January 30, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 4: The Polar Opposite of a Shaw Bros. Ending

After a week of unsatisfying optional content, light grinding, and item procurement, I’m finally ready to take on Hollow Bastion and the climax of Kingdom Hearts. What dangers will befall me as I rush in to stop Maleficent’s ominous evil? Will Riku be as awful as a boss fight as I’ve heard for multiple years? And while we’re at it, why is Mickey Mouse king?

January 23: Didn’t play.

January 24: Entered Hollow Bastion, beat Riku and Maleficent.

Pessimist with barely-controlled anger that I am, I gotta say this: proud of ya, Goofy.

An unfortunate consequence of being friends with people who know Kingdom Hearts better than I (and more to the point, me being someone who likes asking people about the story of Kingdom Hearts) is that I already know more than a few of the series’ plot twists. One of the sillier was how Donald and Goofy would abandon Sora once the three got to Hollow Bastion, the first game’s final main world. I do wish I came in blind for that, because hoo boy is that dumb. It takes a genuinely neat idea – that technically, they’re only ordered to support the wielder of the Keyblade, whether or not he’s a jerk, so they follow Riku after he takes the sword from their new friend – and plays it in a super-serious way that doesn’t work at all. The absence of the order, and really Mickey, in most of the story makes it come out of nowhere. Donald’s goodbye to Sora reads as sarcastic, and the idea that the two would give up on him so immediately is unearned and forced.

Of course, they come back. Goofy’s declaration that garsh, he’s not going to let his leader kill someone is great. So is he and Donald damning the rules. I mean, it still doesn’t fully work since the concept is unearned. It’s also the mechanics of the Keyblade being vague and confused; Riku got his by having more will, but Sora’s will never seems to waver at any point. And part of it is that Sora never has a moment to mourn his abandonment or really interact with it at all. He meets a new character who’s struggling with his own problems, convinces him to join the quest, but he never loses that perpetual pursed lip frown. But their return was very good, and I don’t want that to get bogged down in the context. It was a moment of true heroism in a story that doesn’t really have a ton of that.

I may never have liked Riku enough to do the “friendship with Riku over” meme, but Donald? Goofy? No irony when I say you two are real friends.

Mechanically, Sora losing his main instrument of interacting with the world is better, if not perfectly executed. Since all he has is a training sword that does no damage, all of that X button mashing means nothing. He’s got to stand back, cast spells, weakly stab just to fill up his magic, and let the bulk of the work go to Beast from Beauty and the Beast (played as always by Robbie Benson, who I’m sure is happy playing someone who doesn’t get killed with a desk). It’s the zenith of the trope of the special guest party member who’s better than your actual party members; he wasted every foe with barely any Thundering on my part. I was sad to do it, but I did leave him behind after getting Donald and Goofy back. They’re my team. And I need them for the Trinity markers, since even near the very end I’ve gotta find as many secrets as I can.

And secrets are blissfully ahoy here at Hollow Bastion, which is definitely one of the stronger worlds. It ain’t perfect; the lifts are irritating. But the scale and look is tops. If the vast majority of this game has been spent painstakingly recreating Disney IP, the Bastion is essentially Kingdom Hearts’ own take on an original Disney look. It’s odd, distinctly JRPG aesthetically, and very, very pretty. I kinda wish the castle had gone further with the great visual motif, that half is soulless clockwork and half dead wood, but it’s already cool. It also has this new enemy, this lion man whose front is fully protected, that I really like because he’s fun – and more importantly, proves that the big guys shouldn’t have the two gimmicks of being both really big and invincible from the front. On the whole, the place is solidly in the B-tier. Not perfect, but strong. It’s really clear why it got to be the Smash stage.

As for bosses, Riku was easy (I’d say deceptively so, but the run-killing Riku fight of which I’ve heard is clearly a second round), but Maleficent, less so. It’s a cool fight, though. I almost never used the Gravity spell until Hollow Bastion – where it’s used to get treasure chests that, in retrospect, are rather good signposting – before this, but it was fun knocking her down. Though some of her spells were seemed a bit too strong, and that seems to be true of her new dragon form. I died a few times before deciding that exploring a mammoth dungeon, using several kinds of silly warps, and going through several dramatic narrative beats was enough. I’ll try again tomorrow.

January 25: Beat Maleficent (Dragon) and Riku.

Honestly… that Riku fight was very hard indeed, but kind of way more satisfying than I expected. I do think that ultimate attack (which looks like two separate Smash Bros. Final Smashes stitched together) is too much. And any battle that A) forces you to use the Kingdom Hearts items menu and B) puts you in a space too small to reliably run away to use the items menu feels a bit unfair. But dueling with that horse’s ass was still enjoyable – much more so than the Dragon, which was just irritating and onerous. He felt like a classic Dark Souls boss, if oddly kind of less fair than a typical Dark Souls boss.

One of the things I enjoyed about it was also one of the things that made it so intense: the lack of Donald and Goofy. While there’s no reason why Sora should fight Riku without the friends who prove his heart’s worth (nor is one ever stated), it does bring back the “mechanic” of them being gone, just with Sora actually being able to fight. As much as Sora’s buddies can feel useless, and as much as they can be useless, it’s very intimidating fighting a boss knowing that he won’t be supported by someone else. That you lack the support to which you’re accustomed. It’s good to be reminded of how much they do help out.

It reminds me a bit of Xenoblade 2, which in one of its later chapters took away your partner Pyra. Pyra’s immensely strong, so losing her – even for a short sequence – made you realize just how much you were relying on her. And then, soon after you rescue her, she gets abducted again for a longer period. Narratively, it’s odd (though I think it works; it blindsides you), but it’s great for the gameplay. It throws you in the deep end, gives you a different perspective, lets up, and then throws you back in once you know how unsafe you were. Taking away the things you rely on is a very Nintendo move, and for a series that spent much of its history as a PlayStation exclusive, Kingdom Hearts has a lot of Nintendo DNA in it. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I’ve come to that conclusion. It’s a lot of little things in the level design and boss fights and structure. But it does.

I’m now at the dramatic end game. Kairi was in Sora’s heart all along (which doesn’t make any sense, though the game did clue us in by having Sora see Kairi’s memory). Sora stabs himself and, unlike Maleficent, turns into a cute Heartless instead of a big dragon. We finally know the Princesses of Heart: Jasmine, Belle, Aurora, Cinderella, Snow White, ~~Ariel~~ ~~Sally~~ ~~Jane~~ Alice (?), and Kairi. Ansem the Wise from the supplemental reading was the guy who possessed Riku all along. Our heroes escape, just without Riku or Beast or six of the Princesses. And now we’re… back in Traverse Town to regroup? I actually just made a shopping run there before fighting Riku, so coming back feels redundant. It almost reads like an attempt to keep Kairi away from the story.

Since we are at the end, and since we finally met Ansem (I know he’s not exactly Ansem, but that’s what the game is explicitly stating), I’ve decided to look at more of Jiminy Cricket’s Journal than just the hints. Ansem’s Diary is perfectly fine, but what stood out to me was Jack Skellington’s profile. It reads like a Smash Bros. trophy description, just with absolutely no flavor or style (and hey, if you want to read stylish Smash Bros. trophy-style descriptions…). But it also refers to his movie as “Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas,” and while that may be the actual title, it’s still nonsense that he got top billing over Caroline Thompson or Henry Selick. Go away, Tim! Yer a hack! Shoo!

Ansem’s Report, the very dry flavor text of this game. One thing I really like is how each chunk is actively given to you out of order; many are given out in optional worlds or before earlier pages. It makes the trying to solve the (admittedly limited) mystery much more interesting.

January 26: Returned to Hollow Bastion, defeated Behemoth, entered End of the World.

It’s frustratingly fitting. I’ve spent a month with this game. I’ve gone to each major area, finished quests, and come to like it and really like its wavelength. And here, at the end, many of my original criticisms are back in force. Narratively, it’s nuts for Sora to leave Hollow Bastion, find an extension to the Gummi Ship, and return just to close a Keyhole he had already found. The plot undercuts itself with this shift from stopping the Disney villains and saving the Disney princesses to this one guy’s evil scheme to control this vague, representational concept. Demanding two long Gummi Ship sections was padding of the highest order. And the enemies… it felt like a joke, how many waves there were in each room. The worst was that high walkway over the Castle Gates, the one filled with wyverns that stop you from simply leaving on the elevator.

Some of these issues had gone away earlier. The trope of the conga line of enemies definitely felt like it had disappeared during Agrabah; I’m not sure if their actual placement bears me out or not, but I definitely didn’t notice it. The Gummi Ship segments never got good, but they never felt too obtrusive once I could fast travel. But other problems never left, like how vacuous Sora, Riku, and Kairi are right now. Haley’s acting for Sora is bad to an almost cosmic degree (my best comparison would be Paul Walker’s hypnotically bad performance in the first Fast and Furious movie), Riku’s not much better, and Kairi doesn’t really seem to exist beyond her connection to them.

But I have also found positives – many of which I never expected to find when I was finagling my way through Traverse Town and Wonderland. I’ve come to like Goofy as a partner, and Donald, too. I’m definitely better with the Keyblade now than I was with that training sword back on Destiny Islands. Most of my deaths (the Dragon and second Riku fight aside) aren’t really due to bosses anymore, just heavily guarded rooms. And I think my frustration with Ansem taking over the plot reveals how much I’ve come to enjoy Maleficent and her gang of theatrical bad guys. They were fun, and like the rest of the Disney content, provided a lot of much-needed energy.

On that note, it’s totally Mickey talking to Riku in the void, right? It’s gotta be. I know that there were a number of stipulations and restrictions about his role in the first game, so him being offscreen and unvoiced seems like a natural (or as “natural” as it can be) role. It being him would also help offset just how little Mickey seems to matter, even to Donald and Goofy.

I don’t like the new Keyblade, the Oathkeeper. Don’t like the name; makes me uncomfortable, though that’s not Square Enix’s fault. But it’s better than my other ones, so I’ll stick with it.

January 27: Explored End of the World, defeated Behemoth (2 and 3) and Czernobog.

I’ve played Kingdom Hearts every day save Sunday. I did so for two reasons. The first is that I am very excited to see the end, put the game away, and start Chain of Memories (and, more broadly, I don’t think it would be interesting for people to read about it for a fifth week). The second is that I was unsure of how long the final act would actually take and wanted to start early. After all, this wouldn’t be the first JRPG – or video game in general – I’ve played with a protracted end dungeon. Wow, I did not know how fair that concern would be.

The Gate to the Dark, the beginning of End of the World.

Narratively, Hollow Bastion is the climax. Sora reunites with his friends, fights his rival, and discovers the overarching villain. It’s (somewhat bizarrely) the home of the Final Fantasy characters, bringing them back into the story. Beast’s presence is odd, but not negatively so. It even ends by the Keyhole. But no. First, we leave Hollow Bastion, only to immediately reenter it from a new Gummi Ship section that still puts us at the same starting point. Then, we go back to where we fought Riku. Then, we go to a new location – the End of the World, this blander final, final location. And between us and Ansem is a lot of fights – nigh endless fights, really. There’s a second Behemoth just after the one in the last world, a real struggle against Chernabog from Fantasia, and then…

Right after beating Chernabog, I found the next area. I didn’t find a save point or a way back, which is a bit intense given how overwhelming he was. There were a few tunnels and then, a big room with a Kingdom Hearts heart-crucifix door. It’s got a third Behemoth, and after it wave after wave after wave of powerful generic enemies. It was awful. And exhausting. And after dying repeatedly, I found a groove that involved using those ultra-rare Megalixers. But I couldn’t keep going. The fights just never stopped, and I couldn’t figure how many were left before that door broke down. I left and ran, because that seemed the only solution. But with no save room or apparent way to go back to the last one, I went back… and the Behemoth was alive again.

I felt a deep pit in my stomach seeing this (and subsequently deciding to quit and start from before the Chernabog fight rather than waste those Megalixirs). It’s the worst I’ve felt about this project. Parts of this game are padded, but this feels ridiculous. Instead of being a fun look at Sora’s journey, or a space for the game’s genuine sense of joy and exploration and fun, this march through End of the World is a tribute to its worst qualities. Since Tuesday, it felt like the goalposts keep instinctively moving right when the story’s about to conclude.

Because narratively and mechanically, it should have concluded. The adventure is complete, Sora has proven himself as a fighter and boy of character; the plot has run out. End of the World reminds me of those games from the late 2000’s that would add any repetition they could because executives were freaked out about nerds who complained whenever a game was under twenty hours, even if it didn’t warrant that time. It doesn’t need to exist beyond including the Chernabog fight, and really, you could just have it be Chernabog and whatever form the Ansem fight is gonna take. I’ll be honest that I began to truly resent this final world, not just for being bad and miserable, but for actively turning away from the fun I’ve had with Kingdom Hearts. I’m not asking for this to be as short and blunt as the ending to a Shaw Bros. movie…

But just a little brevity would have done this wonders, especially since the game was largely strong up until then.

As a declaration, this game is getting finished before this goes up. It won’t be satisfying for me to keep writing about it (especially with Pokémon out tomorrow), and it won’t be satisfying for you to keep reading about it. Maybe I’ll force my way through it, or maybe I’ll grind for hours right before the finish line. I could try the third cup again, and the fourth. But it’s happening.

January 27, part 2: Beat the Hercules Cup; fought in the Hades Cup (died to Cerberus), defeated Chimera.

I chose to grind. I opened the door to Chernabog, and then went right back to Olympus. I got further than expected in the Hades Cup and against Cerberus, went through End of the World up to the 100 Acre Wood save point again, and replayed the Pegasus Cup, though I’ve only managed to go from Level 49 to Level 52. Gotta get up however I can. I don’t want to grind for Megalixir ingredients, but I might have to [EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: TURNS OUT I LACKED THE RECIPE FOR MEGALIXIRS ANYWAY].

I liked the cutscene when you beat Hercules. Herc comes out, Sora explains that he won by working together with Donald and Goofy… despite the fact that Sora expressly forbids Donald and Goofy from helping him fight Hercules in what turned out to be a really fun match. It’s silly, but I liked it. It and that very Zelda-y boss fight put me in a much-needed good mood.

January 28: Beat Cerberus (lost to Leon and Cloud twice), beat Chernabog and the Linked Worlds (a.k.a. the Hallway of Ceaseless Pain).

By the time I went back, I was Level 54. I had spent last night and today grinding away, fighting the Chimera, hurting my thumb against the Red Armor twice, being happy to lose to the Final Fantasy duo and sad I didn’t get to fight Hades, attempting to get ingredients for the equipment that raises experience (before trying to fight the unstoppable sniper monkey army and realizing a lost cause when I saw one), and, finally, going back to that preset menu. It was someone watching me who suggested seeing if I could make Donald and Goofy more active in battle; for whatever reason, I missed that when I changed it to make them more conservative with items.

That was absolutely on me. I should’ve changed that the first time I went in there. Even still, I do think the two also attack far, far too infrequently for the default option. It’s not just that they’re less useful, though having them actually helping me with Chernabog and the parade of mooks was of course exceptionally helpful. Not attacking frequently also makes them less useful with magic. Kingdom Hearts’ generally satisfying magic system – you refill your pool by doing damage, prioritizing aggressive gameplay – doesn’t work for characters who aren’t aggressive. And while the AI change was the thing that cinched victory, I also don’t think I’d have been able to survive the gauntlet without all that grinding.

Fighting Behemoth so many times this week – Hollow Bastion, about three times in various Hades Cup runs, several just in the “Linked Worlds” hallway – didn’t help. It’s a perfectly fine boss, but that many times…

With all that work, Chernabog was far less of a pain (if not particularly enjoyable), while the successive hallway of enemies actually did get fun… to a point. By the time I was in the third or fourth wave, I appreciated how well my team and I were working together and just plowing through opponents. It was pretty cool to see how powerful Arcanum could be against a real phalanx of foes. A few waves later, that feeling had mostly subsided and I just wanted it to be over, though I wasn’t exhausted like last time. Just quietly ready to move on.

In general, I’m not a fan of grinding. I farm items in Castlevania to fill out each enemy’s history, do light EV training in Pokémon as a passive exercise, but those are just me finding ways to spend more time with the game. Required (or heavily coerced) grinding rubs me the wrong way; it fails the ideal difficulty curve. It’s especially frustrating here because it’s only now, right at the end – I hadn’t felt the need to grind once in Kingdom Hearts before. It wasn’t too long, thankfully – the two times in Dark Souls III where I trained for the Dragonslayer Armor and Twin Princes were much longer (though the gameplay there was more engaging) – but it’s just the game tripping over itself. It had the perfect spot for an ending! It didn’t need to keep going!

January 28, part 3: Dunzo. Ansem is outta here!

After a two hour, roughly seven phase final boss, I’m done. It was only in the end credits that I finally realized who played Ansem: Billy Zane, star of the very underrated The Phantom and the actor of my most hated Twin Peaks character. I kicked John Justice Wheeler’s ass! And all it took was about a half a dozen deaths right before the end of a long fight (and long flight) to get it done.

The KFC Double Down of a final boss fight was, well, pretty much a continuation of all of my problems with the end of Kingdom Hearts. It’s too long, poorly structured, and repeats itself far too much in ways both thematic (holding back Donald and Goofy, which, to be fair, I did commend…) and literal (fighting variations on the same boss phase multiple times). It’s very big and dramatic, Ansem’s cruise liner-sized final form. But the excitement I got from it just ebbed away with each quintuple-sized health bar. I get the “more is more” attitude, I really do. Look at how much I’ve talked about Smash Bros., a series that worships at that altar. But this climax – and Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura, who I have oddly not referenced yet – takes it way too far.

There’s Asem, atop an actual “Boaty McBoatface.”

But this is just covering well trod ground. Instead, I wanna talk about the wonderfully bonkers ending. We finally see King Mickey, in silhouette, and he has a Keyblade of his own! He helps Sora and Riku seal the Door of Darkness (as you need people on both sides to close it, a very cool idea I wish had been explored more). And Sora says that he’ll see Kairi again as all the worlds go back to how they were. It’s an ultimately unsatisfying montage, all building up to the sequel hook that Sora, Donald, and Goofy are off on another, sillier adventure.

That person who gave me advice earlier also saw the final fight, and they were shocked and put off by its lack of explicit closure or clarity or payoff. I can’t disagree with that. And I don’t mean that as a disparagement of stories with less interest in conventional or explicit storytelling. David Lynch is one of my heroes, and he traffics in surrealist and impressionist stories almost exclusively. I just don’t think this one is done well. Despite that, I also ended up liking it, and not in a mocking way. It is audacious, and it’s hilarious and admirable for that audaciousness. It’s a game starring Donald Duck that ends with a multiverse explicitly being cosmically altered! Mickey Mouse sacrifices himself by sealing himself away in purgatory! I’m never a fan of crossovers ending with the IPs simply parting ways forever (even though I get that’s a necessity, and also that parting ways can be a great ending), so putting that kind of ending into this kind of context is wonderfully crazy in a way I needed. It’s also a good show of what made Kingdom Hearts feel so less mercenary than typical crossovers.

January 29: Didn’t play.

Final Thoughts: When the week started, I was slightly concerned about finishing one game and starting another within the same week, lest I give short shrift to one of them. That concern was fairly bluntly answered. This may seem cynical – it isn’t meant to – but I’m going to assume from this point that long endings are just Kingdom Hearts’ style and just plan accordingly for the sequels.

However, I want to make something abundantly clear. I hated the overall climax and ending to Kingdom Hearts, but I did not hate – or dislike, for that matter – Kingdom Hearts. I came into the game with many concerns, some hopes, and far more expectations. Virtually all of them were met in some way, and many more I discovered. But I did find myself enjoying its loopy wavelength a lot more than I had expected. I came to like Disney characters I had never known or had little interest in. While I never found the combat great, I do like the gameplay loop of dodging to hitting to casting. And there’s something nice about finding a game that, in so many little details of its construction, seems to be as indebted to Nintendo as I am (I mean, a lot of indies are, but it feels different coming from something Nintendo would never make themselves). I liked Kingdom Hearts! I just wish I had ended it on a better note.

And that’s what makes this chapter so hard to finish and publish. It’s the longest one I’ve written about, by far, but it’s also by far the least representational about how I feel about the game. It does have all my complaints, to be sure (except for the ones relating to the Winnie the Pooh level, but still), but it has too few of my pleasures. If you read this from start to finish, you saw a person starting from a position of relative positivity and just getting more and more negative. But that’s not how Kingdom Hearts turned out in general for me, not at all. I was excited and intrigued, but also concerned, and I wasn’t sure how much of it I was going to enjoy. As it turns out, I enjoyed a lot – and while I’m very happy to put this game behind me, I’m also quite eager to keep going with Game No. 2.

I gotta level with you all. I’m a bit nervous about Chain of Memories, whose original Game Boy Advance release replaced the gameplay by necessity for a system totally unlike anything I’ve ever played (even though that was folded back into the first game’s system in the remake, which is the version I’ll be playing). But I’m also genuinely excited because of that. It’ll be nice having something to shake things up before Kingdom Hearts II, and who knows? Maybe I’ll be just as surprised and pleased by that twist.

Overall progress: Destroyed Billy Zane and beat Kingdom Hearts Final Mix.

Other games played: