Kingdom Hearts, First Report

One of the presents from Santa was to Kelly and me. Kingdom Hearts is a joint venture between Squaresoft, one of my fave game companies, and Disney. It mixes characters from the various Final Fantasy role-playing games with characters from the Disney stable, in an adventure game with a mix of story and action. Kelly was asking for it frequently before Christmas, though by the time Christmas rolled around, the ad campaign for it was over, and Kelly had forgotten all about it.

Monday we finally got through the backlog of toys and Kelly decided that she wanted to play the game. We got through the first part, arrived at Destiny Island, and collected all the items we needed for our raft. Then we were 'promoted' to the next sequence. The first time through I was pigpiled by a bunch of evil little shadow creatures, and I couldn't hit them for the life of me. My character got killed. Kelly told me to try again. This time I decided not to try fighting the shadow things, and instead ran across the island looking for help. I found Riku and got to the next level, a boss monster that looked like a big shadow demon. I fought hard, but got snuffed again.

At this point, Kelly took over, starting on Destiny Island again. She went into her 'hop, jump and twist' mode, where she just endlessly runs around, jumps up on stuff, whacks things with her sword, and generally pushes every button in sight. I went back and checked the play clock, and she did this for seven hours. Needless to say, I took a nap during that time.

So I went on the web and did some research, and discovered that the boss monster is called Darkside (no, not Darkseid), and most hints suggest that you need to spar with Tidus, Wakka and Selphie on Destiny Island to build levels (one guy said Level 7). So we spent today sparring, bringing in Jean as our ringer for several matches (she's the Bust-a-Groove champ around here, so her reflexes top all others in the household). It's now around 3:30, and we are at Level 7 at last. We saved, and quit, 'cause I insisted to Kelly that my hands were too sore to do any more fighting (and Kelly never does the fighting parts of these games).

So at this rate, assuming we don't lose interest first, or get ticked off by some unfair (*cough* Final Fantasy X *cough*) segment of the game, we'll finish the game around the time Kelly becomes a teenager .