Tuesday 15 January, 2008

Gameplay
So far the game has done well with the difficulty of the game, with its gradual increase in difficulty as the game progresses. One problem may be that at some parts of the game, specifically Agrabah, seem to have boss battles of a difficulty slightly higher than what could be considered accurate for the world, and in the aforementioned world, the enemies have a higher chance of killing you off before you can properly procede with the story. I found that the Cave of Wonders boss battle, was a bit hectic, with the purpose being to attack both its eyes while being attacked by Heartless, normally in groups of five at a time.
Also, Donald appears to have some difficulty in staying alive, though that could be said of any mage-type character in Square's collection of RPG's. This said I found myself either healing him more than the rest of the party or running around the area during a boss battle, waiting for him to regain consciousness. For him to stay alive without my assistance I found that I had to set it to where he was always casting the two defensive magics, Heal and Aero.
I found that the Goofy and I could be managed fine without the use of equipment given the area, but if I wanted to keep him alive, Donald would have to wear some defense boosting equipment. Aside from accesories, I found that I could manage perfectly with the starting weapons of each character. The new weapons acquired in the different worlds did little to help with my stats due to the use of Power, Defense, and AP Ups i stocked up to this point, though i know later i will surely need to up my weapons due to a shortage of these enhancing items.

Design
Aside from the main story, I found that many of the extras added an enjoyable experience to the game and added to he replayability, mostly of the same game file. Some of these, such as rescuing all ninty-nine dalmation pups from the classic movie by rescuing them from item chests (three per chest) reward your hard effort. The side-quest mentioned previously rewards you for making certain milestones such as finding ten, twenty, and so on with various items such as a rare ribbon accesory or a full set of gummy ship parts. Of course I still have yet to recieve these rewards but the other rewards are still worth obtaining. Another aspect item was the Trinity Marks, which allow you to gain items and other and other useful things by meeting certain criteria, mainly having Donald and Goofy in the party.
Some of the cutscenes were amazing and a majority of the story is told through them. For those who have already played the game, the inability to skip past them may be slightly annoying, especially in the beginning and end (laying the groundwork for the games story and ending the game without unintentional ambiguity), but do not disturb the gameplay too much throughout the rest of the game. Also i might add that the opening CG was quite remarkable and was very sybolic, forshadowing events that have and will happen during the game.
The game itself, I felt was very innovational.
Its replacement of random battles and the removal of a turn-based battle system give it the feel of an action game and gives the world amore realistic (or semi-realistic) feel. I partly believe that the success of this battle system and character customization for party members evolved into some of the features in Final Fantasy XII, with random battles being elimated and encouters being modified instead of the trap-like encounters in Kingdom Hearts. Also the character customization may have been a precursor to the Gambit system, a sort of prototype version so to speak.

(Nicolas Kent - Grader)

For highly story-driven games, there is often a feel of playing through a move, which i think makes creating replay value difficult. Assuming you've completed everything on one game file, would you feel much inclination to start another character and play through again? Why, and if not what could the designers do to make it more replayable?

You mentioned wanting Co-op play. Its uncommon for action RPG's to support co-op play. Can you think of why? What about the nature of the game and the storytelling style makes it so difficult to allow for multiple players? Can you think of non MMO action rpg's that have successfully accomplished co-op multiplayer? How did they pull it off?