Aug 29

If there's one thing that the Kingdom Hearts series does well most of the time, it's letting the player set how difficult of a time they want to have with the game.

If you're familiar with the games at all, you'd know that difficulty doesn't just stop at choosing the game's difficulty. Probably the most well-known challenge run is the Level 1 run. This usually entails enabling an ability that prevents the user from gaining experience, therefore making them much easier to defeat, but giving the player some benefits in the process to make it more bearable.

Even though there's no specific ability to stay level 1 in some of the Kingdom Hearts games, entries like 358/2 Days and Re:Coded have their own ways of remaining level 1. Since those specific titles revolve around panel-based stats, you can just choose not to place level up panels or replace level up panels you're forced to equips later on respectively.

Completing a Level 1 run on the highest difficulty is a large task and I can attest as someone who's cleared some of the Level 1 runs in the hardest games to do them in because of how much you can get screwed over from one mistake, but it is possible no matter how much time you're able to put in. There will always be strategies to help beat some of the tougher bosses in the series.

Some of the games that I've completed level 1 runs in:

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance

Kingdom Hearts 3

I plan to eventually do a level 1 run for the whole series (which is 4 other games!) and document how hard they were vs how fun they were to complete.

If you ever feel like giving yourself a challenge in your next playthrough of any game in the series, try playing at level 1. Depending on which game it is, you just might find yourself having a new respect for the game all over again as I've experienced with almost all of the games that I've done a Level 1 run for.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my first walk-through. If you’re here you’ve read the title and know what this is about. Over the next few weeks/months I shall do my best here to write a comprehensive walk-through to completing this game as an army of one. This walk-through has been written by playing a PS2 copy of the game, but most of the strategies should be applicable to all other versions. I’m going to write the game section by section and divide by certain quests. Before we start however, there will be a few notes and rules to go over.

1. Your chosen character is the only character that can be leveled up or developed on the license board.

2. You can choose to either use the Guest characters or kill them off. I chose not to as it becomes a hassle to kill them every time I touch a save crystal, but if you really want to go all out, then more power to you.

3. When your chosen character dies you can bring out one reserve character to use a phoenix down; once your main is ready, the backup will go back in the reserves. If you really want to go hardcore though, you can reload your game.

4. Mist charges are okay to use, as are Espers and Quickenings, since they’re mostly higher level spells. I wouldn’t make the Quickenings a big part of your strategy though, because they’re not really as effective with just one character.