Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 1: Destiny Island, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello!

I’ve decided to journal this week’s entry day-by-day. I’m not sure if I’ll follow this format exactly.

Game played: Kingdom Hearts Final Mix

January 1: Started the game; ended after meeting Leon in Traverse Town

My first thought: this game is exceptionally early-2000’s in a way that’s hard to fully explain. There’s the way the introduction has some of Sora’s dialogue last longer on the page than others for no reason. There’s the Eurodance-y mix of “Simple and Clean” that somehow comes before the original Hikaru Utada version. It combines the style of an early Aughts music video with the style of an early Aughts American TV or movie trailer. Like, Sora’s words planting on the screen feel like something from a Matrix rip-off. It’s very much selling a tone and atmosphere more than a story, which seems very simple – just presented in a roundabout way.

It’s not really “captivating” so far, to be honest. Destiny Islands is a pretty locale, but Sora feels like a non-entity. The introduction (insofar as I’m technically still part of the intro despite having fought two boss battles) is kind of inscrutable; having me choose an aspect of your fighting style without adequately telling me what I’m choosing or letting me explore the combat feels like a cheat. Of course, conversely it’s impossible to really get a sense of what I lost by the choice I made. So far, the fighting is pretty simple. It’s just that the whole process of learning how moves work and what you’re meant to do is so protracted.

But, let’s bring out the positives. First, the acting is hilarious, just some of the most awkward, stilted performances I’ve seen in a game lately. Like, it’s really bad, but it’s bad in a way that’s more charming and compelling than other kinds of vocal performance (except for Donald and Goofy, who are just good). In comparison with some of the games I’ve written about on this site, it’s got more emotion than, say, Resident Evil 6, which has more professional and skilled voice direction but is just so boring. The game’s also rather beautiful. And it’s rather wholesome, which I appreciate. Maybe too wholesome, and I may regret saying this down the line, but that’s nice.

This is an aside, and I realize how trite this is, but Yuffie from FFVII’s head seems weirdly big and reminds me of Billy Quizboy from The Venture Bros.

…Look, I can’t explain the thought process that led me to this.

January 2: Went to and completed Wonderland.

God, what an awful, awful boss. I’ve had a few bumps already, but the Trickmaster was a trial. The whole conceit where you have to jump to hit it – except that you can really only hit it at the apex of your jump – led to this bizarre sequence of dying repeatedly after ungainly leaping up near its midsection again and again. After a few tries, I went back to Traverse Town to refill a supply of potions that had been depleted by fights. Which meant making two trips on the Gummi Ship, because fast travel was still a fairly limited concept back in 2002 and there doesn’t seem to have been anyone in Wonderland who could sell potions. Stupid anthropomorphic cards.

On that note, I think the Gummi Ship is currently the main problem I’m having with this game in microcosm, which is that it doesn’t find an idea worthy of about a minute that it can’t stretch out to five. The idea that you travel to each world via a Star Fox-esque space rail shooter is pretty cool a few times. Doing it every time you need to go anywhere (and I’m assuming that’s how it works, since I had to do it twice just to buy Potions) is needless, especially when the controls are bad and there seems to be no reason to do more than just survive. The fighting is perfectly fun, but having so many battles – against such a small number of enemy types, and with so few ways to fight – really highlights how shallow it is. Perhaps it gets better once I figure out how the abilities work.

It also just feels bad. Clunky.

I suspect this is probably gonna be a refrain from me for the rest of the project, but this is giving me very strong “bad long-running shōnen anime” vibes. The repetition, the attempt to drag out the story; it’s very evocative of the genre. Though Sora is so far definitely a better protagonist than the norm in that case. He’s kinda dopey, but he’s purely positive and without any kind of uncomfortable reactionary core. He ain’t no Nagisa from Assassination Classroom, but really, who is?

January 3: went through Olympus Coliseum, started Deep Jungle (up to meeting Jane)

Learned how to attach the “dodge” mechanic. Perhaps I’m being hypocritical by decrying this kind of thing in this game but loving it in NieR: Automata, but it feels fundamentally wrong to make something as concrete as a dodge move A) optional, B) turned off by default, and C) demand space that’s used for more advanced moves. It’s a dodge in an action game.

Something slightly odd happened in the Cerberus fight. Whenever I died, I’d pop out where I was after having beaten Cloud in his terrible new outfit, with no potions and Goofy’s AI back to before I had altered it. I saved multiple times, but then I realized that it was sending me back to an autosave that was made before my actual save. Just another bit of that awkwardness, the kind that forced me to take the Gummi Ship from Wonderland to Traverse Town, then from Traverse Town to the Coliseum.

Thought: should I start another run on Easy Mode now? Not sure. I guess I completed two worlds, so I’ll just keep at it. And Deep Jungle does look rather pretty.

January 4: finished Deep Jungle, returned to Traverse Town

You climb on a vine with △, but you jump from vine to vine with X? That’s not good design! But, even though I really did not care for the runaround throughout Deep Jungle, the Clayton fight was pretty fun. Definitely the first boss that wasn’t a chore, but the gimmick of having to hit the one little target and not the one big target was really cool just on its own.

There’s this weird thing that happens in, like, almost every cutscene where the camera will just hold on a character for a little too long with no audio before cutting. Like taking film editing class in high school all over again.

January 5: met Merlin, sealed the Traverse Town Keyhole, entered Agrabah

Kudos, Kingdom Hearts. After I played yesterday, I started thinking about Destiny Island, and how far Riku and Kairi were from my mind. Like, I made the title for this chapter when I started the game, but ever since Sora wound up in Traverse Town, both his friends and their island home just felt like non-entities. It seemed apparent right from Wonderland that the search was probably going to involve Sora and friends going to a bunch of Disney brand dead-ends before finally stumbling onto their friends. Not exactly my favorite mystery structure, though it’s way better than the version where the answer is so obvious that the author tries to fool you by making it “impossible” before revealing that no, it was the obvious one all along, Jeph Loeb.

I was pleasantly shocked, then, when Sora had another vision of Kairi and met up with Riku (and put his fingers in his mouth, like he’s a horse at market). Fantastic! The three still aren’t, um, interesting, and I do not care for Traverse Town with its endless samey fights and empty streets, but there’s a genuine sense of scale and crossover that’s starting to build. We’ve now got Maleficent trying to trick a kid with terrible hair into her villain gang (a gang that pointedly does not include Clayton the hunter from Tarzan, despite the specter of British colonialism being way more threatening than the other villains). It’s “grander” than the random excursions we’ve been doing so far.

Like, I do really respect that this game doesn’t try to couch the weirdness of these two characters being in the same frame, let alone talking.

There are other good things. Having a healing spell takes some of the weight off of using potions, but that’s also supplemented by how I was able to buy an insane number of potions thanks to the endless fights in Traverse Town. I’m not dying nearly as frequently, too. I also got something that sounds like it makes fast travel easier, which is great since I’m refusing to make a custom Gummi Ship. Doing that would mean legitimizing the whole on rails shooter affair, and I refuse to do that. I refuse! Plus, Gilbert Gottfried is in the Aladdin world! Gilbert’s more fun than mattress (allegedly) stuffed with unrefined cocaine and sometimes actor James Woods.

Overall, the frustrating grind with the incessant generic fights aside, today was a good day – way better than the past four. I didn’t accomplish “much,” but I fought a boss, I just set foot in the world that excited me the most, and overall, I feel I’ve made tremendous progress in a mostly frustrating experience since this started. So I’m gonna stop for the rest of the day…

* roughly twelve hours later, past midnight *

…WAIT, SEAN ASTIN VOICED HERCULES IN THIS GAME?! Like, Lord of the Rings / Bruce Campbell stinker Icebreaker star Sean Astin? Right off the heels of Fellowship? He’s not even Herc’s regular actor! He doesn’t even have more than, like, two lines! Why is he in this game? Why isn’t he playing Sora?

January 6: Didn’t play. I’m worried that I’m moving through the game too fast, so I’ll be taking the next two days off.

January 7: Didn’t play. It’s my birthdaay!

January 8: Completed Agrabah.

Dear god, is Genie so bad. It’s not just that Dan Castellaneta is doing a bad Robin Williams impression, though it is dire (Genie comes across as more hungover than coked out, which is the defining part of that performance). The animation is also a big part, and I get that no 2002 gaming company was ever going to be able to make a 3D character dynamically and fluidly shapeshift in the way the original Aladdin animation could, but he’s just way too static. Giving him those same broad, comic limb waves that everyone else feels like it gives away too much of the game’s limitations in adapting very pretty 2D animation to polygons. It just feels wrong.

Despite being very repetitive (just like with Clayton, you fight a small, comparably vulnerable boss while avoiding an invincible big boss, and then immediately… fight a small, comparably vulnerable boss while avoiding an invincible big boss), Agrabah was definitely an improvement over the previous levels. I liked finding Aladdin’s house well before the game required me too; it’s a nice way to casually reward exploration (it also sometimes had a merchant, which Wonderland sorely lacked). I also like that I only died once, and to the Lion gate / door / sand statue guy. I’m still largely avoiding non-Cure magic, since stopping to access the menu never stops feeling immensely risky, but I am trying to use it a bit more. Usually Thunder, which fits, since that’s my favorite spell Sora has in Smash Bros.

Final Thoughts: After I staggered out of bed on the 1^st and started playing, I was feeling a bit of trepidation about this project. Okay, a lot. The first couple days were kind of exacting. The gameplay was simplistic, the writing awful, and a lot of it felt like crawling in the dark. I had regrets about this project – and not just because the header to the preamble spelled “diary” as “dairy” – and the excitement I had going in was starting to bottom out.

I don’t know when things exactly changed; probably between fighting Clayton and exploring Agrabah. But I’m gelling with it a lot better. And oddly, it comes from enjoying the part I least expected: the Disney crossover itself. As much as I don’t like the company and mostly lack the nostalgia, I am enjoying their presence. The villains especially; they’re theatrical, and the only parts that really “cross over.” The intrigue of which IP is gonna be thrown into the grinder next (I know a bunch of the series that are used, but not all of them and not in what order) is fun.

It’s not as though I’ve made a 180°; I still think the combat’s fundamentally bad, the pacing poor, and while I don’t mind that the broader plot is as well, the ungainly writing really hinders the whole project. And I do think that the original content, what little of it there is right now, struggles to match the Disney stuff. But it does feel like the game is meeting me on some of my issues. The second day, I was terrified at the prospect of constant Gummi Ship sequences; now I’ve got something that alleviates that. Throughout the early going, the combat was interminable; it still is, but it’s a lot easier to get into it – and I feel better about skipping it outright when I’ve had my fill. That fear that maybe I should restart my playthrough on Easy is completely gone. What I’ve heard about both the inevitable Riku fight and the Little Mermaid levels is concerning, but I can handle it.

Even Jiminy’s Chronicle, which initially seemed useless for providing practical clues, is more direct about giving me advice on where to go.

Which is why, despite my enthusiasm for this whole project coming back in full, I also need to slow down my progression. This seres is supposed to last a long time, and while The Story So Far has several “experiences,” a few of those experiences are not actual games. I’ve gotta pace myself. But spending the week getting a feel for what Kingdom Hearts is like is good for knowing how to do that.

The title of this chapter is a reference to the Beach Party film series by AIP. I kind of associate Destiny Islands with those movies for reasons beyond me, but in a way, the game has some parallels. The plot is largely an excuse to spend time with characters (cartoon ones in this game, celebrities in the movies), all anchored with a dopey but friendly set of kids. There’s not really a “plot,” just a few comic or dramatic set pieces loosely strung together. I know there are in-game musical numbers to come, at least in the series as a whole, and a clear investment in showing off very pretty locations for this silliness. If Kingdom Hearts is mostly an interactive five hundred-episode shōnen (something I’ve struggled with a lot of the time) that’s inexplicably about the House of Mouse (something I’ve struggled with most of the time), it can also be like other things, too. Other things I like. And maybe that’ll help me bridge the gap to these things with which I’ve struggled.

Overall progress: Started Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, went through roughly six worlds and almost twice as many bosses.

Other games I played: