News ► Gamekult interviews Hazama, Nomura & Suzui about KH Melody of Memory

[Chaser]

It is unfairly priced.

 

[rokudamia2]

It is unfairly priced.

Unfairly proced but not unexpected.

Anyways I'm not shocked at any of this. This is the same company that made advent children cloud a separate character instead of a costume(granted they were using 2d sprites).

 

[Chie]

I mean I don't really think any video game is unfairly priced because prices of games have always been arbitrary and not some kind of measurement of objective "value". I think 60 is a pretty annoying price to pay for any video game period, but there will certainly be some people who love this game so much that they have no problem paying that much. If they enjoy the game that much, they aren't "wrong" per se, even if I might spend money much less freely than them. Price (in the context of creative works) only has relevance to how much you want something and then how much you enjoy it afterwards, which are completely opinion-based.

Of course if you can stand to wait a little bit, all Kingdom Hearts games recently end up having very cheap used copies within a year. So there's no reason to pay full price if you don't want to, especially if you don't actually think the game will be good anyway.

 

[Launchpad]

Is it weird that a lower effort rhythm game costs the same as KH3, or a collection of all previous KH games in one? Totally. But ultimately, I'm after hours of enjoyment, and if that can be commensurate to the asking price, I'm fine with it. If the rhythm gameplay is high quality and provides a rewarding challenge on the highest difficulties, I won't be sore about the price.

40 dollars would have rocked.

 

[AegisXIII]

Is it weird that a lower effort rhythm game costs the same as KH3, or a collection of all previous KH games in one? Totally. But ultimately, I'm after hours of enjoyment, and if that can be commensurate to the asking price, I'm fine with it. If the rhythm gameplay is high quality and provides a rewarding challenge on the highest difficulties, I won't be sore about the price.

40 dollars would have rocked.

yes, 40 dollars sounds more appropriate. Then again, it is the kind of game targetting the fans, thus lower sells. And the fans might complain, but will buy it anyway. The goal is the highest price without loosing your public.

 

[Chaser]

$70 dollarydoos would be fantastic instead of $90 dollarydoos but we can't all be winners in this capitalistic hell!

 

[AegisXIII]

$70 dollarydoos would be fantastic instead of $90 dollarydoos but we can't all be winners in this capitalistic hell!

Think of it like an annual subscription to your KH playtime and divide it by the amount of hours you play per year. Mine is something like 60$/300 which is 20cents per hour. I know hobbies that are worst than that. So if you are not happy with the price, it means you have to play more.

 

[Chaser]

Think of it like an annual subscription to your KH playtime and divide it by the amount of hours you play per year. Mine is something like 60$/300 which is 20cents per hour. I know hobbies that are worst than that. So if you are not happy with the price, it means you have to play more.

MoM will certainly get a lot of playtime out of me. KH3 somehow was my longest played game on PS4 last year (thanks to the 2019 year in review that had it at like 160 hours or something).

I know what kind of game MoM is and I'm happy to pay the $90 but at the same time it is unfairly priced in other regions (a new game here is $100 dollarydoos so we are actually getting a tiny discount whereas in America it's the same price any other new game) and $70 still would have been cool. But if I didn't like what MoM was bringing to the table or it was more than $100 for whatever reason, I wouldn't buy it.

 

[AegisXIII]

Actually, when something sells more, you can drop the price and still maximize your margin. That's how consoles are so much less expensive than gaming computers. For games, it is the same. AAA games can cost the same than AA games because even though they have a higher production value, they are reaching a far broader audience. If AA and AAA games cost the same, it is not necessary the AA games that is a scam but rather the AAA game that is cheaper thanks to the huge appeal.

 

[SuperSaiyanSora]

Y'know, I'm disappointed that we can't change our teams (huh??) or that we won't get costume changes (I get it in terms of the context within the story they're telling, but... Huh??), but I'm still looking forward to the game. The decisions they're making here are... Questionable, but it's not enough to make me say "I'm not buying". It's a shame too because a KH Rhythm game with Disney music would print money if they execute it correctly, so here's hoping that the devs change their minds once they see people asking for more stuff.

Then again, FF7R's release date was April 10th, had zero Day 1 patches (despite it probably needing them for some assets) and Square hasn't touched the game since. It's possible that they'll drop a QoL update out of nowhere at some point, but who knows.

Honestly if you're buying MoM only for the new story content... If you choose to not buy it, I can understand. But if you're a lover of music in general like I am and think that it's pretty great that Yoko Shimomura's getting the shine she deserves here (think about that for a second), as well as a fan of rhythm games... Give it a try. It's been said in here already, but the bulk of the content in MoM won't be the story, but the difficulty levels, the World clearing and the song acquisitions. November 13th is close to the end of 2020, and the 20th anniversary is in 2022. Not to mention with the rumors of FFXVI being announced on Wednesday... I think we should be set for a while. Give it half a year, E3/June 2021, and I'm sure that we'll be getting news about a brand new traditional Kingdom Hearts game.


Plus I mean yo, who doesn't want to play a rhythm game during the holiday season?? Imagine cooped up in your room after coming back home from the cold, maybe there's snow on the ground depending on where you are, back from the mall where they've most likely already started the Christmas jingles... And you're unwinding with Melody of Memory. Idunno, that's a pretty cozy vibe to me. It's clear that MoM isn't a game with a AAA-budget, but it's at least something to tide us over until that next game does come out.

Most rhythm games Have 20~ all the way up to maybe ~80. 140+ is unheard of.

Well, this might depend on the format of the games. For example, Love Live and BanG Dream's rhythm games have 160 songs (or at least BanG Dream's game does). However, those may be different because they're mobile phone games AND because the entire premise of those two franchises are focused on music.

If we're talking about a franchise that gets rhythm games as spin-offs, or something like Project Diva where you have to buy some of the songs though, then yeah, they're not that much. Melody of Memory is lucky to have that many songs because it's spanning a whole saga of almost 20 years. But I think the strictly musical-based series tend to have more, only because that's the whole point. But I agree overall that it's not a common thing to have that many songs.

$70 dollarydoos would be fantastic instead of $90 dollarydoos but we can't all be winners in this capitalistic hell!

As a Canadian, I feel this to the core... lol. If this was $60 CAD, I'd be over the moon. But it is what it is. I only hope that people don't put the pricing woes on Nomura, because there's departments in Square that decide that sort of thing and I don't think he'd have a hand in that.

 

[Alpha Baymax]

This game is going to do fine, It's on the Nintendo Switch. And if this title is successful on the Nintendo Switch then it will incentivise Square Enix to port the HD Remixes to Nintendo Switch.

 

[Dast]

Apart from the price, I think they could have avoided some of the negative reaction from fans if they had been quicker with these interviews explaining what is and isn't in the game, or at least made the launch trailer clearer so people weren't speculating about greater story content, non rhythm-based gameplay, customisable teams etc. for several weeks before being disappointed by fate.

 

[SuperSaiyanSora]

Apart from the price, I think they could have avoided some of the negative reaction from fans if they had been quicker with these interviews explaining what is and isn't in the game, or at least made the launch trailer clearer so people weren't speculating about greater story content, non rhythm-based gameplay, customisable teams etc. for several weeks before being disappointed by fate.

Agreed, and that's the downside of a news drip. On one hand, it gives people a "seemingly" steady flow of information, but on the other hand, it takes a while for people to get the information that might be a deal breaker. Cause if all of the story content isn't playable, then I can't blame people if they just decided to watch the cutscenes after that interview. Melody of Memory was already a bit of a tough sell for some.

But you know, between this, UX and DR's monthly updates, it's not so bad. We're not in the dark for years anymore in terms of story content, and while the execution could be better, I like that every update is a big deal in the community. It is what it is. It's like what I said when ReMind came out -- Given the content, it sounds like it justifies the price tag, but it's ultimately up to the buyer themselves to decide if the experience justifies the price. And I was saying that before COVID-19 hit, so that's even more true now with how sparse money can be for many.

 

[AegisXIII]

Apart from the price, I think they could have avoided some of the negative reaction from fans if they had been quicker with these interviews explaining what is and isn't in the game, or at least made the launch trailer clearer so people weren't speculating about greater story content, non rhythm-based gameplay, customisable teams etc. for several weeks before being disappointed by fate.

You are mentioning something that has been bothering me since ReMind. They do not really explain what you are buying!
That's not good. We should know what it is, how to access it and its impact on the story. ReMind had this issue that when it got released, we didn't know how it would be accessed, nor what are the conditions to unlock the various episodes. I am pretty sure a lot of people bought remind for the story and felt screwed because the meat of this dlc was the superbosses.

 

[Chie]

If people are only buying something for a certain thing they should be waiting until it comes out and talking to people about it anyway though. You should only buy something on launch if you know you're gonna wanna play it no matter what it ends up being.

 

[2 quid is good]

Yeah but try explaining that to people during a hype cycle and you'll get downvoted a lot

 

[SuperSaiyanSora]

Yeah but try explaining that to people during a hype cycle and you'll get downvoted a lot

Cooler heads usually prevail. Although with MoM, there's no real hype because not only has the marketing been pretty lowkey compared to a typical KH game (even if Nomura says this is a KH game, MoM is obviously vastly different in all areas with a seemingly smaller team and budget), the interviews have come out early enough to let people know what's to be expected here. So at least this time people are more reasonable.

If Verum Rex were to get announced tomorrow though, yeah, there wouldn't be a lot of calm discussions due to the hype for a while. I say this on the cusp of a possible FFXVI announcement in the coming days, and while we don't know what to expect, FFXV set the tone on that (both in good ways and not-so-good ways). XV had a lot of hype to it, and I enjoyed it personally, but we know how it ended up.

It's like TLOU2 -- a game gets hyped to oblivion (for good reason), it gets bombed with negative controversy which shaped a LOT of opinions months before release, and the game at release disappoints some because they were spoiled on aspects and the game wasn't what they expected. Did I love it? Absolutely, but too much hype for a product, and it'll work against itself no matter what it does. That's why my expectations are tempered for Cyberpunk 2077.

If people are only buying something for a certain thing they should be waiting until it comes out and talking to people about it anyway though. You should only buy something on launch if you know you're gonna wanna play it no matter what it ends up being.

True, although it's a tricky thing too because you never really know if people's tastes align with yours. For example, just the other day, I heard that people thought the Doctor Strange movie was mid. I, on the other hand, thought it was one of the best Marvel movies to come out, other than Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Infinity War/Endgame (have yet to see Ragnarok at the time of this post). Twitter apparently thinks the Aladdin Live Action movie is trash, but to me it looks promising and I might finally watch it tomorrow. And let's not forget the whole TLOU2 fiasco. Even KH3 had to deal with it, 2019 was rough for KH fans lol.

I think if a game has won you over with everything it's shown, it's fine to take the risk. But being on the fence, it really does depend and like I mentioned above, cooler heads generally seem to prevail. I didn't play Death Stranding until Boxing Day in Canada and beat it on January 2nd. Granted, I wasn't intentionally holding out in that instance, but I enjoyed it even after people moved on from it (and people move on from things quick lol). Even after people were calling it "pretentious" and "boring", I could honestly put it as a GOTY contender if I'm not being biased. It really does depend.

 

[Chie]

Well I do mean talk to people about the specific content of what's in the work (i.e. how much of ReMind is ultra-challenge bosses), not just a basic idea like "good" and "bad" which I actually would say are pretty much useless, given how much my opinion on everything differs from the concensus.

 

[Alpha Baymax]

It is unfairly priced.

Honestly, I don't think it's unfairly priced at all, It's just poorly marketed. The content alone justifies the price tag.

The larger issue at hand is the fact that this entry feels like padding for the sake of padding just like Re: Coded did. Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance had the benefit of having new Disney worlds and characters whilst Days was riding the success of Kingdom Hearts II and making the most out of Roxas and Organization XIII. To add insult to injury, the use of the outdated PlayStation 2 HD character and environment assets cheapens the presentation of the game by default because they feel dated.

I'm sure this is going to be an enjoyable game, but there's absolutely no denying that this is a stopgap title to fill the quota of releasing a Kingdom Hearts title every year.

 

[Chie]

To add insult to injury, the use of the outdated PlayStation 2 HD character and environment assets cheapens the presentation of the game by default because they feel dated.

Bigger number =/= better, nor does newer. No graphics are "outdated".