I was delighted to receive an advance review copy of Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix in the mail last week. Delighted, but also a bit uneasy. Confession time, I have never beaten the first one. I always seem to lose steam after the Tarzan stage. Nothing to do with how excellent the game is, of course, just me being the lazy gamer as always. Consequently, I have never played the sequel, either.
So it left me with a problem because Kingdom Hearts 2 is not a game that you can just jump into without really knowing the mythology of what came before. It's a rather unique series in that missing either an entry in the main franchise or one of the portable spin-offs affects your understanding of the plot a significant amount.
Reviewing the game in a conventional sense is clearly out, then, but it did bring me to a greater understanding of the unique problem of video games as an art form.
When people talk about the evolution of gaming as an art they are usually pointing to A List voice casts and photorealistic graphics. To be sure, all of those things have contributed a significant amount to where gaming has reached these days, but to focus on them is to ignore what makes gaming unique.
It's interactivity. It's the literal act of playing. I remember David Lynch once saying that often what happened in his films was not so much a linear plot, but designed to create emotions in a certain sequence. He would play reaction like a piano, a song without words in a sense.
Gaming is the same way. It's not enough that you get a jump scare through a window, but that it is coupled with your immediate need to do something about it. Run, fight, or die. That's what gaming offers that movies and books and music can't.
Despite not fully experiencing it myself, it's pretty safe to say that ,em>Kingdom Hearts is one of the grand, sprawling epic stories of gaming. I've played enough of them to at least see it as tale the size of A Song of Ice and Fire, and it's still being written.
Here's the problem, though... gaming "rots" faster than any other medium. Music has gone through only a handful of media storage shifts in a century. Ownable film and television only three, and one of them fully backwards compatible. Books? Only one.
More than that, the quality remains largely unchanged. An eBook version of David Copperfield is pretty much the same experience you would have gotten when it was published.
But gaming suffers from two hazards. The first is that making systems backwards compatible is usually costly and therefore ignored. That means that there is a continued march away from the sole machine that you once played a great title one. There's a reason my PS2 is still hooked up. Sure, downloadable copies of old games are more common every day, but unlike uploading your old CDs to iTunes you're just essentially rebuying old games to run them on a single piece of technology.
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