In 2024, I personally found a lot of the new games released to be quite underwhelming and uninteresting. To pass the time, I spent a lot of the year clearing games from my backlog and going back to some of my favorite titles I had played in my lifetime in pursuit of 100% completion. In the fall, I decided to revisit the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 compilation and set myself the task of platinuming the collection since some of my favorite games of all time are included in there.
If you are unaware, there are four games included in Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5. What I needed to focus on were the original game, Re:Chain of Memories (a Game Boy Advance game remade for the PlayStation 2), Kingdom Hearts 2, and the PSP prequel Birth By Sleep. The journey to 100% had its highs and lows. While I felt accomplished at triumphing in past hardships, there were moments I felt I was close to breaking mentally. At the end of the road, I’m asking myself, was putting myself through such anguish worth it?
Recalling my Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 completion journey
While the overview of this article focuses on questioning when it is right for a person to put their soul into completing a set of games, I will say that I still have a ton of love for the Kingdom Hearts series overall. In fact, this journey didn’t kill my love for the first and second numbered entries. I could still see myself going back and playing through them again.
Kingdom Hearts 1
For the first game, the criteria for 100% is pretty straightforward. Collecting everything and beating all secret bosses is the real challenge here. In fact, doing this finally gave me the sense of accomplishment of beating Sephiroth, who I could never figure out when I was a kid playing on my PS2. I had to do a second speedrun through the game to mop up a few loose ends, but overall, after 43 hours, I was feeling very happy with myself completing the first Kingdom Hearts.
Kingdom Hearts 2
For Kingdom Hearts 2, I enjoyed the process just as much as the first game. For many, including myself, this is the best the series has ever been. As a kid, I never had the context of Chain of Memories filling in various holes in the plot, but the gameplay is drastically improved from the original.
Once again, finding treasures and defeating secret bosses are the focus (shoutout to beating another version of Sephiroth I never could beat as a kid!) but there’s more to chase down here. Filling Jiminy’s Journal has a lot more to it, including synthesizing all kinds of items, which require grinding kills on enemies to get the proper ingredients. Doing that, all of the gummi ship missions with the highest rating, and the introduction of the tougher data battles against Organization XIII tested my patience, but at the end, I came through again feeling quite accomplished with myself completing another game from my youth that I genuinely love after 56 hours.
Re:Chain of Memories
This is where the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 completion journey dives into an area where it’s no longer fun. As stated above, Re:Chain of Memories was originally released as a Game Boy Advance game. To make the transition from PS2 action game to a small handheld console, the combat was changed to focus on using cards.
Re:Chain of Memories takes the card combat from the GBA game, and essentially just moves it to PS2. Everything looks better, there’s voice acting, and in the end, this is a game I really had to push through to finish. Relying on cards for all of my battle moves never felt that good and the grinding in this game makes the same rooms you constantly see feel even more dull than they already are.
In all, it wasn’t the worst experience I had, but having to play through the Sora and Riku campaigns was a draining experience that my save file says took 50 hours, but because of having to reload the game every time I died so I could still get the “no continues” achievement, I may have spent about 60 hours on it. It’s a very dull game with not a lot necessitating its existence besides “you probably didn’t play this on Game Boy Advance, so play it now.”
Birth by Sleep
Here it is. The game completion that pushed me to write this entire article. Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is without a doubt, the worst game in the series to complete. Back in the day, I played this on my PSP and overall I enjoyed it. While some people say that the command combat in this game is the best in the series, I don’t really agree. I think it made the series playable on PSP, and it’s a lot better than the card system. Overall, it gets the job done. Unless you are a true Kingdom Hearts sicko, though, I highly don’t recommend completing this game.
In BBS, there are three campaigns for its main characters Aqua, Terra, and Ventus. The story on one simple playthrough is a good telling of each of their tragedies, but it’s when you go to complete everything that things truly begin to eat away at your psyche. With three campaigns, you essentially have to complete this game 100% three times. Every battle, minigame, board game, command list, and secret boss have to be done three times. The battles and minigames are whatever, because those are pretty standard for Kingdom Hearts, but it’s the others that truly bring down the experience.
Command board
For whatever reason, Square Enix decided that making a standard Kingdom Hearts game wasn’t enough and they had to include the Command Board. This is essentially a simplified take on Monopoly, and it’s as dull as that sounds. Three players roll dice around a board and spend points to place their commands in spots that will earn them points when opponents land on them. The first person to return to the starting position with enough points wins.
With seven boards, winning these games doesn’t seem too bad, right? Yeah, 21 games to win is quite a bit, but you would think you can grind that out quick and move on? Well, my sweet summer child, there are certain commands that are exclusive to spots on three of the boards. The only way to unlock them in the game is you have to land on them and buy them and finish the game. If an opponent gets to them first or you never roll the right dice number to land on it, you can’t check off that command in your report journal.
Across all three campaigns, I played 53 Command Board games to completion, and that doesn’t include the ones I quit and started over part way through when I couldn’t get the command I was playing for. All three characters have command lists with over 200 entries you have to fill out for completion. One missing entry means no platinum for you.
The worst boss fight of my life
With all of that said, I would still take the mindless grinding in the Command Board over one particular boss in Birth by Sleep. After completing the final and secret episodes of the campaign, you can return to the Land of Departure and have a fight against the Unknown (or as we know him now, Young Xehanort). This fight might be the worst designed boss fight I have ever had. Starting out, he has a selection of about ten moves he can pull out of nowhere. A lot of these moves have the same starting animation, but are timed differently, so you pretty much have to play a guessing game of when to dodge or block a strike to have any chance of survival. When you get him to half health, he turns invisible and gains about five more attacks that now you can’t see coming. You have to just blindly dodge around the arena until he reappears. Sometimes you can stun him momentarily with a properly timed Thunder Surge, sometimes he blocks it and regains health. Shotlocks, which have been invaluable for progression in the game so far, are completely useless against him. Additionally, he has moves that will completely invalidate the once more and second chance abilities that keep you alive in long string combo attacks. It is an absolute headache to go through and you have to do it three times.
The Unknown is an awful boss fight because it’s long, it relies almost entirely on luck depending on the moves the AI pulls out of nowhere, and when you play as Terra, it is impossible to avoid incoming damage. In the case of Aqua and Ventus, they have dodge abilities that give them invincibility frames. For Terra, his dash doesn’t have this, so most of this fight relies on you taking damage and praying that the RNG doesn’t ignore your abilities and kill you outright, and healing when you have a sliver of breathing room. On just this one boss fight alone as Terra, I was stuck for a combined 8 hours across two play sessions. Aqua took me like 20 minutes, while Ven’s fight lasted about an hour and a half.
If you have a desire to 100% complete Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5, I highly recommend you do Birth by Sleep in chunks. Don’t marathon it. Not only was I set back about 25 hours after accidentally deleting my Aqua save early, but the fight against the Unknown almost broke me mentally. In all of my life, I have never broken a controller out of gaming rage. This fight pushed me the closest I have ever been to it. Afterwards, I don’t feel accomplished. It doesn’t feel good to win that fight. There’s no relief. All I can think of is how badly put together that fight is.
After an estimated time of 125 hours in Birth by Sleep, I never want to play this game again. At least the others I would entertain the thought of doing again. Any goodwill I had towards this PSP adventure is completely drained.
Was completing Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 worth it?
As mentioned above, I still have a lot of love for the Kingdom Hearts series. I do plan on completing the 2.8 collection after a long break, which is much smaller and easier to do, and I might go back to the third entry as well. That being said, upon completing Birth by Sleep, the best feeling I got was having people I didn’t know on the internet congratulate me on a large effort. When I look at myself, though, I don’t feel fulfilled. The games don’t go out of their way to reward you. There’s no victory flare, just Mickey emblems showing that you did everything in that category.
In the end, am I just as empty of a husk as the nobodies? I let my heart be my guiding key and saw this journey through to the end. Why did I do it? With the first two games being some of my favorites of all time, I wanted to say I completed them. With 11 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute recorded on my Xbox profile for my time played, would I do it again?
NO, OF COURSE NOT! BIRTH BY SLEEP IS AN AWFUL COMPLETION EXPERIENCE!
