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Hard to judge at 360p, but thanks for the speedy update.

lol @1:12 Ultimania.

No, you're right.

From my experience, I think you have about half a second from the moment your enemy puts it down for it to count as a rapid break. It's not too hard to get. Just get a fairly high valued card (7-9 is pretty safe), a 0, or even a card stock/sleight (totaling 7 or above), and use it the moment you see your opponent use a card.

A while ago I posted a fairly comprehensive explanation of gameplay and some tips. So I'll just repost it. I know you said you understand the basics, but read it anyway in case you missed something.

Also, if you're dying a lot, level up your HP, and make sure you have at least one cure magic card with you. If you're reloading a lot, level up your CP. If your cards are low values, hit everything you can to get new cards, as well as moogle points (red orbs), which you can also use to buy more cards. Always go for the most expensive pack first. Sell cards you know you'll never use if you can't afford it (though I always try to keep at least one of each value). You should be fine if you do that.

Riku's only slightly behind Sora. He came to Castle Oblivion around the time Sora was done with the first floor. When Sora defeats Marluxia, Riku has three basement floors left (right before Destiny Islands). Namine comes to Riku in the form of Kairi presumably right after Sora enters the pod.

It's a little hard to make sense of, since you have to keep scrolling for translations, but here's the official timeline:

http://www.kingdomhearts3.net/khiifm-ultimania-timeline-for-com/

Honestly, Willa Holland's one of my favorite voice actors in the series. I was a bit put off when the first trailer came out, but as soon as I started the game I was totally on board with her. No doubt she's not as seasoned as a lot of the other VA's, so some lines fall a little flat, but there's something very genuine and unique about her voice. I couldn't disagree more with people reading into it her acting as monotone. Toned down, for sure, but not emotionless. Aqua's personality calls for a little more subtlety than say, Sora or Ven. While she's an overall outgoing character, she doesn't always say exactly what's on her mind, and though she doesn't emote a whole lot, there's a lot of weight behind her words. I think Holland strikes that balance perfectly.

As I mentioned before, her voice is a little eccentric, which in my opinion makes it more memorable. A more generic-sounding voice actor with better vocal control would have made her a less interesting character. She's become my favorite Kingdom Hearts protagonist, and her voice is a good part of the reason.

So no, I wouldn't want them to switch her out for someone else.

On top of the KH3D opening, in KH1, Leon says "that was nine years ago" when referring to when their world was swallowed by the darkness.

I agree that the script for the original was better. Probably partially because there was no lip synching, but it generally just had a darker tone. If you compare the Organization's main theme in CoM (Thirteenth Discretion), you'll notice the GBA version is MUCH more sinister, which I really missed in the PS2 version. Also, I REALLY wish they didn't add that circular arena for boss fights. I think it would have been much cooler to just keep it in the actual Castle Oblivion hallway. Overall though, I prefer the remake, for just about every other reason.

In response to other people talking about Axel. He's awesome in CoM, but it's a pretty unique situation that's somewhat unfair to compare to the other games. It's the only time you see him where he's always "on duty". A lot of the time, he seems like he's putting on an act (which he is). Even when he's joking around, it's all pretense. He's playing the part of a villain, and you can tell he doesn't like being there. His only sincere moments are when he's alone or with Namine. So even though he's a cool wildcard, it's not really him: most of the time he's just serving as a tool to Xemnas or Saix. Though it does mark the point where he really starts becoming his own person and thinking for himself (ie. making the decision to save Sora), after which point his loyalty to the organization starts to fade little by little. I personally like his appearance in Kingdom Hearts II the most, with Days as a close second. We don't see that much of him in KH2, but I really like the sincerity of his character. It's hard to describe: he just seems more relaxed. Probably because he's on his own personal mission, operating on his own terms, rather than answering to others.

And sorry for getting a little off topic, but I honestly didn't mind him coming back in DDD. His sacrifice, as sad as it was, seemed unnecessary, so it didn't cheapen it that much for me. Plus they gave a solid reason for him to come back (along with the other nobodies), and devoted a good portion of the story to him and the others dealing with being recompleted. Quite a few people seem to dislike the course that DDD put the series on (in terms of heartless/nobodies reforming into humans, and in general for complicating the lore), but I actually think it did a great job of tying all the installments together.

Out of the first three games, Chain of Memories has my favorite story. It's very "video game-esque": essentially boiling down to saving a princess inside a castle, but with a dark twist. They are so many complex themes that it initially shocked me a supposed children's game would tackle. Sora/Donald/Goofy: the subjectiveness and deterioration of memory. Namine: what it means to be lonely, and how painful that could be. Riku Replica: Loss of identity. Riku: Redemption, and recreating one's identity. Even the Disney worlds brought up deep philosophical points relating to memory and emotion. And though all the villains wore the same clothes, they were by no means a single entity. They all served a different purpose, both for the story and the main characters' development. And I am a big fan of the leveling system and combat too. Though I prefer command decks, because even though you are more limited by what moves you can use, it's much easier to change up the order that you use them in. A lot of my CoM fights play out exactly the same way; Blitz, Sonic Blade, Firaga Burst, Lethal Frame, etc. With the command deck, you can easily choose which attack you want to use for specific situations, and throw in regular melee attacks without having to worry about messing up the order of your deck.

This thread's about Chain of Memories so I won't go into the details, but with Days and Birth by Sleep, it's hard for me to choose a favorite storyline in the series. Days retroactively made Kingdom Hearts II a much better game; adding a lot of emotion and meaning into the character's actions, which it was previously lacking. And then there's Birth by Sleep, which on top of having a well-fleshed out, simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting stand alone plot, it had throwbacks to all of the series' installments. In the past I spent so much time piecing together Kingdom Heart's story, reading all the reports and thinking about how everything connected, but it wasn't until BBS that I finally felt that my questions were answered, so for me it was the most intellectually satisfying game to complete.

Overall I think Birth by Sleep is the best in the series, but I'd definitely argue that Chain of Memories is the most underrated.

Probably because she never tried. The time she protected Sora against them, her light fended them off (and returned Sora to normal).

That's what I call a party.

No problem, man. Glad that I could help. Yeah, the battle system requires a little more thought than the other games, but not as much as you might think. As long as you build a decent deck, you should be able to breeze through most battles.

The system at its core is really simple. The higher number card/combo/sleight wins, except for 0, which can break anything that is already active (meaning you see an enemy's card in the bottom-center of the screen), and can be broken by anything if an enemy plays a card while yours is still in effect.

Basically the same thing for doors. Most show a number with an up arrow. So if you see (5^), that means you can use a card with a value of five or greater. Sometimes you can only use cards of a certain color (I believe red, green, or blue), which it will indicate. So pay attention to the number and color of the card. Also read the description for each card, because they determine what's inside the room you just opened. Some rooms make Heartless weaker, while others make them stronger, etc. Moment's Reprieve will lead to a room with a save point. A Calm Bounty will have a treasure chest containing either a new card or sleight (I always use at least one of these for each floor, because they have unique cards/sleights for each world).

Some tips on building your deck:

-Look at the sleight list (I think you press square when editing your deck) and see what cards you need to execute them. Set up your deck so you can easily use them, one after another. In most battles, I press triangle a lot more than I press X, because I have my deck set up as a series of powerful sleights. If you want to get fancy, try and order your sleights so that when you reload them (now missing the first card in your original sleights) your deck is ordered so that you can use other sleights. But that can get complicated, so learn the basics first.

-If the order of the cards in your sleight doesn't matter, put the lowest valued card first. Ex: If you need a total value of 15 to use the sleight, and you have cards valued 6, 7, and 2, re-order them: 2, 6, 7. This way, when you reload you keep your higher value cards, and get rid of the low value card that can easily be broken by enemies.

-Make use of the shortcut button. If you go to Customize (I think), you can choose a card in your deck so that when you press Left (I think) on the D-pad, it'll snap right to that card. This way you can quickly heal when you're low on health, without having to frantically look through your deck for a cure card.

-Keep 0 cards at the bottom of your deck. This is especially helpful for bosses, because they can use sleights. When you see that they activated a sleight, just press R1(or R2, depending on your settings) twice, and use a zero card to break it. You can also use them to fend off attacks when you're almost out of cards and want to reload.

For regular Heartless battles, I'll use sleights like crazy, even just stock cards that don't make a sleight, because I know the battle is short, and I won't get stuck with a really small deck that I have to keep reloading. For boss battles, I'm a little more conservative about my card usage. Usually I go through my first set of sleights, but after reloading I just play my cards normally, watching what they put down, break it if I can, otherwise dodge it. I'll throw down a sleight or regular card stock every once in a while if I think I can afford it. I'm always conscious of how many cards I've got left.

When did I ever say appealing to kids meant they can get away with bad writing? My point is that in the Kingdom Hearts universe, they aren't going to create a protagonist that goes around stealing hearts and using darkness at every opportunity. For what reason would we sympathize with someone like that? He associates himself with Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Hades, and Captain Hook, all before realizing they're evil. It's all fine and good to learn "not to be so gullible", but we haven't seen a single example of him putting it into practice. He nearly became a pawn of every single villain he encountered. So I don't know what more you wanted from his character to make his fall from grace more comprehensible.

People are allowed to be more than one thing. They're allowed to have conflicts. Showing another side of a character isn't a contradiction: it makes them believable. I'd define Terra's character in BBS as: a well-intentioned young-man who has trouble seeing the evil intentions that surround him. There aren't any points in the game that contradict that.

I'll concede that "I've been to the same worlds as you, and I've seen what you've done" is a very clunky and vague line, at least on its face value. I've come to interpret it as Aqua using that line to pry Terra and see how he reacts: seeing if he lets slip any other information, because she's very unsure of him. Aqua was by no means reassured about Terra after talking to Maleficent. Screaming "Stop lying!" hardly sounds convinced to me. You're taking everything very literally. Just because someone says something, doesn't mean they completely mean it, or even understand what it means. Aqua continually reassures herself that Terra is fine throughout the game, because she is not at all convinced that he IS fine: she just desperately wants to believe he is. Likewise, just because Terra says he learned something, doesn't mean he actually did. When the s*** hits the fan by the end, "playing by the rules" is a grey area (certainly more so than in a go-cart race). He isn't thinking about whether he's a "hero" or not: just that he wants to protect his friends. He's too lost to despair from learning he was being tricked all this time, from losing his master, from his friends being at risk, to think about what Xehanort wants out of it all.

So no, it's not sloppy writing. It's characters acting out of emotion, which is realistic. Oftentimes, I find Sora uninteresting because of how consistent he is. He's certainly had his moments of imperfection (Chain of Memories) and distress (KH1, DDD), but as a whole he's too sure of himself. That's why I welcome stories like BBS, Days, and even DDD, because they challenged the characters, and made them act human.

Terra is NOT a bad person: that's the main point of showing him fight against the darkness, and in many cases succeed. But he's also very conflicted and unsure of himself, thus susceptible to Xehanort's (and other's) influence. It's a struggle that he ultimately lost, but primarily because of Xehanort's planning, and less so because of his own shortcomings. The point of Birth by Sleep wasn't to make Terra look like a bad guy. Xehanort exploited a good person in a very vulnerable point of his life, having been passed over as a keyblade master.

Aqua briefly meets up with Terra in the Castle of Dreams where she feels reassured that he's okay, but later she meets Maleficent, who suggests that Terra told her, an outsider, all about the keyblade, and that he "hurt someone" with it (also a part of Xehanort's plan to make the three grow apart and doubt each other). I agree that it would have carried more weight if Aurora didn't get her heart back in the game, but it's still consistent with the plot. Maleficent didn't plunge the world into darkness until after BBS, when Ven and Aqua are no longer around to get her heart back.

So it's not out of nowhere that she confronts him. Eraqus told her to keep an eye on him because he was worried, and then Maleficent basically confirms (though somewhat deceptively, seeing as he was under her control, and Xehanort was the one who told Maleficent about the keyblade) that there was cause for concern.

Likewise, neither is Terra's fall. You're talking about the Disney worlds, but neglecting to mention all the times in between that Xehanort leads him astray. Gaining his trust and sympathy with the story about Vanitas, leading him to protect Ven at all costs, calling him "Master Terra" to reawaken his lust for power, turning him against his master, causing him to fall into extreme guilt, making him more susceptible to giving into anger at the final moments of his story. And there were those times that Hades and even Captain Hook managed to trick him, albeit briefly, to be on their side.

You're asking a little too much of the series. I hesitate to call it a "kid's game", but the franchise is at least supposed to be child-friendly. They can get away with the darker stuff because they have the cheesy kids stuff to point to. Call it Schizophrenic if you want, but it's in every Kingdom Hearts game. A lot of the Disney worlds serve as comic relief, and are inevitably going to be more light-hearted than the main story.

Orange-yellow (noun) : A color that is not as cool as lime green. But over time, it grows on you.

I believe that's the dictionary definition.

It would depend on how many people they wanted to put on the team, assuming they want to add it at all. From what I remember, there were only two programmers who worked on the HD conversion for 1.5.

Simulating cloth can be grueling at times, and they would probably need cleanup animators to fix stuff that isn't working, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say it could take months, IF they start with nothing. Then again, I've never done video game work, and it's probably different from short film. For all I know Kingdom Hearts could have a REALLY good physics engine that doesn't need much manual tweaking. But whatevs. I guess we'll find out soon. Hopefully good news, but I won't be crushed if not.

The texture quality is higher, and it looks like they added a few extra strands to the model, but it's really not that much. If the PSP could handle it, the PS3 can certainly handle the marginal improvements. I don't really see why they'd go through the trouble of updating that much, getting it to work in motion, and then scrapping it for the final product.

You're talking about this trailer, at 1:18?

This kind of thing interests me (being a 3D animator and what not), so I've been paying close attention to the quality, and I haven't seen any quality degradation between the trailers and the actual game. You can compare that trailer scene to the one in the game at 19:45:

I don't see any changes in textures, and I haven't elsewhere. The only time they lied about the quality was when there were still images. The reason they could do that is because they were renders. In other words, instead of taking screenshots within the game's engine in real-time, they turned a single frame into an image, possibly taking seconds, or even minutes to process. On top of that, they may have even done additional photoshop tricks to polish it. That's why they had such nice crisp eyelashes and less-polygonal looking bodies. Incredibly shady that they didn't mention they were rendered images, but at least they didn't do it with the trailers. It would be impractical to do it for 1800 frames (30 fps for a one-minute trailer).

Unfortunately it may take more effort than you think. I don't know how Kingdom Hearts runs its secondary animation (ie hair, clothing, capes), but whether they hand animate it, or run a dynamic simulation and bake it to animation (more likely), there are plenty of problems to work out. Animation can take a while, and with simulations it can be difficult to make sure the collisions are working all the time (so that it doesn't go through the character), especially with fast motion. I know there aren't THAT many cutscenes where they have armor, but they would also have to do it for every single battle animation, for each character. And they would need to add it on Aqua's armor in KH2FM to keep continuity. If they're doing it from scratch, it could easily take a few months, what with having to model, texture, rig, and sim them. Not that I'm against the idea. I hope they do it, but it's unlikely. I'd say the only hope is if they had previously finished them for the initial release (animated and everything), but took it out because of the strain it put on the engine, BUT held onto it in the event of a re-release.

I'm looking back at their appearance in 3D, and they look the same as in BBS to me. What's different about them?

Also, what makes you think the finished product won't look like this? It's not like they are still renders that they showed for 1.5. Everything appears to be running in the game's engine, and it's not like it looks so incredible that the PS3 can't handle it. If anything, I see them making improvements to more textures as time goes on, like we saw in the first collection.

And capes would be nice, I guess. But I really doubt they'll add it.

A few other quick, nerdy things I noticed when doing comparisons. They seemed to have extended the frame on the sides slightly (except for the 1,000 Heartless FMV) , rather than cropping it on the top and bottom like they did in the first collection. So they're showing more this time, instead of less.

In addition to the textures, the models in Birth by Sleep also appear to be higher resolution. You can clearly see extra detail on Terra's left pant leg in the three wayfinder shot. And in the closeup of the three of them in the Keyblade Graveyard, Terra's arm is higher-poly (and apparently more muscle-y), and Aqua's skirt-thing has extra ruffles modeled in.

Glad they're going all-out on BBS. It definitely deserves it!