Alex*Sora*89

I really hope the collection makes it to Vita, like the Metal Gear Solid HD collection did when it came out. The main KH titles (I and II) have been tied to home consoles just for too long, and as happy as I am for this rerelease (Final Mix making it out of Japan? Re:CoM making it to Europe?! Wow!), fighting alongside Donald and Goofy needs to be made portable. But alas, that's just wishful thinking. Either on Vita or on the Wii U anyway. I'm just not into PS3 yet.

Hi there everyone, sorry for having kind of been away from the site ever since KH3D released! Came back just to comment, actually. Good news for KH fans everywhere, especially worldwide fans who will FINALLY get to play the Final Mix version of the first KH (and Europeans like me, who will finally get to play Re:COM). Also, full localized subtitles once again? LOL, Square Enix does learn from such mistakes as the partially untranslated KH3D. Surely an awesome game, but man, did the Spanish and Italian (like me) KH fans ever come back and bite them in the ass!

I've kicked Julius' ass today with each character, losing only once with Sora and once with Riku. That's it. And if I could beat him, anyone can. Want to follow my footsteps? There you go.

1) Get your hands on Leaf Bracer (Meow Wow's Ability Link grid), Second Chance (Escarglow's Ability Link grid) and Once More (Drak Quack's Ability Link grid).
2) Equip Firagas and Curagas in equal number.
3) Spam Firaga as often as you can (and if you have Meteor like me, that helps a lot as well, although it's Riku-only) and use Curaga. Keep in mind that Leaf Bracer turns Curaga into a neat shield if you button-mash X when said command is highlighted. Especially when Julius uses his cheap combos.
4) Watch as the poor thing only keeps desperately delaying the inevitable (one of his attacks - still don't know which one - paints your commands black, and when that happens, it takes way longer for them to load, but aside from this spanner in the works as well as his late-into-the-boss-fight lightning attacks, that's pretty much it) until he collapses.
5) Celebrate. Happy dance, yay!

Also there's Balloonra, yeah. I hope I've been helpful.

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And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why forced drops should be disabled after completing the game.

Well, hello there, fellow Keyblade Masters! It's Alex*Sora*89 here. I'll describe my help-seeking situation as briefly as I can, but not before a little disclaimer: if there's any thread like this, then I'm sorry but I had little-to-no-clue there ever was one in the first place. I mean, I checked.

Here's the summary: as it happened in my Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep saved games (as in, game sessions), I've done the same in Kingdom Hearts 3D - namely, beating the final bosses without actually unlocking the abilities, only to start unlocking the stuff in the postgame. I rushed through the final phase of the game as soon as I got to the second-to-last save point in The World That Never Was (Verge Of Chaos) and stopped playing after saving the "clear save data" (at 4 AM. That's how addicting the game is). To clarify, the stuff like EXP Walker, Once More, Second Chance and the like isn't something I equipped early in Birth By Sleep, if only because I had no clue about how to do it. After the BBS endgame, I finally started understanding how Command Melding works. In my playthrough of KH3D, more or less, the same happened. However, there's a lot of stuff that's even trickier than it used to be in BBS, hence this very thread (current status: level 33 Riku at the time of this writing, for those curious).

1) First things first, the Drop Gauge. That's the one problem I have with the game which I would like to solve. I don't mean the Drop mechanic by itself, but the way it is forced on us. What does the number written on it mean? Like, "1.0", "1.1", et cetera. I went nuts as soon as I found out there was a "Drop-Me-Never" command among the abilities in Drak Quack's Ability Link grid, only to be disappointed upon said command's nature as an item. So, is there an ability meant to freeze the gauge, or to slow it down considerably? Or maybe a command similar to the Drop-Me-Not and Drop-Me-Never ones, only working as a Magic command (akin to, say, Cure compared to Potions or the newly-introduced Esuna compared to Panacea)? Because the fact players can also Drop back and forth at will doesn't solve the problem with each characters' playtime being reduced to what ultimately amounts to a glorified timed mission, let alone the effect of dropping during boss battles.

2) The second question concerning the Drop system is more or less a paranoia-related issue. Does the Drop counter (number of Drops so far) seen at the top of the Save/Load screen (as well as at the top of the main menu itself) have any unfortunate side effects I'm unaware of? Maybe side effects triggered as soon as the Drop count reaches a certain number? Or is it there just to mess with players just as it is messing with me? If - as I hope it is the case - that Drop count is just there to screw with me, then I'd feel less nervous about Dropping deliberately (41 drops with a Clear Saved Data game file at the time of this writing).

3) The Ability Link system. By now, I've gotten the hang of how it works, but I'm afraid I can't say the same about using it to unlock more stuff. I think a list of each Spirit's ingredients (without the need of any recipe), its abilities and commands would come in handy, especially when it comes to unlocking Support abilities (the ones in the center row and that don't need any Spirits in the party) or the aforementioned anti-dropping Command (or, even better, Ability) I'm hoping for. By now you can guess that, to me, once I get rid of forced Drops, the rest of the game's difficulty courve would just go downhill.

4) Given my questions about the Ability Link, there's the fact that Spirits need to be created in the first place. Some of them, like Ryu Dragon, have really neat abilities (Superglide in Ryu Dragon's case) but happen to need really rare ingredients. So the question is, pure and simple, provided I have to go and look for some of these ingredients, which one is the fastest way for gathering everything I need for any given Spirit (with information concerning which world, which enemies and which moves are needed for each ingredient, provided anyone who answers this knows enough not to need doing any further research, as I don't like to bother others generally)? As you can guess, I haven't unlocked Ryu Dragon yet.

5) About the abilities, I've managed to unlock Once More before even knowing which not-unlocked-yet Spirit has Second Chance in its Ability Link grid. But I managed to equip Once More anyway and dared to challenge the-bonus-boss-of-Fountain-Plaza-who-I-am-not-gonna-spoil, hoping that no forced Drop would get in my way when fighting such a hard and long boss fight (unsurprisingly - yet contrary to what I feared - the boss killed me first instead, anyway), which prompted me to ask: wasn't Once More supposed to be an upgrade for Second Chance, and therefore requiring the latter to be equipped? Because it seems Once More has the same features as Second Chance, but it also supports combos. I always thought that Second Chance shielded the player from 1-hit-KO attacks, while Once More provided the additional insurance against combos and nothing else. Am I missing something?

... and I guess this is it. Sorry for bothering you with these questions, especially given I could have worded them in a more laconic way. If it's okay with you, we might use this thread to do some brainstorming for any eventual Drop-and-Ability-Link section of KH13's upcoming KH3D guide.

Going to sleep now, as it's 2.15 AM here in Italy. *drop*

*Drop results*

*choose a bonus: Drop decelerator*

*starts playing as Riku*

Hi there, it's Alex*Riku*89 here. I have to ask... oh, nevermind. Looks like Alex*Sora*89 did it first. See ya!

Aside from my now-known hatred for the lack of localization (regardless of my knowledge of English), the biggest turnoffs are - what else? - the forced drops (turning a potentially nice character-swapping game mechanic into a mess that makes the entire game a timed mission of sorts), and the fact that Square Enix hasn't learned anything since Birth By Sleep, by making stuff like abilities and whatnot outright impossible to unlock properly without a strategy guide.

That said, everything else about the game is just as awesome as we have expected here: Tetsuya Nomura proved once again how much a "foreign" director, so to speak, can portray characters, mythos and universes in a stunningly respectful and faithful way. What I feared would be a turnoff, that is, the limited number of worlds, in the end mattered very little. I mean, there's a lot of variety with these worlds (mostly thanks to the blender-of-settings that is Symphony Of Sorcery), more than I could ever predict. Also, why complaining about Country Of The Musketeers? Sure, it's based on a Direct-To-Video movie, but a really, genuinely fun one at that, who turned Mickey back into the little, adorable hero he's always been supposed to be. A world based on Mickey Mouse's Playhouse - or whatever the show is called, maybe Funhouse or Clubhouse, I can't remember now and I don't honestly care - on the other hand? Now that would have been a problem.

Peace.

Thank goodness - nice to see some sympathy, regardless of your lack of this kind of problems! As an Italian fan, let me say I appreciate that. I'm dead serious about it.

Great! Now if anyone can tell him (directly) that I could translate the entire game in a week, we're in business.

Can't help but imagine delivering lame lines while making a toast.

"I propose a toast. To thy light. Or something. Whatever."

xD

Aqua.

Not only because she's sexy as hell, but also because she's less likely to be as strict as any one of the other masters, save for Mickey, who wouldn't be strict enough.

And, last but not least, because of her sheer badassery. Chuck Norris beat Xemnas with Sora's wooden sword. Aqua beat the Mysterious Figure with Xion's wooden stick. :-D

Disambiguation between comments: the first line is my reply to Nikolasvanitas while the following two lines were originally meant to be a reply to axel_lea_lives_on's comment about the CGI faces; he replied to the latter, right above this reply of mine. Whew!

Dude, start going on a Heartless/Nobody/Unversed hunt in the so-far released games in the meantime.

Especially the Unversed in the same section of Radiant Garden where Aqua fights Terranort. You can pause the game where the first bunch appears before you, and say, "Sorry, Unversed, nothing personal, but..." *then you put on your sunglasses* "I've gotta KILL... the time". And then you already know what to do next, un-pause the game and scream...

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Yes! You know, two-days-earlier-than-the-official-release-date sales are quite the norm in the videogame market. Good thing KH3D is no exception, although I saw that coming. Okay, now the only thing that'll make the wait bearable is the game's soundtrack getting uploaded on Youtube. By the way, you guys should check this out - link below - while you're waiting. Judging by the latest videos, it seems "Bells Of Notre Dame" didn't make it to La Cité Des Cloches, but it was worth a try. Keep it going, Youtube-user BlueNoctrn!

The Keyblade got its "Tron Lines" (see link below) in Space Paranoids back in Kingdom Hearts II, so it's only natural The Grid is going to do the same.

http://tvtropes.org/.../Main/TronLines

By the way... it's weird: I think I just got wet and don't know why. Must be because of LIGHTSPEED LOCALISATION!!! :-D

@ Setting Sun:

Well, let's face it, we're the Kingdom Hearts fandom after all - our favorite series is made of awesome games, but said awesomeness requires a lot of work - enough to keep us waiting and make our hype skyrocket with every single announcement. Being impatient is only natural.