This is Hollow… CHRISTMAS!

Please note that between the time we recorded this footage, and now, I have actually sat down to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time. When this was made, I had not seen the film.

Someone in the Square Enix offices is obviously a huge fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, because out of all the Disney worlds, this one got the most love by far.

The script is so much more well written, they added a ton of cool little details into the Final Mix version, the enemy and scenario design is heads and shoulders above most other worlds. There is so much care than went into this level that I’m genuinely impressed by it.

Shame that the other worlds aren’t cared for as much.

Welcome to my personal hell.

I hate this world with a blinding, fevered passion. If you want a preview of my big problems with Atlantica, you can read about it in my post from way back in the day.

I touch on it here, but in truth we’ll need to wait until we come back a few times before I can really drive the point home. It’s bad, and just thinking about it makes me wonder why on earth did it turn out the way it did.

We skip Timeless River in favor of Port Royal instead.

When Sam and I talk about this game’s tendency to just recycle the stories from the movies they source from, this world is one of the worst offenders. Not only is this the same exact story, but it’s also the same shot more often than not. On top of the frequency in which they repeat scenes, it’s one of the worst ones in the game. It exists only to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise back when Kingdom Hearts came out.

It’s also just a strange world in general. The “realistic” visuals looked pretty good at the time, but it just hasn’t aged well at all. By modern standards, it just looks too uncanny. And to have Sora, Donald, and Goofy is juxtaposed to the much more washed out visuals of the world and characters is even worse. Sam’s right when he says it looks like it’s from a different game entirely.

When I went through this level way back when Kingdom Hearts 2 first came out, I was impressed by it. That said, it doesn’t hold up to the test of time. Nothing here is particular well done.

Witty intro setting up the episode you’re about to watch.
“Interesting”, long-winded discussion or critique of the material we covered in the episode. This could be anything from an elaboration of a point Sam or I made to a new avenue of discussion that only occurred to me when re-watching the video for the purpose of making the post.

Follow up to the previous paragraph, further elaborating on the points made as needed. Sometimes this is short, sometimes this can take multiple paragraphs.

End with a brief sign-off that either servers as a punch-line to a joke established in an earlier paragraph, or gives a nice stopping point for the reader.

Or I could just be an ass who didn’t have enough points to make for a good article on the nothing that just happened.

Let us finish what we started, with puns.

In a typical Hitman level, most of your time is spent figuring out what approach would be best to take out your target. What weapon will you use, when’s the best time to strike, how will 47 get out after the kill is completed, and remove all evidence of the crime?

Players are likely to screw up several times before they successfully complete the mission, one way or the other. What makes this mission different is that one of those questions is already answered for the player. What weapon will they use on the targets: The Viral Syringe (which is functionally identical to the Modern Lethal Syringe).

This would normally be fine, but this one question also answers several others. When and where is the best time to strike? The answer to that is basically any place and time where no one is looking at the target. How will 47 hide the evidence? He doesn’t need to. A Poison Kill is treated like an accident, so it doesn’t matter if the body is discovered.

Because of the particulars of how this weapon works, the tricky part is merely in finding where all three moving cogs (the viral syringe and the 2 targets) are. Since players can still restart until the first objective is complete, the most dangerous part of this mission is completely safe. You’ll notice that once I found where both targets were, I was able to quickly kill both of them, delete the evidence tape, and escape.

I think it’s good to experiment with new ways to add challenge to the Elusive Targets, but I think this experiment failed. This was just far too easy.

The filler never ceases!

I feel like I’m grading on a curve for this plot. Sure, it’s original, which makes it 10 times better than most of the Disney world stories in Kingdom Hearts 2. That said, there are too many little problems I have with it for me to think it’s more than bland, uninteresting filler.

It’s death by a thousand cuts. Nothing here is bad, it’s just mediocre all around.

We talk about the addition of the Professional difficulty while completely another Elusive Target.

The addition of a Professional difficulty hammers home the need to allow players to more easily customize their own difficulty settings to form the ideal experience for them. There are a ton of ideas in the Pro difficulty that I would love to have added to my Hitman experience. I want to play around with how the game plays if players need to make clean kills to take disguises, or if cameras can detect suspicious/illegal activities and summon guards.

But other parts of that difficulty mode, like the limit of 1 manual and no auto-saves, and the rearrangement of objects in the mission to make them harder to get to, are things I’d rather not have when playing Hitman. I’d love to be able to turn some of these options on and leave others disabled.

After playing Dishonored 2 on my own custom difficulty with enemies who are easy to sneak around, but deadly and tenacious once alerted, it’s hard to not see how other games, especially these kinds of “immersive sims”, could benefit from this kind of customization. In one of the recent updates to Dishonored 2, players can change everything from enemy detection rates, how much damage they inflict and how often they attack, to even how much potions heal for. It takes the innate replayability of the game and severly ampli

The priming continues as we explore the ramifications of Winnie the Pooh, and then travel to the depths of the underworld.

Even during my first playthrough of Kingdom Hearts 2, despite how cool Auron is, I was checked out for most of the story parts of Olympus Colosseum. Frankly, I just didn’t care.

It’s also hard to get invested in the plot when the characters make decisions that I can only describe as nonsensical. As I said in the episode, when Sora volunteers to help Meg by going to speak with Hades, how did he think that was going to go down? Hades was the villain for this world in the previous game, and Sora should know he’d be up to no good. It just seems kinda pointless.

Nothing that went on here seemed to really matter, even to my younger self. Little did I know, right?

Welcome to the Beast’s Castle, home of old friends and missed treasure chests.

In lieu of making any meaningful commentary on Beast’s Castle, I’m going to instead talk about a problem I have with RPGs.

Many times in an RPGs, players will see treasure chests in the level while watching cutscenes. This is good because it gives them something to pay attention to while the characters are busy talking about things not relevant to the main plot.

On the other hand, if the scene changes or they end up behind a point of no return, then it feels like the game is teasing them about the chest they missed.

Remember the player’s feelings when placing chests in your game.
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