ign responds!

Oh wow these guys seem like the stereotypical ******bag dudebros who spout memes they got from really unfunny reddit comics.

also, it's really annoying how the guy on the right, the guy who apparently wrote the article keeps smugly shaking his head after everything the other dubstep dudebro loving guy says.

 

A series that you can jump into on the fly must not be a very good one. There is a reason things are called sequels. You are not meant to play them out of order.

 

I agree. I mean, Assassin's Creed has a FAR more complex story than KH, but no one seems to be railing on that series. A person who starts playing Revelations without playing the first three games will likely have no clue what's going on.

Really, KH's story isn't as complex as people think it is. There are plot twists and behind the scenes stuff, sure, but so long as you know the basic concepts its fairly easy to keep up if you pay attention. Or maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence/attention span of the average gamer.

 

I agree, but i Feel as if BbS is an acception.

 

What is an acception? It sounds as if it being accepted into something.

 

Yes, but it doesn't mean that you should have to go out and find three (four if you want COM and Re:COM) out of print games for a system that's been out of manufacturing for a fairly long time. As much as I love my PS2 and Kingdom Hearts games, I would never be committed enough to go around from store-to-store to find a PS2 and KH, Re:COM, and KH2, then buy Birth by Sleep, Days, and Re:Coded just so I can understand what's going on in Dream Drop Distance. At the very least, they should make sense on their own and then make more sense when applied to the rest of the series. That, as far as I'm concerned, is a legitimate flaw with the series. BBS was a great example where they avoided this problem. The main story, not including the secret ending, was presented such that any callforwards to the later time periods of previous games would come of as foreshadowing to someone new to the series.

To recap: It should make at least a little bit of sense out of context, and make more sense in context.

 

That depends on if you see it as continuing a series or creating a new game. If you see it as 'creating a new game', then of course you want it to make sense. You are used to games being standalone pieces. But what if you wish to continue the series? Can you think of a book series that makes sense without the backstory?

 

You said you cannot Play them out of order, and I agree With you, But,if play BbS After KHII you can still understand the story.

 

You're... serious? So much wrong here, so much!

 

You DO know there are wikis out there dedicated to KH like The Keyhole right?

If someone wants to know about a game that's out of print look for it's information on the web. This isn't the dark ages, this kind of info is READILY AVAILABLE to anyone who wants to know what when on in a game or a summery of the major plot points.

 

Story is the most important part of a game for me. If I had just heard of the series and wanted to play it, I would go out of my way to get the old games. I imagine they sell rather cheap on amazon.

 

Personally, I think it should be both. It should at least work as a standalone piece, even if it was not made to be a standalone piece. Birth by Sleep, as I pointed out, is a very good example of what I'd like to see in future Kingdom Hearts games. Take Dream Drop Distance: Since I know the whole story, I can understand it very well. However, that makes my opinion misleading when my friend, who doesn't know squat about Kingdom Hearts, is thinking about buying it and asks me if it's any good. I'll say yes, and he may or may not consider that I think this because I went into the game knowing the backstory inside and out.

Of the top of my head:
I read the Chronicles of Narnia out of order and understood them pretty well, with the exception of the very last book which was just kind of boring without having read the others. The Redwall books by Brian Jaques made sense without having to read all of them as well, though that may be because they were written out of order in the first place, making any book a good starting point. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made sense to me as well, though it did help that I had at least a little bit of knowledge about the Potterverse from movie trailers and my acquaintances who happened to be Harry Potter fanatics.

 

It's not really that hard for a game to make a summary. A game can be just as long as the developer wants it to, a short summary, or possibly bringing things up again and explaining them is perfectly acceptable. Just because we live in a day where information is easily accessible, shouldn't have to mean that we need to lower our standards. It's like saying that Final Fantasy XIII has a good story because you read all of the logs and finally understand the story, the game could easily show you if it had some decent story-telling.

 

Sorry, allow me a brief moment to fangasm over the Redwall series, and Brian Jaques in general.

Wow. Sorry.

And also kind of off topic but related to your off topic: I didn't really like The Last Battle at all. It was okay but the deus ex machina at the end, plus the complete throwing away of Susan (Oh, she grew up and pretended it was all fake. All that character development in the previous books? Yeah, forget that, we hate her now.), ruined it for me.

 

Actually, I got the same impression. What with all of the references to previous games everywhere.

Narnia hardly counts, as most of the books have little connection to each other than being in the same universe. Only the main characters stay the same in the ones that are continuous, and most of them do not even share main characters. Red Wall I have not read, but yes, that does count. However, it is certainly not the standard for works to be standalone. I am a firm supporter of doing things in order and learning the entire story, even if you have to download ROMs or such.

I happen to have a lot, and I mean a lot of trouble believing that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made sense without knowing the story of the previous books.

Spoiler

They did not explain things such as that Harry Potter was "The Chosen One" and how he got the scar or why he got the visions inside Voldemort's mind, that he went to Hogwarts, that he had Snape as a professor, who Dumbledore was or who Dobby was and how he came to be free and so on. They didn't even explain horcruxes in that book (if I recall correctly). So much was missing that it is astounding you could make sense of it at all.

 

Again, it helped I have friends who know Harry Potter inside and out, so I was able to fill in the holes from what I had picked up from them. Harry being the "Chosen One" just made sense given that he was so well established as the protagonist that he couldn't have been an Ishmael. And I was able to figure out just what a horcrux was by the time I got about halfway through the book. There were some things I didn't understand until near the very end, but the whole

Spoiler

Snape kills Dumbledore LOLOLOL

meme got me through what could have been a very confusing chapter. As for Harry's scar, I figured it out (minus some details that I found out later were pretty important) after that big twist near the end.

 

It does not count if you have people filling in the gaps for you, or tell you anything about the series. I could make the same argument about any Kingdom Hearts game if you count that. How would you have fared without any help?

 

It would have been quite a bit harder to understand, but still not too confusing to enjoy as a story.

 

Again, the same could be said of Kingdom Hearts... Correct?

 

Not necessarily. Even the first time I played KHII, I couldn't understand any of it because I hadn't even heard of Chain of Memories. Once I did get to a point where I understood things, Riku came along and left me clueless again, since most of COM was involved in how things went for him. And I couldn't understand what happened to the rest of Organization XIII either, leaving several big plot holes that wouldn't have been present if I had played COM. This was resolved because I actually was dedicated enough to search out a copy of Chain of Memories and eventually bought Re:COM as well, but before that all I really understood was "Nobodies want Kingdom Hearts, we don't want them to have Kingdom Hearts, Kairi was kidnapped, and Axel knows Sora but Sora doesn't know him. Oh, and Axel died to save Sora, Sora still doesn't really understand how Axel knows him. And then what's with this Roxas guy, who hasn't been hinted at at all?"

Even just not seeing the Another Side Another Story left me very confused.