Kingdom Hearts Faults

[immortalfrieza 14]

This also isn't related in-game itself, but I hate the fact that Disney sets so many restrictions on Kingdom Hearts. Final Fantasy games get so much hype because Square has 100% rights. I know Disney is one of those pieces that holds together the series and makes it magical, but I really wish Disney wasn't so uptight. I understand where they are coming from with their assets, but if they weren't so strict, maybe Kingdom Hearts could be reached out to an even larger fan-base if they allowed the stuff that FFXV has been able to do to hype the release (such as the ATRs).

That reminds me of another negative. Honestly? I feel like the Disney parts of the series have become largely irrelevant at this point and really just there as time fillers, the original and even the Final Fantasy related content being of much more significance to the actual plot, with most of the Disney worlds all but completely forgotten about plotwise after the first time they are visited. At least in KH1 we had a council of Disney villains that drove the overall plot for most of the game and a few other Disney characters like Beast and the Princesses of Heart actually involved in the overall plot, but now? Now the Disney stuff doesn't really even hold the Kingdom Hearts series together anymore, it seems like the Disney stuff is just "there" because it has to be. Even Donald and Goofy's character development and relevance to the plot (not that they had much) basically stopped after Kingdom Hearts 1, now they basically just make a comment every once in a while but you'd otherwise forget they are there, it's rare anymore that they ever actually DO anything. King Mickey is really the only Disney character that has any relevance to the plot anymore and it's not that much.

Edited July 16, 2016 by immortalfrieza

[Hero of Light XIV 2,381]

To keep myself from ranting about things that OTHER fans find annoying that annoy me personally when they rant about them, I'm just going to avert my eyes from anyone else's comments. I tend to get lost in tangents about my thoughts about other people's opinions WAAAAYYYY too easily...

 

Anyway, I love KH to death, and that's mostly due to the fact that I don't find too many faults in the series. Granted, that's either because the few there are don't bug me too much or I just haven't picked up on them yet with my limited observation skills, but still, I feel that your enjoyment of a series depends not on how many flaws you notice, but on how little they interfere with your experience.

 

That said though, there are tiny little nit-picks that I have every now and then. And I call them nit-picks because really, that's what they are, relatively small details that only bug me usually in an aesthetic sense.

 

One would be the lack of crowds, or as some people have lovingly called, the "invisible crowds" of the KH series. With so many iconic Disney movies being relived in these games, there's bounds to be lots of iconic scenes from those movies recreated for the enjoyment of the viewer. Some of these include the the gathering of Simba's pride after Scar's defeat, Esmerelda's near-burning at the stake in front of Notre Dame, Cinderella's dance at the ball, etc. However, in a few of these kinds of iconic moments, many fans have been quick to point out one thing missing from them (aside from their iconic musical scores): THE CROWDS. While some moments like Simba's triumph and Mulan's honor were noticeably filled with background characters to fill the scene, there are still plenty of moments in other worlds where there are supposed to be signs of other people, yet there are none that appear anywhere. The Notre Dame and Cinderella instances are noteworthy examples (I guess nobody cared about Frollo's mad ravings about gypsies or the king's invitations to meet with royalty, apparently), but by far the worse offender of this can be seen with Olympus Coliseum. In every single game it features in, Phil always talks about how "everybody comes here to see the games", how "the crowd came to see heroes fight", and various other lines that indicate that there are indeed spectators watching the games. But you wouldn't know that from looking at them, because there are no people ANYWHERE in the stands. Now I think that with KH1 a lot of people were willing to forgive that since it was an early PS2 title and they probably couldn't handle that kind of crowding at the time. But then you see things like the Heartless Swarm, Twilight Town Struggle tournament, and Mulan's honoring in KH2, and yet in the same game not only is there still no visible crowd in the stands, but they still put in cheers and direct acknowledgement that people were watching! Hell, Herc feels guilt and shame because he left the crowd to the mercy of the Hydra, that he put people's lives in jeopardy. Yet that holds almost no weight on the player because as far as you're concerned, they never existed. And with BBS the same thing happens, Zack turns Terra around to listen to the cheers of the audience to prove to him that he was indeed a hero, but once again we are getting no proof that these people exist other than their disembodied cheers. And it doesn't matter whether you're just passing through the Town Near Thebes or if there's an Unversed swarm ravaging the place. NO ONE. IS EVER. THERE. Back when this series was young, it was easier to look past this sort of thing, but now that more advances are being made with the technology that runs it and they keep making signs that people DO live the worlds you explore, it is beginning to feel like an annoying oversight that they keep neglecting to fill the space of these worlds when they should be filled. It's not like each room with Heartless should also have vulnerable NPCs that have to run away from enemies all the time, but in areas that SHOULD have people in it, there should be people in them. Agrabah feels more like a ghost town than a bustling desert metropolis. There is NO middle eastern city that has that much walking space.

 

Another not quite unrelated issue I have is with the absence of certain characters in certain worlds. Now faceless crowds aside, there would be no point to detailing every single character in every single movie, especially when they don't offer too much to the overall plot. Like with Beast's Castle, it's not like we had to see every single servant in their cursed forms, when really only a select handful of them had any direct influence on how the plot went (plus you could also argue that everyone else was just hiding as their "inanimate" forms so that the Heartless wouldn't attack them, much like the main cast did in the dungeon). But with some stories like Tarzan where the cast is already so tight-nit and notable in the plot, a few missing faces can actually mean something. Like notice how Jane's father is no where to be found, despite the fact that he was one of the leading scientists behind the expedition, the source of most of that chemistry stuff, and most likely the financier of the whole trip. Now you could argue that Jane could have handled the whole thing on her own, as she was also involved with the study, but the fact that she does it independent of her daddy when she was as fragile as she was in the beginning of the movie is just a lot to swallow. It just doesn't make sense that it's just her and Clayton. I can excuse the lack of the ship crew that brought them there and took them back, since this was in the midst of the movie, but the fact that the professor wasn't present or acknowledged at all just really bugged me. The lack of Tantor or even any significant Turk moments kind of bugged me too, I mean I know that they aren't that necessary to the plot, at least in the way it was handled in KH, but they were still really memorable parts of the movie. Halloween Town is also very noticeably lacking in it's population of monsters and creatures that make the holiday so charmingly frightful, which really undermines the efforts that Jack goes through to bring Halloween to life, as they are his most immediate audience. Castle of Dreams, you never see the King who put the whole ball together; Deep Space, Pleakley was cut out from production; Neverland, you only meet TWO Lost Boys; Pranksters Paradise, you never meet Lampwick, Honest John and Gideon, Stromboli, or the Mad Coachman or any character that acts as a temptation for Pinocchio, most of his actions are just to be assumed to have come from his mind only, other than a KH original character (like Riku or Xehanort); and so on. Like I said, not every single character that appeared in every single scene of every single movie has to be featured in KH, but you would think that if they would go the extra mile to get every single marketable character of Winnie the Pooh in the 100 Acre Wood, then they would do the same and have every single marketable character be present in each Disney movie they depict. I swear if San Fransokyo only features Hiro and Baymax then they're completely missing the point of the movie's title.

 

Another complaint that some members may be familiar with me complaining about before is certain aesthetic errors occurring in various instances in the franchise. In particular, errors that were made with the HD remasters in some instances. While many may have noticed the Kingdom Key's model in Days HD and Re:Coded HD (and one instance in Re:CoM apparently) being replaced with the DDD model (the pointed teeth rather than the blocky teeth), hardly anyone ever acknowledges a few other graphical errors, particularly in Birth by Sleep HD. A relatively small issue is with the Land of Departure's castle, particularly it's model in the Mirage Arena events. Whenever you do the Copycat Crisis event, the arena appears as the cliff area of LoD when it's in it's starry night mode, the one you have access to right before Xehanort covers the land in Darkness. By that logic, the castle would appear intact, and to my memory it does in the PSP version. However, I've noticed with the HD version that when you play that event, the area appears as it should, but the castle in the background still has at least one piece missing, despite the rest of the world looking completely fine. But that's a background detail, a simple easy thing to mess up, right? Most of the staff that worked on the remasters were relatively new and recently hired, it makes sense that something like that could be messed up.

 

But my REAL issue? Ven's Station of Awakening. Particularly it's appearance in the beginning prologue of the game (the tutorial where you play as all three characters). In the original PSP version, it starts out all white and broken, then once Sora's heart connects with Ven's it fills out and we see it have an actual image, Ven sitting among the Badlands without his shoulder armor or Keyblade, with fleur de lis (stylized cross things) decorating the circles near his head. Now we know that by the end of his story in the game, it changes. First it changes to depict him and Vanitas in an opposing Yin-Yang style with both having their current looks and Keyblades, along with respective symbols connected to them (Void Gear and Unversed emblems for Vanitas, Wayward Wind and Keyblade Master emblems for Ventus), and the X-Blade symbol between them. Then after the battle it reaches it's final form where it resembles the first form, but with the completed details that Ven's side of the fused one had. He has his Keyblade armor pieces, his Keyblade, and the fleur de lis are replaced with the Keyblade Master emblems and the Wayfinders. Now KH is well known for it's symbolism, and with something that is supposed to be pure symbolism like the Station of Awakening, it's changing appearance with Ven is supposed to represent his cycle of growth. When it was broken in the beginning, it helped emphasize how broken and weak he really was. Once Sora helped him out, it looked whole, but still relatively lacking, like there was still more meant to be there. Fleur de lis are usually used in the series for characters that otherwise have no symbol to affiliate with, kind of like a "default" emblem for those who have not made an affiliation with anything yet (apart from it's typical "coat of arms" affiliation present in the Valor and Master Forms). So since Ven at that point didn't have any significant connections in his life, there wasn't really anything to fill up the space, so the fleur de lis just sort of act as a placeholder. By the time Ven is forcibly fused with Vanitas, he's already grown a lot, and his side of their fused Station of Awakening really shows that. It's fused look also helps represent the nature of his union with Vanitas, it's not complete, not singular, they are still two two independent beings sharing the same space. The battle is not over till only one face is depicted in that image. Once Ventus wins and is truly made whole with Vanitas again, his Station of Awakening takes its final form, it's updated appearance and imagery showing how much he's grown over the years and the connections he made with his friends.

 

Such a change only makes his character arc even stronger when you piece it together.....

 

It's such a shame that that symbolism is TRASHED when the designers responsible for the remaster's graphics intentionally replaced his opening Station with his ending one! Yes, in the HD version of the opening prologue of BBS, once Ven connects with Sora for the first time, his Station no longer changes to it's filled yet empty appearance, but rather it's whole and complete version that we're only supposed to see at the end of his story. Now I can probably assume that they mistakenly thought that the original version was "incomplete" by accident and replaced it with the ending version in a misguided attempt to fix what wasn't a problem, but the boneheaded oversight of such a painfully obvious detail just works against the story's benefit. If we are to take this imagery symbolically, then that would suggest that Ven was already as strong and developed at the beginning of his story as he was towards the end of it. That. Is so. STUPID! Not only does it disrespect the thought and attention to detail that went into the original design, it just undermines the silent storytelling that imagery like that supports the spoken story with. And think about it from a logical standpoint. When we see young Sora's Station later, we see that it looks different from what it does in later stories. That's because as a kid he hasn't gone through much yet. All we get is an image of the sea with images of objects that can be found on the islands. As a child, Sora's heart is only filled with the world around him, he's discovering things for the first time every day. He hasn't made the many meaningful connections that would be depicted later on in his life. So logically, his heart is only filled with things that he is already familiar with at the time, things he's already been exposed to, that's why he doesn't have future images of teenaged Riku and Kairi and whatnot. But with Ven's HD Station in the opening, he already has the Keyblade Master symbol and the Wayfinders everywhere. Now granted, he was already being trained under Xehanort, so odds are he had that symbol we within his memory already, but what excuse is there for the Wayfinders!? He hadn't had met Terra and Aqua yet, Aqua wouldn't make those charms until four years after they met, so there is no reason he would know what those look like, so they shouldn't be in his heart at all. I realize that I'm just ranting about a single thing, but it just ruins so much of it for me. I really love all the care and detail that goes into the symbolic nature of Kingdom Hearts, so when something that was handled well at some point is completely botched up in what is supposed to be the "definitive" version of the game and story, it just pisses me off to no end! How could no one have picked up on this, did nobody who had even touched the original version of the game even notice this difference? This is literally the only problem I have with having new people hired to work on something that other people have already made great before, you leave open room for stupid mistakes like this to happen, cause this really feels like a misinterpretation of work here. Any other changes made in these games are pretty minor to me, this is honestly the only thing that ruffles my jimmies in the worst way possible. When so much attention to detail was made in the first go, it just feels like an injustice that it get botched up like this the second time around.

 

SIGH.

 

...well, I guess that covers the only things I can think of that really bug me about the series. I think I really blew any other thoughts I could have given after that rant. Still, despite it's few flaws, most of which just revolve around a noticeable lack of certain elements, I really love and enjoy this series. Heck, noticing those lacking elements just means that there is more to add to the series rather than take away. If all you have to do to a series to improve it is to add things rather than remove, then you know you're heading in the right direction.

[Xiro 3,468]

But my REAL issue? Ven's Station of Awakening.

 

It's such a shame that that symbolism is TRASHED when the designers responsible for the remaster's graphics intentionally replaced his opening Station with his ending one!

Holy crap.

I've been deceived by the HD

[Hero of Light XIV 2,381]

Holy crap.

I've been deceived by the HD

Yup.

 

Beginning: 

 

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/kingdomhearts/images/f/f2/Station_of_Awakening-_Ventus_(Art)_KHBBS.png/revision/20100326081311

 

 

 

Ending:

 

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/kingdomhearts/images/2/23/Station_of_Awakening-_Ventus_2_(Art)_KHBBS.png/revision/latest?cb=20100630181807

 

 

Pretty big difference for them to miss.

[immortalfrieza 14]

One would be the lack of crowds, or as some people have lovingly called, the "invisible crowds" of the KH series. With so many iconic Disney movies being relived in these games, there's bounds to be lots of iconic scenes from those movies recreated for the enjoyment of the viewer. Some of these include the the gathering of Simba's pride after Scar's defeat, Esmerelda's near-burning at the stake in front of Notre Dame, Cinderella's dance at the ball, etc. However, in a few of these kinds of iconic moments, many fans have been quick to point out one thing missing from them (aside from their iconic musical scores): THE CROWDS. While some moments like Simba's triumph and Mulan's honor were noticeably filled with background characters to fill the scene, there are still plenty of moments in other worlds where there are supposed to be signs of other people, yet there are none that appear anywhere. The Notre Dame and Cinderella instances are noteworthy examples (I guess nobody cared about Frollo's mad ravings about gypsies or the king's invitations to meet with royalty, apparently), but by far the worse offender of this can be seen with Olympus Coliseum. In every single game it features in, Phil always talks about how "everybody comes here to see the games", how "the crowd came to see heroes fight", and various other lines that indicate that there are indeed spectators watching the games. But you wouldn't know that from looking at them, because there are no people ANYWHERE in the stands. Now I think that with KH1 a lot of people were willing to forgive that since it was an early PS2 title and they probably couldn't handle that kind of crowding at the time. But then you see things like the Heartless Swarm, Twilight Town Struggle tournament, and Mulan's honoring in KH2, and yet in the same game not only is there still no visible crowd in the stands, but they still put in cheers and direct acknowledgement that people were watching! Hell, Herc feels guilt and shame because he left the crowd to the mercy of the Hydra, that he put people's lives in jeopardy. Yet that holds almost no weight on the player because as far as you're concerned, they never existed. And with BBS the same thing happens, Zack turns Terra around to listen to the cheers of the audience to prove to him that he was indeed a hero, but once again we are getting no proof that these people exist other than their disembodied cheers. And it doesn't matter whether you're just passing through the Town Near Thebes or if there's an Unversed swarm ravaging the place. NO ONE. IS EVER. THERE. Back when this series was young, it was easier to look past this sort of thing, but now that more advances are being made with the technology that runs it and they keep making signs that people DO live the worlds you explore, it is beginning to feel like an annoying oversight that they keep neglecting to fill the space of these worlds when they should be filled. It's not like each room with Heartless should also have vulnerable NPCs that have to run away from enemies all the time, but in areas that SHOULD have people in it, there should be people in them. Agrabah feels more like a ghost town than a bustling desert metropolis. There is NO middle eastern city that has that much walking space.

 

Another not quite unrelated issue I have is with the absence of certain characters in certain worlds. Now faceless crowds aside, there would be no point to detailing every single character in every single movie, especially when they don't offer too much to the overall plot. Like with Beast's Castle, it's not like we had to see every single servant in their cursed forms, when really only a select handful of them had any direct influence on how the plot went (plus you could also argue that everyone else was just hiding as their "inanimate" forms so that the Heartless wouldn't attack them, much like the main cast did in the dungeon). But with some stories like Tarzan where the cast is already so tight-nit and notable in the plot, a few missing faces can actually mean something. Like notice how Jane's father is no where to be found, despite the fact that he was one of the leading scientists behind the expedition, the source of most of that chemistry stuff, and most likely the financier of the whole trip. Now you could argue that Jane could have handled the whole thing on her own, as she was also involved with the study, but the fact that she does it independent of her daddy when she was as fragile as she was in the beginning of the movie is just a lot to swallow. It just doesn't make sense that it's just her and Clayton. I can excuse the lack of the ship crew that brought them there and took them back, since this was in the midst of the movie, but the fact that the professor wasn't present or acknowledged at all just really bugged me. The lack of Tantor or even any significant Turk moments kind of bugged me too, I mean I know that they aren't that necessary to the plot, at least in the way it was handled in KH, but they were still really memorable parts of the movie. Halloween Town is also very noticeably lacking in it's population of monsters and creatures that make the holiday so charmingly frightful, which really undermines the efforts that Jack goes through to bring Halloween to life, as they are his most immediate audience. Castle of Dreams, you never see the King who put the whole ball together; Deep Space, Pleakley was cut out from production; Neverland, you only meet TWO Lost Boys; Pranksters Paradise, you never meet Lampwick, Honest John and Gideon, Stromboli, or the Mad Coachman or any character that acts as a temptation for Pinocchio, most of his actions are just to be assumed to have come from his mind only, other than a KH original character (like Riku or Xehanort); and so on. Like I said, not every single character that appeared in every single scene of every single movie has to be featured in KH, but you would think that if they would go the extra mile to get every single marketable character of Winnie the Pooh in the 100 Acre Wood, then they would do the same and have every single marketable character be present in each Disney movie they depict. I swear if San Fransokyo only features Hiro and Baymax then they're completely missing the point of the movie's title.

Both happen for the same reason they always happen in games, because it makes less work for the developers. It's why you only see like a dozen NPCs milling about a supposedly thriving metropolis all the time, every NPC they have equals more time and work for the artists, animators, and writers have to put in, which is also why whenever you DO see large crowds in video games they are always just the same 4 or 5 characters if that done over and over again all using stock animations or worse a bunch of crappy 2D things that look like cardboard cutouts. It's the same rationale used for your next nitpick, they only had Jane, Tarzan, Clayton, and a handful of the Gorillas as important NPCs because the developers decided to just go with the "Clayton goes after the Gorillas" plot and her father wasn't needed for it.

[Hero of Light XIV 2,381]

Both happen for the same reason they always happen in games, because it makes less work for the developers. It's why you only see like a dozen NPCs milling about a supposedly thriving metropolis all the time, every NPC they have equals more time and work for the artists, animators, and writers have to put in, which is also why whenever you DO see large crowds in video games they are always just the same 4 or 5 characters if that done over and over again all using stock animations or worse a bunch of crappy 2D things that look like cardboard cutouts. It's the same rationale used for your next nitpick, they only had Jane, Tarzan, Clayton, and a handful of the Gorillas as important NPCs because the developers decided to just go with the "Clayton goes after the Gorillas" plot and her father wasn't needed for it.

I know but that really takes away another flavor of enjoyment brought about by those characters. Plus the same actor voices Merlin so they could have had easy access to him...although Merlin is noticeably mute in KH, so maybe that's why they didn't get him to voice him as well...

 

Well anyway, with all they're doing in KH3, it'd be really nice if they went that extra mile and made those NPCs, if nothing else but to actually have sources for any cheers or what have you.

[The Transcendent Key 12,109]

Remember that battle when the Lingering Will fought against Terranort?  Yeah?  Well, I remember the annoying "Gyahh, hehe, gyahh, hehe!!!" Terranort would constantly shout out every time he'd dodge my attacks!

 

STOP MOCKING ME, TERRANORT!!!! ;_;

[Clouded Sun 1,232]

What is vanilla again?

Not Final Mix, Non- FM aka Critical Mode.The voice acting in KHII was pretty good compared to JRPGs during the PS2 era. But the shit that one game set up for.... like why do I have to explain EVERY DAMN GAME if I wanna give a friend a synopsis about the story of Kingdom Hearts?And like everyone else says, Sora was a freakin' idiot in DDD. Time travel was a waste. Why the hell did RE: Coded exist? Edited July 16, 2016 by Sun Wukong