April 24, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 16: Sora. Riku. They’re Cops

After five weeks with Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, the prequel that dramatically, only sort of revealed the story of Kingdom Hearts is done! We’re done! That means we can move on from Disc 1 of Kingdom Hearts: The Story so Far to Disc 2, charmingly titled Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. Because we all need a laugh. But, much like the hero Sora, we will be marching only forward, never back. Goodbye, Disc 1! Bon voyage!

April 17: Went back to the Mirage Arena as Terra; got Xehanort Report 5.

HA! You probably thought I was really done with Birth by Sleep, didn’t you? Well, dramatic pause, I’m not, and you were wrong the whole time! Wolfman Jew wins again! Muhuhahahaha!

…There’s a few things I still need to do, namely to finally read more of those secret reports. I ignored the ones from coded and 358/2 Days, since it didn’t feel important to read bonus content from chopped up movies (you probably had to search high and low for them in the original games, but you can’t really do that for a movie—at least, not since the days of weird secret DVD menus). But, before I go on and switch discs, I should read them.

Also, I need to really finish Birth by Sleep. Nantenjex mentioned that I actually still have a final, small fourth ending campaign, and the only way to get it is to get all the Xehanort papers. Fortunately, all I needed was one. The fifth report is the reward for beating the fourth level of the Mirage Arena, and that’s just what I did. I’d do more, but as I mentioned, I’m literally hosting an online Seder in less than two hours and, not being religious, am slightly nervous about how well I’ll do. So tomorrow will be mostly about dramatic revelations.

April 18: Completed the Final Chapter of Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, read some of the reports from Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.

By the way, the Seder? It was perfect. Next year in the same room!

This final sequence of Birth by Sleep has two values—three if you count the fact that it works better when the two Aqua stories are at opposite ends, once again proving I was right with how I did the campaigns. The simpler one is that, by putting me into her shoes once more, I could play as Aqua with even more proficiency. A few minutes of grinding back at Coliseum gave me access to Magic Hour, a phenomenally cool move that’s sort of a vertical Sonic Blade. The grinding also helped me deal with the challenging final battle against Terra-Xehanort. I also got to add her Double-Jump, something I must have forgotten to do last time.

But narratively, it manages to actually provide a greater degree of context. Ventus never had a deep historic connection with Sora; his spirit just lives in the kid’s body, which is presumably why Roxas looks and sounds like him. Xehanort didn’t skip out on Ansem and become an old Keyblade master before betraying him; the “Terra-Xehanort” was Fake Ansem all along, and old goateed Xehanort is just hopping bodies like he’s in Get Out. And Aqua does live up to her accomplishment by actually standing as a Keyblade Master, turning the Land of Departure into Castle Oblivion, and sacrificing herself to an eternity of darkness to save Terra’s possessed body. Kinda like how Naminé and Xion both sacrificed themselves so that more boring guy characters could live, but I do think it worked better here. She has more of a choice in it.

I also made sure to actually read all the Xehanort Reports from this game, as well as a bunch of diary entries from 358/2 Days for good measure (coded has none, which I do find funny. It’s too anemic even for the baseline of stock video game storytelling). I didn’t read many of the latter, just because there’s so many of them and they didn’t add much that wasn’t already in the main text. But yep, the Birth by Sleep ones are pretty important! That’s where we learn that Terra really was just a chump all along meant as a quick replacement body, not fit even to really seduce to the Darkness or help forge the χ-Blade. It adds a lot to his actual story, with which I had a lot of trouble with for its wishy-washy heel turn plot, though it’d have been nice for that to have percolated into the cutscenes we got. Xehanort still remains the bloviating old man he apparently always was, but this does add flavor. If nothing else, his “thing” being body stealing means he’s taking after the Ultra-Humanite, the world’s first supervillain.

However, we’ve got a bit more to do than just that. See, every Kingdom Hearts game has has secret bonus endings beyond something like this final chapter, and all of them provide oblique hints for the next chapter. I’ve largely been ignoring them to get the more “casual” or “standard” player’s perspective, but today I got a bit of helpful yet frightening advice. It seems I’m now going to have to watch these secret endings from this game going forward to get the full plot, and can I just say that that isn’t how secret bonus endings and cutscenes should work? It’d be like if you were only allowed to see the end of Only Murders in the Building after drawing a floor plan of the apartment complex. If you treat a feature like it’s secret and special, getting it should be special, not expected or demanded—especially not when it’s meant to affect your experience with the next game more than the one you’re playing.

There are two final sequences in Birth by Sleep: “Blank Points” and “A Fragmentary Passage” (not to be confused with the other Fragmentary Passage in the Kingdom Hearts collection that is a direct sequel to this, once again, secret ending). I momentarily considered just trying to do all of the requirements at once, things like getting all the treasures and stickers and optional crap—all of which is waved aside if you play on the hard difficulties, which, fair—but I can’t. I have to start Dream Drop Distance tomorrow; it’d be absurd not to. This means it’s time for the old Wolfman standby of watching Kingdom Hearts cutscenes on YouTube! Here are the video I chose:

Well, technically, I also watched this, as I only realized upon starting the embedded one that it also featured “Blank Points,” but the above video gives you everything you need.

The first half is tease after tease, hence the “Blank” in “Blank Points.” Eraqus is possessing Terra, too, and that’s why he’s staving off the worse kind of bodily possession! Braig is setting himself up as Terra-Xehanort’s main goon again! Aqua meets a possibly (not) amnesiac Ansem! He does the stupid title drop! Then he doesn’t say Sora’s name, but Naminé does! We get a reminder that Xion existed! And thus, it reveals the point of Birth by Sleep, which is that Sora is the ultimate vessel of everyone’s hopes and dreams. Everyone says his name, even if by all accounts they couldn’t know it, and I guess that’s really the idea. That this game was a drama of characters good and bad looking for the right guy, failing to find him or failing to be him, only too late realizing that it was this affable numbskull from Destiny Islands all along.

“A Fragmentary Passage” is set somewhere in between one of the epilogues (the “0.5” position, to be specific, as I roll my eyes). It’s a full-on gameplay epilogue after the prior gameplay epilogue, which makes it feel both unnecessary and more important. It’s actual gameplay! That matters. We’re still playing Aqua, as is right—both narratively and in her being better than the other two—just now in the Realm of Darkness. It gives her the privilege of getting to fight the Heartless, also known as the one good enemy type of Kingdom Hearts, and in the grossly overpowering numbers they had in KH1 and 2. It was really nice seeing a lot of these moves I didn’t use; a few of them looked extremely cool. And then, after beating a bland boss, she discovers… the Castle of Dreams??? As a preview for “Volume Two” of Birth by Sleep—and I kinda hope that the smaller side game is that volume two and we’re not stuck waiting until 2025 for Kingdom Hearts: Fellini SaTERRAcon or whatever—that is enjoyably bonkers.

This still doesn’t quite solve a lot of my issues. In the final analysis, it’s the plot points that matter more than the characters, which is not great. It’s still hard to really feel like the main trio really means that much, and I don’t feel like Sora needs this kind of buildup over, say, more significant character development or better writing. And really, more than any other takeaway, what I’ve learned over the past two days isn’t related to the plot or the themes, but that I’m gonna need to get serious about getting these secret endings. I’m only going to play on Standard Mode, not higher (I don’t trust any dang difficulty spikes in these games), which means I’m going to have to do much more when it comes to getting collectibles and secrets. Fortunately, the design of these games does mean I’ll probably be able to just get what I need by focusing on the bonuses at the end. Later in the week, I’ll also take a look at a secret scene from Kingdom Hearts II that was recommended to me; it’s apparently helpful for Terra’s story.

This also means one awesome thing that I can finally, dramatically reveal: I never used the D-Link summons! Maybe once, but only half-heartedly! I flagrantly ignored an entire aspect of the game! And I’ve tried not to do that throughout this series, but I didn’t mind one bit! You can’t get me for this!

April 19: Began Kingdom Hearts 3D Dream Drop Distance, explored some of Traverse Town as Sora and Riku.

Of all the Kingdom Hearts experiences I knew about when starting this project, Dream Drop Distance was the one that interested me the least. It’s the gaming equivalent of an anime training arc; Sora and Riku have to prove themselves yet again worthy of becoming Keyblade Masters. And I am familiar with at least part of the premise, which is that some of this test involves experiencing their old adventures. That’s… not really compelling, especially since we’ve already done this twice, and it just makes me think of that RiffTrax joke about how Harry Potter’s word is worth squat until he saves his stupid school a fourth time.

With that in place and my expectations measured, so far it’s been at the very least inoffensive. You’ve got the standard Kingdom Hearts silliness, like Riku not noticing that he’s shrunk by at least a foot to go from his KH2 to KH1 body, that helps the proceedings. Our “Final Fantasy” characters this time hail from Nomura’s cult classic The World Ends with You, and while it’d be nice to see this series use more Square Enix characters he didn’t make, it does expand who can appear in this crossover. Along with them, we’ve got a new parade of generic enemies in Dream Eaters, creatures that live in the dreams of sleeping worlds. They’re a lot more colorful and cute than the other enemy types, largely because you can team up with them. In an enjoyable bit of monster catching, Sora and Riku can create and befriend some of them for allies and sources of new powers. In that way, these low rent Pokémon / Personae can be your own, possibly better, Donald and Goofy, but in a way that also expands on the command system from the last game.

On that note, the game itself feels both very iterative and very different in a way that I’m enjoying. We still have the system where our heroes go through the rolodex of commands, but instead of getting a billion commands and trying to mix them, the mixing is what gets you the spirits, and raising the spirits gets you the commands and abilities. It’s a bit more deliberate that way (even though I got a copy of a spirit I already had while trying to create my fourth unique one, leading me to quit the game rather than waste the money I’d spent on materials). I’ve already managed to get Cure from the very first spirit I got, a mix between a cow and a helicopter I’ve named “Cadillac,” and it has access to the other healing spells, too. I probably prefer the simplicity of the melding from Birth by Sleep, but this is a neat innovation.

Here it is: Meow Wow. I’ve also got Pricklemane, Komory Bat, Tama Sheep, Toximander, Hebby Repp, Yoggy Ram… but my nicknames are better.

Another notable thing about the game how open it is when it comes to flashbacks, “previously on” segments, and tutorials. There are a lot of them, and DDD (a weird in-joke about 3DS games having “3D” in their title) is always happy to offer them up or let you ignore them. Some of these interludes are things like full-on tutorials for entirely new mechanics, some of them are light recaps, and some of them are entirely new bits of story that probably shouldn’t be relegated to a side thing. The tutorials are helpful, and I suppose using them like this is a good way for returning players to ignore them. But I think it’d just be better to have the story sequences just part of the narrative and not pigeonholed in this way; there’s already a button to skip them anyway.

The biggest feature, though, is its main gimmick, one of which I was blissfully unaware. So I know there are two campaigns, one with Sora and one with Riku. What I did not know was that they are actually one in the same. It’s a multiversal buddy cop comedy! They’re Starsky & Hutch, McMillan & Wife, Hart to Hart, Laverne & Shirley, but in two different planes of the same reality! You can manually switch between the two characters, but you also have a time limit that sends you to the other one after a point. While this might be irritating later when I’d prefer to just be one character for a while, and it’s possible that you can just get around it by Dropping into the other person immediately, it’s very cool. In a way, it’s a more exploratory use of character switching than what we got in NieR: Automata—not that I’m saying it’s a better game than NieR: Automata (I am not). You have to deal with time, though the limit is pretty generous. I know because I spent like ten minutes as Sora in the inexplicable factory below Traverse Town, repeatedly doing the same platforming challenges because I’m still acclimating to the new movement powers…

…Well, I guess that’ll be the topic for tomorrow.

April 20: Completed Traverse Town (Sora and Riku), entered La Cité des Cloches (Sora and Riku).

To be honest, I’m not sure I really have that much to talk about the context-sensitive movement additions. There’s quite a bit of them, from tossing barrels to pole dancing to grinding on zip-lines or rails, and it’s mostly fine. It often feels like these keep trying to find reasons for them to exist, but it’s not bad. In fact, it’s good to have more ways to move and fight in these games, which do tend to often fall back on whacking things with your plastic-looking stick. So let’s just jump into the level.

You know, I think Kelsey would make a good Xehanort, too.

I was excited to come to La Cité des Cloches, the setting of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I’m not sure why they don’t just call it Notre Dame or Paris; at least the Land of Dragons was an actual land, not just one Chinese city). Amongst the standard animated Disney films, and the stories they use for inspiration, it’s one for which I had a certain fondness. Part of it is that I identify with characters like Quasimodo, this tragic figure who is feared, dehumanized, but also able to live in a cool church with talking gargoyles. Primarily, though, I like its concentrated aura of darkness and pain. It’s unusual for Disney; they’re generally uncomfortable with stories where the hero is physically disabled, the girl goes with some other guy, and the villain is, well…

I knew he was going to appear, and of course he would, but it’s still astonishing seeing Judge Frollo—Disney’s most scary, monstrous, and well-realized villain—talking to Sora. In Hunchback, he’s a theocrat, a racist, an abusive guardian of Quasimodo, but also horny in an unhealthy way. He wants to have sex with a woman from a race he despises and brutalizes, probably because she’s from a race he despises and brutalizes, and he hates himself for wanting her and her for rejecting him. It only inflames his bigotry, and since he has unchallenged authority, he can make that bigotry law. Frollo commits genocide, and not in the “Xemnas needs Sora to mass murder weird insect creatures so he can open up a magical world of light” way. He persecutes and tries to eradicate a real, actual ethnic group that has survived many acts of persecution and genocide. France had (and if we’re being fair, still has) plenty of real life Frollos. Every country does.

Naturally (and justifiably), a series as sexless as Kingdom Hearts is not going to touch Frollo’s sexuality, which means we have to lean on his racism. Which, unfortunately, leads to a lot of scenes where he, Esmeralda, Phoebus (played by Phil LaMarr; I’d know that Green Lantern / Samurai Jack / Hermes Conrad voice anywhere), and Riku regularly use a particular ethnic slur for Romani people. Oof. Another feature is that instead of just being a monster of his own volition, he’s clearly infected by the Darkness. He’s got that black and purple evil cloud, Sora thinks he’s under the influence, but more than that, it just fits how the series handles a lot of its villains. It’s just potentially problematic here, since Frollo’s goals are atrocities more realistic than “kill skeleton to take over Halloween” or “be evil genie.”

More positively, though, I love the setting and music; Medieval Paris is gorgeous—way nicer than Beast’s Castle, our last sojourn to France—and the music is excellent. That’s actually tied to my favorite aspect of new Traverse Town as well: it has a remix of its theme. Constantly hearing the same themes was a big bugbear of mine by the last game, and as if from out of the blue, here’s Dream Drop Distance giving me just what I wanted! But really, it’s just one aspect of what makes me like the score. Birth by Sleep’s score wasn’t bad or anything, but this really feels like the next audio step the series needed to take after Kingdom Hearts II. There’s a great bit of bombast and energy to each piece, almost as though it’s ushering us into the next stage of the story.

April 21: Continued exploring La Cité des Cloches.

Because it’s a big level! So far Paris seems like it’s the largest level in any Kingdom Hearts game just by physical size, which is crazy given that I’m going through it twice at once. I believe I’m getting near the boss fights for both Sora and Riku. One of the odd bits so far has been that Sora’s gauge for how long until I switch to the other character seems to go down quicker than Riku’s, but he also seems to gain levels and experience faster.

I did a bit of playing last night, mostly grinding to improve my spirits and get new abilities. I had been under the impression that Sora and Riku shared the latter, but that’s not the case; they get the abilities that get unlocked during their session. That’s gonna make things a lot more complicated, as Sora already has Magic Haste at Level 3 and Riku not at all, and it means I’m probably gonna have to keep a separate journal to figure out how to most efficiently give the two the right number of abilities. To be honest, of all the new stuff in this game, a lot hasn’t been super well explained.

I didn’t mention it earlier amidst all of the other, more immediate things happening, but it’s a bit nonsense that we have another bad guy in that black cloak, and that he also looks pretty much exactly like Fake Ansem / Terra-Xehanort.

April 22: Completed La Cité des Cloches (Sora and Riku), entered The Grid (Sora and Riku).

I’m glad I was wrong about Frollo, and it’s interesting that Sora and Riku have separate but similar stories. I was also assuming their stories would match up, with Bad Cop Riku and Good Cop Sora influencing the main cast from different planes of reality, but they are just similar retellings. That’s less narratively interesting, but clearer. It also now seems that our villains are a team-up of all the Kingdom Hearts bad guys Sora knows, meaning that we’ve got at least two Ansems and a Vanitas—who Sora never fought but is keeping a prisoner inside his mind. It’s kind of a perfect symbol of how much Xehanort has just dominated this story.

But that’ll be for later. For now, I’m in The Grid, the new update to Space Paranoids based on Tron: Legacy. Fred Tasticiore is our big star for this journey as a bored soundalike of (an apparently also bored) Jeff Bridges. I had been under the impression that Dream Drop Distance had managed to score Jeff as one of their poorly directed celebrity cameos, so that was a bit of a disappointment. So far, it’s very much the same digital world from Kingdom Hearts II, complete with ugly neon, worse cyberpunk bikes, and terminology that goes unexplained. The latter of which is something that works better when The Wire does it.

It was today that the Memento system—the one that provides optional tutorials, flashbacks, and recaps—began to really snarl. Specifically, it’s the written recaps that are the problem. I’ve read the two that cover Birth by Sleep and 358/2 Days, and it’s amazing how lifeless the script makes them. I’ve complained in the past about how Kingdom Hearts makes no effort to help newcomers, and this is clearly done to help newcomers. But they’re boring and uninteresting, and they provide no real context for the first-time Dream Drop Distance player. I mean, you’re new to Kingdom Hearts, you want to jump in, and now you get a weird report on these three characters from a prequel who Sora and Riku don’t even know? Honestly, they read as though they’re made to remind longtime fans of plot points. The flashbacks aren’t much better, since they’d be better served as just cutscenes, but this olive branch is the bigger problem.

The Diving, the replacement of the Gummi Ships, is bad as well. It’s pretty much a lateral move from the Gummi Ship sections, with confusing movement and unsatisfying timed boss fights. Actually, I think they might be worse, just easier.

April 23: Watched Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix’s “Lingering Will” secret boss fight.

This was the video recommended to me:

It’s a bonus boss: the remainder of Terra’s mind from the end of Birth by Sleep that you can only get after getting the Birth by Sleep ending teaser. It’s a cool fight to watch, though I’m not unhappy at all for having missed it entirely—those seventeen health bars are a lot. It’s insane how Kingdom Hearts gates stuff like this behind optional, easily missable, and very hard fights. I mean, even Elden Ring lets you skip the vast majority of bosses and a huge number of areas for each ending. Fortunately, it’s not really important; it just shows how Terra’s will has fallen into guarding this dead land forever.

This isn’t narratively or mechanically important, but this is the first time I’ve seen Donald and Goofy with significant roles in over a month. Kinda makes me sad I never bothered to use them in any of these headers. Also makes it clear how far they’ve fallen in stature since the beginning.

What I find most interesting about this can be seen in the title; this was added to the Final Mix remaster of KH2, and was not in the original version. Of course it couldn’t be in the original version. It features a character from a game that came out years later. It’s just one of several direct references—or previews—KH2 Final Mix made to games that came out before it, but after the original KH2. This seems true with most of the remasters to the series’ earlier entries. Isn’t that weird? These games are rebuilt with the partial purpose of being more narratively or thematically connected. It’s like how my collection places 358/2 Days before KH2, despite the fact that it only really makes sense as a prequel starring characters you’ve already met and seen in KH2.

I’m not a fan of this. It feels too… “retcon-y,” in a way, too aggressive about connecting everything. It alters the experiences of these games, almost to the point where you’re basically playing remakes. My guess it that it stems from a desire to make sure that the series’ convoluted plot is aggressively interconnected, but maybe it’s okay that Kingdom Hearts’ story is just dumb? I don’t think that these “legitimize” the narrative, and I really don’t think they make it stronger or clearer. They’re just weird, like the Star Wars Special Editions, and every one of these winking continuity nods feels like it exists for preexisting fans and not anyone new. Which only further exacerbates the problem of how this series treats its newcomers.

This should’ve probably been used for the title and header, but… eh. I’m very attached to Sonny Rikrocket and Tubbsora.

Final Thoughts: At this early going, the most important thing so far is, naturally, the buddy act Sora and Riku have going on (despite the fact that they can’t interact). Narratively, it’s an extension of their entire relationship; they’re doing the same things and going to the same places at the same time. Thematically, the episodic structure seems even more set in stone, since there’s not even the loose argument of them not being sure where they are in the Ocean Between. Gameplay-wise, and this isn’t a complaint, they aren’t different enough to be considered that unique. But this weird rubber band they have is neat. It’s a hurdle that’s controlling, and as we keep going I’ll have to decide as to whether it’s too controlling, not enough, or just right.

I’m sure this’ll be different over time, but so far nothing’s really able to fully rival it. Not the Spirits, not the characters—especially not fake Jeff Bridges—and not even the super-sized worlds. Of course they can’t. This is a fairly decent leap mechanically, even with the many old systems it’s using. I’m looking forward to seeing more of it. The story might be dumb, the worlds might be a bit too large, but so far it’s been fun to tinker with its bells and whistles.

Overall progress: Burst into Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance and watched some other stuff.

Other games played: