May 29, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 21: Every Plot Everywhere All at Once

Last week, I played through about four worlds of Kingdom Hearts III. I played every day, too. That was the first week for this series where I did—though it was only the third if you count watching Kingdom Hearts content as the same as playing it. Which you should, and I do, because there sure was a lot of it. Since January, I had to watch a playthrough of a whole game, three cutscene compilations, and a movie. Carefully, too, as every bit is considered just as narratively important as the parts where I’m uncovering world-shaking conspiracies or hanging out with Simba from The Lion King.

And Chapter 20 wasn’t just a series of quick bites (or “Quibi,” if you will, referring to the incompetent mobile TV lovechild of former Disneym’n Jeffrey Katzenberg). Each session last week took hours; some of the sessions went on as long as those cutscene compilations. And even then, I only managed to complete four of the major Disney worlds. But that just leaves three more: Frozen, Pirates of the Caribbean, Big Hero 6, as well as any theoretical original worlds. I’m sure we’ll be spending at least some time back at the Keyblade Graveyard.

May 22: Didn’t play.

I actually kinda wanted to, but no. Again, I played every single day last week and thought it was important to step away. So instead of jumping into Arendelle, I spent the day in a weird funk as I effectively went cold turkey.

But since I’m here, I wish the truly awful fake Instagram posts the game uses for loading screens…

From tomorrow’s play session. I do wonder what #dosomethingdonald would look like as a trend on Kingdom Hearts Instagram?

…Came from more characters. It’s not just Sora who publishes them; Riku, Donald, Mickey, Kairi, and Ienzo have them too. But theirs are just as idiotic and suspiciously read like the same person wrote them. We need different kinds of people on Fake Social Media. Especially the villains. Like, it’d be really fun if one of the loading screens was something like this:

If you haven’t played Mass Effect 3—and if you are a Source Gaming reader, you statistically have not—you get this e-mail late in the game. It’s sent by a villain named Kai Leng, who the game thinks is exceptionally threatening but is actually exceptionally nonthreatening. This message is supposed to be scary and depressing and crushing, a kick in the teeth while the story’s near its bleakest. But… just read it. It’s hilarious! It’s so stupid! He… he literally signs it with his initials, like you’re bros! The villain comes off as a petulant, angst teen (which he is, no matter what the game thinks), and it oddly gives ME3 a more positive kind of kick than it’s intending. Instead of a gut punch, it’s a bit of much-needed levity.

I want this game to have that. Every Kingdom Hearts original villain is like Kai Leng: smug, overbearing, not nearly as intimidating as they’re meant to be, and at best occasionally amusing for how badly they measure up to their reputation. Sometimes, they’re more silly (Xigbar, Vanitas), but let’s be real. If you’ve seen a bad anime villain threaten Ichigo or Naruto—and their villains are all bad—you’ve seen everything Organization XIII has to offer. Just like how the main cast needs a Garak, Org XIII needs a Dio Brando, a Magneto, an Ice King; even a single Lupin III character would give it so much juice. People to offset the constant stream of vague philosophical threats. And if we can’t have those kinds of fun overarching villains, the game should at least be willing to mock the ones we have. God knows it’s aggressively meta as it is.

Also, please don’t take this image and assume Mass Effect 3 is all this. It’s a really good game! Definitely check out Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

March 23: Entered Arendelle, explored up to the Valley of Ice.

Perhaps I was too hard on Corona.

I’ve talked before about an issue I’ve had with Kingdom Hearts and how it functions as a crossover. For various reason—both creative and executive demands—the stories it tells are often recreations of Disney movies (the worlds that avoid this, like Halloween Town or Toy Box, are almost universally better for it). That’s why Sora and the player usually only join the plot by crash landing midway into it. But sometimes, this goes further, and the games recreate scenes from the movies themselves that fail to account for Sora. At best, it’s simply a poor bit of nostalgia bait that goes on for too long. At worst, you get to see worse acted, worse animated versions of scenes you’ve theoretically already seen. Corona was firmly in the former, and it did its job well, but this should not be the standard. It turns the game into an advertisement, but for something you’re expected to have already experienced. And fitting for snowy Arendelle, sometimes the people without that experienced get left out in the cold.

And yet, even the most egregious of those scenes at least advanced the plot. That cannot be said for the needlessly extravagant musical number in which Elsa, queen of Arendelle and mascot of Frozen, sings “Let It Go” while Sora watches from afar, mouth agape.

It was probably inevitable that 2013’s most inescapable song was gonna wind up in these games as more than just the inspiration for background music. It was, like everything in Frozen, downright epochal for the culture. And Kingdom Hearts certainly has an interest in doing weird, impromptu music videos; that’s how it starts every game. But, having listened to it for possibly the first time (or at least, the first time where it wasn’t playing quietly in the background of a New Brunswick Mexican restaurant circa 2015), I’m… kinda nonplussed? It’s a perfectly fine Disney song, but nothing special, certainly no “Friends on the Other Side” or “La Llorona” or “What’s This?”*

* Or “Gaston” or “Friend Like Me” or “Part of Your World” or “Mother Knows Best” or that song that got cut from The Emperor’s New Groove or…

While previous moments like this—Barbossa doing the “you like ghost stories” bit from Pirates of the Caribbean, Flynn and Rapunzel’s meeting in Tangled—established plot points by simply redoing them, this doesn’t even do that. Sora’s there the whole time, at least, but he’s on hand only to marvel at the song. It goes on for three to four minutes, and regardless of my feelings about it as a piece of music, the presentation doesn’t work at all. Our knowledge of Elsa within the context of the game is that she has incredible powers over ice, is uncomfortable around the Heartless, and that she’s voiced adequately by Idina Menzel. That’s it. She’s a non-entity in this game with no real context, despite being the biggest character in Disney’s biggest animated movie. Perhaps it doesn’t need to contextualize her for just that reason. But that doesn’t make it good storytelling.

The only role it has for furthering the narrative is to show us that Elsa is finally willing to stop hiding her powers (something we aren’t aware she was doing, as, again, we know next to nothing about her) as she builds a grandiose castle and sets up the main conflict. Will Sora convince her to be good, or will Larxene from Chain of Memories trick her into joining the Darkness? But there’s not a lot of reason to be invested. Not because it’s a forgone conclusion (I can’t imagine Disney would want that to happen to a character they put on the back of a box of Rice Krispies that I’ve had in my pantry for at least a year), since I don’t think foregone conclusions are inherently boring. It’s solely because Elsa doesn’t mean enough at the moment to matter, and that we’re spending less time with her and more time with monotonous level design.

Arendelle has other stuff, mostly of poor quality. It’s very pretty (as any snow level had better be) but not compelling. Most of the first act involves a giant, gray, very dull ice labyrinth where Sora spins on ~~stalactites~~ stalagmites to move walls; it’s so utterly removed from the setting that you literally warp in and out through a magic portal. After the song, there’s this interminable sliding sequence where you evade a mountaintop avalanche. This is where having other party members would help, like how Mike and Sulley gave a bit of life to Monstropolis, but I’ve only just gotten a hint of the world’s terrible new party member. I assumed going into KH3 that Elsa would be the game’s token female sidekick, given her popularity and powers, but since our job is to approach her that’s not the case.

But things are okay. I mean, the generic overworld music is absolutely gorgeous. Oh, and the new pre-release test for Multiversus came out, and after being screwed over by that stupid 3DS crossover brawler, Steven Universe has a really good moveset! At least Kingdom Hearts III did nothing to deter that.

May 24: Completed Arendelle.

Well, look here, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” ain’t no great shakes neithers. On the plus side, I was wrong about the sidekick we were getting!

There’s not much more to tell about Arendelle’s gameplay. Its back half is a picturesque, vacuous series of simple rooms. There’s nothing to shake up or distinguish the combat (which only forced me to engage with how shallow combat has gotten), whether by mechanics or unique enemies. The most unique feature is a sequence in which Sora has to jump from cover to cover to avoid being thrown back by heavy wind that’s as innovative as it is enjoyable. Fortunately, it was at least nicer when I went back to find some of the optional crap I need for the secret ending.

Story-wise, we finally have other residents of Arendelle, but only one of them gets substantial personality. Elsa’s sister Anna (played without much energy by Kristen Bell, who I loved in The Good Place) is sturdy, kind, and not much else. She’s our third “New Pure Heart”—part of Frozen’s success was that it had two Disney princesses—and apart from my ongoing distaste for this plot, it’s hard to imagine her being central to the broader story right now. Kristoff (Jonathan Groff, a couple years off of Hamilton) is almost a parody of lifeless Disney hunks; his pet reindeer Sven fares no better. We’ve also got Hans, who I gather is the film’s fakeout love interest / secret villain and has, at most, maybe one line of dialogue. As always, Sora is barred from telling them that there are other worlds despite that being a concept any of these characters could easily grasp.

As bad as this is, KH3 is still a better project for Bell than Thanks a Million, a Quibi game show about rich people forcing their poor friends to… right, no one cares about Quibi.

And then there’s… ugh, Olaf the snowman (Josh Gad, who if nothing else—and there may be nothing else—did entertain my mother years ago in the failed, apparently terrible Presidential sitcom 1600 Penn.). Olaf’s reputation as the worst part of Frozen preceded him, and he lived down to that reputation completely. Godawful, unfunny, grating, loathsome; he’s the “Crappy Disney Comedy Sidekick” perfected. There’s a miserable mission where you find his body parts to put him back together, and if you were wondering whether the game forces you to find a bunch of wrong pieces and listen to his terrible commentary before you get the real one, wonder no more!

If there is a saving grace to Olaf, it’s that I had been under the false impression that he was this world’s sidekick. Instead it’s Marshmallow, a not particularly Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goon who serves Elsa and is blissfully silent. I feel bad saying this, as I’m sure all these people (Olaf excepted) are much better in the film, but he was my favorite character. That’s not me being flippant; I genuinely liked how he expressed concern for Elsa without dialogue. Plus, he starts off as a boss fight, filling a hope I had last week.

He also looks very cool. Although it’s hard to see his blasts of ice shards and not think that Elsa really should’ve been in his place.

Forget these folks, though. We’ve got us a Real Organization XIII meetup! Larxene and Marluxia have a couple new collaborators from the last go-around: Demyx (a.k.a. Guitar World), and… *pauses to look up Organization XIII on the KH Wiki* …Luxord (the gambling guy with the earring). It’s heavily implied that these four are descendents of the sages from χ Back Cover, and that they were only recruited to both Organizations because of their connection to that movie’s black box. And since Vexen is just makin’ replicas all over the place, they’re no longer needed as vessels for Xehanort and only have this one task of getting the box.

For me, the most notable part is that Larxene wasn’t aware that members of the Real Organization are meant to be vessels, and after learning about this loudly begins plotting a coup that gets ignored. I guess Xehanort still needs her around (which also explains why she and Marluxia were brought back at all), but it’s so crazy. It’s two things, really: her brazenness despite this being a group where everyone is spying on each other all the time, and the fact that no one else seems to mind being a vessel. This group is so dysfunctional; you’d expect it to be the subject of a Coen Bros.-style black comedy thriller, not the greatest threat to the multiverse. The continued use of “Thirteenth Discretion” for these goose-stepping dorks does not help. It was a song from all the way back in Chain of Memories, and for all that it tries to be ominous, it’s always been just too silly to ever work.

…Oh, right, I went back to Arendelle. So look, this series has gone on a long time. Five dang months. I’m tired, if a bit excited, and though I think I’ve had more good times than bad with “Dispatch from the Dive,” I’m ready to put away the keys to the Gummi Ship (currently the Template MK 2, which I’m tinkering with every so often), though maybe I’ll bring it back for future Kingdom Hearts games. I’ve got four more numbers for the header images left—Voyager made them along with the image template—and I kinda feel bad about asking for more when we’re so close. I’ll also soon need to devote plenty of time to the upcoming, E3-murdering Summer Games Fest 2022. And there’s still the expansion to Kingdom Hearts III and Melody of Memory (both of which I hope to do in one week, along with a day that’s just reading about scrapped ideas and behind-the-scenes stuff). As much as I want to take my time, I’m almost exactly twenty-nine hours in with a lot left to go. That means keeping up momentum, and that means doing the work beforehand to get KH3’s secret ending.

It seems that the main requirement for getting it is finding sixty of the Lucky Emblems, the Disneyland-style engravings of Mickey’s head, that I’ve been eagerly searching for anyway. After leaving Arendelle for the first time, I had about thirty-three. And after a long night of exploring afterwards, I now have exactly forty-five (I also went from Level 32 to 39 for good measure). If I get at least a few in the Caribbean and San Fransokyo, that’ll put me near the golden number before any that may appear in one of the theoretical final, non-Disney related worlds.

May 25: Entered the Caribbean, reached the Huddled Isles.

I don’t really have a ton to say right at the moment. I wanted to play for just a few minutes, but the audio desynced by the time I entered the Caribbean (this happened sometimes when I kept the PS4 on Rest Mode for too long while playing Control and Elden Ring). So I had to just wait and play until I could find a manual save, since it’s much nicer to start a session from there than an autosave. And such waiting and playing! There were terribly long infodumps, a chase sequence, a dumb Shadow of the Colossus riff, and several attempts to recreate scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, a.k.a. the one that tries to be sad and serious about themes.

Ah, everyone’s favorite part of Pirates of the Caribbean 3: the part where the heroes hijacked a flying monster and shot at other flying monsters.

Stray observations: I accidentally found where one of the Lucky Emblems is on a Wiki—I really only want to use a guide for them if we’re down to the wire—but fortunately, it seems like an easy one I’d have found anyway [note from Saturday: I’d end up only finding it after returning to the world on Friday].

The only other thing I’m gonna say is this: whether it’s because he commands too high a price or because his on-set behavior racked up literal millions in production cost for the last Pirates movie, I remain very happy that Johnny Depp is not in this. I’m sure Disney, at least, is happy not working with an actor who “needed” his lines piped in through ear buds. Jack Sparrow’s new voice actor only half-does the impression, and the game blissfully ignores the “island of ghost Jacks” from the third movie. He’s been replaced. And that’s good for me, because if that abusive f___ing gonif had been in this game, I’d probably put my statue of Don Quixote through the TV.

May 26: Continued through the Caribbean, entered Port Royal and repaired the ship.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was a frustrating film. The intended end to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy was a needlessly serious ode to rebellion in which an East India Trading Company stuffed shirt had somehow become a tyrant lording over the Caribbean. The officer, Beckett, had the immortal squid man Davy Jones* on his side, so it was up to honest pirates to keep the seas free for everyone (despite the fact that most “privateers” were agents of the British Empire, but it’s not fair to ask Kingdom Hearts to fix Disney’s understanding of 18^th Century mercantilism). But that freedom was stymied by a complicated mythology that placed Jones, Jack Sparrow, and the villainous Barbossa from Pirates 1 (and Kingdom Hearts II) in the center of a secret pirate society. Sparrow, the series’ increasingly irritating anchor, was also sillier and campier than ever; the main plot starts with him trapped in a pseudo-Purgatory populated solely by versions of himself. That part was especially dire.

* Played by Robin Atkin Downes in this game and super-duper Pokémon fan Bill Nighy in the movies.

Small miracles: Kingdom Hearts III (which adapted At World’s End in 2019, twelve years after the film’s release) lacks the island of Jacks. Sora simply finds his way on the island after sailing off the literal edge of the world, and he and Sparrow chase down their ship. But it’s otherwise shockingly faithful. The serious tone is thankfully lessened—there’s no opening scene of a child being hanged—but it starts with a weirdly somber rendition of “A Pirate’s Life for Me.” The film’s main cast change, that Barbossa is inexplicably back from the dead and on the good guys’ side, has already happened by the time Sora reaches them. Our villains (at least, our non-Luxord, non-Vexen villains) are Beckett and Davy Jones, neither of whom appeared in Kingdom Hearts II but are written as though they were. And plot points like the Pirate Lords and Jack’s relationship with white crabs are breathlessly introduced. It’s very good that I did see Pirates 3—if only when it was in theaters, so my memory’s hazy—because holy hell, absolutely none of this would have made sense otherwise.

Fun fact: until doing final edits, I had confused Beckett with an equally insipid stuffed shirt from the first movie. No, he’s just a new loser. But Davy Jones isn’t! Look at that glorious tentacle beard!

This weird sense of breathlessness is matched by the gameplay. After seeing Arendelle throw up its hands and provide a humdrum Kingdom Hearts level, the Caribbean has almost too many ideas for its own good. The name gives it away; Port Royal, the Pirates world from KH2, is only one location in an oceanic sandbox you explore on a boat, the Leviathan. But there’s also substantial underwater movement (using controls that are totally different and largely improved from previous Kingdom Hearts games), nautical chase sequences, and a leveling system for your ship that involves collecting crabs. Like, a lot of crabs. When you get to Port Royal, Jack Sparrow immediately demands that Sora collect three hundred crabs to fix their ship. It’s a joke, but thankfully not too mean of one; I gathered five hundred within a few minutes. It’s easy to find them, and I like crabs.

The crab thing must have been one of the details of Pirates 3 I forgot. There’s no real context for them, but they must’ve been in the movie since they’re here. Everything else is here. Boring would-be pirate Will Turner is here. Elizabeth Swann, the love interest from the first movie who became the best buccaneer of the bunch after Pirates 1, is here. Barbossa is here. Sora’s mildly surprised to see him on the good guy side (he doesn’t care about Liz’s career change), and while I think the twist might actually work better in this game than as the surprise ending to Pirates 2, it’s a terrible way to start a world Kingdom Hearts hasn’t visited since 2005. In that sense, it’s unintentionally a very good adaptation of At World’s End, which put all its chips on plot twists and lore instead of, you know, good plotting or figuring out how to escape Jack’s dominating energy.

But, that also means the Caribbean is fundamentally much better as a video game world than Pirates 3 was a film. Because it lets you actually explore the seas, fire upon ships, and ride the crab. The game’s attempt to mirror the film’s live action origins works better than it did in the prior Pirates and Tron levels by giving Sora, Donald, and Goofy realistic shading. I think it’s still mixed in its gameplay, and it’s probably got the worst plotting of all the Disney worlds, but it is certainly better than Arendelle. And hey! Ariel’s a summon now!

May 27: Completed the Caribbean.

The Caribbean being very fun to explore is definitely one of the biggest surprises of Kingdom Hearts III for me. It is essentially a cut down, less good riff on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but one that’s actually better than the cut down, less good Wind Waker that was the official sequel to Wind Waker. I’m also very happy that I managed to find at least seven Lucky Emblems before finishing the world—and the one I accidentally learned about wasn’t even one of them! It’s definitely in the upper echelons of the KH3 worlds.

Tragically, its story has somehow gotten worse. None of the plot of the Caribbean makes much sense, largely because it’s applying William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to the plot of a movie that didn’t make sense to begin with. There’s no context for who Davy Jones is, or who Beckett is, or why Davy Jones is under Beckett’s thrall, or why he can only leave his ship if he stands in a bucket of water, or how Barbossa’s alive, or what’s up with Jack’s new crew member who’s secretly the goddess of the sea, or why Will Turner is stuck captaining Davy Jones’ ship after Jones is killed, or why Elizabeth can’t just stay with him, or how Elizabeth became a respected pirate captain. It just happens. Beckett, the actual villain of Pirates 3 and one of cinema’s more boring analogues for unfettered capitalism, doesn’t even interact with Sora.

Probably the most frustrating part revolves around Tia Dalma, the shipmate who is actually the sea goddess Calypso. She was one of the many characters and plot points of the three Pirates of the Caribbean movies that I simply forgot over the years (she’s also connected to several of those unexplained plot threads), and the game has no interest in explaining her role. She has a conversation with Sora early on, but we don’t actually see it—we only see his recollections of it. I was really excited for that; I like those kinds of tricks where you and the character know different things. Unfortunately, nothing comes of it. Sora plans to “free” her heart, but after collecting his three hundred crabs she disappears and mostly stops being referenced.

You know, I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once last night. So far it’s my movie of 2022 (which is not hard when I’ve only seen three movies but is hard when the other two are The Batman and The Northman, both of which are excellent). It’s an incredible science fiction thriller that jumps between realities and deposits wild exposition and, in some ways, kind of does some of what Kingdom Hearts does. Even has an expertly-delivered Ratatouille joke. But its exposition is woven elegantly, and it’s buttressed by excellent writing and acting. Its action is beautifully frenetic. It’s funny. And it connects its high concept ideas to concrete emotions and feelings and relationships—a lot of them, at that. I’ve never expected Kingdom Hearts to wow me with its plotting, not when I knew so much of its plotting going in. And I’m not saying Tetsuya Nomura has to go as far as the writer-director team of Daniels Kwan and Scheinert. But this is a storytelling low for the series, and while I’m not sure what my relationship with this series will be once “Dispatch from the Dive” is done, I am worried of this becoming the standard.

Plot updates: Mickey’s been kidnapped by Heartless, while Ansem’s been kidnapped by… Ansem! Hayner, Pence, and Olette save the old geezer (who’s finally sad over what he did to Roxas and Naminé), with an aid from a mysterious Organization XIII member. Who could it be? What villain could summon Nobodies to help our heroes it’s Vexen. He just… shows up, without the game trying to make a serious stab at turning it into a mystery. Vexen’s entire personality is being whiny and weaselly, so it was a bit surprising losing that and seeing him be sincere.

Why are all these posts so bad at hashtags?

It took a while, but I also managed to finally get those sixty photos. I got all but one in Twilight Town, Toy Box, and Corona, and most of the ones in the other worlds. Not that I’m going to give up on looking for more.

May 28: Entered San Fransokyo, defeated the Darkube.

I could probably have just stopped for the week after kicking Davy Jones down to, um, Davy Jones’ locker. But I am working on a schedule. Besides, I figured this might be a great way to keep this utter confusion going, as San Fransokyo—our last Disney world—comes from the Kingdom Hearts III property I actually know the least about: the superhero flick Big Hero 6. I know it’s based on a comic, though not related to their Marvel Comics line, the very cool setting of an American West Coast that hadn’t brutally curtailed Asian immigration in the 19^th Century, and that there’s a cute giant robot that hugs people. That was it. Well, that and that I apparently would have trouble experiencing this world, as it, like Toy Box and Monstropolis, is set after the events of the film.

Fortunately, things turned out to be a bit more digestible than that, and not just due to my years reading Grant Morrison comics in college. We’ve got a teenage superhero team that pretty easily fits in the mold Marvel and DC established decades ago. There’s Hiro Hamada, Go Go Tomago, Wasabi, Honey Lemon, Fred, and Baymax the robot sidekick. Each fits neatly into teen superhero roles: the young sibling with something to prove, the tough girl “who’s not like other girls,” the robot who learns to feel, the obnoxious comedy characters. They’re all fine; none leap out at me other than Sora’s truly lovable partner Baymax and the equally unpleasant Fred (fittingly, they respectively have SF’s best and worst celebrity guests: Scott Adsit, a.k.a. Hornberger from 30 Rock, and T.J. Miller from the Creepo Depot). They also have a fitting Organization XIII nemesis in the most teenage villain of all time: Dark Riku, who is apparently not Replica Riku from Chain of Memories, or the Riku possessed by Ansem from Kingdom Hearts I but an apparent amalgamation of the two that also went back in time to the era of Young Xehanort.

Initially, I was worried when San Fransokyo started in earnest. Hiro forces Sora to run across the city and jump through rings for unsatisfactory reasons, something no superhero video game should even consider implementing (especially after Larxene might as well have shouted “solve my maze, Superman!” during Arendelle’s ice dungeon). But then I got to explore the city in earnest, and while I don’t think it’s great, it’s pretty dang fascinating. It’s a full-on urban sandbox, full of skyscrapers and flying machines you can tether yourself to. Kingdom Hearts has never done this; the closest was Toy Box, and even Toy Box smartly segmented itself into distinct sub-areas. That this and the Caribbean, two of the game’s most structurally ambitious main worlds, are also the game’s last main worlds is a pretty wild thing. I don’t think that works—putting both of these close together to the end game is a lot—but it is ambitious. It’s nice to remember that this is a truly ambitious game after a week with a lot of frustrations.

Flying on Baymax.

Final Thoughts: I’ve mentioned it before, but I am not happy with this whole “New Pure Hearts” plot development. It’s hard to explain why, exactly. Part of it’s the bluntness—Yen Sid tells us that the original Princesses of Heart “completed their duty” in KH1, but they didn’t really do anything (I don’t think Aurora from Sleeping Beauty had a single line over the course of this series)—but that’s not it. I mean, when I first learned more about the plot of Kingdom Hearts, years ago, the idea of regularly rotating out Disney films made sense. It’s all just an advertisement for Disney! And it’s fun to see new settings, so why have Sora go back to old worlds? Why not substitute the original Disney princesses for the ones of the newer movies? Certainly we can’t bring back every setting for each outing. Remember, I have almost no nostalgia for the studio, so I don’t have personal investment in this.

But then I actually started playing these games and liking these Disney characters. Some of them were people I didn’t know or didn’t like, but I grew to like them. Like Mickey; I never liked Mickey Mouse until playing these games, and not because of his supposedly “badass” behavior. He’s just nice. Mickey, Goofy, Jack Skellington, Jafar, Hades, Ariel, Jiminy, and Pete have become fun companions, and it’s been nice seeing them grow. And that list is opening up to include newcomers like Woody and Rapunzel, but it’s sad that so many of these stories are being cut off entirely. And the thing is that you wouldn’t even need to reuse the worlds (which would be narratively unsatisfying and logistically impossible), just let the characters leave theirs for a little while, but this series’ stupid insistence on segregating the worlds and keeping “order” restricts that. Even bringing back characters like Ariel (or Stitch, who I got in San Fransokyo) as summons limits what they can do.

And so we have to cut the threads and find new ones, which was always going to have to happen. But the way in which it’s happening is fundamentally broken. KH3 wants you to love these new Disney movies, just as it clearly does, but it also expects you to already love them. This doesn’t affect every IP equally; the game did put in the work to bring you into the tale of Rapunzel and the internal politics of Monsters, Incorporated. But for every world where it accounts for newcomers to these movies or to Kingdom Hearts, there’s another that doesn’t give a damn about it. That’s insane when it’s adapting movies from the tail end of the Bush Administration that most people didn’t even like, but it’s bad even when it’s for a movie as popular as Frozen. I’m sure the sequence was great for the people who loved the movie and the song, but removed from that the “Let It Go” sequence just a perfectly adequate musical number that goes on for too long and connects to nothing. No matter what Sora thinks:

I’m legitimately surprised that Sora didn’t also put in a #girlboss hashtag.

On the subject of these posts, I really don’t like saying this, but after running both hot and cold on him for each of these games I’m starting to hate Sora. I’m tired of how little he’s grown as a character over the course of these games, and how he’s gotten worse at pulling interesting things out of the Disney characters. But if I listen to my heart and not my mind, I’m not upset with him for those things. I’m upset because of these goddamn fake Instagram posts. I hate how cloying they are. I hate his truly obscene hashtag game (#awkwardtimetofindout? #Likefatherlikeson? #dosomethingdonald?). And I don’t like how they’re a cheap substitute for more serious storytelling.

That’s just it. This week was full of cheap substitutes for storytelling. But it doesn’t have to be. Corona did a truncated retelling of Tangled, but it told it well and frontloaded its two best characters. Toy Box gave Woody, Buzz, and their plasticine friends another adventure. Monstropolis may have been a middling sequel to Monsters, Inc., but it was perfectly adequate and more than accessible as a sequel. And it’s not like these were underperforming cult classics that were just steamrolled by Frozen (at least, no more so than everything else); those are big series that were simply depicted much better. This morass of bad stories and bad nostalgia is not an inevitable future for Kingdom Hearts, but it’s a possible future. And it’s a bit worrying seeing the franchise go down this path.

Overall progress: Entered and completed two worlds, entered a third.

Other games played: