Thread by @Mike_Prinke

As someone who once aspired to reproduce Kingdom Hearts-style combat, I’ll weigh in on why people don’t borrow its design as much as you might think/hope. 🧵

KH’s combat is great, and worth study. But, it’s exceptionally hard to borrow from because it’s so specifically KH.

https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1673835717062021121

Quick primer: Kingdom Hearts is an action-RPG series started by Square-Enix in 2002 in collaboration with Disney. The original was a FF/Disney crossover nobody asked for, subject to bemusement/confusion when first announced, but it over-delivered with engaging story and gameplay.

The game centered on Sora, a spiky-haired kid with clown shoes from Destiny Islands. His world is destroyed by beings called the Heartless, and he has to team up with Donald Duck and Goofy to find his lost friends and save other worlds from being destroyed like his was.

Kingdom Hearts has a lot of early-2000’s Square’s dramatic panache and visual flare, but fundamentally targets a younger audience than the Final Fantasy series. As such its gameplay is a mix of:

- Platforming
- Zelda-inspired swordplay
- RPG mechanics borrowed directly from FF.

This mixture of mechanics basically makes KH a bridge between faster-paced, more accessible/playful/spontaneous games like Mario/Zelda, and the strategy/story-driven Final Fantasy — IE an action-adventure FF game for kids, with Disney-themed jungle gyms to crawl around on.

You have a party of characters, but Sora is the only directly playable character, which simplifies everything for the player dramatically. As such, while the combat system translates FF into real-time action verbs, combat is fundamentally designed around Sora’s specific moveset.

Said verbs are:

-Attack with the keyblade (mash X to win)
-Use item
-Cast spell
-Defend
-Dodge
-Jump
-Use super move (Summons, limits, and later Drive forms)
-Interact with environment

Pretty much everything you could do in a FF combat system plus traversal.

Probably the best thing KH did was the auto-combo system. The controls are crowded enough that you only get one attack button. However, Sora has multiple attacks and combo finishers that can add into his combos depending on how many enemies he’s surrounded with.

By default, you have a three-hit combo. “Huh, hah, EEYAH.” But Sora will track enemies with a lot of automation/root motion moving closer to a target w/ each strike, and picks a different attack depending on how far away the enemy is and how many enemies you are surrounded with

When you’ve got him fully kitted out, it’s a really dynamic “smart combo” system. If you have one enemy, he does quick/focused strikes. If they’re far away, he’ll dash towards them. If there’s a lot of them, he’ll do a spinning or wide strike. All this applies to finishers too.

Over the course of the game, you build up a library of these combo modifiers, and pick and choose which ones to turn off and on with AP (Ability Points). This lets you customize Sora’s combos to suit your play style.

These are all weighed against adding more super attacks (which similarly are built around simple attack one target/attack many target/close/far kind of dynamics), enhancing magic, or adding other support abilities.

All the non-hit-things-with-swords abilities are accessed chiefly through the command menu, a Final Fantasy-style JRPG menu in the lower-left corner accessed with the D-pad. This is horribly unwieldy, so there’s also a customizeable shortcut menu accessible by holding a trigger.

Like, this is what a magic menu looks like late game. You thumb down to “Magic,” hit “X,” then thumb down to the option you want, all while still moving and dodging.

It’s a good thing this is a kids’ game, then, so base difficulty is tuned mainly around mashing attack.

It HAPPENS that mashing attack causes a really complex-feeling, highly optimized set of combos to come out, which feels satisfying and looks insanely acrobatic for something so simple to operate. KH is a masterclass in making simple mechanics FEEL dynamic and cool.

BUT…

… If KH required you to use the slower, more unwieldy verbs from the command menu at greater frequency, it would be extremely difficult to play. There IS a balance between all the options, but it’s specifically tuned with this compromise in mind.

Each subsequent game in the series has tried to inject more methods for expanding on these mechanics, but invariably runs into the same problem: the Command Menu is a kitchen sink of cool but redundant toys that the game inevitably can’t assume you will ever use.

I can go down a rabbit hole of the design pitfalls this system entails, but at this point I’ve established enough about the series’s combat to give you a picture, and I want to switch gears to the original topic: why people don’t copy KH’s mechanics.

I will preface saying that I know a handful of indie games that are explicitly trying to take cues from KH, including @jordy_j_s’s Arbiter and @nukefist’s Genokids. But, these examples are few and far between, and a few of them have been in production for a very long time.

The first big problem is how much of KH is dependent on Sora’s auto-combo system. Every playable character in the series has the same weapon — a keyblade. Every playable character has the same set of attacks: Near/Far/Surrounded and aerial versions of those, plus dodge/guard.

There are a handful of exceptions. Sora can briefly use a projectile-based moveset in KH2 with Wisdom Form, and 358/2 Days makes all the Organization XIII characters playable. But, Wisdom is the least popular Drive form, and the most successful move sets all resemble keyblades.

In other words, the core attack system for Kingdom Hearts is insanely successful at representing one weapon type, but basically can’t adapt outside of that one weapon, and doesn’t provide a lot of legroom for creating nuance between multiple versions of that weapon.

Terra, Ventus, and Aqua in Birth by Sleep are meant to be a heavy, lightweight, and magic-using variant of Sora’s moveset.

But… other than Terra being a little stiffer, there isn’t really any difference in how they conrol or strategize in fights. They are all still just Sora.

On paper, you can take any Final Fantasy and adapt it with Kingdom Hearts’s mechanics.

In practice, Cecil, Terra, Cloud, Squall, and Tidus are all Sora clones, with identical combo logic but slightly different animations.

God help you if you want to adapt gun Yuna or Barrett.

Pulling the KH combat system outside of KH immediately faces you with design problems when you want to provide more than just Sora. These are solvable, but you immediately have to start compromising. One fix requires another and another.

FF7R plays superficially similarly to KH, for instance, but it has to give up the jump button and most of the traversal gameplay and flatten all environments. In exchange, each character has a unique secondary action and unique interplay with magic.

Barrett and Aerith would SUCK in Kingdom Hearts, because all you’d do is mindlessly lock on and tap attack from a distance. In FF7R, they do chip damage, but their attacks fuel the ATB gauge, which gives them frequent access to magic — which is much more useable/strategic in FF7R

This makes them the go-to caster and big-picture strategist characters, even when Barrett isn’t great at it.

Even Cloud doesn’t feel like a Sora clone due to his stance-switching, with fast attacks available on one stance and vicious counterattacks available on the other.

In my own case, I was trying to design something kind of like “Kingdom Hearts, but for Phantasy Star instead of Final Fantasy.” Sounds doable, Phantasy Star was another Dragon Quest-inspired menu RPG.

It all falls apart when you give Not-Sora a gun as a secondary verb.

I wanted to keep the traversal and similar sense of progression, but expand what the player could do immediately without diving into a command menu.

Depending on how you lean, it stops looking like Kingdom Hearts quickly and turns into either DMC, Ratchet and Clank, or Souls/PSO

Other problems with borrowing KH’s design stem from the sheer scope of it. If you’re making a KH clone, you want a variety of cool worlds with cool jungle gyms to explore and unique bosses. This was and is a huge production nightmare due to the number and intricacy of enemies.

Kingdom Hearts has a cheat: the Heartless. One group of enemies with a very similar, intentionally simplistic design language. This is the enemy type on every world, they are low-detail as fuck, and 80-90% of them can be recycled no matter what world you’re on.

In addition to helping tie together the story between worlds as disparate as The Little Mermaid and the Nightmare Before Christmas, the Heartless are easy to produce. They’re small, they navigate the environment easily, you can fit them anywhere.

There’s definitely world-specific Heartless, but they make up a small part of the roster and are still cheap enough to produce and easy enough to re-use. It’s this kind of clever, cost-conscious design that makes it possible for KH to support its spectacle-laden bosses.

If you want KH-level results, this means you have to come up with a design that’s as versatile, cost-effective, and clever as this little guy.

Like

I don’t think people realize just how much of this franchise is carried specifically by the humble Shadow.

Going back to that Phantasy Star-inspired KH clone, think about trying to adapt these kinds of enemies to 3D — variously requiring either pretty intricate mechanical design or pretty intricate creature design, all embedded in specific locales.

Now you have to animate them.

Animation is Kingdom Hearts’s other big bottleneck. They do the kind of detailed moveset animation that’s normally reserved for character action games, which themselves normally have a MUCH smaller scope.

Do you have world-class gameplay animators? Does your combat design team have a lot of experience with integrating gameplay and animation?

Do you even know how RARE this set of traits is in one team?

I don’t think people understand how hard such animation-driven gameplay is. The kind of interdependence that creates means changes to one department’s work can ruin the other’s, and the prototyping workflow requires constant communication between them.

Square can do this because they built those resources for the better part of a decade leading up to Kingdom Hearts’s development. Capcom and Nintendo can do this.

There’s a dozen western companies who I think have the ANIMATORS to do this, but not the inter-departmental pipeline

Part of the problem is philosophical. The western industry classically has thought of the art and story as disposable set dressing, not as a fundamental part of the gaming entertainment experience, so they don’t frame animators and artists as “partners” so much as employees.

That’s a paradigm that’s been slowly changing over the past few years, but it should tell you something that character action-inspired games like @ENENRAGame and KH-inspired projects like @jordy_j_s are almost all indie passion projects rather than having publishers behind them.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand, though — that’s why you see a lot fewer attempts at KH clones and a lot more of almost every other kind of action-RPG. Not to say they’re “easier,” but the talent pool and production pipeline for a Diablo clone is comparatively well-defined.

Finally…

It does bear mentioning that for as popular as Kingdom Hearts is, and for as frighteningly engaged as its community is, it isn’t such a big moneymaker that it has commanded the industry’s attention. It didn’t make CoD-level money.

For perspective, KH2 distributed about 5.2 million copies worldwide, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, especially back on PlayStation 2.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II sold nearly 12 million, Elden Ring did around 20 million, and GTAV sold over 180 million.

This is… an unfortunate part of the industry, but the big publishers like to copycat the biggest sellers. Kingdom Hearts is HIGHLY respectable, but it’s not an Earth-flattening meteor of sales, which is mostly what executives like paying attention to.

To sum up…

Actually I think this person puts it best. “Perfect for the game it is” really summarizes KH’s mechanics perfectly. Square NAILED this exact game so, so well. Every part of it is in harmony.

https://twitter.com/AKDot98/status/1674131655223824384?s=20

This isn’t to say there aren’t opportunities in exploring or borrowing its ideas. But I think the opportunities are limited trying to use the whole picture of KH as a template for a genre. Even KH has a hard time expanding on what the first game already perfected.

Rather, I think it’s better to pursue the ideal of what KH’s design accomplished: making your game uniquely “it.” Whatever your game does, utilizing its design to the fullest in a truly harmonious way.