April 17, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 15: On the Origin of Stories

With the stories for Terra and Aqua finished, it’s time for me to finish off Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep by completing Ventus’s campaign. I intend to complete it in just one week this time, meaning that we’ll be going fast, going far, and getting in as much easy grinding and command melding as possible.

BUT WAIT! It turns out that before I even started playing, Kingdom Hearts released a 20th Anniversary trailer! There are two new games: the ugly and bland looking Missing-Link, and Kingdom Hearts IV! It’s part of the “Lost Master” Saga, and it’s got quite a trailer.

Either that acrobatic gameplay is very obviously fake, or it’s only further proof that I’m right all along that this series should’ve been a platformer to begin with. That, or Kingdom Hearts is now turning into an Uncharted-esque “cinematic” action game, and that’d be more depressing than anything.

April 10: Began Ventus’s story in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, entered and completed Dwarf Woodlands and Enchanted Dominion.

While I died a few times to the boss of Enchanted Dominion, a monumentally ugly tree beast, the gameplay has been easier than ever. I’ve gone from acclimating to the Command system to outright exploiting it, which feels great. I managed to already meld Firaga before leaving the second world. It feels nice being in full control of this system, and already mentally planning to upgrade my physical and magical talents.

The character I’m piloting helps. Ventus is a fitting complement to Aqua’s all-magic focus and Terra’s slow strength. He’s fast, decent with every kind of command, and has an apparent and interesting preference for status effects. His first spell was Aero, a classic bit of Kingdom Hearts magic that does light damage but mostly traps enemies. One of the first commands I got was Mini, a goofy (and not particularly helpful) attack that shrinks them. These are not moves I regularly use in RPGs and even less in this series, but I’ve been doing fine with them. Mostly, they’re there for me to meld into weirder and rarer commands, but they’re alright.

So far, however, it’s hard to see the kid as complementary when it comes to the story. Narratively, Ventus is the annoying, rebellious pre-teen who flagrantly disobeys the master’s wishes (the Jason Todd to Aqua’s Dick Grayson and Terra’s Bucky / Winter Soldier). Theoretically he’d bring a naïvety that’ll get crushed into dust by the machinations of Xehanort. Mostly, he’s just kinda dumb, a bit like Sora at his most thoughtless. The superhero analogy works well here, as his interactions largely follow that genre’s standard. The Dwarves from Snow White think he’s a thief, so he beats them up to prove he isn’t before bringing a stranger into their house.

Having him come after Terra was an inadvertently interesting creative choice on my part. When we started with Aqua, we were going after a person we knew was getting into trouble, but the details of it were largely mysterious. When I moved onto Terra, we saw the truth and banalities of his actual “turn” to the Darkness. Now we have Ventus, whose point of distinction is his weird and largely obscured origin story. We know that Vanitas is his evil double, that Xehanort split them to help forge the most powerful Keyblade in the land, and that Ventus himself comes from another world. But the specifics of it were unclear, and spending more time with Ventus should let us explore this stuff more thoroughly.

April 11: Entered and completed Castle of Dreams, defeated Vanitas in Keyblade Graveyard.

By far the most different any level has been in one of these playthroughs, Ventus’s version of the Castle of Dreams outright ignores the castle entirely. He—and why this happens is never explained—finds himself shrunken down to the size of a mouse in Cinderella’s home. It’s a pretty bad level, all things considered, with a lot of one-way paths and unclear level design. On the other hand, it’s yet another piece of evidence to be filed away proving that this series really wants to be a platformer. The entire level structure was reminiscent of gimmicky shrinking levels in something like Mario 64 (Ōkami also springs to mind), where a generic room would become a mammoth sandbox.

The level also brings to mind Wonderland from KH1, which then brings to mind the memory of that awful boss Trickmaster.

Cinderella is voiced by Jennifer Hale, who’s had the role since 1999. I mostly think of her as Mass Effect’s tough, courageous Commander Shepard, and her “typical” characters—Avatar Kyoshi, Killer Frost, Bastila Shan, the dialogue-free grunts of Samus Aran—tend to fall in with that. She’s great at really intimidating people, so it’s interesting seeing her play this very kindly, unobtrusive lass. Sadly, the script doesn’t get her much to do; even if Ventus is the protagonist who spends the most time with her; she still takes a substantial backseat to Jaq.

In Kingdom Hearts, the concept of the Princesses of Heart was such a huge deal. They were these symbols of “purity” who could open up the door to the secret world, and there was always this implied power they could wield. And it kinda just… went away. I had wondered if Birth by Sleep was going to bring it back after I learned that the first three worlds each had a Princess. And having finally spent time with this entry’s Princesses across all three campaigns, it’s still not really important. C’est la vie.

April 12: Entered and completed Radiant Garden, Deep Space.

I also did the Castle of Dreams Command Board, god knows why. But it worked! I actually won this time, and I got a lot of experience points added to a lot of commands. Let’s chalk the victory up to the afterglow of beating Elden Ring earlier today.

Amongst the Source Gaming staff, I take a… let’s call it a “Grant Morrisonian” approach to narrative linearity and storytelling. Strict timelines based on in-universe “canon” and “linearity” are largely dishonest factors that obscure how we actually engage with intellectual properties. Characters are collections of stories, not “real” people, though they can still contain multitudes. And in this case, prequels, sequels, and remakes are essentially the same thing: attempts to recreate and expand a world. From a narrative standpoint, each one is a response to the one that came before it. From a creative standpoint, each has the job of reworking the bones of something old into something new (or newish). It’s a response in the form of a balancing act, with the pit below below hosting stories that are too iterative or too separated.

Commercially, things are a bit weirder, because follow-up stories are expected to do better than the original. Generally, companies expect—demand, really—stories and properties whose success breeds more success. Sometimes, it does work; the world’s biggest brands are proof of that. Of course, often it doesn’t, which is why cinema from the past decade and a half is a graveyard of failed shared cinematic universes. But it’ll always be a tall order. You have to retain all of your audience and get a new audience. Realistically, the only way to do that is to have each new game or movie or fast food tie-in sandwich be just as accessible as every one it follows. And ultimately, that’s a good thing, because it keeps art from being too closed off, too demanding to experience. Especially since some people might only be interested in the sequel, not the original. Like, imagine if I told you about a good but not great Wes Craven movie about a DC Comics horror character. Some of you would be interested, and some of you would not.

Now imagine I told you that it had a much wackier and more fun sequel. And imagine I told you that by showing you this trailer:

Just look at that beauty of a preview. “He’s got a grudge ’cause they turned him to sludge!” It’s gotta be way more exciting than the first film to at least a pretty broad demographic because it’s wildly different. A lot of follow-ups are wildly different to the stories they’re following. And the thing is that that’s only one reason of many for why most consumers probably only want to experience the latest entry, or some entries, or out of order. And the people who make and produce the kind of art that gets sequels need to work with this.

And yet, Kingdom Hearts, a huge property of two of the biggest companies in their respective fields of the entertainment industry, flaunts this aggressively. This train of thought started this morning, when I saw this headline on Nintendo Life (I’ll confess to only having read it this afternoon) about the difficulties of finding a perfect “first game” for a long-running series. It’s a hard question, one without a universal answer. Except that Kingdom Hearts does have its answer, and that answer is to play it from the start and play every entry. You can’t start in Chain of Memories, since that’s following up on a cliffhanger. Ditto coded. 358/2 Days can’t work, either, since it only exists to explain KH2. And while KH2 itself should be good—it’s got a number on the end, and that’s always an implicit starting point—it isn’t, either. The prologue with Roxas is utter nonsense based heavily on two separate games (three if you count the prequel the official collection puts in front of it); it means nothing without having played those. So you can’t skip an entry that doesn’t seem up your alley, you can’t skip the post-credits scenes, and you can’t find another on ramp if you’re on the outside.

Birth by Sleep, then, should have been the on ramp. Like Metal Gear Solid 3 or Ocarina of Time, it’s set far back enough that the experiences of Sora don’t necessarily have to be on our mind at all times, something most sequels can’t do. Its mechanics are unique enough for it to be a decent break. And the way it provides context is to show locations that Sora didn’t or couldn’t visit (and by extension only have bearing on the new characters, not him). But it has no interest in doing any of that. Mickey’s role is confusing without knowing how important he is in the rest of these games. The game never bothers to explain the significance of Xehanort or Hearts filled with pure light. And scenes of characters like Maleficent or Yen Sid are only for the benefit of longtime fans.

Ventus’s trip to Radiant Garden is a good example of this—and funnily enough, I was even thinking of this topic before I started my session today and saw it. Like the other campaigns, he goes to the world, teams up with the other protagonists to fight a boss, and leaves in a huff. But unlike the others, Ventus has a full-on supporting cast here. And while they’re ostensibly new characters, they’re obviously the original versions of the Nobodies who made up part of Organization XIII: Lexaeus, Xaldin, Vexen, Zexion, Saïx, and Axel. Even, the scientist who’ll become Vexen and die hilariously, makes ominous and vaguely threatening statements towards Ventus that imply our boy is gonna find himself in some wacky duplicate shenanigans.

The scenes lack the one good thing about Organization XIII, which is their banality and quiet desperation. But they’re also fairly incomprehensible unless you’re, say, in a position where you have been mainlining Kingdom Hearts stories for three and a half months. Why do these characters matter? What’s their narrative role? Ultimately, their role is to explain the origins of some of the people whose Nobodies became members of the Organization, which has no bearing on Ventus but does have bearing for those of us who wanted to know about what Axel was like before he was Axel (the answer being “ the exact same”).

And this is what I meant from the beginning about prequels, sequels, and remakes being the same thing. Because they’re all follow-ups, and in theory, a good follow-up will strive to give a newcomer a satisfying experience. It’s hard to do, and there are times where you do have to give up on it. It’s fair to assume that anyone watching the final episodes of a long TV series is a longtime viewer. But overall, it’s worth doing. Not everyone who would want to play Birth by Sleep has the time, money, or inclination to go through five Kingdom Hearts “experiences” first—especially if they aren’t interested in Sora as a character or the magic meter of the prior games. I suppose it wouldn’t be right to call this kind of storytelling “hubristic,” certainly not with its commercial success. But it is absurd, and it has hobbled this game’s storytelling in particular.

April 13: Entered and completed Disney Town.

More than completed, if I’m being honest. Alongside actually succeeding at Ice Cream Beat, I spent a lot more time here this time. I explored the town’s underground, hung out in Pete’s inexplicable giant pinball game, and got a ton of cash for my troubles. My only problem now is that most of the commands I have don’t seem like they can be combined any further, at least not most of the physical ones. And I have a lot of moves right now, well over a dozen Firas. Most I can do is buy doubles of the ones I don’t have and see if I can make any more combinations, though hopefully getting to the Coliseum tomorrow will help with that.

Both this and Deep Space were the first times in this game that a world felt truly concluded. In the latter, Stitch escapes so he can be in the rest of his movie. In the former, it’s revealed that our three heroes all won the Million Dreams contest with equal votes, thus causing Pete’s downward spiral into being Maleficent’s goon. Bad storytelling from the second plot? Absolutely. Pete’s arrested for no real reason (he demands the prize for winning, but he’s not really harming anyone), but he’s also only “saved” from spending a bit of time in a celestial time out. It’s also quite the anticlimax that the prize is just a bowl of very sugary ice cream, and not really in a dramatic way. But it was nice to just have an explanation about where it all led.

Since I’m done with this game, I should also finally mention Pete’s amazing superhero outfits. Captain Justice and Captain Dark look great—better than his regular duds.

Ventus has spent a lot of his time in this game being openly sad and lonely. In Disney Town, he’s close to crying knowing that his friends were already there—at least when he’s not “fixing” a broken carnival game by playing it. In other places, like Radiant Garden, he’s painfully desperate to make more friends. If Aqua seems to be constantly holding back an imminent emotional breakdown (side note: relatable), then he’s more comfortable expressing his. I guess the thing that links the three protagonists of this game is that old Jimmy Carter buzzword: “malaise.” They’re all kinda depressing, lonely, and holding out hope that their doomed friendship will last. I don’t think it works for me, because the friendship itself is kinda vapid and based on nothing but the mutual desire to be Keyblade masters.

It makes Ventus a relatively distinct spin on Sora, in that he marshalls Sora’s immaturity and lack of awareness into drama, not just hollow comedy moments. At the same time, he lacks much of anything else; his interest in being a Keyblade Master doesn’t even seem tied to anything other than it being what his foster siblings want. Writing this out, I feel like I should like Ventus more as a character. I should appreciate that he’s a surprisingly deft portrayal of depression in how he constantly seeks emotional highs and friendships that inevitably fail to fill a void (that void being Ventus himself without his dark half). But I just don’t like him. Maybe he’s just fundamentally too similar to everyone else, or too similar looking to our previous heroes. Or maybe it’s that this is the fifth week of a game I’ve already beaten twice. Either way, he’s a frustrating companion.

April 14: Entered and completed Coliseum.

You’d think that I would’ve found all the secrets behind Commands over the course of the past two playthroughs. Not the case! I managed to get myself Thunder Roll, which is not an assuredly delicious sushi blend of tempura, mango, and shrimp but a new command. It’s an offensive dodge roll. I’ve spent most of my time with Birth by Sleep assuming there were upgraded versions of movement-related commands, improvements to your jumps and dodges, but it took until today to get them. I got Thunder Roll, an icy aerial dodge, and there have to be more. Going by the law of traditional JRPG elemental systems, the system has to include a fire-themed upgrade to complement the Electric Slide and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out [NOTE FROM TOMORROW: there is one: a Fire Glide I got right before the final boss. Let’s call it… Paper in Fire].

In the Coliseum, Ventus needs to keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ (what?).

Thunder Roll especially is the absolute best. After three games of fighting those large guys with attack-proof shields, now I can just roll into them! It’s only driven me on further to keep grinding and experimenting with the system. I also went out to find more recipes, though it turns out those only tell you what command you’ll meld. And yet, that means that the mammoth number of upgraded physical commands I’ve gotten from fights are largely useless. I can’t get more than a few greater commands out of them, some of which seem easier to just purchase outright. The game probably could’ve done better with making more unique physical commands.

April 15: Completed Ventus’s story in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.

And we are done! Goodbye, Birth by Sleep! I’ll miss your excellent command system. I won’t miss the unpleasant controls on the map screen, where you have to wrestle your character’s Goblin Glider from world to world.

It’s appreciated that after a week of being frustrated with Ventus as a character, we finally—literally, like, right at the end—find out what his deal is. And it’s not just that he was some kid with a dark half that Xehanort pulled out. He is, in fact, the ultimate child, and the one expected to unlock the χ-Blade. Vanitas, his dark half who was made to help forge the sword, is responsible for all of the villains. And then Vanitas takes off his helmet, dramatically revealing…

Oh, no!!! It’s…, um… ?

Okay, fine, it’s obviously Inexplicable Evil Sora. And that holds true in the opaque ending to the campaign, where Ventus seems to submerge into the consciousness of a person who is, in all likelihood, Sora. And that’s the reason why he looks like Sora’s Nobody, Roxas. Did he create Sora? No, Sora already exists by the time the story happens. Did he create or shape Roxas? Maybe? Will this be explained further? Almost assuredly, but for now it’s a monumentally weird beat to end on.

…Hey, wait a mite. All that stuff about Vanitas came from Terra’s story. That’s interesting—though it doesn’t fully help with Ventus often feening secondary to Terra and Aqua. He’s a void, like that movie, The Void.

April 16: Didn’t play. But I did beat a third game this week: Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

Well, with three playthroughs of one game done in five weeks, let’s do some rankings!

Heroes, ranked best to worst:

Aqua: Largely, this is because Aqua is by far the most competent. This is a weird series in that there aren’t a lot of characters who are just good at their job, but she is.
Ventus: Kind of a nothing of a character, but I find his constant sadness to also be mildly interesting character detailing.
Terra: Man, what a clod. What a nothing of a hero.

Major worlds, ranked best to worst:

Enchanted Dominion: Even if it’s a terrible adaptation of that excellent Sleeping Beauty art.
Castle of Dreams: Just not the terrible version Ventus has.
Dwarf Woodlands: I like that it has three major areas in the castle, the forest, and the caves. It makes the world feel larger than it necessarily is (and feeling in games is often more useful than being)
Olympus Coliseum: Boring, but familiar, and very easy grinding.
Never Land: How to make the boring world from Kingdom Hearts I better? Add Spider-Skull Island!
Disney Town: Terrible mini-games, but a cool underside.
Radiant Garden: It’s frustrating how much less interesting Hollow Bastion has gotten in every game.
Deep Space: Just ugly and boring. It also features the mini-game where you fly out in space on your boogie board; that one was really bad.

My Five Favorite Commands, no particular order:

Sonic Blade
Mega Flare
Thundaga
Meteor Crash
Seeker Mine

…Yeah, this is pretty anemic, isn’t it?

More than anything else, I’m looking forward to finally moving beyond Disc 1 of The Story So Far. It’s a big milestone; I’m approaching the idiotically titled Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. When I started this series, I genuinely assumed it was going to take me a whole year. I suppose I had been ignoring the fact that half of the games in the collection were only included as two hour movies, but it’s still surprising that we’re halfway through April and I’ve got six “experiences” under my belt. Wrapping this and Elden Ring (and to a lesser extent Kirby) up in the same week definitely reorients my thinking.

Actually, there is one other thing, and I think it can be summed up in this GIF:

This comes from the opening. It captures the motion of Terra and Aqua fighting, locked in combat. It’s very dramatic and sets up the idea of a great betrayal—why else would such good, photogenic friends be at such hateful odds? Except that this image is representing not a final conflict but the early cutscene where the two non-violently (and non-angrily) fight in the Mark of Mastery Exam. While it does technically represent an actual thing that happens in Birth by Sleep, we all know what it’s setting up: the two pupils forced into moral combat. The purity of the Land of Departure destroyed by a wave of Xehanort’s hand. That’s exciting! It’s powerful! And… it doesn’t happen. The two don’t fight; really, none of the three protagonists fight other than Aqua fighting Ventus while he’s being controlled by Vanitas. Aqua kind of tells Terra off, and then they never see each other again.

I think this is kind of another waste of the story. If BBS is the sad game, the game where heroes are failures and betrayal is the order of the day, then we really should have these characters fight. At the very least, the final scene with Terra and Aqua—which, as a reminder, I saw three times—feels too passive. C’mon, Nomura, if you’re gonna try to rip off the Star Wars prequels, at least go at it with a bit more verve.

Final Thoughts: Origin stories are exceptionally popular (my mother loves them). It’s easy to understand why. You learn how and why your favorite characters got to be that way; you get a chance to see them become that way. It’s canonical in the true sense of the word, legitimizing the process that turned a character into an icon. I’m not always the biggest fan of the trope, since I think it’s sometimes better to canonize a character by having them be that character, but I always know a good origin story when I see it. It looks like this:

Because this is apparently superhero discussion week on Dispatch from the Dive. Maybe I’m just excited for this Superman-themed writing project I’m starting that may or may not be released.

And that’s an admittedly extreme and intense example, but it’s far from the only good kind. There’s also the two-parter that reveals the start of the Avatar universe in The Legend of Korra, the many flashbacks of Adventure Time or The Venture Bros. or The Good Place, the previously mentioned Metal Gear Solid 3 and Ocarina of Time; the list goes on. Literally; we could add to it all day. What makes these stories—origin stories, prequels, flashbacks—work are two things that are paradoxical. They provide context and closure and answers to the world we know, the one of the main story, and they act as stories that are disconnected by virtue of taking place in a different time. That’s a difficult thing to manage, right? You’re playing with two different worlds at once, even though one of them is gonna turn into the other.

Ultimately, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep fails to live up to either virtue. It provides no satisfying revelations about the world of Kingdom Hearts; it gives us origins for Sora and Xehanort, but nothing that is in and of itself compelling. Conversely, it’s an unsatisfying setting, one lacking in joy but resplendent in boring, monologuing old men. I know I’ll regret saying this in the future, but right now it’s hard to view this as mattering much at all. At present, it’s the kind of story a Kingdom Hearts fan could easily dump. Perhaps the secret endings you get in the ultra-hard difficulty provide more interesting connections, as they seem to for every Kingdom Hearts game, but I’m not that good as a player and am going to treat these like normal, casual experiences.

At the same time, this impromptu remake of the Star Wars prequels does stand on its own in one way, which is that it does have a great and immensely addictive gameplay loop. Rejecting magic meters or points is great. Rejecting it in favor of skills you fuse and experiment with and always passively train is even better. The command system absolutely hit my brain once I started realizing how far it can go. It’s wild, and my biggest complaint (other than the fact that it can be hard to get enough money for it in the early going) is that it doesn’t go far enough. Imagine fusing the Poison spell with Fire and getting a toxic flume. Or combining Bind and Thundaga to trap foes in an electric prison. Or different kinds of mines. It’d be cool to have gotten those—but, that’s okay. That the system is good enough for me to want even more of it is a good sign.

And that is our latest Kingdom Hearts game, a project filled with ambition it was only able to partially fulfill. The idea of a wild, nonlinear game with branches you have to bind together is a great one. Unfortunately, it was either unable to make it work or more invested in other storytelling beats, and looking at the game, it’s hard to tell which. But now that it’s over, after five weeks, it’s time to move on. To Disc 2, to the 3DS, and to Kingdom Hearts 3D Dream Drop Distance. That should make for an interesting week.

But for now, I have a Passover Seder to host.

Overall progress: Began and ended Ventus’s campaign in—and by extension, completed the entirety of—Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.

Other games played: