March 6, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 9: In Which I Kvetch About the NBC Show Heroes for 400 Words

EDIT, 4:18: Correctly credited Mae Whitman as the voice of Yuffie, not Aerith.

The ending of Kingdom Hearts II is upon us, so let’s explore what we’ve got left and take down Organization XIII.

February 27: Completed 100 Acre Wood, raised Master and Valor Forms to the highest level.

So we’re gonna be doing something different this time around. There’s still so much I have to say about Kingdom Hearts II, but this is the only chance I’m gonna get to do something that’s near and dear to my… well, not exactly “heart,” but still. See, in KH1 and 2 (and Birth by Sleep, but that’s a prequel that I assume gives her a smaller role), Kairi was voiced by Hayden Panettiere. Ignoring her role as the co-lead of Nashville, Panettiere’s career arguably peaked around 2006 – the year Kingdom Hearts II released Stateside – when she starred as the female lead on the NBC television drama Heroes. The show ran for four years, pretty much always on fumes, and then it got a very embarrassing, short-lived revival which Panettiere smartly avoided. But why is this important?

Because I f___ing hate Heroes. Hate it. Tim Kring’s utterly insipid and stylistically ugly superhero show is to me the broadcast TV equivalent of something like Naruto or the 2016 Suicide Squad movie, something so purely awful, toxic, and cancerous that it infests everything around it. I hate its writing, its smarmy self-righteousness, its constant Orientalism and leering depictions of non-American cultures, its creepy fetishization of young blond women, and its lazy vision of a connected 21^st Century world. I hate every character in its cast, a cast in which Panettiere’s character rose to be one of the most unpleasant. I hate how it wasted great actors like Andre Royo and Stephen Tobolowsky (who had quite a few things to say about his time on the show), and how it enabled racist behavior on its set. I hate that Bryan Fuller was stuck doing punch-up work on its scripts years before creating Hannibal, and that when he wrote Heroes’ one genuinely good episode, the show referenced it constantly to pretend it had anything else to its name. I hate the cloying and lazy approach it took to the superhero genre, which wasn’t exactly straining for more half-hearted takes on X-Men and Watchmen. And I really, really hated this guy:

Every single character in Heroes is The Worst – every one – but morose, mind-controlling hero cop Matt Parkman is unequivocally THE WORST.

And so, here I am, in a writing project that was always intended to be looser and chiller than my usual fare. The thing is that pretty much every missive from “Dispatch from the Dive” is actually longer than any of my normal articles. I just started doing preliminary work on a thing about Elden Ring; that’s gonna end up shorter than whatever chapter comes out that week. It really wasn’t meant to be like that; I expected this to be much less involved. So, in the interest of that looseness, this week, I’m going to beat the dead horse that is Heroes as my main reference point. It won’t be the only part of this, I promise you, since KH2 definitely deserves some full attention (nor will I abstain from other points of reference). But it’s what I want to do. Similar reasoning was used for why I used Sora’s “die” form to represent him in the header, because I did not talk about that last week, and holy hell is it hilarious.

For instance, take the ending to 100 Acre Wood. It comes after a bad mini-game, and it’s kind of mawkish. Sora and Pooh Bear reconnect after the former throws the latter around, and we learn that friendship can last forever and stamp itself on the moon. I didn’t care for it (and I do wish the last three mini-games had kept up the quality of the first two), but it’s not bad. It’s certainly not like Heroes, which had so little narrative consistency that the actors and crew had no idea what was going on with each character. I have no investment in the relationship between Sora and Pooh; I mean, one’s not the brightest octahedron in the munny pile, and the other’s too single-minded to be compelling. But, I do like that they like each other, and it’s good to have the perennially younger and less experienced Sora be the one to teach and guide Pooh.

I also did some grinding, improving Final Form and perfecting Valor and Master Forms. The latter two were fast, the former wasn’t (and ultimately, the Nobody enemies it needs to kill to level up are just too infrequent), but overall it was a quick and painless increase of power. Of course, the same cannot be said for Heroes, which had no sense of scale and had obscenely strong characters so powerful that they had to constantly lose or gain their powers. I don’t like “overpowered” as a term – my favorite superhero story starring my favorite superhero has Superman invent a universe – but it fits when you have no idea how to use these characters. Fortunately, Sora simply earns his power instead of absorbing it passively (or cutting off someone’s skull and “reading” their brain in a way that makes it look like he’s eating brains, then have him show up in a “hail to the chef” apron to explain that no, stupid viewers, he doesn’t actually eat brains, and then he plays Spock). Kingdom Hearts also didn’t see fit to weaken him by giving him a brain tumor that made him able to talk only in Star Trek and Star Wars references. Which is a real plot point that happened on national television, and it starred Masi Oka, who I think got an Emmy for playing that very terrible character! Argh!

…You know, maybe there’s only so much I can do with this Heroes mockery. But I’ll get more of my jabs in at some point.

February 28: Explored the Cavern of Remembrances, fought Sephiroth (and lost) twice, completed Chapters 4 and 5 of Atlantica.

It was after the Engine Chamber that I accepted a sad truth: I had to give up my dream of getting every puzzle piece. The Chamber’s in the Cavern of Remembrances, yet another addition from Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix. It’s filled with tough enemies and platforming challenges, and uniquely, the platforming is built around the movement abilities you’ve inherited from your Drive Forms. You know, the very things I’d spent all that time building. Which is cool! However, while I worked my way through most of the rooms with relatively little trouble, one of the very last areas requires the highest level of Glide, the power you get from Final Form. And since I don’t want to just run around the same corridors in the World that Never Was, fighting thirteen Nobodies at a time, I’ve decided to simply abandon the prospect.

So, RIP, my dream of finishing every puzzle. However, I am glad I got enough pieces overall to finish four of the five and the vast majority of ones for the fifth. I’m also wondering about the two I also missed in Twilight Town (EDIT FROM SATURDAY: they may have been in Yen Sid’s tower, which you can apparently return to). Still, I needed to walk away, which is what I also did in my two fights against Sephiroth today. I respect and appreciate his presence here, and I’m sure I’ll have a ton of fun seeing him beaten at various Games Done Quick shows, but it’s not for me.

As a side note, Sephie pulls off his sillier Kingdom Hearts look much better than Cloud did back in Kingdom Hearts I.

Instead, I went to finish the two songs and chapters of Atlantica, which ended up the weirdest and arguably dumbest world in the game. It’s so odd; it’s just a series of rhythm mini-games that are largely not good and overcomplicated. It’s also bad as a story. Ariel seems to have forgotten who Ursula is and is now pining for Prince Eric, the least believable and least satisfying love interest in a Disney movie before Kylo Ren in The Rise of Skywalker. It’s hard to not feel that the Little Mermaid’s spunk just left with her role as a party member, something the other Kingdom Hearts I characters had largely managed to avoid.

What ultimately places Atlantica over Space Paranoids is just the weirdness of it all. The rhythm games let you play along to “Part of Your World” and “Under the Sea,” fantastic classics in the Disney music canon, but the three other songs (the first of which I’ve embedded below) are surreally terrible originals. Donald Duck, one of American fiction’s most unpleasant and obnoxious voices, gets to vocalize for one of them. And then there’s that inexplicable ending number, where Donald, Sora, and Goofy sing about how all the worlds are connected with no background music. Does it work narratively? No. Did its potential demand inventing an entire new mechanic for swimming, even if that was able to be used for the carpet ride in Agrabah? Perhaps not. But the fact that it exists, and the way in which it exists, is more entertaining than some of the series’ other stabs at these animated worlds.

So… that seems kinda it, then? I’ve finished all of the worlds, tried a bunch of the optional content (I’m not gonna attempt the optional Organization XIII fights; I died to a couple of them in the earlier weeks, and they’re clearly beyond me), and have pretty much exhausted the story. It’s time to finish this.

March 1: Took Xemnas to the cleaners and completed Kingdom Hearts II.

…At least, I mostly completed Kingdom Hearts II. In the Theater mode (which I checked out after the post-credits scene), there are two scenes near the very end that I apparently did not see; I’m assuming they’re from Hard Mode or a secret boss fight.

I have a lot to say about this game, its great highs and frustrating lows, and how it seems to have concentrated so much of the latter in its ending. And the ending itself deserves a lot of focus. But what struck me most was Sora parroting that claim from the beginning of the game that Nobodies “don’t exist” after interacting with Roxas and Naminé and Axel. The thoughtless line from Yen Sid (and admittedly Xemnas himself) that Nobodies are utterly hollow and lacking in feelings has gone from being vaguely bigoted to patently absurd, something I’m assuming gets even more so in the Roxas-focused prequel 358/2 Days.

Literally all I know about that game is how important ice cream is as a plot point, and it’s hard to imagine any work of art try to dehumanize someone by having them eat ice cream.

This has led me to have a revelation about Sora, that he is ultimately not so much “selfless” or “heroic” as he is “blandly nice.” And that might seem an academic distinction, but I think it’s worth considering. Sora’s interactions with people tend to be fairly rote; they’re either a villain he politely rebuffs or a hero who he’ll engage with in a very positive but superficial way. He only understands the unique cultures he visits in the sense of getting a new costume or form. But he doesn’t have to learn harsh lessons or improve his behavior or try to be better beyond believing in himself. And by extension, he doesn’t really expect much else from anyone other than to be vaguely better. It’s that shōnen thing, the idea that the protagonist is in a life of constant, martial self-empowerment. You can’t look back.

It’s not a bad thing for him to be nice, nor is it a bad thing for a hero to have a limited range of morality. But I’m not sure if the game is fully aware of this. As much as I liked Sora in Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II really hasn’t built on his ignorance or internal struggles the way that game did. In fact, he doesn’t really seem to have any real internal struggles at all – at least, beyond the literal one with Roxas. He’s not a bad character, but he is a flat one, and I think that has consequences in the stories. When there’s a good character around for Sora to bounce off of, he’s great. When there isn’t one, he’s unsatisfying. But he is very much dependent on the people around him, much more than any character is dependent on him.

However, one way in which that flatness worked for me was in the ending, when he and Riku – finally reunited for real after three games and several bad fashion choices – simply sit at the beach of the world of darkness, being friends in the face of nothingness. In fact, their being reunited finally and fully worked for me more than any of the other end game plot points. There’s no stringing along the quest, and there’s a sense of true finality. They’ve grown (well, Riku has grown, identified through a hilarious growth spurt) and they can now go back to their island home. That’s probably why the absurd sequel hook stinger doesn’t use them, just people in bizarre Power Rangers armor in a field of dead Keyblades. But that is that, and it’ll be for later. For now, I’m just happy that we have a conclusion to this story of Sora’s. That’s ultimately why I chose to have the three of them bunched together in the header; our trio of Destiny Islands kids finally coming home felt really special. And somewhat, if not fully, earned.

March 2: Didn’t play.

I touched on this before when I learned that Christopher Lee played a character actually named “Darkness in Zero,” but it’s wild just how many big name actors are in these games. Dan Castellaneta as the Genie no one likes, Ming-Na, Gilbert Gottfried, B.D. Wong, James Woods, Billy Zane, and Lance Bass from NSync as the first voice of Sephiroth (who I missed when I played Kingdom Hearts I). George Newbern replaced him in KH2, which is cool for two reasons: George is almost certainly a better actor, and it started the weird but fun trend of Superman actors playing the One-Winged Angel. I mean, they’re both Hebrew-coded übermenscen who fight an evil corporate executive and have an extraterrestrial source for their power. All we need now is for Sephiroth to try Cloud Strife for witchcraft during the American Revolution and grow a lion head.

It’s interesting that in the case of actors’ fame and pedigree, there’s not really any clear correlation between quality of performance. Richard Epcar’s a professional voice actor, and his fake Ansem runs circles around Zane’s. Longstanding VO Corey Burton was definitely weaker as real Ansem in Chain of Memories than Lee was – though Burton’s also being compared to Hammer Horror Dracula and is fine as seemingly every other character in KH2. As for other voice actors, it’s all over the place. Kevin Michael Richardson? Great! Jeff Bennett? Fine. And then there’s Zach Braff being terrible in his inexplicable (and by my understanding Disney-ordained) cameo as Chicken Little, which is admittedly inevitable when you cast Zach Braff in anything.

Bruce Boxleitner is also bad as Tron, but I’m not convinced that any version of a Tron character would work.

Maybe part of it is how much they get to do? Mae Whitman’s great, but she’s bad here as the criminally underserved and kinda vacuous Yuffie (this isn’t me calling out the character in general, just her depiction here). Oogie Boogie’s no better dramatically, but he gives Ken Page a lot of room for delightfully hammy acting. And yet we also have Haley, whose Sora is just kinda bland. Overall, it’s hard to really get a bead on the acting.

My friend (and primary source for my preexisting Kingdom Hearts knowledge) Rachel once said that the Kingdom Hearts series has no real voice direction for its actors. It’s not surprising when watching these games, where the acting is often wildly inconsistent even within the same scene. Her theory is that because of that, the actors who give the best performances – Bill Farmer, Tony Anselmo, and Susanne Blakeslee as Goofy, Donald, and Maleficent – are ones who have a longer history of working with bad roles. Given all the bad Disney crap they’ve been in, these scripts are probably easier than they’d be for other actors.

This is something that’ll be on my mind as we go forward. Truthfully, the acting in Kingdom Hearts II isn’t that far afield of the standard at the time; a lot of games had that mixture of stilted celebrity acting and satisfying vocal veteran work. But it’s odd in these games, because most of the characters are from movies that have and are expected to have good acting. Just one more bit of weirdness.

March 3: Didn’t play.

I didn’t talk about it, but this was a bad final boss. I feel like the worst bosses so far seem to have been Organization XIII members or characters original to Kingdom Hearts, which feels a bit too on the nose as an analogy. In Xemnas’ case, there are two parts. There’s the one where you have to play as Riku (with none of Sora’s movement abilities) to run around and save Sora, constantly evading a second Xemnas. And then there’s the last bit, where you have to mash two button prompts at the same time as Sora and Riku for, like, a full minute. It’s so needless.

Let’s talk about good stuff next time.

March 4: Didn’t play.

March 5: Didn’t play.

You know something neat about Kingdom Hearts, something I barely ever discuss when I write about games? Production values. This is a sizable game, and it looks and plays and feels good. It’s very pretty generally, even if some areas and art styles are stronger or better realized than others. Yoko Shimomura’s music is great – honestly, it’s probably better than the scores for the previous two games.

For whatever problems and misgivings and criticisms I have leveled towards Kingdom Hearts II, it feels truly big, as big as a crossover of its size demands to be. Kingdom Hearts I was fine, size-wize (and Chain of Memories felt smaller, because it need to be), but KH2 is so much greater. The places that returned from KH1 are smaller, but they don’t feel worse or lacking for it. The greater number of worlds and environments helps a lot, too, and the way they orbit Radiant Garden on the world map feels more special than the first game’s idea of the cosmic ocean.

Even the small things are bigger. I still think that a non-Robin Williams Genie is ultimately pointless, but one of the problems I had with him in the first game – that his movement lacked the rubbery transformations of the Aladdin movie – were mollified here. Genie obviously can’t fully shape-shift as a side character in a 2005 video game, but his movements and animations were all so much more colorful and deep. The textures are nicer. The stupid Gummi Ship levels, while still boring, are more dramatic and visually interesting. None of the levels fall into the issue that hurt places like Deep Jungle or End of the World, where they’d be bland or too monotone; every area feels much more dynamic. The closest is the end of the World that Never Was, and that still had the cool (if admittedly very underused) Dark City section.

Every so often, my mind turns to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, one of the many modern games to try to capitalize on the success of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It’s a crossover fighting game built out of a myriad of beloved Paramount properties: Avatar, Invader Zim, Spongebob, even that terrible lasagna cat. But if you look at the game, it’s rather bland, flat, and lifeless. This was probably partially a budgetary thing; the game was a fairly inexpensive project, and the developers decided to emphasize its apparently rather deep competitive gameplay over more “secondary” elements. But that ironically led to compelling icons like Toph Bei Fong and Helga Pataki being drained of life; the personality of these characters and worlds became ephemeral.

Kingdom Hearts, thankfully, lacks this issue because of all that Square Enix and Disney money behind it (even if I highly doubt Disney puts in nearly as much scratch as Square). It feels weird to be lauding budgets over things like mechanics or storytelling. But it’s important, because this kind of production is necessary for getting everything out of its characters. Chain of Memories didn’t need it, but it was a side game that had established the world. But the big games, the “main” games? They’ve got to have this sense of prestige and grandeur – and that’s something KH2 does really well. I totally get how this game managed to hold its own in a year with Resident Evil 4, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, and Psychonauts.

Final thoughts: Kingdom Hearts II was big. It was big in ways that were largely good: dynamic worlds, excellent music, an improved and more satisfying combat system, and a general ability to function as both a sequel and also a sort of remake. It brings to mind games like A Link to the Past or Super Metroid, which as games acted almost like super-sized, super-expanded reimaginings of an original project. It was also big in sometimes frustrating or limiting ways; Organization XIII was a drain on the adventure, and the labyrinthine conspiracies feel like they exist to justify… something, I suppose. I’m not sure what, maybe just their own existence. Perhaps there’s a meta thing in the Nobodies’ lack of identity, as Organization XIII, Xemnas, and Roxas felt like characters looking for a place in this land of noble princesses, cackling villains, and excellent musical numbers.

In that sense, Kingdom Hearts II is not unlike another JRPG: Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which almost blew up and exaggerated every aspect of Xenoblade Chronicles, good and bad. That’s not entirely the case here; there was nothing in this game nearly as awful as the end game of the first Kingdom Hearts. But it is interesting seeing a project that pushes its flaws almost as much as its virtues. And it’s not like these are particularly intertwined; the Disney stuff and the original story spend most of their time cordoned off in their own sections.

Though when both sides converge, it can be wonderful.

And if you’ll permit me, that’s okay, because you can do a lot worse than not knowing how to deal with your flawed material. You can be like Heroes, which had nothing but flawed material and no idea how to use it. You could be like Heroes, which never saw a golden opportunity it couldn’t throw away fast enough. You could be like Heroes, which read online fan complaints and derailed its own story to badly respond to them. Fortunately, Kingdom Hearts II is like Heroes in only one way, in a single choice of casting (well, other than Bruce Boxleitner and Cam Clarke, who also had small roles in that asinine show). And if you’ll permit me a moment to go further, it was really good. Its world is not deep – though its combat can be – but it was exceptionally fun to explore most of the time. It was a pleasure to spend time with quite a few Disney characters I didn’t care for, and an even greater pleasure to spend time with those I do.

I know I’ve often been down on these games, and I do stand by my many criticisms of them. And I have no doubts I’ll find and make more as we continue. But this was, for the most part, kind of a blast of a game. I’m not sure I’ll ever replay an entry in this series, certainly not for a while, but if I do it’ll be this one.

Well, on to the next thing, which I believe is gonna be watching the movie versions of Re: Coded and 358/2 Days. That’ll be another largely simple week; I’ll just spend Monday or Tuesday watching one and Friday the other. And that’s cool. Taking it slow is nice – though I’ll admit that it was a bit harder this week, with the first three days having all the stuff that happened. Hopefully I’ll be able to organize that a bit better during Birth by Sleep.

Overall progress: Completed Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix, and spent the rest of the week opining on it.

Other games played: