You journey to what you think is interesting and fight badies along the way. You’re still largely spending most of your time fighting verities of fearsome foes. San Fransokyo plants Kingdom Hearts’ style of gameplay in a superhero sandbox, like the recent Spider-Man.įunctionally the Kingdom Hearts gameplay system is all still there. The Caribbean plants Kingdom Hearts’ style of gameplay in a pirate game, like Assassin’s Creed 4. Rather, instead of drawing inspiration from the usual linear approach of previous Kingdom Hearts games, these two worlds draw their inspiration from different genres of games. These aren’t highly detailed, battle focused, vignettes. These worlds feel so different because they aren’t ‘traditional’ Kingdom Hearts worlds. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different, but overtime my thoughts became more clear.
Upon completing both of these worlds I was struck by how differently they felt in comparison to regular Kingdom Hearts worlds. In particular, the final two Disney based worlds: The Caribbean and San Fransokyo. The worlds of Kingdom Hearts felt less like worlds but more like tiny, Disney-based vignettes.Īlong comes Kingdom Hearts 3. Digital Foundry, in a graphical anaylisis of Kingdom Hearts 3 footage, found the perfect words for me. The worlds of the Kingdom Hearts series were starting to blur together. This didn’t bother me so much at the time but when I played through KHDDD for the first time, with its focus on speedy traversal but without levels that really supported it, I started to realize that I wanted something fresh. In that sense, the world design that Kingdom Hearts eventually settled in was actually pretty par for the course for the industry. Moving outside of action games, lets not forget that Final Fantasy in its 10th and 13th installment opted for a more linear approach. The rebooted Ninja Gaiden removed its Zelda-like elements for its sequel, Ninja Gaiden II, which focused more heavily on combat in linear stages.
Devil May Cry eventually dialed back on its Resident Evil styled exploration in favor of a more streamlined approach. Lots of action based games went down this path.
This wasn’t just the case with Kingdom hearts. Worlds are depicted as small but highly detailed combat arenas that you move through in a rather linear fashion. With the release of Kingdom Hearts II so many years ago, the world design of the Kingdom Hearts series has been fairly cemented and consistent.
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