I woke up happy because Re:Mind and Patch 1.09 saved Kingdom Hearts III. They improved so many things about basic combat that it's actually ridiculous. Patch 1.09 was worth the price of admission on its own. The new combo abilities make Sora feel snappy and responsive. His new finisher, Final Charge, completely outclasses all the others, so taking off all combo plus abilities will net you two full combos with a beefy finisher on any human boss. It's just... So amazing.
And aside from new combo abilities, COMBO STARTUP IS SO MUCH FASTER AGAINST ENEMIES. Before 1.09, the strat for tutorial Darkside was to do a full air combo, air dash, and then start again. Now in 1.09, you don't need to air dash to start attacking at the same height. Sora starts the combo again, twice as fast as before, and continues the string.
There are so many more things. Guard radius being increased. You can lock-on to offscreen enemies now. Auto-superjump has been removed from Aero.
But the craziest thing in basic combat is that they added cancel windows to Triple Rush and Speed Slash. Those finishers used to be really unsafe to use on Crit LVL1 because they had long animations and you couldn't dodge or block out of them. I NEVER would have thought they'd do this, but Square has CHANGED these attacks, adding generous cancel windows so you can dodge out of them at almost any point. This is a serious gamechanger.
Osaka team has finally become the team that Kingdom Hearts deserves. You can bemoan about the story all you like (the story can never disappoint me, because I mostly just poke fun at it) but the future is finally looking bright for KH gameplay again. The new bosses in Re:Mind are actually well designed and push your skills to the absolute limit, and hopefully, whoever directed this portion of the game will be sticking around for the next title, because I haven't had this much fun playing Kingdom Hearts... Maybe ever.
And aside from new combo abilities, COMBO STARTUP IS SO MUCH FASTER AGAINST ENEMIES. Before 1.09, the strat for tutorial Darkside was to do a full air combo, air dash, and then start again. Now in 1.09, you don't need to air dash to start attacking at the same height. Sora starts the combo again, twice as fast as before, and continues the string.
There are so many more things. Guard radius being increased. You can lock-on to offscreen enemies now. Auto-superjump has been removed from Aero.
But the craziest thing in basic combat is that they added cancel windows to Triple Rush and Speed Slash. Those finishers used to be really unsafe to use on Crit LVL1 because they had long animations and you couldn't dodge or block out of them. I NEVER would have thought they'd do this, but Square has CHANGED these attacks, adding generous cancel windows so you can dodge out of them at almost any point. This is a serious gamechanger.
Osaka team has finally become the team that Kingdom Hearts deserves. You can bemoan about the story all you like (the story can never disappoint me, because I mostly just poke fun at it) but the future is finally looking bright for KH gameplay again. The new bosses in Re:Mind are actually well designed and push your skills to the absolute limit, and hopefully, whoever directed this portion of the game will be sticking around for the next title, because I haven't had this much fun playing Kingdom Hearts... Maybe ever.