Our recounting of the Kingdom Hearts series continues as we destroy the Destiny Islands and beat up Final Fantasy characters.

In this episode, we compare Sora and Riku to Naruto and Sasuke. This is a more apt comparison then we expected it to be in the episode, and we actually end up making that comparison again several times in the primer for Kingdom Hearts 1.

Sora, like Naruto, is a naive teenager whose simple charm gives him an almost supernatural aptitude for gaining and maintaining friendships with other people. They both tend to get in way over their heads, but still manage to save the day against all odds.

Riku, like Sasuke, is wiser than his friend. Though there is a sense of friendship, this friendship is as competitive as it is cooperative. Although Riku and Sasuke start out superior to their rivals/friends, the fact that their friends keep getting better, stronger, and happier leads to a growing jealousy and sentiment. This causes them to turn on their once friend, and now enemy.

The difference being that Riku only needed one game to get over it, while it took Sasuke an entire series to do the same.

Fuck Sasuke.

After our fabulous performance in Paris, we head to Italy for some much a needed vacation… and murder.

After this episode, I looked up the use of the Modern Lethal Syringe, just in case I had missed a good, or at least an interesting, use for it.

Unfortunately, my conclusion seems to be the consensus. The modern lethal syringe only exists so that even if the player can’t find good lethal poison in a level, that they still have a valid method of complete challenges for taking care of targets with poison.

But this renders the weapon redundant in a few ways. Most missions have a poison vial somewhere in the level. I have personally found a vial in every level aside from Sapienza. So even if the syringe wasn’t there, I could still get poison kills.

And speaking of Sapienza, leveling up to level 11 in Sapienza nets players the infinitely more useful Lethal Poison Vial. Instead of having to directly inject the poison into a target, like with the syringe, the poison vial can be used on food and drink, to kill targets when the go for a snack. This will almost always be a more discreet action, take less effort, and put the player in a better position to complete the contract.

There’s nothing wrong with having a few items that aren’t very valuable, and the game isn’t made worse with the inclusion of the lethal syringe. It just seems odd to have it there at all. In any circumstance where it would make sense to use the Modern Lethal Syringe, it would much more sense to use either your bare hands (and free up that slot for another item with more utility) or the Fiber Wire (which as we’ll discuss in the next episode, is also fairly worthless).

Welcome ladies and gentleman. Interactive Friction returns once more. Sam and I have a new idea for a series, and today we’re excited to share it with you.

With that said, enjoy.

And now, for a funny little diversion.

Though this episode does show off a little bit of what I was talking about last episode, in truth this was just an excuse to have a little bit of fun.

In case anyone thinks that Hitman is a serious game for serious people, show them this episode. Trust me, it’ll teach’em.

We… look…. FABULOUS!

The feedback loop for this game is one of its smartest systems, because it encourages exactly the kind of behavior gives the player the best possible “Hitman” experience.

Players start with a single entrance point, and a single location they can smuggle an item into, along with some starter equipment. This gives them enough to successfully complete the level the first time (they could even do Silent Assassin if they are attentive enough, but that’s unlikely).

But then, once they’ve completed the level, they gain experience in that level for the challenges completed on the way (and since killing the target the first time is it’s own challenge, this is guaranteed). They go up in their “Mastery Level” for the stage, and gain new weapons/items, new starting locations, and new places they can smuggle equipment in through.

Knowing that more bonuses await, they are encouraged to replay the level, and find more unique kills and opportunities to complete challenges. This process is made easier both because they already know the level layout from having played it previously and by having new items and starting points to work with.

Then they complete new opportunities, gain more bonuses, and the loop continues on. Since Hitman is a series that thrives on players who love to explore and discover, encouraging this behavior through it’s challenge/reward system gives the player the best possible chance of enjoying the game.

It’s genius, and it’s so bizarre to think that the genesis of these challenges is Hitman: Absolution, of all the games.

Ladies, gentleman, and all other persuasions, we at Interactive Friction are pleased to announce our new project. That’s right, Sam and I are back at it!

Welcome…. to Kingdom Hearts.

A long while back, Sam and I were talking about how he didn’t really understand the plot to Kingdom Hearts, while I did. So, in anticipation of Kingdom Hearts 3, we decided to do a series on the plot of the series, such as it stands.

We couldn’t have anticipated what a colossal undertaking this would turn out to be. Ultimately, the recording of this series is ongoing and it will likely be the most ambitious Interactive Friction project to date.

The idea will be to release new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, starting next week. To accommodate this, the Hitman (2016) LP will transition to a Tuesday/Thursday schedule.

Get excited, guys. This is going to be quite the ride!

Welcome to the Paris fashion show: Home to chic design and fabulous murder.

One of the things I am grateful to Absolution for is that it forced IO Interactive to seriously improve on the sneaking/stealth mechanics of Blood Money. Where we once had this terrible binary of “detected/not detected”, there now exists a ton of states and transitions between those states.

Hitman didn’t have any of the things you’d expect from stealth games, like detection notifiers, searching/suspicious states, distractions, etc until Absolution. For all of the things it did well, this was an area where even Blood Money faltered.

I disliked Absolution when it came out, and frankly I still dislike it. But in a weird way, this episodic Hitman game almost redeems Absolution in retrospect. Without the new engine, gameplay improvements, additional mid-mission challenges, and UI adjustments, we wouldn’t have this game. We might have a different Hitman, but it’s doubtful that they could make a game of this level without first having worked on many of these ideas in Absolution.

So in a weird way, thank you, Hitman: Absolution. You suck, but you also made a good game possible.

Today, we finish the tutorial.

There’s some dispute over whether or not this section can be treated as part of the tutorial. I lean on the side that it is part of the tutorial, because it makes sense if you treat like a further escalation on the Freeform Training.

At the start of the training, the game focuses purely on the mechanical aspects. It introduces the mechanics in ways that make sense and guides players through their first attempt.

Once that’s complete, the player, armed with their knowledge of the first attempt, is given a set of basic tools and told to try the mission again on their terms. Further, they are allowed to reattempt the mission over and over until they are comfortable working on those terms.

This can thought of as another step in that chain. The player has been guided through the level, and then told to go through that same level Freeform-style, but with the knowledge they gained. Now that they have been indoctrinated in the mechanics and thought patterns, the game removes the guardrail of knowledge from previous runs. You know the mechanics. You know what to do. And now it is time to apply those skills in a new, unfamiliar scenario.

However, this is still a relatively small area compared to an actual episode’s map, so it’s not a full-fledged mission. It’s Hitman in miniature, so the game designers still haven’t thrown you to the wolves yet. By the time you’re done with this mission, you should be more than ready to head to Paris for Episode 1…

…which we’ll do in the next episode.

Welcome to the smartest Hitman tutorial IO has ever made.

I really can’t stress how smart a decision this was for the tutorial. While any tutorial can be used to introduce the basic mechanics, the mechanics themselves are only half of a Hitman game.

The other half of teaching someone how to play Hitman is teaching the mentality required to get the most out of the experience. This is something Blood Money failed to understand. It taught the mechanics, but not the mentality, which is why getting lost in the first mission is such a common experience.

But here, in this game, they were much smarter about it. They guide players through their very first mission in a somewhat scripted sequence to familiarize them with the mechanics and the map. Once they do that, they release the guardrails and give the player more freedom. They’re not totally defenseless, because they game provides some basic tools and they are still armed with the knowledge from the scripted sequence. But the game escalates and expects them to be able to practically apply what they’ve learned.

Even better, once player’s finish this “Freeform Training”, the game encourages them to go through again and again until they feel comfortable acting and behaving like a Hitman should. Not only does this help ease new players in, but it also introduces the idea of replaying missions over and over again. Once we’re out of the tutorial, this becomes very important.

But we’ll get to that another day.

Welcome, my friends, to a World of Assassination.

I never went through the tutorial for Blood Money when doing the LP for it, and there’s a very specific reason for that. Said tutorial is so poorly done that it makes my blood boil ever more than the White House mission.

It’s does teach the basic controls and mechanic for the game. However, it does so in such a staged manner, where most of the game elements are introduced outside of contexts where you’ll realistically use them, that it’s quite useless beyond that. It’s very common for people to complete the tutorial mission in Blood Money, and then enter the first contract and have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

This tutorial is different from that. Mechanics are introduced in contexts where players can be expected to make use of them in actual missions. It guides you through the assassination, but not enough to be annoying or to undermine the player’s development.

And once this part of the tutorial is over, it handled training in the best way for a game like Hitman. But we’ll get to that next episode.