April 10, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 14: Terra, Portrait of a Serial Blockhead

Serious questions and feelings about narrative art powered last week’s missive, a story that involved Terra’s ill-fated question through Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. Will such questions reappear as I complete his story? Let’s find out!

April 3: Entered and completed Radiant Garden.

“Wait, Horace isn’t Goofy’s relative? He’s a horse?? Why do Disney’s horse people and dog people look so similar???”

Those thoughts had been clouding my mind since last night, after I learned about the limits to early Disney character design. I was all ready to jump back into Disney Town and see for myself… only for me to realize that we did have Radiant Garden first. Well, that’s fine, too.

When Aqua went into the world, it was a barely-existent level lacking much more than a couple of tiring boss battles. For Terra, however, it’s significantly larger, and the greatest example so far of how the three Birth by Sleep protagonists get to experience different sides of the same realms. In this case, we see the big underground sewer system that we’d seen in Kingdom Hearts I and II, where Terra has his big, eye-gouging showdown with Braig.

Oh, Braig. You and your weird shadow double Xigbar are such fascinatingly intrusive characters. I don’t think I’ve seen either of them cackle, but they perfectly embody that old How Did This Get Made joke (it would have to be old given how quickly I bounced off it) about how the villains of Battlefield Earth were an alien race trained in nothing but maniacal laughter. They’re so absurd, and while they’re not really that much sillier than any other Kingdom Hearts character, for some reason they get to me. I mean, out of all of Xehanort’s old toadies that formed half of Organization XIII, they had to choose Xigbar to bring back. It had to have been due to how goofy he is, right? It couldn’t just be for his terrible boss battle.

After that fight, we finally get our Star Wars prequel moment, where Xehanort makes a speech about Light and Darkness, takes Terra on as his pupil, and only later is revealed to have been responsible for every one of Terra’s “lapses into the Darkness”. I’m a bit mixed on the latter. Him not repeatedly succumbing but just being tricked has a drama to it, but it only reaffirms my feelings that he’s kind of a giant clod. It’s not just that he lacks agency in his inevitable fall from grace; he lacks any real situational awareness. On the plus side, it was the most fun we’ve gotten out of Nimoy, who’s still not nearly as evil as his Columbo character but finally able to get in some real scenery chewing.

This isn’t really important, but you know, Jack Palance would’ve made a really good Xehanort.

April 4: Entered and completed Disney Town.

I’ll probably go back there in some capacity, so I decided to make it a (very) short session today. Especially since I got first place in the racing mini-game on the first try! With that kind of success in the face of bad design, I’m gonna bask in victory and take the day off.

Later that night…

I have also, as of tonight, purchased Kingdom Hearts III, albeit sans the Re Mind expansion (I’ll buy that when I’m done with III). I’ve also purchased Balan Wonderworld for my triumphant return to “The Forgotten, the Maligned,” and I was planning to hide that fact, but I’m gonna end up putting it in the “other games played” list. So look forward to that.

April 5: Entered and completed Olympus Coliseum.

Zach was a… surprisingly hard boss fight. Died once to him, due to that stupid combo move he has. This series really struggles with balancing its enemies’ combo attacks, which is why it was very nice to finally get Once More (the move that lets you survive a lethal combo with 1 HP) afterwards. After that, my subsequent fighting of the Coliseum’s enemies had an extra element of urgency on top of my desire to get more commands, which I’ve only just realized I keep calling “abilities.” I’ve got me an Earth Meteor and a couple Quakes! Those have been exceptionally helpful, especially since the physical commands that Terra excels at still can’t get through those stupid large enemies. I never noticed it during Aqua’s run since I only used magic, which gets past it, but damn is that “large baddie you can’t hit from the front” trope wearing thin.

On an unrelated note, this is the sixth Kingdom Hearts game I’ve experienced so far. All six have featured the Coliseum in some capacity—as will, as I understand it, the following games. Which means that I’ve spent a lot of time listening to this piece of music:

This piece, too:

Kingdom Hearts is somewhat unique amongst big Japanese gaming franchises for the extent to which it reuses its soundtrack. I don’t mean in the sense of remixing its famous songs the way Castlevania and Street Fighter do; I mean in the sense that it literally reuses music tracks Yoko Shimomura composed all the way back in 2002. I started learning about this last year, when I was writing up the article covering Sora’s admission into Smash Bros. I was cruising through YouTube, trying to find the music, and it shocked me that seemingly every piece was just from Kingdom Hearts I. The shock came back when I played Kingdom Hearts II, and I’ve never really stopped being surprised by it. This industry is certainly known for retaining leitmotifs and themes, but this much is pretty rare.

It’s frustrating, to be honest. While the individual pieces Shimomura composes are all well and good, it’s gotten a bit old hearing some of these again and again. Of course, my playing the series in this hyper-concentrated way doesn’t help, but even if I wasn’t, I still wish these pieces had at least gotten remixes. It would’ve also helped the crossover element, since you could theoretically have pieces that reference different songs in the Disney soundtracks. That’s what was so great about Christmas Town having different Nightmare Before Christmas-inspired music from Halloween Town—and that was only even added in the Final Mix of Kingdom Hearts II!

It’s not always like this; I recall Agrabah getting a new battle theme in KH2, as has this game’s version of Neverland. But it’d be nice if it was a regular occurrence. Like, Radiant Garden should not have the same theme that it had back in KH2. Back when it was Hollow Bastion in KH1, it had this dark, foreboding, and great theme. Then, in KH2, that theme was remixed to be lighter—albeit still too dark and foreboding, given that the world had changed from a spooky dead castle to a town in the process of rebuilding. The second piece is reused in Birth by Sleep and sounds even more out of place now, since we’re at the point when the Garden is flourishing, happy, and only fated to get turned into Hollow Bastion in the future. It’s an odd and unsatisfying creative choice, like the way each required fight spends too many seconds doing closeups of the participants’ faces.

April 6: Entered and completed Deep Space.

Oh, crap! I got so excited from playing Elden Ring yesterday that I almost forgot to play today! It was incredible; I spent over a week beating my head against a wall over how to beat two late game boss fights—the Godskin Duo and Commander Niall—and on Tuesday, I beat both of them! It was great! Casing the Consecrated Snowgrounds was all I had on my mind, as well as my plot to take down the next boss of the thunder-coated Crumbling Farum Azula.* In all the excitement, I, well… kind of forgot to go back to Deep Space.

* Because nothing says “Azula” like terror, lightning, and inexplicably using “taking down” as a euphemism for murder.

So I just did! I had to go back to get Brutal Blast (both times I tried making it yesterday, it went all the way to Quake), but I did it. It was nice seeing Terra’s first burst of genuine emotion when Stitch stole his friendship trinket, and it went by much faster than Aqua’s time in the spaceship. One reason why? Terra got his map much earlier, which is an interesting quirk of the design. While it wasn’t my only problem when I first went to Deep Space, taking so long to get to the map was a point of frustration. Terra gets it almost immediately, which was very useful.

The story is a bit limited, unfortunately. Terra goes to the ship, breaks the professor and Stitch out, nopes out and leaves the second the guards find out (thus bringing into question what he was doing here at all. I think he crashed into the prison, but I’m not sure what his role here really is), leaving the two characters to meet Aqua later. Again, it’s very odd plotting—almost as though the story is being built around the need for these relatively contrived moments.

Terra’s sudden bout with Experiment 221, the series’ first Disney character to hail from a direct-to-video spinoff. His landmark addition opens the door for so many bad movies!

I was rewatching the fourth season finale of The Wire, and that episode is really good at bringing back old concepts, plot points, and characters. The characters are especially great, because the finale finds ways to have characters from wildly different parts of the story meet, for the first and probably last time, in a way that’s powerful and important for both. That’s something Elden Ring is great at, too, and it should be—it’s central to the design philosophy in FromSoftware’s “Souls like” games. It’s a wonderful idea, the way people can come together, touch and better each other’s lives for just a moment, and then leave knowing they’ll never meet again. Kingdom Hearts gestures towards this, with the idea that Keyblade wielders aren’t supposed to interact too much with the worlds and not reveal the existence of the multiverse. But it doesn’t totally work. Part of it’s the reality that many worlds get revisited or acknowledged, but mostly, it’s that the marks never feel deep, especially the ones that are supposed to be felt by our heroes. How well am I honestly gonna remember Stitch’s battle against the Unversed? How well do we expect Terra to remember him?

April 7: Entered and completed Never Land.

…Which I guess is now two words?

Narratively speaking, I think Never Land / Neverland offers a more interesting take on the plot divergences than the previous levels have. That’s because it lets Terra hang out with Captain Hook and fight Peter Pan as a boss, pretty much the opposite of how it worked in both Aqua’s plot and the last time we went to the Peter Pan world. Hook is more fun than Peter and the Lost Boys; he’s also, I think, the first time Terra has actually worked with a villain of his own volition. Hades doesn’t corrupt him, Maleficent tricks him, the Evil Queen doesn’t get anything out of him, and it’s hard to think of Stitch’s creator as competent enough to really be a villain. If we’re supposed to believe Terra’s fall into evil, this is at least him making the choice to operate with an evil malefactor, even if he does switch sides before doing anything more harmful than fighting Peter.

The structure and design of the world changed just as much. Neverland / Never Land is more of a sandbox than it was in Aqua’s story, despite both campaigns using the majority of the rooms. It led me to going back and forth, fighting the probably racist totem pole enemies a lot. It’s easy when there aren’t any of those large baddies who are invincible from the front. I’ll also admit that I got confused late in the story. After teaming up with Peter, I left Skull Rock only to hear a cry for help from the Lost Boys. I teared back through most of the whole world, only to realize that I was supposed to just go back into Skull Rock (there’s a stock message when you try to enter a room that’s only available to another character’s campaign, and it changes to Terra thinking he needs to go back to the cave during this part). These games are never the best at signposting.

The story is more blunt, though, certainly when my session ended today. As Aqua did, Terra finds Destiny Islands, and his sojourn was significantly more major. He spoke to Young Riku (who was even more of a jerk than he was back in Kingdom Hearts I), then saw him morph into both old Riku and a person who is almost certainly a young Xehanort. Apparently, the good doctor was the first person to leave the island, thus ensuring that everything rolls back into that boring tropical paradise. What I most like is how Terra just abandoned that stupid rule about hiding the existence of other worlds to show off his Keyblade, which presumably means he’s the person who pushed for Riku and Sora to really start their adventure in the first place. It’s far from the world’s best retcon… but it’s far from the worst, too.

April 8: Explored the Command Boards, bonus Castle of Dreams fight, and Mirage Arena.

With the end approaching, it was time to explore some of the optional aspects of Birth by Sleep. After all, I’m going to try to do Ventus’s story in just one week, which means that any excess of time is gonna be spent grinding at a super-fast speed. I neglected to go back to Disney Town, but realistically, there was no way I was gonna finish all the mini-games and stop Pete’s dastardly plan to… be more popular? The others I jumped into with zeal, though, and each had an extra flavor with Terra in the driver’s seat.

Like the Command Boards, bizarre party mini-games in which Terra and two opponents try to outpace each other’s earnings on a board game. You roll some dice, hop around some atrociously made boards, and hope your rivals land on the spots you got to first. There are a ton of these, too, seemingly one for every world and more. I played three: the default one where you fight Aqua and Ventus, the Winnie the Pooh themed one I got at Radiant Garden—after all, nothing says “bad Kingdom Hearts mini-game” like the 100 Acre Wood—and the Disney Town one. Call the latter my actual return.

The presentation is, admittedly, somewhat lacking…

It’s not a great game. There’s no real sense of control or momentum, things seem to happen for little reason (characters can repeatedly steal each other’s boards, but not always, and what stops that from happening is never clear), and the randomness is stacked against you. In all three games, we rolled for who went first, and I rolled snake eyes either two or three times. In one game, I spent the entire game without any of the playing cards you need, even though I repeatedly crossed over and landed on the spots that are supposed to give you playing cards. Stilted and awkward even by this series’ standards, the Command Boards mix the worst parts of Mario Party, the worst parts of Monopoly, and with none of the good of either.*

* The good being, respectively, the time you get to spend with Mario’s wonderful friends and the time you get to learn about archaic, crypto-socialist taxation systems based on land ownership.

But it does have one thing, which is that stupid, sullen Terra f___ing loves the Command Boards. He’s so happy every time he lands on a good space! He has no emotion when he decides to give into the Darkness or abandon his master, but being able to upgrade his Meteor Crash spell or earn Sacrifice? He’s in love. Part of what has made this playthrough frustrating has been Jason Dohring’s performance as Terra, which routinely comes across as more bored and petulant than cool but ambitious (which, if nothing else, does make the Anakin Skywalker comparison easier). He treats everything, even himself, with so little energy. But he’s in love hopping around on these dumb ethereal boards. It was nice, a bit surreal, and pretty much the only thing that kept me going beyond the journalistic integrity of completing three games to get a better experience.

The Command Board was the most interesting of the three things I tried. The bonus fight in Castle of Dreams where you have to kill living shoes was… fine (I assumed it was, like the bonus battles in Kingdom Hearts II, gonna let me beat on Organization XIII members). As was Mirage Arena, which lacks the personality, warmth, and energy of the Olympus Coliseum. Perhaps Hercules has a weird rider in his Disney contract where you can’t make a Coliseum at Olympus unless he gets to fight you, and he’s too much of a scrawnjob now. But I explored both of them with Terra, and after his big gesture towards the Dark Side. I’m not demanding the game have unique dialogue for optional features like this depending on where he is in his story—it’d be cool, but game production is terrible enough as it is—but it is kinda funny that he’s doing all of this dumb stuff now. After he’s decided to abandon his home, friends, and mentor. And it hasn’t impacted his appetite for this kind of thing at all.

I’m at Level 41 now, and with many highly upgraded commands. I’m ready to finish this.

April 9: Completed Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.

Dun dun dun! Fake Ansem from Kingdom Hearts I wasn’t the Heartless of Xehanort but the Heartless of Terra as possessed by Xehanort all along! That’s really… not that… great of a twist? Did we need a backstory to explain how an old guy with impossible magic can create two young, bishounen duplicates of himself? Assuming that’s what the twist even is supposed to do? It feels needlessly complicated, since it’s not really wildly altering our understanding of the events.

I mean, let’s workshop this, middle school English-styles. There was a creep named Ansem who we fight in Game 1, except he wasn’t actually Ansem but the aspect of another creep named Xehanort. We learn this in Game 3, which has another guy—Xemnas—who is another aspect of Xehanort, and when both of them are dead, we learn that the actual Xehanort is still out there and only more powerful. This has not been, on the whole, a satisfying narrative throughline, as it postulates this endless pit of treachery all conducted by one guy. This reveal that he was possessing another person doesn’t necessarily worsen it, but it’s also not additive in any way. Just embellishment.

This reveal, the bizarre anti-climax of an ending where Terra’s free mind swears to fix everything, and the terrible final boss fight that links the two are not great. Worse was the surprise beforehand that Terra wasn’t even the one who killed Master Eraqus (who was either literally or only figuratively his father?), which shortchanges his entire role as the person who gets taken over by the bad guy. As little agency as Aqua had in her story, the game at least made drama out of it. Terra’s is worse, and it’s hard to quantify what kind of plot it actually is. He doesn’t turn to evil, but he also doesn’t rebuke or fight it. He gets possessed, but only after failing to do what Xehanort wanted anyway. It’s more like he simply exists adjacent to Darkness, which could be interesting but isn’t.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t laud Mark Hamill who, as I suspected, turns in a great death scene. It’s emotional, satisfying, and mostly avoids that stilted Kingdom Hearts acting that regularly trips up even the best voice actors of our age. I’m not surprised; he’s one of the few voice actors around who could justify being the star of his own animated hagiography:

I probably should get around to watching Corvette Summer one of these days…

Final Thoughts: Remember last week, when I talked about taking this week easier when it came to writing?

Ha ha ha ha. Well, we can’t always control our destinies.

Anyway, by now it’s abundantly clear that I have problems with how Kingdom Hearts creates its protagonists. They’re all variations on the same Sora mold, and their internal or emotional struggles are either nonexistent or unsatisfying. Sora had the benefit of a real character arc in Chain of Memories, and Aqua had her vaguely depressed aura to distinguish her, but Terra has been the worst by far. As another derivation of Sora (he’s a derivation of Riku, too, which doesn’t help since Riku is also a derivation of Sora), he’s bland. But as this tragic hero who’s supposed to flirt with the Dark Side and constantly be tempted, he’s somehow even less. His whole role feels constrained and confused.

Contrary to pop culture discourse, “flat characters” are not inherently bad. There are many who are great, often because they are flat (Mario springs to mind). Some can be as good or as emotionally satisfying as any deep character. Kingdom Hearts is rife with flat characters, and while I think it’d be good to have a few deeper ones, the characters themselves aren’t bad for it. Donald doesn’t need to be as interesting as he is in the DuckTales reboot. But, this kind of story—a prequel, a tragedy about failure—needs characters who are deeper. This may change when I go through Ventus’s campaign, but the central failing of this game’s story is that it does not have characters who can be truly tragic. And Terra, this weird collection of gestures to more developed narratives, is at the center of that.

I’m kinda doubtful at this point that Ventus can turn this around. But we’ll just have to see.

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

Other games played: