Kingdom Hearts has this problem of building up a ton of cool premises that could lead into really fascinating philosophical and sociological musings… and then dropping them like lead weights before they’ve really had time to develop. Worse, they often just refuse to capitalize on them.
This game is one of the first examples of that, particularly with Namine. As Sam noted in the episode, if you never saw or played Chain of Memories until this point, you’d have no real idea how tragic a backstory Namine has.
There’s also the moral and ethical discussions pertaining to rewriting and manipulating other people’s memories. This is the only game where this conversation could even possibly come up, because the whole concept gets swept under the rug in every future game.
I understand that this game only exists to setup Kingdom Hearts 2 and to explain why Sora is at level 1 at the start of it. In that sense, I shouldn’t be surprised we don’t indulge in this conversation. At the same time, this is a intriguing enough premise to spin that debate off from, that it’s immensely frustrating when the game chooses not to.
This Elusive Target is noteworthy for two reasons.
This Elusive Target is the very first target to take place in the hotel in Bangkok
It is also the first one to have two targets.
Since players can no longer retry an Elusive Target once any one objective has been complete (in this case, if either of the two targets is eliminated), the most obvious way to minimize risk was to eliminate both targets at the same time. That way, there is no time where I cannot retry while a target is still on the loose.
But before we can even think about that, the very first step was to find a way to get into the restaurant undetected, or to find some other opportunity to take care of them. Unlike Paris, I have a limited experience working in Bangkok, so I didn’t have quite the map knowledge that I’m used to when dealing with these targets.
Thankfully, since players can still retry up until the point where an objective is complete, I had the chance to look around, scout the area, and take my time in cooking up my approach. While the Elusive Targets will severely punish failure, and players need to attempt them within the allotted window, the contacts themselves are by no means unfair. Players still have the ability to take their time, think, and come up with a method that works for them.
Like an good puzzle, a Hitman contract is posing a question to the player, and expecting them to come up with an answer. In this contact, these questions are:
How will you (the player) approach the target without setting off an alarms?
Once you get your approach nailed down, how will you perform the kill while giving yourself enough of an opening to escape?
I found my answer to question 1 this episode. Next episode, we’ll answer the second question.
One thing that we point out in this episode is just how strange the script sounds when delivered by these voice actors.
I don’t fault the actors themselves, or even the voice direction. The actual performances aren’t bad at all. When you hear them in other games, with better scripts, it’s even easier to take notice. But this script just doesn’t read very well.
I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that this script was originally made of the Game Boy Advance. Since voice acting, animation, and visuals weren’t really a strong suit of that old platform. For that reason, the script basically had to perform all of the work in terms of storytelling.
And that worked for the GBA, when these lines remained unspoken. Then they remastered these scenes for the HD re-release of Chain of Memories, with 3D cutscenes and voice acting. But when you do that to a script not suited for 3D animation and vocals, it just comes off as stilted and awkward.
It really sucks, but I don’t think there’s much that could’ve been done about it.
Today, we undertake a new Elusive Target: “The Identity Thief”
With all the Elusive Targets, I have noticed that a very large percentage of them take place in the Paris map. To a degree, that makes a lot of sense. Paris is the first map they released, and it comes with the Intro Pack, which otherwise only includes the tutorial. This means that if all a player purchased was the intro pack, then they still have a chance to wet their feet with a Elusive Target or two before they drop money on the rest of the experience.
It’s also a very large map with a ton of moving parts. Not as big as Sapienza or Marrakesh, but there’s a noticeable size to the Paris map. And with the fashion show, the auction, and all the many people gathered here, it’s easy to both think of some story justification for why the target is in Paris and a good routine for them to enact once they’re in the level.
On the other hand, this makes Paris a strange focal point for a lot of the content added to the game. For people like me, who have played the game so much, Paris is almost like a second home. I have nearly memorized the Paris map after all of the many times I have played contacts and Elusive Targets in it and/or seen others do the same. Sapienza also gets this treatment, but to no where near the same degree as Paris.
This leaves me conflicted. I understand why Paris gets so much love, and I appreciate IO going out of their way to keep sticking their noses out for newcomers. At the same time, I wish the other maps got a little more love. I want to have more reasons to go to Bangkok or Colorado or Japan aside from just killing some time.
Today, we rediscover how much filler is in this goddamn game.
Since we don’t have much to say regarding the events of the story, I’m going to instead talk about why I personally don’t care that AtRiley didn’t include any of the individual world’s storylines.
Not only are they filler, but they follow the exact same story of their Kingdom Hearts 1 incarnations, just replacing any mentions of “Hearts” with “Memories”. The kind of edits you can perform with Ctrl + F. And that’s just Sora’s path. Riku doesn’t even get filler stories. He just fights the bosses and moves on.
Considering how much of this game’s main plot is filler, going through all that additional filler would just be painful. As this Primer series goes on, you’ll gradually see Sam and I lose our minds to how much content isn’t related to the main story.
Ignoring some of that in Chain of Memories may have merely delayed the inevitable descent into madness, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
Welcome back to the Kingdom Hearts Primer. This time, we’ve moved on to Chain of Memories.
Thanks again to AtRiley for allowing us to use his cut for our purposes.
There’s not much to say about the overall story yet, because even in a story that’s largely build-up to Kingdom Hearts 2, most of the first half of Chain of Memories is just build-up to the plot twists in the second half.
Also, Sam and I apologize for even suggesting the Kingdom Hearts drinking game. We love you guys, and we would very much like for you to not die of blood alcohol poisoning.
If the title of this episode has you confused, my attempt at “The Fixer” was… less than ideal.
I’ll be honest with you, I was really bummed that I bungled that mission at the end.
But in hindsight, it’s good that I was able to capture that on camera, to demonstrate the true finality of these Elusive Targets. Because of my failure, I will never be able to succeed at “The Fixer”, even though I know exactly what I did wrong and how I can correct my mistake if I could have a second chance.
Yet, despite my failure here, I still think that these Elusive Targets are an awesome addition to the game. This story I’m telling through my experience here is completely unique to me. No other person will be able to replicate what happened in these last two episodes.
There’s something inherently unique about video games in that even if two players have similar stories, going only similar beats, no two players will ever have the exact same experience. These Elusive Targets capitalize on that, even if the one-attempt clause can lead to frustration. The benefit of giving each player a single, unique story of how they either cleverly found their own path or failed in some spectacular, tense, and exciting manner, is worth that frustration born from hindsight.
It’s something I look forward to every time an Elusive Target is announced.
Today, we take another look at Elusive Targets with “The Fixer”.
The tricky part of an Elusive Target is that players can restart as many time as they want until they complete an objective.
IO allows players to restart because they want to offer them the opportunity to scout out the area and how the Elusive Target interacts with the otherwise established NPCs and routines. If they make a mistake during the approach, or if they learn some new information that gives them a new possible approach, they can even go back to the planning stages to account for it.
When the mission is just to kill a single target, this works just fine. This means that players are afforded the chance to plan and scout as long as they want, only sticking their neck out during the kill attempt and the escape. If players screw up before they kill the target, it’s not a big deal.
However, throwing another objective into the mix changes this dynamic. Now, players need to decide on not just their approach to each objective, but also in what order they want to take them on. Once even a single objective (like retrieving the diamonds in this contract) is complete, restarts are no longer an option.
That’s why I consider going after the diamonds so quickly to be my biggest mistake here. Out of the two tasks, killing the target was the more difficult of them. Even then, had I not picked up the diamonds, I would’ve still been in the clear to restart if things went wrong.
Because players can’t restart after completing an objective, they need to assign and evaluate risk when more than one is in play. It counter-intuitively makes more sense to go for more difficult and risky objectives first, because if the player fails, they can always restart. Leaving the easier tasks for last minimizes risk. I’m not sure if IO intended to have the effect, and I’m doubly not sure if I like it, but that’s the way it is.
Welcome to the next installment of our Kingdom Hearts Primer. This time, we cover the game that begat many of the concepts that confuse the hell out of people trying to get into Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
We hope you look forward to this as much as we look forward to presenting it, with the aid of our video source: AtRiley.
The story of Hitman has always been a precarious position. As a series, Hitman has always been gameplay first. While a story exists, and there is a canon for the series, it has never been an important part of the series.
There has only been one Hitman game where the story came to the forefront and had a large impact, and that was Absolution. You might remember Absolution as one of the worst received Hitman games by fans and critics alike.
While this was partially due to the story being an absolute mess, a large part of it was that the focus on the story made the actual missions unfun. It was less of a Hitman game and more of a traditional, but mediocre stealth game with Hitman tropes thrown in every now and then. And ironically, the assassinations felt more contrived than ever in the context of the backwater, stereotypically grindhouse flick it tried to be.
There’s a story to Hitman (2016) too, to be sure. However, it takes a different approach. Like Blood Money before it, the missions are book-ended by story-related scenes. And while they have solid acting, direction, and a decent plot to go along with it, they know exactly what they need to do an aspire to do no more than that.
Each mission is given a briefing that provides context to how the target has become a “bad dude” and why Agent 47 is hired to assassinate them. At the end, they are given a cut-scene that ties the assassination into the game’s larger, overall plot. It’s not particularly fancy, and the story isn’t some highbrow melodrama, but for Hitman it doesn’t need to be. All it needs to do is tie together all the happy murder fun times.
