Does anyone else feel like Kid Icarus Uprising could have been split into several games?
Just finished playing Kid Icarus uprising for the first time and something has been on my mind. This game’s full story feels like it could have been 5 separate game stories but they were all just put into one. The plot moves at such a breakneck speed with developments and interactions that I often felt certain elements could have been explored more.
For example the Aurum chapters and the Chaos kin chapters themselves have plots that I feel like could have encompassed an entire game but feel like hyper compressed stories. And while Hades is a constant presence in the game due to the character talking to Pit, The general plan to fight him after chapter 9 gets put to the side until chapter 23. The chaos kin chapters alone could have been a great premise for a darker game. Imaging a game that starts with Pit stuck in the ring and getting his body after the first chapter then spending the rest of the game working with humans like Magnus trying to figure out what had happened, allowing much more time to ruminate on the fact that 3 years passed and letting the overall mystery of the situation be more intriguing. As opposed to existence of the chaos kin just being revealed by Viridi. A game like that could also help develop Pits internal perspective on the situation and test his usual upbeat attitude, something we do get small parts at in Uprising but I never felt were fully earned or satisfying.
Ultimately I don’t see this as a problem with the game, its general tone and humor show that nintendo wasn’t going for a particularly deep and expansive story on the scale of say the legend of zelda. I actually wonder if the developers knew that due to Kid Icarus’s rather small presence within Nintendo’s franchises that this would probably be the only Kid Icarus game for a long time, possible even the last one and just wanted to put all their ideas into one game. And on the other hand while the story does move rather quickly it is nice that each chapter, even when they are part of a larger arc like the Aurum ones, is rather unique in terms of location and events thus making them more memorable.