April 3, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 13: This Town Needs a Garak

Aqua’s playthrough is done! Now I’ve got two more campaigns to go in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. I’m starting with Terra, that living pompadour of a man with some spectacular wide legged pants. Let’s aim for beating the first half of the game and see how well he gels with the mechanics.

March 27: Started Terra’s playthrough of Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.

And on Standard difficulty, not Easy, no less! I figured that if I’m proactive about the melding of abilities, the difficulty will be a lot more manageable. Will I regret this decision? Perhaps. But I’m gonna go for it.

Being someone with a truly poor memory, choosing to experience the tutorial again (sans opening, as I’ve already seen it twice and heard the “Simple and Clean” remix that plays over it far more) was a good idea. There were a lot of things I totally forgot, and since I decided to stop right after Terra proved right that his home should be called the “Land of Departure,” it was easier to focus on them. There was the way Xehanort infected the training light balls with darkness—and perhaps he manipulated Terra’s arm, too?—and his presence in the astonishingly odd opening scene. Just Ventus in the sheet like he’s Laura Palmer.

And I’m not going to mash those two scenes up in a collage for the sake of decorum (and laziness). So here’s Ventus’s feet.

Mostly, the start of Terra’s journey has been material shared across all three playthroughs. What little unique stuff was here, though, already pegs him as a world-class chump, something already implied by that pompadour, admittedly. Xehanort comes in with the world’s least subtle sell, makes no effort to hide his intentions, and yet Terra finds his words comforting. He’s in a bad place with having lost the test, but c’mon, man. Don’t assume he’s Leonard Nimoy as Spock; assume he’s Leonard Nimoy as the killer in that great episode of Columbo.

You know, with all of this talk of the darkness in Terra’s heart, I’m finding the cosmology of Kingdom Hearts to be a bit limited. The pureness of the dichotomy isn’t satisfying for me; I’m always more interested in the gaps, the caveats. A world of a largely purely good one side and entirely purely evil other isn’t for me; I find it kinda depressing. It’s a big part of why Star Wars—a property that informs this series so badly it hurts—does so little for me. But it’s late, so I’d like to get into it further later.

March 28: Entered and completed Enchanted Dominion.

Unlike Aqua, who went into Castle of Dreams first (albeit after Ventus), Terra starts out at Enchanted Dominion. It means he gets to actually interact with and be possessed by Maleficent, though it’s Aqua who ends up fighting her as the boss. That’s a bit odd for him, narratively, especially since the boss is that kind of boring, rushed “exists because we need to end the level on a boss” model Kingdom Hearts likes to deploy regularly. You know the kind.

It was also nice to see Maleficent again, though it has made me a bit sad. In the first game, she was a fun villain with this awesome, theatrical air. Pitching the evil witch from Sleeping Beauty as the center of this silly bad guy team-up was a great pitch; she was older and more intense than most of the other members, and her magic was distinctly opaque and spooky. But then, at the culmination of her scheme, she was revealed as merely the pawn of another, less fun villain. She was suddenly swept away, to be ignored for the rest of the plot. After all, with Ansem revealed as the true mastermind, what role does she actually fill?

Since the climax of Kingdom Hearts I, Maleficent has kept reappearing, and always as this weird, nonthreatening secondary antagonist. She’ll make a spooky proclamation, maybe be a boss fight, but more often than not she’ll team up with our heroes, sacrifice herself, or simply be outclassed by the main villain. She’s become the Team Rocket of Kingdom Hearts—complete with her own comedy cat in Pete. While she’s more fun (and better acted) than the series’ original villains in all her appearances, she feels so out of place. We can’t really take her seriously again now that she’s on the outside of a conspiracy with no apparent end.

There’s some potentially great drama in Maleficent trying to claw her way back into power, but I don’t think it’s worked so far.

Gameplay-wise, Terra’s much easier for me in the early going. Already melding my first ability (Blizzard Strike, I believe) helps, since I know it’s time to be as aggressive about this as possible, but he also fits my play style better. Remember, I’m the kind of player who’s far more aggressive with the sword than anything else, and his gimmick is that he’s slower but very strong. But I suspect I’ll probably need as many souped up abilities as I can in the end, just like with Aqua, so starting out with the character who relied on them the most was for the best. I think I’ve really acclimated to the system.

March 29: Entered and completed Dwarf Woodlands, did about an hour of grinding.

And pretty effective grinding at that! I’m overleveled, which is fine, but I’m also getting to explore far more powers than last time. Even though Terra’s spells are weaker than Aqua’s, they can be merged with his attack abilities in neat ways. I’ve been playing with them – though so far, I haven’t found many physical moves that combine with each other, if any. That was surprising.

Oddly enough, I’ve barely had any healing stuff on me at all; I haven’t got any Cure spells, but I’ve not really needed to even have Potions in my list of commands for more than the first boss battle. It’s presumably another side effect of Terra’s style gelling better with the way I play most action games.

What I meant before, about the whole “light and darkness” dichotomy? I just find it uncomfortable in general. It’s such a stark and exclusionary world that’s nothing but choosing between two rows of seats. And unlike Star Wars (which I don’t like either, but who posits its Light and Dark Sides as religious and philosophical states), the Darkness of Kingdom Hearts is a physical realm, with actual denizens in the form of Heartless. It’s not fully tangible, admittedly, and a product of people who come from the light, but I still find it off-putting. A lot of it is the way characters like Eraqus and Yen Sid talk, where both sides are equal, you must always have balance, but you are also expected to kill any dwellers of the Darkness you see. I’m not sure what term I’m looking for—reactionary? psychotic?—but it just rubs me the wrong way. I mean, we all agreed that Xemnas trying to mass slaughter Heartless to rebuild Heaven was bad, but was it bad because that’s wrong or only bad because it was part of his plot?

Maybe this is partially coming from me being part of an ethnicity that’s often othered, but really, a lot of it isn’t even from a moral worldview but an artistic one. Kingdom Hearts’ cosmology and vision so aggressively segregate the good and bad sides that a huge portion of its universe is kept off limits. Who’s the “Sora” of the Darkness? What is the stuff of his dreams? We don’t know, because the Darkness is such a dangerous, inherently corrupting space that we never get to see him. That’s the rule, and there are no exceptions. But when it comes to fantasy or science fiction, it’s the exceptions that are the most interesting to me—as are the obscured details, the cracks in the façade, and the dark alleyways. It’s with those that a great story questions itself or its world; it’s with those that a setting gets depth and world building. My favorite Grant Morrison comic might be Seven Soldiers, not the arguably superior All Star Superman, for this reason. This is especially true when it comes to stories about two distinct realms, because… why wouldn’t I want to see all of them? We’re supposed to see Xehanort as the proof of why that line of thought is dangerous, but his worldview is so nonsensical that it doesn’t hobble my interest, merely confuse it.

The closest Kingdom Hearts has come to this, the fairly compelling 358/2 Days, gave us a glimpse into the lives of villains who had previously been inscrutable, confusing, and frustrating for it. The “experience” wasn’t the equivalent of a five hour YouTube video trying to prove that Xemnas was the good guy all along (he was pretty unambiguously the most evil, cruel big bad of any Kingdom Hearts story, far worse than Ansem, Marluxia, whoever was the villain in coded, and himself in KH2), but it did give context and empathy for his followers. It was willing to push back against some of the absurd claims about Nobodies that we had heard from Yen Sid and Ansem, like the idea that they can’t feel anything even after we repeatedly saw them feel things. The story was self-critical, which was kind of surprising. However, it was limited; it focused mostly on the Nobody we were expected to like already and, by being a prequel, had no real impact on the plot or the setting. Ain’t much you can do with a cast that had died a couple games ago.

Ultimately, this is a matter of personal preference; there are things I like from fantasy and fiction, and Kingdom Hearts isn’t invested in some (or all, maybe) of them. That in and of itself isn’t bad. But I do think its story has legitimate problems that go beyond personal preference: vague concepts and values, confused world building, and far too many similar characters. And while these problems would not be inherently solved by interrogating the series’ beliefs or cosmology, I think it’d be worth trying. At the very least, it’d help offset characters like Eraqus or Yen Sid, or even villains like Xehanort. The world of Kingdom Hearts is limited, its limits percolate downwards and influence its characters, and pushing back against that might do a lot.

March 30: Entered and completed Castle of Dreams.

Terra, you insensitive oaf. When you see a woman crying because she’s the victim of domestic abuse, you do not tell her to avoid the darkness in her heart.

I did another hour of grinding today, but it wasn’t at all because of the difficulty or to get my levels up. I’m not having any trouble, and haven’t outside a few deaths since Dwarf Woodlands. It’s all because I want to keep melding new commands, a process that’s been doing a number on my completionist brain. I keep creating new powers and finding different bonus effects (not Once More or Second Chance, at least not yet in this playthrough), and trying to see how far I can take them has been enjoyable. Honestly, it’s been one of the neatest and most addictive aspects of any of these games. Just can’t help but keep throwing ones together to see what more I can make—and Sonic Blade. I made Sonic Blade in Aqua’s playthrough, and I really want it now.

I think I’ll take two weeks for Terra’s story, then do Ventus’s in one. Maybe.

March 31: Didn’t play.

Right. The header image. Okay, it’s really not just me being flippant by including a screenshot of something that has nothing to do with Kingdom Hearts. It’s actually emblematic of something I’ve been thinking of intermittently ever since I wrote about the series for the Smash Bros. Spirit Description Project late last year, but increasingly after watching that Chain of Memories playthrough. This is gonna take a while before I get back to Sora and friends, but please bear with me.

Over 2020 and 2021, I watched what became one of my favorite television shows of all time: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I don’t like any other branch of Star Trek, to be clear. Bores me to tears. Discovery’s okay, it’s fun to mock Voyager, and I like the episode of the original series with the gangster planet, but that’s it. I can’t stand the pomposity of windbags like Jean-Luc Picard or ~~William Shatner~~ Jimmy T. Kirk, the stilted and declarative writing the franchise trades in, and how the older shows used fictional species as reductive allegories for real world cultures (the new shows are much better on that front, thankfully). The speculative future Gene Roddenberry envisioned—a humanist paradise in which discovering the cosmos and befriending strangers are acts of inherently human self-betterment—is admirable, but weirdly lifeless in its presentation. DS9, though, is different by design, the result of being made while Star Trek: The Next Generation was airing. After TNG reestablished the franchise on TV by hewing to Roddenberry’s vision, any concurrent Trek show would need to be different.

Not that Trek could ever have a monopoly on pompous windbags. Our own Yen Sid has enough ponderous bloviation for a phalanx of Keyblade Masters.

And so Deep Space Nine was built from differences. It didn’t take place on a spaceship (that could fly to and from a unique setting in the span of an episode) but a space station (which a Trek show would treat as the one-time setting), so it allowed more serialized storytelling. Instead of just being reductive cultural analogues, the different alien species had to become more well defined and unique. And the Deep Space 9 station itself was as much a melting pot and home for these people as it was a base for Starfleet, the military branch that is Star Trek’s future—an interspecies “Federation of Planets”—in microcosm.

The characters are the most important, as many explicitly offer countering and challenging points to the franchise’s worldview. The casts of the previous Star Trek shows were all part of this heroic navy, and by Roddenberry’s weirdo vision of the future not allowed to quarrel with each other or question the story’s ideals. But Deep Space 9 is a town on the edge of the galaxy; the military is dwarfed by people from other walks of life, many of whom are suspicious of what the series is selling. Major Kira, the female lead, is religious, abrasive, and haunted by but not regretful of her actions as a former terrorist—things that are unacceptable to either Starfleet or Roddenberry. Freewheeling bartender Quark is a proud cast-off of a society of corrupt entrepreneurs; he bemoans a government that gives equal rights to women but won’t let him sell snake oil. Odo, the shapeshifting police chief, is perennially grumpy and always on hand to harrumph any act of Federation niceness. Even the heroic captain, Benjamin Sisko, is eventually forced to commit morally spurious acts—ones the franchise has always justifiably decried—as his new home becomes the epicenter of a galactic war.

Notably, none of these characters ever “prove” Roddenberry’s experiment to be bunk. Quark will get in a few fair jabs about the hypocrisy of the Federation, but he’ll always fall in line, and the show questions his ideas rigorously enough to prove them illegitimate. Kira’s actions as a freedom fighter—having committed terrorist acts to end the genocide of her people—are treated as things that needed to be done then, but not necessarily now, and reconciling the differences between then and now is part of her arc. Odo’s concerns bear fruit as he experiences racism from the unimpeachable Federation, something which is held up as a failing that must be fixed. Over time this happens with most of the characters, who all have issues fair and unfair about the world as imagined by Star Trek. But while all of them test and bend that world, no one breaks it. I think that kind of storytelling validates the Star Trek universe in a metatextual sense, but it’s also good drama. Having truly excellent writing doesn’t hurt.

And then there’s the fan-favorite Garak, who takes this as far as it can go. He’s a former spy exiled from his fascist home, but he has no compunction about his crimes. He’s slimy and duplicitous, always telling lies and half-truths. He’s openly distrustful of the morality the show and its characters espouse. But these make him electrifying and compelling, especially thanks to a wry performance by Andrew Robinson. He’s so alien, but he can’t be ignored, especially as he keeps popping up. Unsurprisingly, the show rarely takes his side (which often boils down to “commit war crimes before war crimes are committed upon you” and “dress fancy”), but he does help Star Trek reckon with its own legacy. And all the while, that legacy slowly changes him. It’s a story that’s good on its own and good for a series as established as this one had been.

What does this have to do with Kingdom Hearts? At all? Well, as the title says, I think it needs characters—even just one character—like Garak (or Kira, or Quark, or Odo, or any of the ones I didn’t mention). It needs people who are willing to challenge and question the foundations of the series. This is not to say it needs characters who prove that it’s wrong—in fact, I don’t want that to happen—but that it needs an easy avenue to explore and interrogate itself. The closest you get are villains who try to stretch the limits of the world, and that hardly counts. You never see them do their work, the series never seriously engages with the implications of their actions, and they’re all so samey. It’s a flash mob of cackling, duplicitous overlords who are either pulling someone’s strings, having their strings pulled, or most likely, both.

That last one’s a problem in and of itself, because much like classic Star Trek, Kingdom Hearts is in dire need of more unique characters. So many of their heroes and sidekicks and mentors all act the same way; they do the same things and believe the same things and share the same perspective. And, like Trek, that is partially caused by them mostly coming from this one broad school of heroism and Keyblade wielding. But it’s not the only problem, since even the animated characters (who are invariably more distinct) have their differences ground down as they’re placed in tertiary roles. I mean, the closest you’d get is what, Jack Sparrow? And even his worldview is ultimately superficial and his role inconsequential—just like all the Disney folk. You need original characters to do this, and Terra has been especially frustrating on this point, as he’s just Riku without the camp. Or maybe Riku’s story would have just been boring, and we were merely spared it. But either way, Terra’s journey from hero to pawn isn’t asking questions about the good guys or the bad guys, something that should be standard in prequels about someone going from one camp to the other.

I’m not sure how able the games would be at incorporating these kinds of characters. As long as you have that weird bifurcation between the original character medicine and the Disney brand sugar, I think it’d be hard to do that kind of introspection. But I’m also a bit doubtful that Kingdom Hearts and Nomura would want to explore this beyond 358/2 Days explaining that Nobodies are people, too (which was good, to be clear, but also not this). Regardless, if the series wants to explore drama beyond standard heroes’ journeys—and I do think it wants to—it would behoove it to question its own ideas and world. And the best, easiest, and most natural way to do that would be to have characters who look at the world in a way that doesn’t fit. Characters who aren’t necessarily right or good or true to themselves, but who ask different questions and come up with different answers. And if you want characters like that, the “bisexual fashion lizard” and his friends in that bicycle wheel in space provide quite the template.

Or, failing that, it could just cast Jeffrey Combs in like eight separate roles. That’d be good, too.

April 1: Entered and “completed” Mysterious Tower, Keyblade Graveyard.

As these levels were just cutscenes with only one generic fight between them, I did go back to Castle of Dreams and keep fighting enemies. Again, for all of my complaints about the story, I’m really liking the melding of abilities. I thought about powering through the rest of the game today, but it’s already been a long week, writing-wise. I’m gonna take the rest of this and next week easy, but yeah; the natural end point here is to just do Ventus in one week. Had I planned it out quicker, I probably could’ve done Terra’s in one week, too, but as ever my talents at planning are poor.

In that case, next week with Terra will probably be based around exploring other parts of the game—things like the optional boss battles, that “Mirage” building, and trying to see how far I can reasonably push the ability system.

In the meantime, I’ve hit the act break of Terra’s story, in which it is dramatically revealed that Vanitas came from Ventus, Xehanort is the one who brought Ventus to the Land of Departure in the first place, and that Terra has absolutely no situational awareness. Seriously, I know that characters in games like this aren’t meant to have much in the way of higher reasoning skills, but how do you listen to Xehanort’s explanation and not think something’s up? You know he’s been trying to find all of these people with “pure” light, man! He told you it was bad for him to use the Darkness despite advocating that you use the Darkness mere hours ago! Did your playlist neglect to include “Suspicious Minds” or “Smiling Faces Sometimes” or any other song about lies and mendacity?

WHY WOULD YOU EVER TRUST THIS MAN? Would you buy a used car form him? This is his only expression! All he does is look menacingly and obliquely talk about harnessing the powers of darkness!

Narratively, it’s interesting coming into this now. With Aqua, bad things happened more around her than to her, and we only learned about them after the fact. It made the drama weak but at least tinged with a bit of mystery. With Terra, those qualities sort of even out, where the mysteries (i.e. whatever’s going on with Vanitas) are weaker but the drama (c’mon, when is Terra going to get seduced by the darkness) is a bit more existent. It makes me wonder what it was like to do Aqua right at the end, where she’d mostly see things the player had already seen in the other stories.

April 2: Didn’t play.

One thing that makes the whole command system work so well? It incentivizes trying as many abilities as you can. Since—in theory—almost any non-final move can be fused into a one more powerful one (though this might not actually be true with spells like Sleep or Bind, at least from my experience so far), it’s good for you to get and strengthen all of them. Maybe Blizzard or Square Mine or Slide Dash can meld with a far more powerful ability?

It’s incredibly exciting because you can find yourself with crazy powers just by being willing to build up any ability. It also has more involvement from you specifically, since you have to build the powers and match them. It’s more interesting than the other powers, like the Finisher moves. And I do think that, again, it’s limited in the fact that two of the characters are much better at one form of magic than the other. Well, that’s not wholly true—Terra has so far been good with even the weak spells. It’s Aqua who’s more limited, though the focus on spells does give her a bit more focus. But let’s stay positive. I don’t like being wholly negative, especially when the mechanics have been so much fun.

It’s also a nice way for the multiple levels of a power to feel more legitimate. Realistically, you’ll want to upgrade everything you have; the weak versions of spells and attacks will never get stronger on their own. But every melding comes up with a power better than the two that created it, and the new powers can also be melded, too. On top of that, there’s reasons to both buy the weak, low level abilities and the more powerful ones (which you can only do after creating them at least once). Since you can combine each melding with a ring that’ll create a bonus ability, going about building them the long way gives you the opportunity to stack tons of bonuses. And that doesn’t take long, but it can be tiresome after a while, so you could simply buy the more powerful ones and skip the grinding. These are options, and that’s great for a system this relatively simple and immediate. And that’s just one part of why, in the final analysis, I’ve never regretted staying on the Standard difficulty once in this playthrough.

Final thoughts: The ratio of “playing” to “writing” was pretty lopsided this week. In this case, there was just stuff I wanted to say, and early on it became clear that it was the time to write about them (it was also helped by it being a lighter week, something it wouldn’t have been had I been better about planning). Next week will probably be lighter. I know I say that a lot, and I’m sure I’ll be regretting making this claim once I have things to say about Eraqus’s death, but it should be lighter in general. I’m going to try to do more things, explore the game a bit more, and then lead us out with Ventus.

Also, I’ve realized that I really do need to buy Kingdom Hearts III soon—and with the DLC, since that’s unskippable for the plot (like seemingly every part of this franchise). I’ll be honest, I really didn’t expect it to take this short a time to get this far. It’s only the start of April, and I’ve almost completed six “experiences.” Between them and III, the only major entry is Dream Drop Distance, only alongside some smaller entries that might not actually be playable. It’s surprising how quickly I’ve gone, though I suppose I’ve felt a need to play aggressively. I don’t want to publish an entry that had any progress lesser than, well, this.

Overall progress: Completed the first half of Terra’s story in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.

Other games played: