attack. Couldn't chain anything except keyblade combos, and those are always the same anyway.

Edit: OH! and also one thing I'd love to have added (Or I guess just used more) Are having FF characters in the KH universe originate from disney worlds like Zack did in BBS.

Maybe have Van from FFXII live in agrabah because he'd fit right in there, or possibly from a Treasure Planet world.

Also If Gilgamesh isn't looking for excalibur in a Sword in the Stone world, it's a missed opportunity big time.. He would fit PERFECTLY.

Also a Jecht secret boss on destiny islands would be pretty neat, but now I'm rambling.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys.
Thread is still open for a few weeks.

 

What is this for anyway?

 

Might be a little too late for this but throwing in my two cents anyway BECAUSE I'M LOUD AND OPINIONATED AND I GOTTA AIR THAT #&%$ OUT.

Enemy Design • KHFM probably takes the cake here, making the best use of existing models and providing challenges far above and well beyond "Kill the thing/Don't get killed by the thing." Days is a close second for the same reason: Some people don't like the Emerald Serenades, but I thought the idea was great and the execution just a bit lacking. KH2 probably has the worst, least challenging enemies, most of them only difficult for some dumb reason like high stun resistance, attacks with wonky hitboxes/tracking, or over-reliance on Reaction Commands.

Boss Design • Another point to FM for the amazing Unknown boss fight, as well as fine-tuning the abilities of the other secret bosses. Unknown doesn't hit as hard as, say, Sephiroth, but his sheer relentlessness and variety of attacks means he can easily take on your team of three regardless. The only flaw in that fight is his chokehold move; it's just too many things working against you at once, with the initial attack being hard to predict, the release command appearing randomly, and your health draining all the way to 0 in seconds. If just one of those conditions were a little easier to deal with, it might be a nice panic-mode attack. And again I reprimand KH2 for much the same reason as above: uninspired fights that are either too gimmicky to be challenging or too repetitive to be entertaining (Notable exception being Heartless Scar).

Combat Flow • Mad ups to BbS on this one—The removal of MP combined with a wider range of skills and techniques means you're never just sitting there blindly mashing a button, but you always have an answer to whatever your opponent does. I'd like to see standard attacks become a little more useful (Still a problem with KH3D), but otherwise I like the concept. And again, the black sheep is KH2: Attacks are flashy and long-winded, most of the skills actually decrease your DPS (not to mention they whiff a lot), and the MP system is a god-awful trainwreck, especially considering how much you'll be tempted to use Reflect.

Character Abilities • Tie between FM and 3D here. I feel like FM has the most variation, where two players can get by just as well with totally different styles of play, while 3D has a lot of fun flashy things rather than annoying flashy things. And since I touched on it briefly above, you can probably guess that KH2's losing streak continues... Yeah, the skills all felt pointless to me, and at one point I had to take off several abilities that were fully and completely responsible for me losing a fight when I knew what to do to win.

Character Progression • I'm gonna say the original KH1, not FM for this one. I was tempted to side with FM, but it gives you so many cool skills right away that you start to feel a little too powerful, and then you have a lot less to look forward to. KH metes these out at a much more even pace, giving you cool stuff to work with early on but still dangling the carrot and making you wonder what you'll get next. Days actually loses out on this one; at first progression felt like a pain, then somehow it totally skipped past fun and empowering into dull and tedious. Skills are hard to get at first, but then you have so many that nothing can touch you.

Difficulty • KH1/FM is still legitimately the toughest game for me. It just tries a lot harder to kill you, with a wide range of enemies who mix and match attack patterns, and bosses who can constantly trip you up and force you to make mistakes... as opposed to KH2 enemies, whose attacks are lame and predictable but can kill you in one or two shots. Punishing you brutally for a single mistake is fake difficulty; you don't have to be a better player to overcome it, you just have to get a good round. You can cheese KH2 bosses, if you're lucky and patient; KH1 bosses make you work for it.

Integration of Magic in Combat • Honestly, all of them are pretty bad. Most of the spells suck, and MP just never seems to work out in the games that use it. If spells were stronger and could be seamlessly integrated with regular attacks (no, NOT like KH2, NOTHING like KH2), then maybe we'd have something; but as it stands, spells are clunky, costly, and inefficient.

Guarding and Dodging • When it comes to this stuff, I say keep it simple. KH1 does just that; your guard and dodge are both quick and dirty, you can learn their limits easily, and figuring out what you can and can't block is a process that is ultimately rewarding, even if it's a little trial-and-error. I think the games just get worse and worse about this as time goes on—Never could I imagine the need for a dash that goes as far as the ones in BbS and 3D, unless the programmers put the dash in and then build enemies around the dash, which is wholly transparent and pretty unsatisfying. And Squeenix, please... please stop giving us barriers. If we need barriers to win, YOUR HITBOXES ARE OUT OF CONTROL.

NPC Interactions • None of the games are really that involved with this, which I don't mind. It's just not a big part of this series in particular. I'd rather not have the flow of play interrupted by one of my old favorite Disney characters with a painfully obvious second-string voice actor telling me I've got to fetch 10 MacGuffin Tokens to advance, not in this type of game anyway. They do what they must, and that's enough.

Sidequests • I dunno... I guess I like the FM side quests the best? Depends how you define 'side quest.' If we're talking minigames, I prefer 3D's; if we're talking mob hunts, FM wins. I kinda wish farming for synthesis materials wasn't such a pain in the #$% every single game, but I guess that's one of those old traditions that's hard to break.

Arena/Colosseum • BbS, Mirage Arena. I'd be a bald-faced liar if I said anything else. Unique bosses, tight enemy configurations, CO-OP AND VERSUS... It's just the best arena experience. The only one I never got that into was KH2's, and I'm sure you can guess why at this point.

 

If we're talking about high stun resistance, NOTHING can touch DDD. And honestly, the issue with the Emerald Serenades is the issue with nearly all enemies in Days. Too much health and defense. A premise like the Emerald, where the point is that you have to chase them down, needs a lot less HP than they have. Instead, the ideal solution becomes smashing it into a corner, and then just comboing it... a lot.
I still generally agree with you on the issues of KH2, though I think the Reaction Command argument is overblown

I REALLY miss the days when the difficulty of a secret boss wasn't "Egh... we took a regular boss... but now all his attacks are an instant KO... behold our mastery of difficulty" the bosses in KHFM are all about having touch to counter moves that try to overwhelm you, make you panic. But outside some exceptions their attacks are manageable as long as you keep a level head.
A big exception is that choke hold move. As far as I can tell, Xemnas uses it based on a multiplier of how low his health is, so a situation that ended up happening was DIRECTLY after breaking out of it... he used it again and killed me instantly.
I feel like those desperation sort of moves should only be used once, right around the very end.
Pretty much every boss in KH2 could do with about 1/3 less health.

Only thing to add to this is that I think the fact that most abilities could only be used on the ground severely hampered BBS' flow

I felt like DDD's abilities were too out of control, without proper invincibility frames, or the ability to cancel or something. Moves like Sonic Blade were really focused on looking cool, but the end result was you didn't have much of an idea where your character would actually end up. The lack of reward to the risk of a lot of DDD's moves is one of the reasons balloon spam become so prevalent.

That's really dependent on the weapon you choose. With shield at least, in FM I was still getting new moves as late as... somewhere around the 70s. In fact, FM actually raised the level requirement for a lot of moves, msot annoyingly, you have to be level 100 to get the final MP Rage on the shield path.
I found Days' progression really jerky, because they handed out level doublers and the like every now and then, which caused big spikes in expectations

Two words
Strike Raid

I'd actually say KH2 has the best integration. Unlike KH1, where magic cost too much MP for me to use it reliably, or BBS, where you couldn't use magic that often due to the reload time, or Days where magic is too valuable for its own good, KH2 has a system that lets you use magic multiple times in a row, and the magic is well suited to different situations. Surrounded by enemies? Use fire. Enemy in the distance? Blizzard. Both? Thunder, though it costs more MP. Because I always knew I'd get my MP back eventually, I wasn't afraid to use magic somewhat freely

:|

 

Yeah, like I said, it's just too many variables at once. If it were easier to predict, or if the release command moved in a pattern, or if it only brought you to 1HP and couldn't kill by itself... Any one of those things would've made it WAY more manageable imo. The one blemish on an otherwise perfect boss fight, but I wonder how they came that close to perfection and then just lost it all.

I'll give you that one, but I was always a ground fighter anyway.

Yeah, I mostly meant the 3D skills were fun. They had their uses against normal enemies, but against bosses your strats do start to dry up.

Well then that's just a different kind of wonky.

Now hold on. In the next paragraph you say that you're always sprung for MP in KH1. So how d'you afford Strike Raid spam? It's definitely powerful, but you've gotta pump a LOT of resources into it; I only managed to knock off one of Unknown's health bars with it. Plus it's only good against single targets, against groups it starts to become clunky and less efficient.

I almost never used my spells, because the Keyblade was just better. It hit what I wanted it to, it hit harder than if I'd used a spell, and it didn't cost anything. Use Fire on a crowd? Somebody hits me before the startup animation is over. Use Blizzard on a distant target? Could've just run up and sliced him in the same amount of time. Use Thunder at all? LOL bye MP, won't miss you.

KH1 makes it much easier to cast consistently. You can't be a caster in KH2; you'll always be running out of MP, and then you'll be useless. In KH1 you get it back by getting hit, by hitting people, by using Bambi, by using items... There's always a way to get more, IF you're willing to wade into combat and do a little bit of roughhousing. I've done side-by-side comparisons before—You get less casts for a full bar in KH2 than in KH1, and KH2's MP charge is a (mostly) set time that can be longer or shorter than it takes to refill KH1's MP bar, since you have more influence over that.

 

Strike Raid is onyl good in that it allows you to cheese bosses. With regards to MP, I'm speaking more in terms of the entire game, and thinking more about magic. MP is insanely rare for most of the game, so using special moves are generally an insane risk, while magic is largely ineffectual compared to its cost. Late in the game you can get accessories that give huge MP boosts very easily. Throw in some ethers or elixirs, plus Goofy with MP Gift, and your MP will probably last for ages to come.
Strike Raid, sure, isn't really practical early on, but it can be used to cheese pretty much all the bosses that might need chessing. I mean seriously, those invincibility frames, and that damage output, combined, is INSANE. Really a case of fixing what wasn't broken with that one

There is a definite imbalance between normal attack strength and magic strength in all KH games. They can't seem to balance the fact that you're using a finite source to atack something, and as such it should deal adequately more damage to be viable. Really the only game that tried addressing this was Days and they went too far the other way.
But while magic isn't THAT useful in KH2, besides reflect I guess, I find it a lot more practical than it is in the other games. I'd use fire when surrounded by Dusks, thunder to juggle Centaurs... never really used blizzard. But yeah, I had at least some marginal use for magic in KH2, where the other games limited it too much for me

Yo're going to have a hard time being a caster in KH1. First of all, you can't get MP back from taking damage until you get MP Rage. The earliest you can get ONE MP Rage is level 42, and you need the second one at level 75 to be effective with it, especially since it got nerfed. It only restores 1/5 the damage taken in MP now. Sure, later on you can do the stuff I mentioned earlier and be a somewhat decent caster, but it's an uphill battle until them. With 3 MP you're looking at what... six casts for fire before you're fresh out? And I mean, a lot of the methods of getting MP back in KH1 you mentioned are still in KH2, just excluding Bambi, and there's a pretty powerful new option, in switching drive forms, which instantly restores MP. And the Drive Forms are another cool thing, because they let you go after abilities relevant to your fighting style. You cna get more MP skills by leveling Wisdom Form

I'd say overall KH1 is good for casters late in the game, but KH2 is good for people who want to mix magic into the normal fighting every now and then