After completing
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, Square Enix’s Osaka studio refined the Deck Command system again for
Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance].
Flowmotion was a major addition, which lets Sora and Riku utilize the
environment to do special attacks. You can swing on lamp posts or dive
into enemies after sliding on a grind rail.
Instead of
letting players switch between Sora and Riku at save points, the Drop
mechanic automatically changes characters when time runs out. Tai Yasue,
director of
Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], talked about these changes and the growing series mythology during an interview with Siliconera.
Kingdom Hearts 3D’s combat is
fun, but what drove me crazy at first was the “Drop” mechanic. In the
middle of the first boss fight in Traverse Town I got “dropped,” so I
tried to switch back really quickly and the boss’ health regenerated.
Tai Yasue, Director: [Laughs]
Nomura wanted it to be a bit thrilling in a way, so we added a time
limit. It’s a little bit different in the North American version. We
tweaked it, it’s not a big difference, but Sora and Riku’s HP will
become full at the beginning of the boss battle, so if you’re dying, you
can start over, too.
We didn’t really want to lose the
character of the game. It’s one of the parts that’s sometimes stressful.
When you’re successful, when you beat the boss at the last few seconds
it feels really good.
I got the hang of it later on and
how you can use it to boost your character. That’s when I felt it
worked, but at the beginning when someone doesn’t know what’s going on,
it’s like, “Awww…”
[Laughs] As you go along, you earn
a lot of drop bonuses, so we wanted the characters cooperating. A feel
for cooperation, and we did that using the Drop system, I think.
While Kingdom Hearts 3D uses
the deck command system, I found myself using more Flowmotion attacks.
They seemed to overpower everything. You can bounce back and forth
between enemies, and it negates almost all of your commands.
At
the start of the game, the Flow-Motion may feel powerful, but as you
progress, at the later stages, the Deck Commands are really powerful.
Flowmotion is used more when you want to escape, so there’s a difference
in meaning and strategy. At the very beginning, really, we wanted to
introduce Flowmotion, so the Deck Commands are a little weaker, but as
you progress, that balance changes.
I
see what you mean because in the beginning I used Flowmotion a lot. One
of the most interesting thing in Traverse Town, when you go
underground, there’s all of those grind rails. I know you can ride those
and find the correct path to the top, but I just jumped all the way, by
doing an infinite wall-jump using Flowmotion. Did you plan for that?
Oh, we did. We planned for that. Kingdom Hearts
isn’t a game where you have to do one single thing to clear it. We
wanted options–you can go this way or that way. It’s not just one route,
you can go up the wall, you can slide down a ramp. You don’t need only
need to use the Deck Commands, you can use Flowmotion or you can use
Reality Shift. We just wanted to provide a wider range of options and
really wanted users to pick which strategy they use.
In
some places, though, like Prankster’s Paradise, I feel like it almost
“breaks” the level. Like when you flip the world upside-down. All the
really good treasure chests are at the top, but you can avoid doing all
the platforming by horizontal wall-jumping across.
I
guess, but if you want the treasure chests, you have to actually switch
it over. One of the concepts for Flowmotion is a lot of freedom. And
when we say “freedom,” we wanted the player to feel free to do what they
want to do. You could use a lot of map gimmicks, but if you don’t want
to you can use Flowmotion too.
What other tweaks did you make to the North American version, other than to the Drop mechanic?
I
think that’s just the major change; we haven’t changed that much. We
wanted the Japanese version and North American version to be pretty
similar. I think there’s a Drop bonus that was added. I think it’s
called “Drop Speed Down” in Japanese, but I don’t know what the English
name is. We added the drop bonus and that’s about it. Not a lot of major
changes.
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