The New Routine & More Kingdom Hearts

Today marks the start of the new way the Wife and I will be doing our usual routines. It’s a Thursday, which means that my part-time stint at GameAxis is over for the week, and today was the first day of the Wife’s new status as happily unemployed. To celebrate, some paintings the Wife did a while back were brought over to the nearby Frame Shop. It’s a place that we’ve passed by on an almost daily basis since we moved here. It’s enroute to the train station and has a huge banner up proclaiming it to be Singapore’s first online Frame Shop. Ironically, we have yet to actually look it up online and only went in since it’s just around the corner. A new tablet was also purchased by the Wife, and so was some canvas and acrylic. It looks like she’s getting ready to go all out and get back into some serious digital and analog painting. While all this was happening, when I wasn’t being a good spouse and just carrying all the stuff that was purchased, I was plugged into my Nintendo DS playing with my newly acquired toy, just got it last night, which was this:

To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely thrilled with the actual play mechanics of the game itself. For whatever reason, it’s got the play-style of the original Kingdom Hearts, meaning you jump around with a Big Ass Key and slash things with it, but they’ve tacked on a Magic: The Gathering style card system.

In theory, what this means is that you rush your opponent, see that he has an attack card labeled “5″ thus clueing you into the fact that you should shuffle your deck to 6 or better, and then, when you hit the attack button, you swing your keyblade, the game checks to see who has the higher card, and if yours is higher, you win and do damage.

In reality, all this means is you keep bashing something repeatedly (Since your deck automatically shuffles itself for you) until you start doing damage since it’s simply faster to ignore the cards altogether and just keep hitting until you do damage. I can see why they tried adding it in, but it’s a pointless complication that doesn’t really enhance the gameplay in any appreciable way.

In fact, the ONLY reason I’m even playing this is because when I finally got a good look at some of the trailers coming out for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts II, I noticed a bunch of characters I’d never seen before. Doing some checking around on the ‘net, I found out that Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, is a direct sequel (plot-wise, if not game-wise) to the original Kingdom Hearts, and that Kingdom Hearts II takes place directly after the events of Chain of Memories, meaning that if you HAVEN’T played Chain of Memories, there’s going to be some initial confusion as new characters (Like the red, spikey haired adversary Axel) start popping up at the start of Kingdom Hearts II, and it’s obvious Sora knows these people even if you don’t. Once they start referencing events in Chain of Memories, you’re more or less left scratching your head and wondering, “Huh? What’d I miss?” unless you go and read up a FAQ with spoilers for Chain of Memories to get yourself up to speed. Myself, I’m just incredibly nitpicky, and want to see the story for myself. So even though I’m actually not completely thrilled with the direction they took for the portable version of Kingdom Hearts, the story itself is still as engaging as it was in the original console version. Just, y’know, without Haley Joel Osmett, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, or real time polygonal graphics.

Anyway, I’ve still got a dialogue and structure test to finish. I more or less figured out now what I’m going to write about. Now it’s just a struggle to get it all to fit–or more precisely, connect–in a non-linear fashion, but still feel linear. Ack…