I don’t have much to say about this level, surprisingly enough.
There some interesting parallels between Ariel’s desire to explore other worlds and the same desire that started Sora, Riku, and Kairi’s original journey. Even better, the writers saw fit to highlight it and bring it into focus. So while nothing here directly advances the overall plot, it does tie into it on a thematic level.
Shame Kingdom Hearts 2 really pissed all that away…
Hotel missions have always had their place in the Hitman games. As far as I can remember, every single Hitman game has had a mission in a hotel. And it’s not hard to see why something so innocuous would become a bit of a staple in IO Interactive’s repertoire.
As levels, hotels tend to have most of the makings for plausible Hitman play. You have a ton of disguises for all of the staffers, from the cooks to the staff, and even security if the hotel is classy enough (and Hitman does usually have classy hotels, Absolution not-withstanding). Further, most of the people with disguises tend to be out and about, either moving through hallways filled with bystanders, or cleaning rooms with the doors locked behind them. This makes the act of getting a disguise an interesting puzzle to start out with.
Further, most hotels have keycard systems to prevent guests from entering the wrong room. Since odds are the target will be a fellow guest in his room, this gives them a “safe” zone, where it will be difficult for the player to get to them. Again, this inherently poses a challenge. As the Hitman, will you attempt to break into their room or obtain the keycard to just waltz in, and rob them of their safety and their life? Or, will you find another solution? Possibly wait for them to take advantage of some the hotel’s facilities like maybe a pool or a spa or the restaurant, and take advantage of some other opportunity.
On top of that, most luxury hotels tend to be very large buildings with comparatively simple layouts and assets than are very easy to plausibly re-use between rooms and floors. This makes it relatively straightforward to make a large play area quickly.
But most importantly, most people have an intrinsic understanding of all of these various components and how they work. Even if you, like me, have never been to a particularly luxurious hotel, you do know how hotels operate in the general sense. No doubt you’ve been to a few. Designers can use that knowledge, take advantage of that, to make the level a lot easier to understand at a glance.
This probably isn’t necessarily something that designers are necessarily thinking of, but it is something that they understand on a base level. And they know you do too.
Ready to enter the bowels and intestines of a giant whale….
…Yeah, me neither.
Sam and I make fun of Riku a lot, but I like his character a lot. As it goes on, he does progress and becomes one of the more interesting characters in the series. We’ll see it later on as we move into Chain of Memories and onward, he’ll be used to explore some of the more complex themes that Kingdom Hearts explores.
Even now, he does serve as a good example of how to write meaningful, and believable characters that grow over the course of a story. He’s not out to be a bad guy, but a number of critical flaws and some miscommunication have squared him against our hero and turned him to the path of darkness.
I joke that he’s like Sasuke, but in truth he’s a league above that Uchiha edgelord.
This time, we get down in dirty in the deserts of Agrabah.
Not much for me to add on top of what he say here. Agrabah is an important world because that’s where we learn about the princesses of heart, and of the villains’ ultimate goal of “opening the door.”
It also helps cement Riku’s character as the rival who turned evil.
It’s been strange playing Hitman for an audience, but not in the way that you’d think. After spending so much time playing games for YouTube, both with Sam on Interactive Friction, and solo with my Blood Money LP, I’ve gotten much more used to talking into a microphone knowing others will one day hear and edited version of it.
What’s been strange, about this series in particular, is that this is the first time that I’ve been doing an LP at the same time, or at least shortly after, the thing I’m LPing is releasing more and more parts or itself. I’m used to playing for an audience well after my opinions on the game I am playing has already been formed, and I’ve had time to ponder it.
To an extent, that’s true for Hitman 2016 as well. By the time I started recording this series, episode 4 had just been released, so I had my impressions of most of the content already mostly established. But come episode 4 and up, I’m recording my footage and my post-commentary at most weeks after experiencing the content for the first time.
So after this, we’ll start transitioning to the point where I exit my comfort zone. It’s a little intimidating, but I hope that I can continue to deliver content that meets or exceeds the expectations set by you, the viewer.
If you’ve been following the stories of each individual worlds in Kingdom Hearts 1, you’ll notice that none of them thus far have been straight copies of the movies. While each of them do use the same characters and set-pieces from those movies, they are remixing them in a way that re-contextualizes them to make more sense in the context of Kingdom Hearts.
This game is also better at inserting Sora, Donald, and Goofy into these worlds without it feeling superficial or out-of-place. The personal drama and overall plot of our heroes also gets tied into each world.
Deep Jungle is important not just because it’s where the party comes together and forms a whole unit, but it’s also a demonstration of how The Heartless can be drawn to a world. Until the darkness in Clayton’s heart beckoned them, Deep Jungle was a peaceful place.
Welcome to Marrakesh, where we stop a government coup just because someone would lose money if it went through.
Marrakesh is roughly the same size of Sapienza, but it never gives off that the impression that it’s as big. There’s a good reason for that.
In Sapienza, there was a fairly large and sprawling town and a manor within that town, with a laboratory underneath it. All three of these zones were woven pretty tightly together, and there are several ways to move from one zone into the other. Though there were distinctions between each location, they were pretty blurry and loose.
However, Marrakesh operates slightly differently. There is that same separation of zones, but it feels a lot more concrete. Where players in Sapienza can almost accidentally transition from one sphere of influence to another, it’s hard to say the same about Marrakesh. The level almost forms a triangle, with the bazaar, consulate, and military camp each forming a single vertex of it. Lines between each one guarded and tightly funneled. If I drew a similar shape for Sapienza, it would be much more complicated.
That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a interesting approach when all the other levels up until Morocco were much less restricting. Compared to Sapienza, Morocco is less loved by the player base, and some even call it the “worst level of the game”. I don’t really have an opinion either way, but it’s funny that even the “worst level” is still miles above a lot of the terrible part of Blood Money and other titles in the series.
We go to Olympus Colosseum, and I somehow make an Ayn Rand joke…
To fill out what was left out of this series, after we finish up in this world, we return later to participate in more tournaments and eventually kick the crap out of Hades. Later, Sephiroth appears, but that’s not canon. We don’t come back here, so I might as well get it out of the way for completion’s sake.
My “Ayn Rand’s Parasites” comment might seem completely out of left field, but it’s more fitting than I’d like it to be. Frankly, the companion AI is stupid. Most players will start off by removing every item from their allies’ inventories because they’ll likely waste them in a stupid way.
Or at least, they might if they don’t spend of most of a given boss fight knocked out. By and large, the player (as Sora) will be doing all of the work. On top of that, your party is unable to deliver a finishing blow. The fatal hit *must* come from Sora, or the boss will keep attacking.
So while it’s nice to have party members, you’ll rarely think about them.
In this episode, we grow small to visit Wonderland.
Just to make our respect for her clear, we want to point out once more that the voice actress, Kathryn Beaumont, is still voicing the same character that she’s been voicing since 1951.
Also, get used to me saying “I actually really like this boss fight,” because I end up saying it a lot over the course of this series. Each one of these boss fights has it’s own gimmick that separates them from the others. As a result, each one of them feels fresh and interesting, even if you’ve played the game multiple times (like I have).
To appropriate an overused phrase, “It’s like Dark Souls”.
I want to talk about content ID. Starting from 2:25 and ending at 3:17 of this episode of Hitman (2016), I hide in a coffin in a morgue, attached to a church. During this time, an angelic song plays in the background.
Imagine my surprise when I found this shortly after I uploaded the video (it was unlisted at the time, like most of my videos are pre-release).
Yes, the song was from legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and it was copyright claimed by a group called Atmosphere TV (or, more accurately, a bot on their behalf).
None of this will be new or interesting if you are one of those people who knows how YouTube works and what it is like. But it’s more evidence that their ecosystem is broken in a severe way. I uploaded this video a month ago and got the dispute filed the day after, when I saw it was made. But that still gives Atmosphere TV 30 days to respond.
I have a day job and don’t make money off my YouTube content, so this doesn’t affect me personally at all. For someone whose livelihood comes off YouTube, this would mean that the claimant has 30 days to just mooch off their content and bleed them dry without having to do anything beyond saying that Mozart is owned by them.
YouTube does have a process (and from my experience testing it, not a bad one) to scrub the song from the video, but I shouldn’t have to scrub my video of public domain content just because someone else falsely claimed to own it.
