Kingdom Hearts: Gummi Ships

Kingdom Hearts takes place on a series of unconnected worlds. You fight in the Aladdin world, and then The Little Mermaid world, and then the Pinocchio world. You get between these various worlds by flying through space. They could have done this with a simple point and click mechanic but instead they decided to add in a space shooter mini-game connecting every planet. It's not optional and a very different genre from the core of the game which is a little suspect. On the plus side they made it very easy with no boss fights or anything, but on the down side that makes it pretty boring...

They did put a lot of work into the mini-game. There's a whole subsystem built around designing your own ship. You have a 6x6x6 box to build a little ship out of all these bits you acquire through the space mini-game and through treasure chests in the main game. There are patterns of ships you can find if you don't feel like designing your own that look cool and have different strengths and weaknesses. I can see how someone who likes designing cool looking things could have a lot of fun with this aspect of the game; I am not one of those people...

They added a whole bunch of different pieces that make your ship more manoeuverable in a variety of shapes, colours, and sizes. I'm pretty sure the idea was to give you enough different bits to make the ship you had in mind. Me? I just stuck them all into the box anyplace it would let me. The ship doesn't have to look nice... It gets extra agility just by having more triangles somewhere on the ship! Fill the front up with guns, stick some engines on the back, and put ugly triangles wherever they'll fit. I am not playing the build a pretty ship game. I am playing the build a twinky ship game, and boy is my ship twinky.

I kinda wish there was something to do with my awesome ship. I just looked up a FAQ to see if there was something I was missing but no. Apparently you can get a 10x10x10 grid near the end of the game to make even cooler ships but there's never any reason to build a better or prettier ship other than to say you did. Which is a shame, really.