If Kingdom Hearts was about a group of kids who in their yearning to grow up - despite daydreams of a vaster world - had never once imagined a world without each other, Kingdom Hearts II follows up by painting a group of teenagers who have already learnt what departures feel like. As time trickles down, and your mind prepares you for the pain of goodbyes, you begin to already distance yourself before the end has even arrived; the memory of the last thing you ever said to someone being something insincere.
The type of shit that makes me wanna call Square Enix's engineers "Architects". If you didn't lose it at the spear cutting little strands of Axel's hair, you don't love video games. So many people had praised this prologue, but somehow I can't help but think I still underestimated it - this arc aims so high at bringing its evocative, teenage-angst ridden storyboards to life.

Then something strange starts to happen. You just finished a three hour trek through existentialist melodrama, and now you're playing as Sora and friends on another Disney adventure; forget about that other stuff for now. I'm not here to discuss if Kingdom Hearts as a whole is stupid - we've all gone through that already, and I truly do love this series - but it's clear to me that we're growing out of its blueprint here. I wouldn't like to romanticize Kingdom Hearts 1 - the way it implements the storyline into the Disney worlds has always been teasy - but even its emotional scenes fit into the disney-shaped mold of tones better (remember the forced smile scene?). Cashing in on three years of loose ends had a steep price on the series' cohesion.

II's fractured feel doesn't end at the storytelling. Critical Mode - a post-release addition - has this lustrous reputation behind it as a pinnacle-of-the-genre action game. But as someone who decided to follow that fable and play through the game for the first time through critical, it couldn't be less apparent that the game wasn't designed around this difficulty. The way the game is so eager to simplify itself for a cool setpiece, you can tell this game was originally made to let little kids feel cool. The average character action game fan would lose their shit at the amount of distractions at play here; its new core mechanic is advertised as a QTE button. We all saw something special sparkling in its stitched together identity, though. But why?

The Roxas fight was a bit of an eye-opening example for me: shortly into the fight, he uses a desperation attack: shooting instant-death spheres at you for about five seconds straight. I just couldn't figure out how to dodge it, so I searched for runs of the fight on google, and found:
-Using movement options that I hadn't yet unlocked in my playthrough
-I found one video of a dude walking horizontally into the wall to move at slightly less than regular speed, but couldn't replicate it. unserious
-...most of the videos force the game to skip the phase entirely by doing a tight combo sequence that I wasn't skilled enough to replicate either
And so, the solution I ended up using was to simply use an attack that made me fully invincible for ten seconds at a time. Most intelligently designed game's balancing would crumble under the weight of a single move that functions like that even existing. Sora's toolkit has this irresponsibly large volume to it, so something like a Limit being able to exist, and be a well-balanced creative response is a testament to its design.
Just in my experience playing a lot of action games, putting too much emphasis on parries tends to consume more organic, multi-applicable systems - like positioning, or whiff punishing - and place all the weight on memorization. But Final-Mix-on-crit marries it all together with such finesse!! Long-ranged attacks and safer defensive play are both provided via slick management of your remaining Magic, so when you're burnt out of magic, things gets volatile. Dodges and parries gain equally important weight; every second shaved off your magic burn-out is a grasp to pull the momentum back in your direction. While fighting a boss, I'll form an ideal winning run of actions in my head; but there's always some unforeseeable scenario that'll force me to adapt to a different playstyle on the fly. Sometimes overwhelmed by my own range of options, sometimes the invisible numbers of a boss escaping a combo, sometimes literally just RNG. This is the truest definition of the label "Action RPG"

Anyways, it was like 4AM in the morning - it took me all night to finish the final boss sequence - and I'm sitting here, watching that final cutscene. I realized that any cynicism I had in my body had left it at this point. Unremarkable memories wash away as you get older, and sometimes, you don't return to the source of those memories for a long time; most of the longtime Kingdom Hearts fans I've spoken to seem to be perfectly comfortable discarding the "kinda joyless disney story retellings" part of this one from their minds. You could probably call that a "bias", but as I played this, I realized it's only natural to want to reward a project for trying to shoot as high as this one does.. Kingdom Hearts II itself feels like the type of project where everyone on its staff stared at the budget they had been handed to make a Disney game, and realized that if they managed to sneak it in there, they could shove every special idea they ever had into it. Everyone on the staff eventually became in on it. And by the time it was all over, I too, was in on it.

[UPDATE: 2.0 came out earlier today, and I've played more of the game. As such, I'm adding a few notes as I promised - the original review will be present below for the sake of posterity.]

- The AI has been tuned to be less rubberbandy. Good change, and I hope they touch up the items next; some of them feel absurdly overtuned. The shrink rays last way too long, cover way too much of the track, and have a deceptive hitbox (the sparks appear to be just for aesthetic purpose, but actually hit you), tops can hit you twice, and bumpers are way too punishing.
- Track design is a mixed bag. There's a lot of fun ones here, but Marble Garden Zone and Balloon Park Zone are some of the worst tracks I've ever seen in the genre and I'm genuinely baffled they were let through. In general, it appears the game has a thing for track design that forces you to slow down if you don't play absolutely perfectly (a good example being the crates in chokepoints in City Escape), whereas in better kart racers every hazard can be dealt with without slowing down simply by knowing the map and playing well. Not even the AI can navigate some of these decently!
- The fast falling button isn't as useful as I thought, since it makes your kart bounce when you land, which makes it far less useful in tighter tracks.
- The tutorial, while still obligatory, can be skipped earlier. I'm still not keen on that - just make the tutorial optional and have a prompt asking if they'd like to play the tutorial when entering Grand Prix or Online for the first time. Time Attack is also unlocked after completing your first race (instead of requiring 82 spray cans, what the hell?!), and, thinking about it, it's absurd it wasn't like this from the get go.
- Online is still locked behind five cups, albeit the optional tutorial race can unlock it instantly now. Just have it unlocked from the get-go! I think the devs' heart is in the right place (it's a hard game and they probably don't want players jumping online immediately and getting discouraged), but this is still oddly restrictive - again, just add a prompt asking if they'd like to learn the mechanics when they start the game or try to go into Grand Prix or Online right away. Mods are also unlocked at the same time.

I'm feeling more positive about this game, albeit there's still some changes to be made before I consider it "pretty good". Personally, I'd do some more balance changes to make items less overtuned and retool tracks so that you aren't forced to slow down at all, and then by making the tutorial optional but heavily recommended.

Again, the devs' heart is in the right place and there's a lot of promise here - the game just needs to move past those aches.

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[ORIGINAL REVIEW - Based on day 1 thoughts.]

I’m learning I’m more tolerant of a lot more bullshit than most people on this site.

A lot of the complaints here are valid. To get it out of the way, yes, the tutorial is needlessly bullshit long. I get it there are many new mechanics here, and I think the presentation for it (and the setup screens before it) is charming and ooze passion from every pore, but the tutorial did not need to be 30-60 minutes long! The vast majority of what’s instructed here could be delivered in 10 minutes, tops.

I’m not too keen on some of the mechanics either; specifically the new currency system and the melee attack attached. You can have up to 20 rings, and that makes you faster (like the coins in Mario Kart and the Wumpa Fruit in Crash Team Racing), but you can spend those rings to charge up a melee attack that hits everyone around you. I don’t really see the point, because the items feel strong already (some maybe a bit too strong), and, y’know, it’s a racing game. Faster options are preferable.

Another I don’t really get is the trick system. I think the idea is fine, but there’s a few gripes I have with it - the UI element for timing a perfect trick (which covers more distance) is needlessly convoluted, and I don’t quite get the need to even have a “perfect” trick mechanic anyway given there’s a fast fall button now. Tricks are also only accessible through trick springs, which I rarely saw within the first seven cups, so it feels like an underused mechanic as well.

Unlike SRB2 Kart, this has a big singleplayer offering - I’m more of a singleplayer type, so that works great for me. What doesn’t is the AI; it feels absurdly aggressive and fucking LOVES to rubber band. It’s not uncommon for you to be doing well and the AI suddenly sails past you while cutting several corners. Maybe I just suck, I dunno, but I haven’t played another kart racing game with this level of bullshittery. There’s a bunch more singleplayer modes from what I gather, but I haven’t unlocked them yet, so… no comment.

However, the dumbest decision here is, by far, the one to lock mods behind completing five cups. The cups here are pretty big for kart racer standards, and considering just how important mods are to the scene that spawned this game… yeah, stupid ass decision. I get wanting to have players familiarize themselves with the game before modding the hell out of it, but this is, at minimum, a questionable approach to that.

Locking online behind completing a cup first is also something that got a lot irritated, and although I am a singleplayer gal first and foremost as I mentioned earlier, I completely understand the frustration - you can’t just hop on with friends online right out of the box. Couple that with the long ass tutorial, and you have a dealbreaker for many.

Another complaint I share is with color customization being locked behind finding spray cans in each map, instead of simply selecting it from the menu like in SBR2 Kart. I don’t mind the idea of having special unlockables hidden in the tracks (Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled did something similar with the unlockable metal box in its last update) but color customization feels like something too significant to make the target of a goose chase like that. Getting to the spray cans themselves can be very annoying too, with the few ones I’ve gone after so far being needlessly precise.

Moving on to the positives, this game is gorgeous and sounds great. The menu presentation and general artstyle feels ripped straight out of the Sega Saturn era, and it has a pretty excellent soundtrack, at least from what I’ve heard. The tracks look gorgeous as well, and the sheer number of them is insane. 200+! There appears to be a ridiculous number of SEGA characters, (crossing my fingers that a Yakuza character made the cut) and it’s just got generally really good fanservice.

And… honestly? Behind all the weird decisions here, there’s a really fun racing game here. It’s exhilarating to pull off a powerful drift and keep the speed going, and when the AI isn’t being a total jerk, it provides a really fun challenge! It can be a bit much visually and the game does a bad job explaining items and the new race start mechanic (ironic, given the tutorial’s length), but all in all, when it hits, it hits pretty well. It’s fun.

I absolutely do not blame anyone who decides to go back to SBR2K. Locking online, mods, and customization behind completing singleplayer stuff and that long ass tutorial can be a total dealbreaker if you’re just looking for something to fuck around in with your friends. But… I often just play singleplayer anyway. It works out in my favor here.

There’s a lot of love for the series on display here, and it’s obvious the devs are very passionate - it just needs to hold the player’s hand less.

If I see one more person call the UFO system "unfair" then I will personally come to your house and force you to 1CC this game. It is now clear to me that ZUN made Touhou 13 piss easy out of spite alone.

Anyway, Touhou 12's pretty good. It's much more ambitious than its Second Windows Era predecessors with... mixed results. Touhou 10 and 11 are better games overall, but 12 hits pretty hard when it isn't pulling its punches.

Obviously, I like the UFO system. In terms of "gimmicks," they are probably the best system mechanics ZUN has ever made up to this point. Their implementation into the game encourages a lot of fundamental shoot 'em up skills: taking control of the middle of the screen, offensive bombing, smart stage routing, that kind of stuff. All of which is great! The "unfairness" complaint becomes very silly when you spend enough time in TH12 to understand that UFO's are basically entirely deterministic. Everything about their spawn conditions is static. The major difference between each run is you, the player, and when you shoot the UFO fairies down. Plus, TH12 is actually very generous with its resources, too. You can screw up quite a few UFO match-3s before things start to become problematic. It's not a perfect system--- I think it makes scoreplay too linear, and those same blue UFOs that give you points being useless for survival feel incongruent with the rest of the system. But if I--a colorblind dude--can enjoy the gimmick, then it's probably pretty chill.

The actual spellcards are where I find TH12 to be weak, though. There's some pretty cool stuff in this game. Unzan and his hitbox are awesome and I'm particularly fond of the calm and calculated way Shou's fight functions as if you're really fighting a (Buddhist) tiger. But otherwise this game's kinda boring with it, IDK. I don't have much to say about most of the other fights: they're solid but not special. This is especially damning for Byakuren who the game sets up as a bigger deal than she feels like she is, unfortunately.

The presentation in TH12 is similarly simple, but I think the game leverages it way better. The first half of the game spent in Gensoyko's skies gives the world good texture, (ala Touhou 10) and the descent into Makai is genuinely hype. I locked in immediately when I heard Fires of Hokkai play for the first time. It's easy to see why people thought this would lead into more PC-98 content returning. To treat this area from it with so much respect and then to do nothing with it would be such a tease...

Like I started with, Touhou 12's pretty good. Not my favorite game in the series-- I'm not even sure if it holds a candle to 11, honestly. But it's a fun time, and clearly shows how ZUN has improved since the early 2000s.

[Played through the Unabandoned A2 version.]

Remember the Super Mario 64 iceberg?

As someone who grew up on the game and its DS port, mid-2020 was a very fun time period for me. The renewed interest in the game and its development, with the gigaleak serving as its climax, was genuinely very entertaining to watch unfold; Luigi’s model being uncovered 24 years and 01 months after the game’s Japanese release was my “you had to be there” moment.

Anyways, all that resulted in a lot of mythology spawning around the game and its heavily storied development. A lot of it shares blood with creepypastas and general modern internet rumors - the kinda stuff you’d hear on the playground, but lamer and less believable. Nearly four years later, B3313 embraces all that mythology and interest in Super Mario 64 and turns it into a weird, dense Yume Nikki-esque soup.

This romhack is impossible to review comprehensively. It pulls from the preview builds, the gigaleak’s assets, the iceberg, and a lot of internet mythos, as I previously mentioned. As such, my review will consist mostly of broad strokes.

Starting with some of the negatives, the game’s controls are deliberately worse than SM64. Mario is really slippery (especially when skidding, he goes on for way too long), and at first, you don’t have the backflip, long jump, and breakdance kick. The triple jump gets the slow fall twirl thing you get from stomping on Fly Guys and Spindrifts in exchange for a bit of height. That’s good for distance, but Mario cannot grab ledges while slow falling. Adapting to this was a nightmare.

I understand the decision to alter the controls like this - the controls are pulled from the Space World demo of the game. They were retooled for the final release precisely because of how loose they felt. Level design isn’t kind all the time either, with a lot of jumps you barely have the height for. Normally, I wouldn’t complain about difficult level design, but the slipperier controls and very precise jumps makes it worth noting and a source of annoyance. I understand and respect why the decision to make the controls like this was made, but I miss the precision the final game had.

The camera can be particularly atrocious. B3313’s original courses feature level design that’s far more claustrophobic than SM64’s - a lot of this is intentional because of the atmosphere it shoots for, but a lot of the time that sort of level design combined with the awful camera getting stuck results in platforming that’s not unnerving or “living a dream”-y, but rather just annoying. A lot of the time, when twirling and slow falling after a triple jump, the camera likes to point up, which is the one angle that’s not useful when jumping, and that led to my death more than once. Yes, I agree SM64’s camera can be particularly insufferable, but I ran into this way more frequently in B3313 and I feel I touched maybe what, 10% of the total areas?

Moving on, B3313’s scope is the main selling point and it delivers. It’s absurdly cryptic and expansive, with so many layers of places to go that if you fuck up and die it can take a long time to get back to where you were. This is what I meant by the game being impossible to review comprehensively - so many areas with so many warps that it’s impossible to keep a map of them in your head. Granted, the hack indirectly recommends against this, with Yoshi saying to “just let it happen, like a dream.”

The game leans hard into the “every copy is personalized” meme, and the amount of sheer variety in stuff does help with the feeling it’s pulling from your mind. There are a lot of different versions of the 15 courses found in the final game, ranging from small differences in geometry and color palette to entirely new weather and features added. There are also a lot of variants of the castle and its interior halls (with the hud even changing depending on what “era” of the game you find), with access to each being granted differently, as well as a many, many all-new courses. It’s all highly labyrinthian, and fucking up and dying can toss you many, many minutes back. The game even uses your system time to activate a few effects, which is pretty impressive to me!

The most fascinating part about it to me, though, is how… dreamlike it all feels. Areas vary wildly in size, with some being tight mazes and others being enormous. Combined with the constant fog, endless-feeling amount of doors and paths, and the always at least slightly-off-kilter music contributes heavily to that feeling that you’re playing a dream of the game… but with beta elements mixed in.

Where the game loses me a bit is in its horror elements. I get why they were included - analog horror and conspiracies were prominent elements of the mythos that formed around the game in mid-2020. And, to its credit, the game seems to pull near-entirely from those sources; from my research, a lot of it originates from Greenio’s “Super Mario 64: CLASSIFIED” series (even including the AI core asking to be destroyed), with some references to older creepypastas and hacks like sm64.z64, BUP 64, and Faceless.

I’m just not too confident in how the game handles its horror aspects. There’s a lot of warning when you get to the areas with horror elements (sometimes to the point of there being “no entry” signs, unusually dark color palettes, and text boxes telling you to piss off), so they’re easily avoided, but at the same time, pulling off scares in SM64 is kinda really difficult aside from jumpscares? Mario can just schmoove and parkour around, and it kinda takes the edge away when the evil entity that’s chasing you struggles to keep up with long jumps and dive recovers.

I’m also not too big on most of the big scares causing crashes as well. There are only a few “true” jumpscares (one of which I had the misfortune of running into about an hour into my playthrough; if you see faceless Toads, turn back) but being forced a trillion layers back is already punishing enough for not being cautious enough and letting curiosity get the best out of you. Forcing a reset just adds a few more seconds to that.

Anyways, there’s actually a way to progress in this and “beat” it. Technically 100% is achievable, but going for all 450 stars (!) in this spaghetti mess of a game sounds like torture, so I’ll keep it at technically. Back to it, beating Bowser and other bosses gives the player Red Stars. Collect all 13 of them, and you can take the long ass route to the ending. Collecting Red Stars is also crucial to unlocking Mario’s full moveset which… is weird? I’d rather have all the tools at the start to explore these big ass areas.

Outside of that? No real progression aside from unlocking Green Stars at 120 (I think). This ultimately works in the hack’s favor and helps sell the “endless dream” aesthetic, though - getting lost and exploring is part of the appeal. If I recall correctly (I may be wrong on this), older versions had the final level be accessed by climbing up and up in the castle lobbies, and I feel I prefer that approach; there’s a clear, intuitive path the player can follow to beat Bowser for good, but going up and up also reveals many of the paths the player can explore and lose themselves in. Ultimately though, it’s not like I’m playing this to beat it; once I got the long jump and backflip, I just resumed walking around aimlessly trying to find new stuff.

On a last note, the music is… weird. I said it uses a lot of off-kilter versions of the Super Mario 64 soundtrack, but it goes a step further and includes a few tracks from other Mario games that were released before it. A lot of the remixes are good; out of those, “Eel Graveyard” and “Dry Town” are the absolute highlights for me. On the other hand, there’s a few tracks I found intolerable, particularly one used for a few volcano areas. You can make familiar music sound like a distant memory and what you’d hear in a dream without making it actually headache-inducing - most of the game does that!

Wrapping it up, B3313 is one of a kind. The only other prominent hack I know of that does something like this is “Breaking the Barrier”, but that feels extremely limited in comparison. If you’re looking for a tightly-designed romhack, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. Instead, I’d recommend this for those of you who lived through and witnessed the internet mythology surrounding SM64 in mid-2020; B3313 is not only a love letter to that time period, but also a near-perfect snapshot of it, and the experience is generally enhanced by at least knowing the context which spawned this romhack.

I’m not giving this a star rating, though. I absolutely recommend playing this if you were in that mid-2020 SM64 niche like I was, and it remains a really impressive romhack from a technical standpoint all around (seriously the amount the game was modified and expanded is insane), but I dunno if I give it a high rating because of that, or if I give it a lower rating because of the slippery controls, camera that likes to not cooperate and get stuck, and the sometimes grating music. Yes, I know that stuff’s on purpose, but purposefully unpleasant things are still unpleasant!

Play it for yourself if you think it looks cool is my recommendation. I think it’s worth a shot.