#criticalmode

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.