Fail to the King

So, I had a rare opportunity to visit Sierra Vista to do some thrift store shopping. Here's how that went.

From left to right, we have Kingdom Hearts III, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, Chromehounds, Hyrule Warriors, Midway Arcade Treasures 3, and Kinectimals: Now with Bears! Not shown is the Logitech computer cooler, which will come in handy for my other laptops.

Earlier this year, I said I probably wasn't going to buy Kingdom Hearts III. As you can see, I was probably wrong, but the five dollar price tag went a long way toward changing my mind. Then I played it, and realized why I originally told myself that I wasn't going to buy another Kingdom Hearts game. It starts with an excessively long, largely hands-off prologue, and continues with large chunks of dialog occasionally broken up by exploration and chaotic, slightly awkward combat. Casting magic is done by selecting commands from a drop down menu... while the imp-like Heartless scatter in all directions. It quickly gets to the point where you abandon the spells entirely and stick to whacking the little creeps with your Keyblade.

The combat is tolerable, but what really sours the experience for me is the game watering down what everyone likes about Disney characters while cranking up the aggressive product placement. The first level you visit is ancient Greece, home of Hercules. He quickly offers his assistance to your party, but while he says what you'd expect him to say and does things you'd expect him to do, it feels predictable and, for lack of a better word, heartless. The writing isn't just below the standards set by the Hercules movie, but by the more modest yet surprisingly clever television series it spawned a couple years later. 

A Kingdom Hearts comic panel, found by reader
John Harris. If this twaddle doesn't make much
sense to read, imagine hearing it in Donald
Duck's voice. Your ears would grow hands,
grab a couple of knives, and cut themselves
off your head.

Some actors make the most of the lines they're given (James Woods and Jim Cummings aren't great people, but at least they're dedicated to their craft) and others are clearly there for the paycheck (Tate Donovan), but even the best actors can only do so much to keep a limp script afloat... and this one's as buoyant as a sack of pennies. It reminds me of Warner Bros's Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers, except while that was a deliberate parody of how lame the Looney Tunes characters had become, there's no satire to be found here... just contrived attempts to merge the many, many properties owned by the Walt Disney Company.

Oh yes, I can't forget about the synergy. The lead character Sora eventually gains access to more powerful (and thankfully, more readily accessible) forms of magic, with the most potent of these attacks being theme park rides. You know, just in case you forgot Disney owned some theme parks. This not-so-subtle product placement tends to have the opposite of the intended effect on me... for instance, when you plaster the screen with ads for Chupa-Chups candy in Zool, it just gives me an appetite for Tootsie Pops, or Dum Dums, or anything Chupa-Chups doesn't make. I suspect that by the time I'm done with Kingdom Hearts III, I'll have bought a lifetime pass to Cedar Point.

I didn't spend much time with the other games I bought... in fact, I wouldn't have purchased Chromehounds and Dark Souls II at all if they hadn't been two dollars each, and Saint Vincent dePaul hadn't enforced a five dollar minimum. I wanted that copy of Hyrule Warriors for the Wii U badly enough that I was willing to make that (negligible) sacrifice. Midway Arcade Treasures 3 cost a dollar at another store, and this grab bag of racing games has proven itself to be worth at least that much, even if the emulation of Race Drivin' and STUN Runner could be charitably described as a flaming wreck.

As for Kinectimals: Now with Bears!, I hope I don't need to explain that.