May 8, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 18: The Penned is Nigh

With Kingdom Hearts 3D out of the way, it’s time to move on to the next two experiences of Kingdom Hearts II.8 Final Chapter Prologue, the second collection in the all-encompassing Kingdom Hearts: The Story so Far. Or maybe it’s 2.8. Square and Disney don’t seem sure, so I’ll use the one that combines the Roman and Arabic numerals because that’s more charming. Of course, we’ve still got some unfinished business from last week: discussing 3D’s nutso ending (and making fun of its name. Not sure why I implicitly promised that in the promotional tweet when I knew it wouldn’t come up).

Fair warning, this is a long one, probably the longest article I’ve penned for Source Gaming. That’s because it’s here that I finish the entirety of The Story so Far by covering two entries and another entry’s ending. I’ve cut down where I can, and I’m sorry for the length, but we’ve got ground to cover.

May 1: Watched the Secret Ending of Kingdom Hearts 3D Dream Drop Distance.

I really wanted to get the secret ending on my own. To earn it, not rely on YouTube as I’ve done before. I made sure to answer the three questions correctly, I had already gotten more than the seven PlayStation trophies just by playing the game, and when I failed to unlock the secret message in the ending credits, I went back and did it correctly. Still no dice. I felt disappointed. I was going to have to go back to YouTube. Again.

And then, as if by magic, I wasn’t. I turned the game back on to get the nicknames of my Spirits, perused the Records, and realized I had made a grave misjudgment. See, what I didn’t realize is that Dunderheaded Disney Dustup doesn’t analyze those pointless achievements you get on your PS4. The “trophies” it’s actually concerned with are a set of in-game achievements, all of which demand more than playing at a standard level. I had already gotten five without paying attention, so I played enough to get two more. In total, I got the ones for finishing the story, getting 2,000 Drop Points, defeating 2,500 Dream Eaters, defeating 50 with Reality Shift, making 5,000 munny, linking with my Spirits 50 times, and beating Lord Kyroo, whoever that was.

This is whoever that was.

But I forgot which ones I did today and wanted to remember, so I naturally closed the game without saving, jumped back in, and did them again. It was the Dream Eater and Shift ones. Apparently “Dispatch from the Dive” is just one protracted session of self-imposed challenges.

Anyway, I should write about the plot.

Ignoring good levels and terrible bosses, the ending to Dramatic Deeds of Discipline is a standard issue Kingdom Hearts reveal parade. The test was a trap the whole time; Xehanort and Braig / Xigbar had abducted Sora into a dream that formed both heroes’ levels. Riku saves him by taking on a Nightmare Ventus, thus securing his own promotion to Keyblade Master. While in the dream, Sora finally meets Xion. He sees Roxas, who imparts his memories and teaches Sora that yes, of course Nobodies are real people with feelings who deserve their own sense of self. This makes text the last game’s reason for why Sora is the chosen one: he actually is so pure and shallow that he’s a perfect filter for the needs and desires of everyone around him. That’s why the Keyblade chose him (one of the better bits is Xemnas revealing this to crush his spirit and Sora not being phased at all, because what is better criteria for a hero?). And, once everyone is free, we get the secret ending, that Kairi is going to finally join the plot as a Keyblade wielder. Also, Lea has a Keyblade, too.

Sora being a sentient emotional sink makes him even more of an inverted Xehanort. He collects people’s needs; his archenemy extends himself over others. And that leads into the second or third real secret goal of Organization XIII, which was to make a bunch of depressed vessels with no self-worth that Xehanort could possess. All those claims about Nobodies not being worthy of existence were just lies to facilitate this. That’s the basis of the absurdly titled “Real Organization XIII”: Xehanort to the power of thirteen. But with the Org XIII losers dead and not fit for possession, now the society is staffed by a council of cross-time Xehanorts—and Braig. It reads like a joke that our bad guy is such an overwhelming, suffocating presence that one of him isn’t enough anymore. We have to have… well, it’s not even the full number, solely because the series has only given us about five or six on screen versions.

…Actually… Ansem, Xemnas, Terra-Xehanort, Riku possessed by Ansem, old Xehanort, young Xehanort. Yep, six. Six versions of the same guy at different points in his life, and that’s only the ones we know.

And a fond farewell to Leonard Nimoy in what would be his fifth last role. He was one of this series’ best used celebrity guest stars, and Kingdom Hearts 3D thankfully gave him a lot of scenery to chew in a short time.

Such as it is. These six are among the “thirteen Seekers of Darkness” who will finally, for real, forge the χ-Blade once they fight the “seven Guardians of Light.” Since just… not fighting isn’t an option, nor is protecting the seven Princesses of Heart or, I dunno, using Energybending to take Xehanort’s powers away, that means it’s time for a good old fashion Keyblade War. A war that’ll have Sora, Riku, Mickey Mouse, Aqua, Terra, Ventus, and Kairi all on the front lines. Sure, two of them are out of commission and one is currently on the bad side, but I suppose the other entries will help with that. Still, though, we finally have a setup for the end to the supremely dumb “Dark Seeker Saga.”

Much of this feels rather meta, as though Dubious Duplicate Delegation is trying to answer years of fan complaints. Want Kairi to actually matter? You better believe she’s not gonna be a damsel anymore! Didn’t like how the better female characters let themselves be erased out of existence? We were always planning for Xion and Naminé to come back! Prefer Riku to Sora? Now he’s officially better! Wish Sora had depth? His shallowness is his depth! Hated how the game presented the Nobodies in really dehumanizing terms? Turns out all that weird racist bunk from DiZ and Yen Sid was bunk! One scene with Riku, where he meets the Kingdom Hearts coded version of DiZ, feels especially like it’s throwing a bone to whatever fans that game had amassed.

Other parts are weirder, like the revelation about the “X” motif across the series. It turns out even the letter X can’t just be an X in this series (or a χ), but the “Recusant’s Sigil”: a tool that allows Xehanort to track anyone with an “X” in their name through time. Hence the new costume for Sora with the prominent X. Turning words and images into magic is always a really cool idea, one I wish had been deployed here by a smarter writer with a defter touch. Its silliness is nonetheless quite entertaining, especially after I realized that for Xehanort, “X” is gon’ give it to him.

It swings for the fences a bit more and harder, but what ultimately distinguishes Delightfully Declasse Denouement from this series’ other endings is the lampshading and metatextual stuff. As a series goes on and becomes self-reflexive, that’s inevitable. A conclusion needs its beginning. Stories comment on themselves, and increasingly so the longer they last. And while I don’t think Kingdom Hearts uses it well, nor do I find it adequate substitution for having a well written hero, I’ll take it. Honestly, just having Sora tell Roxas that he deserves his own life was meaningful—and a good rejoinder to all the terrible things DiZ and Yen Sid and Sora himself said back in Kingdom Hearts II. Sometimes, the fans do have it right.

May 2: Began Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, made it to The World Within.

When we ended Dream Drop Distance, we had setup, but also plot threads in need of untangling. The biggest is just how the hell Birth by Sleep’s tragic triptych of Ventus, Terra, and Aqua are gonna get out of their respective heaps o’ trouble. They’re supposed to help counter the villains, but one is zonked out in Castle Oblivion, one has already been drafted for the villain team, and one is trapped in an abyss you can’t escape on your own. And they’ve been this way for ten years. It’s the third hero who takes center stage again in Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, a short title packaged in with Final Chapter Prologue. It’s about Aqua exploring a world of Darkness that has subsumed Cinderella’s Castle of Dreams (and Dwarf Woodlands, too, going by the Magic Mirror and Ventus hallucination).

This is a direct continuation of the “Fragmentary Passage” secret ending to Birth by Sleep, and there’s no context for anyone who didn’t see or achieve it, but the ending also doesn’t matter? Far more of the start is spent on Yen Sid recapping DDD than actually showing Aqua’s experiences. While it’s apparently necessary for understanding Kingdom Hearts III (so anyone who just wants to jump into the new game to see the Pixar characters is outta luck), it’s bad as drama. This needs a character with enough depth to carry a story on their own, and the series lacks one. Turns out, though, that’s beside the point.

That’s because, much like Organization XIII, A fragmentary passage has a secret task: to be a proof of concept for an HD Kingdom Hearts game. While I’ve been playing a selection of HD remasters, they’re still very much games from the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo 3DS. Back in 2017, this was the only installment made for high definition, which is wild. The series started in 2002, the move to HD gaming really got going around four years later, and this is the ninth or tenth major installment. It makes more sense when you recognize how long it spent on portable platforms, but still. AFP also came out in the middle of a relative KH drought caused by the protracted development of Kingdom Hearts III; it was a way to placate fans who wanted a new game, an HD game, a reason to buy the collection (which was, essentially, just Dream Drop Distance and two bonus titles), and some acknowledgment of the last game’s sequel hook. All of this was bundled in what is essentially a tech demo.

And the game is indeed more graphically involved. Models are more detailed, textures are more realistic, and expansive light particles are Aqua’s closest companions. The colors and shading are very pretty. The character models are unfortunately more plasticine, looking more like something from 2009 than 2017. Though the UI does suit 2017 by being pretty awful, thanks to terrible text size. I’ll confess that these are limited reactions, since I’m far better at discussing art direction (which is perfectly nice here, with its creepy, ripped apart town square) than analyzing graphics.

All told, what we have is a perfectly cromulent avenue to bring us into this next phase of the franchise’s existence. The plot’s bad, but I don’t think the series has evolved to a point where it can tell compelling stories in three hour games. The gameplay is a comforting mix of Kingdom Hearts II’s combat and the extra powers of Birth by Sleep. There’s not anything substantially new—the only time that’s been true with a KH sequel I’ve played—but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a proof of concept, just announcing that with the most needlessly extravagant name possible. And that’s fine.

May 3: Completed Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-.

And thus we learn the most important secret Kingdom Hearts had held for fifteen years: Mickey didn’t have a shirt in Kingdom Hearts I because a monster stole it from him.

Also, and I hate to be indelicate about this, what’s up with his mouth?

Fine, there’s some other stuff. Aqua inadvertently reveals Ventus’ location to Terra-Xehanort, and since this is set during KH1, that’s probably the reason Organization XIII ever bothered to go to Castle Oblivion. She and Mickey reconnect, then she sort of… decides that she might as well be the person who helps anyone stuck in the Realm of Darkness (lotta women in Kingdom Hearts like giving up their lives). The meeting between the two is nice, and I do like how it’s plotted. When this game is taking place is kept vague for most of Mickey’s time on screen, so we only suss out that he’s here to close the Door of Darkness near the end. That’s a fun twist.

Unfortunately, the fun twist makes the entire story inert, since it doesn’t have anything to do with the theoretical quest to rescue Aqua. You know, the reason we’re here. Building on her and Mickey’s relationship is nice, but there’s not much else, especially any bridge between Kingdom Hearts “II.8” and Kingdom Hearts III. Our only direct link is Sora getting a new job—learning how to be a true hero from Hercules, as he’s lost his powers thanks to his time asleep—which is dumb. He literally just had an examination arc! What the hell kinda plotting is this?

Going back to what I said yesterday, most of this exists for fans who were excited to finally see these characters in HD—and in the case of Kairi, at all. We get a good first performance by her new English language actress, Alyson Stoner (I doubt that was its intent, but it reminds me of that Pokémon anime special that was made to show off the mediocre new English voice cast who replaced the mediocre old English voice cast). Mickey’s got that weird mouth, Yen Sid’s got a poorly modeled beard, and Donald and Goofy have eyes that don’t move. It’s creepy, but at least they blink! That’s more than Studio Pierrot, the terrible animation studio behind Naruto, Bleach, and the bulk of The Legend of Korra’s Season 2 can say! Of the major players, Sora is shown last; the game even lampshades it. I don’t think you should be allowed to lampshade something you’re being so brazen about. Maybe that should incur fines.

While its new ice skating affectations are nice, the gameplay is interesting only in what it reveals about Kingdom Hearts’ combat. You have KH2 gameplay with “overdrawing” the magic meter, but for most of the game you also fight without sidekicks, the standard of Birth by Sleep and the other handheld games. Healing is a much scarier endeavor when spells share a resource, not charging individually after each use, and there’s no backup, Abilities, or way to buy potions. Vulnerability is a standard presence. That’s furthered by how we’ve moved back from a rolodex of Commands to a full menu of spells, items, and bonus powers. I think the former system is a lot better at letting you experiment than the latter, which has a convenient shortcut system but only four commands for it. It’s easier to stick with one set and never change.

To put it another way, we’re back to the satisfying but less dynamic “X, X, X, and sometimes △” style of fighting (which was always in the later games), just without the partners who make it sing. I’m a bit sad to lose a system that made gravity, sleep, and air magic much more convenient, though I will try to use them more when I get to III. Probably put Cure, Potion, Air, and Thunder or Freeze in my shortcuts. A lot of this will surely be alleviated in the main game; I’ll have Donald and Goofy, more spells, more items, shops to buy them, and presumably Abilities.

Other than that, the gameplay exists to lovingly render areas (warped sections of worlds from Birth by Sleep) or characters (the Heartless) we know. The most notable return was Darkside, the weird giant boss who seems to show up at the start of every other Kingdom Hearts game. In that way, the name’s a perfect fit; he’s like another stylish bad guy who never knows when he’s not wanted:

And that is the Kingdom Hearts III demo that is Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-! While certainly not the best Kingdom Hearts, it is the most innocuous. A soupçon of KH, if you will.

May 4: Watched Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover.

Even though it’d probably be easier to pace this out and watch it later, I think it was smarter to get it over with now. It’s easier to do the optional studies of stuff like Union χ—and I do love studying optional stuff—when I’ve already watched Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover.

What is Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover, you ask? Well, it’s a film made for the Kingdom Hearts Final Chapter Prologue collection, like A fragmentary passage. And it’s actually a film this time, not just a cutscene compilation like Re: coded or 358/2 Days. It’s an adaptation of not so much the plot but the premise of Kingdom Hearts χ, a still-ongoing web browser game that started in 2013. The “back cover” of χ‘s dust jacket, if you will. Game’s pretty weird: initially exclusive to Japan (future revamps of it were localized), free from the Sony / Nintendo dedicated gaming hardware ecosystem, largely its own thing, and yet critical to the plot. Unlike the prequels we’ve seen that were set a year or ten in the past, it and the movie go all the way back to the world before the Keyblade War, the one that would get broken and separated into slight recreations of Disney movies. There’s no Sora, no Xehanort, only Daybreak Town and its “Master of Masters.”

This enigmatic, capricious scholar lives in his perfect kingdom with six disciplines, all but one of whom have animal masks: Captain Unicorn, Snake Lady, Bear Necessities, Jaguar XJ220, Foxhound, and Secret Final Member. There are also some kid characters who represent the game’s players, but they don’t matter. These “Foretellers” use Keyblades to protect the unseen but active Kingdom Hearts. They know the Keyblade War is coming and, like the Norse Gods of old, strive to hold off the apocalypse. To this end, they form “unions”—not the cool kind of unions the games industry could use more of but private child armies—of Keyblade wielders who answer only to them, one of which you join when you start the game. Now that’s a… lot on its own, but each disciple also has a special task, one the Master has entrusted them with before his conspicuous and forewarned disappearance.

But wait! Someone is a traitor! Is it Ira, the unicorn mask whose task is to lead the Fortellers? Invi, the snake mask whose task is to spy on everyone? Aced, the bear mask whose task is to be the right hand man? Ava, the fox mask whose task is to prepare a secret union to send across the cosmos after the war ends in defeat? Gula, the jaguar mask whose task is to take a lost page of their religious text, look for an ill-defined “sigil,” and snuff out the traitor? Luxu, the one with the Organization XIII black cloak, the “Recusant’s Sigil” in their name, and whose task is to move an evil box and Keyblade to what will obviously become the Keyblade Graveyard? Or is it the Master of Masters himself, who wears the same cloak and who I pegged as the traitor in the first scene it came up?

Commendably, the identity of the traitor (if there ever was one—I haven’t budged from my theory that the Master turned them against each other) is never explicitly stated. It’s ultimately not important. The plot is just a thing to get these characters at each other’s throats and explain exactly how the war even started at all. People distrusted each other and had fundamentally different ideas about the world, so it didn’t matter if there was any agent of the Darkness. Do we follow a leader who was deliberately vague and unhelpful after he’s gone? Do we make choices that reflect how the world changes? How do we handle catastrophes whose approaches are out of our control?

These are interesting questions, which is why it’s a shame that the only interesting character is the Master of Masters. After a series chock-full of boring wizened men, here’s one who acts young. He cracks jokes, plays with half-truths, and is bored by his own tired proclamations. He’s hip youth pastor Yoda—fitting for Kingdom Hearts, which follows the Tao of Star Wars (and for you Jedi in the audience, happy Star Wars Holiday Day). Everyone else is boring, while he feels new in a way I haven’t felt from a Kingdom Hearts character since… Pete in KH2, maybe? His absence will presumably be dealt with in the new “Lost Master Saga,” but for now it perked up what is a fairly rote movie.

The jaunty Master of Masters flummoxing his successor Ira.

Of the three Kingdom Hearts cinematic experiences, χ Back Cover is by far the most coherent (it had damn well better be, given that it was, you know, made to be a movie). The Unreal 4 engine A fragmentary passage used allows smoother graphics, but the graphics are also used to make scenes, not just cutscenes, of a single story. There’s no static blocks of narration. Unlike the bloated 358/2 Days, the runtime is a smooth sixty minutes. It even does that fun trick where the movie embeds chapter titles into the environment, which was cool enough that I went back and looked for the ones I missed. Outside of one bizarre scene with a stand-in for a player character, there’s no sign that it ever came from a game. Kingdom Hearts finally expanded into multimedia storytelling, which is an avenue worth pursuing. The plot may not be good, but it’s told as clearly and professionally as I’ve ever seen from this series by a substantial margin.

It’s still a Kingdom Hearts movie. There’s an awful opening montage that pairs barely legible writing with footage of the stunningly ugly Kingdom Hearts χ. The characters are boring, so the decay of their relationships isn’t thrilling. It concludes with this non-ending that only gestures at a worse tragedy to come. I’m also unclear of exactly what I needed to grok from this. There are the obvious McGuffins in Luxu’s box and Keyblade—the latter has the Master of Masters’ eye, just like the cycloptic swords Xehanort and Riku use—but characters? Not sure what they’re saying about the game I’ll be playing next week. As with A fragmentary passage, I fear the “point” of the exercise may have gone over my head.

This is less important, but Aced, the brash and proud Foreteller who is positioned as the initial obvious suspect, is voiced by Travis Willingham. It’s fun because Travis is a very good actor. He’s not amazing here (shocking no one familiar with Kingdom Hearts acting), but it still works, since he’s playing someone near his best role, Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist, but ends up closer to his second-best role, Knuckles from the Sonic Boom cartoon:

In other acting news, we’ve got Matt Mercer, which means I can make fun of There Will Be Brawl, his embarrassingly, cosmically atrocious Super Smash Bros. Brawl fan miniseries from way back when. That was the era when The Escapist was the one trying to branch out, producing crap like Ninjak Vs. the Valiant Universe. A friend of mine who is a longtime fan of Valiant Comics showed me that one a few years ago, probably because we had both suffered through Mercer’s series months earlier. They’re both terrible, but the product of his nostalgia is slightly less terrible than the product of mine.

May 5: Didn’t play.

And here, to stand and be counted, are my teammates from Dream Drop Distance and their totally rockin’ nicknames. Not all of them were helpful, or even used once, but they did exist.

Cadillac (MewWow)
Batusi (Komory Bat)
Spiker (Pricklemane)
SheerDelite (Tama Sheep)
Pois(on) (Toximander)
Heb and Haw (Hebby Repp)
S. PINNER (Wheeflower)
Yo, Low (Yoggy Ram)
What Seems (Peepsta Hoo)
slime TIME (Escarglow)
HUH! (Woeflower)
Fish Katsu (Fin Fatale)
BIGUGLYCLON (Jestabocky)
StreetHorse (Tatsu Steed)
Hi Froggy (Sir Kyroo)
Punch (Kooma Panda)
Sir Eatalot (Chef Kyroo)
B&B Seal (R & R Seal)
Chompéd (Fishboné)
XeroX (Cyber Yog)
BURNiNATOR (Tatsu Blaze)
Earful (Me Me Bunny)
Darn Cat (Necho Cat)
BEAKS! (Eaglider)
Who Are You (Staggerceps)
QUACKQUACK! (Tubguin Ace)
Chick & Egg (Ducky Goose)
Trifactor (Cera Terror)
…IN F-14! (Tyranto Rex—this one was my favorite)

I really get why Sora was so excited to be able to jump back into the dream world in the epilogue. The monsters are really fun. Way better than the Heartless.

May 6: Watched a few cutscenes of Kingdom Hearts χ.

It’s a boring looking game, you know. I understand why Kingdom Hearts χ would look the way it does—it’s cheaper, less taxing, and definitely better for allowing player customization—but still.

I had intended to more seriously dive into this still-updating mobile game, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing onto which I could hold. It’s all the weird faction premise, with not much of a world outside that. Its most interesting feature, the art style, is also its worst. It’s so odd that this of all things is so central to the underlying mysteries of Kingdom Hearts.

May 7: Didn’t play.

Final Thoughts: First thing’s first: I never want a chapter in this series to ever be this long again. This whole thing is ten pages! Will this happen again? Probably not, just because I was handling three separate installments and (extremely light) research for a fourth. Hopefully not. I mentioned this months ago, but this series was always intended to be short, only about three pages a week. It was a nice side dish that would never take the place of heartier games criticism, but “Dispatch from the Dive” has become a big project for me. Certainly my second-biggest for Source Gaming, only behind the seventy-one “Fighter’s Spirit” scripts I wrote last year. And while I write these at a much more casual level than my standard, it’s not as though they don’t take a lot of editing work—editing I have to do on my own due to the tight weekly schedule. That’s not a complaint; it’s just a lot.

Despite all that writing, this was a pretty dull week. The gameplay of A fragmentary passage was fine, the Dream Drop Distance revelations that I saw last week were entertaining, the Master of Masters was fun, but that’s kinda it. As it turns out, it’s very hard to create good art that exists to tide people over or pump them up for other art. I don’t want to say that you can’t do origins or prequels or flashbacks (χ Back Cover made me think of the much better “Evergreen,” the amazing Adventure Time episode that exposes the beginning of the show’s entire world). But Kingdom Hearts struggles with them, because its strengths are not in plotting or stories or character revelations. Its strengths are in motion. And limiting that motion to these plodding “2.8” baby steps is tiring. I remember KH fans being agitated with these back when they came out, and I think I understood why then in a general sense, but I get it a lot more now.

This is what a lot of players were excited to see. They wanted to go back to Aqua, but they also wanted to see their favorites really evolve graphically. And sadly, it’s not a great evolution.

So. I’ve completed the “final chapter prologue” for the end of a trilogy of trilogies, that first trilogy of which is itself composed of about eleven or twelve main parts. I’ve read asinine title after asinine title for games that are rather diverse in quality. With this out of the way… what are my hopes for Kingdom Hearts III?

I’d like to see some new ideas with the combat. It doesn’t need to do them, and if the last game I played is any indication, it’ll largely be a return to Kingdom Hearts II, but some good, substantial innovations could do wonders. I’d like to see the Disney worlds use their characters more effectively, since that dropped off a cliff after KH2. More Disney characters in general, really, and leveraging them better against the original villains. Villains who don’t wear the black cloak; it’s a great costume, maybe Tetsuya Nomura’s best, but it is overplayed.

More than anything, though, I want KH3 to be much better about using everything. Kingdom Hearts I, II, Chain of Memories, Birth by Sleep, and Dream Drop Distance all have pretty wildly different strengths. Some are better with storytelling, some with gameplay, some with specific kinds of gameplay. But while I’d place KH2 as the best overall, there is not one I would highlight as Kingdom Hearts in excelsis. Their flaws are all too strong. I want to see a Kingdom Hearts game that manages to pull together every mechanical and narrative and artistic strength the series has. I don’t like making a request that big; I don’t like making requests I know are unreasonable. But if III manages it, it’d be quite the coup.