b e a r d
Kingdom Hearts is out on Steam :D I have NO MONEY right now so I can't buy it quite yet, but it's on sale until the 27th. You can get *all* of the games for $70. Good deal.
If you've never played Kingdom Hearts before, despite the goofy premise and the cheese it exudes from time to time, the gameplay is still really fun and the story is quite heartfelt. There are still some moments that make my tears well up. It's one of those games where it's "made for kids" but you don't really understand the full gravity of things until you're older.
@beardalaxy you should never buy Kingdom Hearts, much less on Steam, for the same reason why you shouldn't give your money to Square, period, they're just going to throw it to fuel gay propaganda or something
the game has literally NO story, anyone saying otherwise has probably fever dreamed it, the only thing is has is some absolutely toothless interactions with Disney's IP because Disney would never allow for fun, thus defeating the purpose of a crossover from the very beginning; and whatever the story might still linger there is penned by Tetsuya "I procrastinated the mainline Final Fantasy in the industry notorious for crunches out of relevancy" Nomura and therefore is a contender right there with Shenmue for "never going to be over" prize
I committed the grave mistake of buying a bundle just like this one on PS4: this is a literal scam, Goofy fights Sephiroth is NOT as interesting as it sounds, at least pirate it first if you really want to try
@tomie nothing about the games has been changed, actually. for better or for worse, they actually are even still capped to 60fps without a community patch lol. might run into issues with kingdom hearts 4 with that kind of stuff, but that's neither here nor there for the moment.
i've played all these games (except 3) at least once, i still think they're very good. and the music is incredible. but yes, i do always still recommend pirating to see if you'll like something before buying it, especially if there's no demo version available and it's a bit pricy. in fact, for the most part, playing these games on their original consoles/emulation is just fine too, although it's best to get the final mix version of kh1 so you can actually skip the cutscenes lol.
it probably won't ever be over though, you're right about that. and it's actually super unfortunate. waited over a decade for kingdom hearts 3 thinking it would be the finale for the series and it wasn't ToT that's kept me from playing it all this time, but i think i'm finally over the salt.
@beardalaxy I see reviews on Steam pouring in reporting crashes and other technical problems; no Japanese voiceover is available, too 💀
@tomie looks like all of the crashes are happening with AMD setups. maybe it's a non-updated driver thing or maybe it is the game, or a mix of both. there are some other issues too, but it doesn't seem like anything you wouldn't run into playing an older PC game. i know they are remasters so they need a bit more love probably, but also important to keep in mind that these were console exclusives from like 2011 that have been ported upwards and then over to PC. so because of that they will definitely have issues, like a lot of games from that era (and even now tbh) where you have to go to pcgamingwiki to find the tweaks you need to do and things you need to avoid to make sure the game runs well lol. i don't think it'll take away from the actual quality of the game much, as opposed to something like new remakes/remasters that are adding in weird sociopolitical bullshit and buckets of yellow paint.
there is apparently a mod tool the community uses to fix a lot of things, it just hasn't been brought over to steam yet. so maybe wait for that too.
none of the original games' localizations had japanese voice options, iirc. it was all english only, at least in the US. there might be a mod that lets you change that. it looks like you can still change the language to japanese in steam, although it will change the text to japanese too. maybe there is a simple way to copy over the voice lines for JP over the EN ones but i'm not sure.