by Touya Fri Aug 10, 2012 7:15 pm
I enjoy KH1's battle system more because like CoM, it's balanced to not be so much in the player's favor. There are techniques to utterly smash the difficulty in two, but they're pretty well hidden--most kids picked sword right off the bat, not knowing that it was the worst development path. If I'm recalling the level progression right, shield on the other hand lets you become nearly unkillable by level 25 (the enemies meanwhile...), while the staff is the best long-term option because magic in KH1 is horribly broken. I'm hanging around right before the final boss on my expert mode staff playthrough right now, just trying to complete all of the optional content beforehand, and from Agrabah on the Thunder line of spells would finish off any random encounter with one shot. Of course things are heavily weighted in Sora's favor now, but it took a lot of work to tune his accessories and abilities to this type of build, a good 30 hours of work in the first place. While in KHII the difficulty is bypassed almost immediately.
Birth By Sleep is definitely my second favorite entry, right behind the original game. I was surprised that they brought back the CoM-style battle system and then mashed it together with KHII's, but the results were very pleasing and I like that you'll usually only be level 30 or so when facing the final boss. BBS is probably the most challenging game in the series so far, at least until you figure out how to make Mega Flare.
I was thinking the other night that it would be nice if Chain of Memories were released on the 3DS virtual console. Reason being, a third party could be brought in to make the multiplayer wireless. CoM's player vs player wasn't really balanced(hi sonic blade ;_; ), but playing against friends is fun.
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