June 5, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 22: Organization XIII HATES this ONE WEIRD TRICK

Last week was a rough one, mostly, but I’m nearing the end of Kingdom Hearts III. Only one world based on a Disney IP is unfinished—and I’ve already done much of San Fransokyo—before I jump into whatever original worlds are left. We are on the cusp of finishing “Dispatch from the Dive!”

May 29: Completed San Fransokyo, entered and completed the Realm of Darkness and rescued Aqua, entered the Land of Departure.

In a surprising twist, it turns out I had actually done not “much” but almost all of the Big Hero 6 world in my session yesterday. There was nothing left but a mediocre boss fight against DARK BAYMAX, who was reprogrammed by DARK RIKU. Dark Riku remains a delight, especially once I learned in the next world that he’s not even this game’s only version of Replica Riku from Chain of Memories. Regular Riku also has Replica Riku in his heart, something from his campaign in Chain of Memories that I had forgotten. Yes, we now have two versions of a character, based on another character, who had not been referenced since 2007. Sometimes, Kingdom Hearts’s near-pornographic depiction of needless complexity works!

More time was spent in the Realm of Darkness as we finally took care of one of the game’s first plot threads: the rescue of Aqua. I had two fights against Anti-Aqua which were pretty alright. She uses teleporting and shooting moves not unlike the Shotlock mechanic that originated in her game, so it worked well as one of those “down and dirty” Kingdom Hearts boss fights. The main feature is that you fight her first as Riku, who has better spells but less health, less magic, and different presets. After that, Sora has an easier time of it, which I liked.

But I liked the story more. After a whole game of hemming and hawing over not being able to enter the Realm of Darkness like Mickey, Sora makes his own dang Door to Darkness by finding Aqua’s Keyblade (Keyblades are, after all, just like the wands from Harry Potter, dumb Swiss Army Knives that do whatever the hell the story needs to progress at that exact moment). He reaches out to Aqua and pulls her from the abyssal sea of Darkness, like all of those Kingdom Hearts openings. But the ending is the best. Aqua wakes up on the beach; she’s still stuck, but at least she has friends with her. Except she’s not stuck—she’s back in the Realm of Light, and turning Castle Oblivion back into the Land of Departure is a breeze. Aqua’s role in the series, to be the best hero who suffers the worst fate, was always weirdly dour and at odds with the general tone. The beat’s a good way to remove her from that state of constant misery.

More negatively, let’s also remember the time Sora made a hashtag of her decade of isolation and trauma.

And with her back, now it’s time to storm the Land of Departure and save Ventus! The plot’s back on track… well, not entirely. After all, that near-pornographic depiction of needless complexity needs to be slaked. Vexen has now turned Demyx to the side of good (but since it’s Vexen, his speech about being a man of science and a man of hope comes across as insincere), they’re now in Radiant Garden with Good Ansem, and they’ve got a replica body that’ll surely be great for Roxas. With that, the Real Organization XIII is more of an Organization XI, because having two Seekers of Darkness who are on the good guys’ side probably doesn’t count. Oh, and apparently Pete and Maleficent need to travel through time. As one does.

I feel kinda bad at how little time San Fransokyo got in both this game and my writeups. It’s a genuinely fascinating level; sandboxes are not inherently interesting, but they are interesting for a series as relatively linear as Kingdom Hearts. It’s perhaps a pinch too short, but that works in its favor in a game this bloated. Instead of deploying longer levels and more sections of levels, it instead focuses on being one of the only spaces in the game where Sora’s extensive new platforming abilities are central and fun to use, not just existing to exist. It is definitely too empty, admittedly. And it does kinda feel a bit like an afterthought of a level right at the end. But it was a nice jolt to send off the Disney stuff.

May 30: Completed the Land of Departure and rescued Ventus.

Screw you, Nomura.

I suppose that needs a preface. The Land of Departure is nothing more than a boss fight against Vanitas; you can’t even return to it. You get to play as Aqua this time, which is great because, again, Aqua’s been handed a raw deal by Kingdom Hearts. It’s a perfectly enjoyable fight, too; as down and dirty as you please. But what matters most is how much the Keyblade Master takes charge. She’s Ventus’s friend, she’s the one who left him, she’s the one who actually knows Vanitas. So of course she’s going to take him on by herself, keeping Sora or Goofy or Donald from getting in the way. It feels good.

And then, after she wins the fight, Vanitas tries to shoot Ventus. And Aqua walks in front of the fireball, stretches out her hands to protect her friend, and lets herself get shot point blank in the chest. In a game where blocking and guarding is not just allowed but largely expected (me not engaging with either is probably abnormal). Come the hell on.

This was a promotional screenshot Square and Disney published a few months before release, by the way.

Divorced from that extremely obnoxious way to imperil a character who’s been imperiled for much of the series, this could work. It’s all setup to let Sora finally unlock the Power of Waking and end Ventus’ sleep, thus allowing Ventus to rescue Aqua just as she rescued him a few games ago. On paper, this probably should work a lot better. Sora finally gets his one magic trick to save the day, it helps someone, and they pay it forward like that awful movie, Pay It Forward. But I couldn’t help watching the cutscene and asking what Sora actually learned in each of this game’s three hour sojourns to the worlds of Disney. Did Hiro or Anna or Woody give him some clue? Did meeting Aqua again do anything? Despite their length, were these the least plot-relevant Disney worlds in this series? And could Aqua’s big comeback maybe have involved giving her an unmitigated victory?

After that, we’ve got nothing but table setting. Everyone reminisces about the times they met each other in other games, we inevitably sub in Axel for Terra as our last Guardian of Light, and he reveals a bit of random backstory about a lost woman in a rather nice pre-confrontation chat with Saïx. The conversation was silly, but I do tend to like scenes where heroes and villains hang out for a bit, knowing they’ll have to kill each other tomorrow. And with the two having each said their piece, now we’ve got nothing but a third galaxy, the Eclipse, and nothing in it but the final world. I think I’ll be able to beat this thing by Thursday or Friday.

By the by, I saw Tangled tonight! It was really good! Afterwards, I decided to queue up some of the Corona cutscenes from the game. It’s astonishing how much of that level just reuses scenes and lines and cinematography, with equally good acting (from the Disney people, not the Kingdom Hearts people), worse writing every time it deviates from the script, and much, much less satisfying animation. It’s a game from 2019 that struggles to copy movement and expressions that a film from 2010 was pulling off with finesse. I do think the general strength of Rapunzel and Flynn keep it working better than most of the worlds in this series, and the source material is still excellent, but… wow. It really just is a copy, but with Sora and Marluxia instead of Paul F. Tompkins and excellent songs.

Wow, Eugene and Rapunzel; you both look so much more polished! I’ll also be trying Tangled: The Series, a.k.a. Tangled Ever After, a.k.a. Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventures, a.k.a. Disney, Make Up Your Damn Mind.

Back when I started Kingdom Hearts I, every world was such an overtly mediocre facsimile because it had to be. It was an untested property on limited graphical hardware. The storytelling tropes were still new, because the game was new. But now we’re at the point where it’s almost like this series is going out of its way to still be that mediocre facsimile. It’s in HD. It’s much more expensive. It can get Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel. It uses the actual CGI models from the movies as source material. But due to this weird morass of Disney demands, Square demands, and Tetsuya Nomura’s weird vision, it can’t consistently remake or follow up the properties it’s representing. And that’s kinda sad.

May 31: Entered Keyblade Graveyard, entered and completed The Final World, reentered Keyblade Graveyard.

Pretty standard start for a Kingdom Hearts finale. We finally get our first look at Xehanort in this game (now played by Rutger Hauer following Leonard Nimoy’s passing). He monologues along with four other members of the Real Organization XIII—three of whom are versions of himself—the heroes decry him, he teleports away. There’s a middling retread of the Battle of 1,000 Heartless from KH2. Then we learn that the Organization’s final member is… Terra-Xehanort?! It’s played as a spoiler, which is phenomenally odd since I thought we all knew he was on the team from the start. Then TX (or “Texas Instruments,” if you will, because what is an instrument or Terra but a tool?l) bodies the good guys almost instantly. He’s only defeated by Donald using a spell so powerful that he also dies from the recoil, and then everyone is killed by the annoying “giant worm of Heartless” boss that Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage- was so fond of. Darkness wins!

All of Sora’s powers are useless against… Terra.

Okay, so I’ve spent the weeks since Dream Drop Distance with certain assumptions, particularly when it came to the “Seven Lights and Thirteen Darknesses.” The idea is that Xehanort needs seven goodies and thirteen baddies to start a new “Keyblade War,” that will reforge the χ-Blade, and that’ll open or reopen or make another Kingdom Hearts. Fine. And upon discovering this scheme, the good guys agree to follow it for reasons that exist but are dumb. They’ll fight. But turns out Xehanort doesn’t even follow his own rules, because he just lets one of his guys bump off everyone else, and… why even go to all this trouble? And while I’m at it, why did KH3 sideline the actual building of the teams, its main narrative arc?

In practice, this first confrontation is just a remix of other entries’ dramatic moments—Goofy’s death, Sora’s duel with Roxas, the defense of Hollow Bastion—that mostly just act as a reminder of things the series has already done. And done better, too. Goofy’s death was an horrendous bit of storytelling, but it least there was a zany camp to it. The Roxas duel was horrendous as well (and I kinda want to write a boss article on it, and then a much more positive one about the King of Toys from Toy Box. One for each mainline game), but it gave us Sora’s and Roxas’ first real interaction. The Battle of 1,000 Heartless was cool. This is just warmed over leftovers. A cheap way to tickle our memories and provide Sora a reason to need his inevitable “come back from the brink” moment.

And what a brink it is! The perhaps too literally titled The Final World is a surreal place. It’s where sea meets sky, Sora’s now blue and translucent, and his only neighbors are star-ghosts (the only one of import being Naminé) and Chirithy, a catlike doll-monster from χ Back Cover. Sora’s mind and body are both gone but not gone enough, ‘cause he’s got stuff to do. People to save. Clearly, we’ve gotta use the Power of Waking, which is proving itself adept at being that one special trick that does everything, and claw our way back. And thus, with perhaps scarce few minutes left in its story, Kingdom Hearts III decides to reinvent itself once more in a way only in can: as a dumb 3D platformer collect-a-thon.

Thanks to there being few good screenshots of the game’s end, I now know that I’ll be going back to this mini-game and the Graveyard for “Re Mind.” So that’ll be something.

I’m not exactly sure how best to describe The Final World’s main gameplay. There’s this vaguely pyramidal superstructure populated by hundreds of illusory Soras that are endlessly running, jumping, and doing jigs (like the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End). And Sora has to run into exactly 111 of them (like the crab mini-game from the world based on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End). The best way to do this is to whack these glowing, floating cubes that turn the platform to its side or upside-down. Fitting the series’ Super Mario 64 inspiration, it’s a… Banjo-Kazooie / Mario Galaxy / Stone Tower Temple / Inception / Fez type-deal. But what it is most is dumb, albeit charming in its dumbness. It’s like Nomura knew I was gonna complain about the opening of Pirates 3 last week and planned a delightfully stupid version of it to blindside me!

After that, Sora saves his friends’ hearts by fighting the same boring mini-boss seven times, each by diving into one of the Disney worlds. I forgot exactly which heroes corresponded to which worlds, but I only noticed the ones I like (Riku, Aqua, Goofy, and Mickey) while rescuing them. Completely coincidental, to be clear. Then Kairi sort of saves Sora, I guess, and we’re now back at the Keyblade Graveyard. This was probably not the most helpful escapade.

June 1: Didn’t play.

“Dispatch from the Dive” has officially passed the “five month” range! Thank the lord this ended up taking half as long as I had anticipated. For all my concerns about the pace of the project, I do actually have time to spend this week clobbering Xehanort and finding as many pieces of equipment with MP Haste as I can. And that means I can indulge in something I’ve wanted to do for a while. We’re gonna play a game! Welcome to “Kingdom Hearts: Who Said it?!”

I’m gonna give you a series of real Kingdom Hearts quotes, and you’re gonna guess who said what. If you get them all right, you get your own Source Gaming No-Prize! But, in the interest of keeping up the challenge, any distinguishing character-specific verbal tics, speech impediments, or words that would otherwise give away the speaker too easily will be cut. If they appear, of course. No relying on “gwarsh” today! Three, two, one; that’s right, away ya go!

“Wow! This place looked big from outside, but the inside looks even bigger!”

“But we can’t. If we take him to another world, we would be…”

“Well, all this time, all we could do was watch you from the outside, Sora. The truth is, we really wanted to go on another journey with you, the sooner the better.”

“He’s not artificial! In every kind of world, Sora is still Sora!”

“Of course it matters! Don’t you think it’s weird that you have the same memory? You can’t both be right.”

“Don’t let your guard down. We may wind up getting separated at any time. Come on, let’s save the world again!”

“This sure is a strange world. The moon even looks like a heart. C’mon, now that we’ve opened the path to the castle, let’s go rescue Kairi!”

“Heartless, Heartless, Heartless! Things haven’t changed one bit!”

“And it always will be! Got it, Larxene?”

“Can you blame him? After all this time, he finally remembers Naminé…only to find out she’s being held prisoner!”

“Have a little faith, Sora! You guys used to be inseparable, right?”

While you decide your answers, why not watch Sora breakdance on a barrel, a mechanic I regularly employed?

I suspect it took little time for many of you to get the answer: every quote was from Donald Duck. None of them were from KH3, as the Wiki remains suspiciously light on details from that game. It really comes across differently without the voice, right? When it’s Tony Anselmo and the beak, it’s Donald, clearly. He’s ornery and curt and easily flustered. But removed from that, his words, his cadence; they all read exactly the same as anyone. The long sentences are almost universally unvoiced statements Donald makes outside of cutscenes, and it’s really surprising when you read them in the game. Because that’s not how Donald talks. That’s how a Kingdom Hearts character talks. How every Kingdom Hearts character talks. And therein lies the problem.

June 2: Defeated the Real Organization XIII, entered the Stairway to the Sky.

In many respects, the final conflict with Organization XIII feels like an extension of something I noted back at the start of Kingdom Hearts III, which is an attempt to give “the fans” everything they want. I’ve still got Xehanort left, but the hour or so I played was filled with a trove of plot points and references and answers to ongoing questions. It was a lot. I also don’t think it works particularly well, as it takes the Kingdom Hearts standard of a revelation conga line to unscaled heights.

Primarily, these gifts to the fans come in two interconnected ways: Sora’s tag-team fights against the Organization and the aid he gets from unexpected places. Each boss—all of whom are quite wretched, it should be noted—employs the moves and tactics they used back in their own games. Xigbar shoots, Vanitas does that obnoxious teleport dive, and the trio of Xehanorts that close out the sequence all have full access to the overlong chain attacks that made their original fights so bad. You fight them with whatever partners most adequately compliment them; the choices are both natural (a Birth by Sleep-themed fight with Aqua and Ventus against Terra-Xehanort and Vanitas) and fudged a bit by necessity (Mickey gets stuck with Luxord, Larxene, and Marluxia since all the other dance partners were taken). It’s a slog, though probably an inevitable one when you put all the villains right at the end.

And as they die (or “get recompleted,” so maybe some of the old Organization members are the old Organization members pulled from the past, not their human versions… no, I’m dropping this), they and Sora have a nice, long chat and come to terms. Some of them are kinda sweet, like Luxord giving Sora a “lucky card” he’s earned as a good player. Some are more inscrutable, like Saïx elaborating on his sudden onset backstory. Some feel unearned, like Xigbar confessing that all he wanted was for Xehanort to bequeath him his Keyblade. Some finally move plots forward, like Ansem’s djinn revealing himself as Terra’s heart so we can finally put the loser hero back in play. And some are bizarre, like Replica Riku defeating Dark Riku and sacrificing himself so Naminé can use his replica’s replica.

I really do not know why this worked for me. Maybe because I do like those weird hero / villain bits. Maybe because I like Luxord wanting to share his games with people.

The last two are part of the other element, this idea of Sora cashing in his chips and getting help from all his non-Disney friends. Yen Sid finally gets off his ass and cuts a path through the second or third wave of endless Heartless. Xion turns out to be the second final thirteenth member of the Organization,* but she instantly turns traitor. Roxas comes back, too, which is great since the two of them can replace Axel (who doesn’t cut it despite lampshading his own fan popularity) and Kairi (who gets kidnapped to stop her from having a role in the plot). And after Xehanort has stopped time and summoned Kingdom Hearts, the heroes all team up, fire their Keyblades, and turn him into a portal for Sora, Donald, and Goofy to follow through time.

* I don’t even know what the final Organization headcount was, though it hardly matters; both sides openly have reserves, which only furthers my confusion over this plot.

The weirdest example, though, comes at the beginning. Sora gets a mulligan in Tuesday’s fight against Terra-Xehanort and gets some unexpected help… from Terra? Specifically, Terra’s “lingering will” that was a bonus boss in Kingdom Hearts II?! And then Sora suddenly rides and shoots a wave of Keyblades? “Which Keyblades,” you ask? Well, the ones that symbolize the online players of Kingdom Hearts χ, of course! You know, the game that isn’t included in the big collection.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I was told to look up that KH2 Terra boss fight. The person told me it would provide context for Terra’s story, and while I watched it I wasn’t quite clear what to take from it. I did not expect that context to be this. I mean, this is nuts, right? Here we have this big, final battle, and our calvary consists of an optional, hard to access bonus fight from a game made over a decade earlier, a side game most players probably don’t even know exists, and neither are explained at all. It’s bad plotting, but it’s also a natural extension of this climax, and arguably KH3 as a whole. It really wants everyone to see their favorite character doing something cool, or tragic, or emotionally resonant. Whether or not it’s earned, or even comprehensible.

I’m now at the “Stairway to the Sky,” a large island city filled with windmills and pretty white buildings which I assume is a quick prelude to the final battle with Xehanort. I mean, we gotta fight him; I’ve fought every other Xehanort at least twice and I’ve never gotten to take this version on once. The town was the setting of KH3’s opening, so I’m presumably going to chill with Young(er) Xehanort and Eraqus and discover their theoretically tragic backstories.

May 3: Kicked Xehanort’s bloviating ass and finished Kingdom Hearts III!

After surviving a truly awful boss fight, many cutscenes, and inexplicable revelations at even this late hour, I have truly finished Kingdom Hearts’ “Dark Seeker Saga.” It’s done! Xehanort is dead after having unsatisfactorily gestured towards redeeming himself, and Kingdom Hearts is safe once more, so I no longer have to be confused about simultaneous possessions or what the “Power of Waking” is supposed to be. I can just enjoy the wind and waves of Scala ad Caelum, the original world—at least, presumably the one that came after the original world from the movie.

As an ending, it was… meh. For all the slog Sora went through this week (including a second death fakeout, albeit one that impressively used the speakers in the PS4 controller), it’s oddly generic. Turns out Xehanort was really trying to destroy all Darkness, not caring that Darkness is a natural part of the human experience or that he was committing mass murder, so he’s cool, I guess? He gets to go to the afterlife with Eraqus, who jumps back out of Terra to give the rare bored Mark Hamill performance. Sora sacrifices himself mostly offscreen to save Kairi. Naminé and Riku hold hands vaguely romantically—insofar as anything in Kingdom Hearts is romantic—presumably so Riku and Sora can each have Kairi as a love interest. And at least some of the Organization members who were “recompleted” aren’t bad anymore; Saïx is now just… one of the gang. Everyone is happy. Cut the Hikaru Utada songs and marvel yet again at how Kingdom Hearts never credits the actors for the Disney characters for their characters, only as a group.

Well…

Of course we have a few curveballs. Gotta have ‘em. So it turns out the entire plotline of Pete and Maleficent searching for the box really was nothing more than wheel spinning (the “Jamie Lannister goes to Dorne” of Kingdom Hearts) because they only find it right at the end. They go to the Keyblade Graveyard, where they see—DUN DUN DUN!!—five of the six Foretellers from χ Back Cover! And the last one, Luxu, the one who spent that entire movie in the black coat… is Xigbar! Yes, Xigbar, the one-eyed goon with the stupid, Steven Seagalian ponytail who probably spends all his free time making out of date memes for the Tesla subreddit, was the mastermind all along! He finally has that sword from Xehanort that secretly came from the Master of Masters, “hopes [we] like long stories,” and gears up for a tale.

But, no, this isn’t enough! It’s just normal Kingdom Hearts silliness! Fortunately, the secret ending delivers on something new (and unlike the one in Dream Drop Distance, it just airs normally instead of forcing you to load the game back up). Where is Sora? What horrors will he witness? Well, we and him find out at the same time. He wakes up in modern day Tokyo, of all places, in Shibuya. It’s dark; it’s rainy. Riku seems to be there, too, but… how can that be when he’s back on Destiny Islands? Wait, oh no. It’s not Riku. It’s Yoroza, a video game character we saw dozens of hours ago, and this… this is the urban setting of Rex from Toy Story’s favorite game: Verum Rex! What the hell is going on?!

Plus the obligatory mysterious hooded figure, who is totally not at all just the Master of Masters.

Okay, I gotta come clean. I did actually know the second twist was coming, and that Xigbar was going to be teased as the next main villain, but c’mon. Let me add a little flair. Anyway, whether or not this is the setting of Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind, the DLC expansion I’ll be playing next week, I’m excited. It’s a dumbass idiotic twist, but it’s a dumbass idiotic twist that swings for the fences!

June 4: Didn’t play.

Let’s dish about Kingdom Hearts III.

KH3 was a big step forward for this series. It was the first entry made for HD (not counting its own tech demo, a web browser thing that’s stylistically disconnected, and a movie). It was the first to get to use Pixar; in fact, Nomura pushing Disney for years to let him incporate Pixar content was a lot of the impetus for this game’s existence. It was the ending of the series’ main story. And in being an ending, it worked twice as hard to incorporate every game, every plot point, even almost every single character.

Many—perhaps most—of these decisions were flawed in either theory or execution, and they led to Kingdom Hearts III being one of the series’ most mixed entries. Outright problematic, at times. As a single story and conclusion, it’s exceptionally poor. Putting all the important stuff (i.e. Sora’s conflicts with Organization XIII, saving his friends, accessing his Power of Waking) right at the end puts too much weight in one space. Xehanort’s role feels oddly small and meaningless. There are all these big moments, but they either get repeated too much or poorly ape stuff we’ve seen in prior games. And we had to have seen them, since large chunks of KH3 are inexplicable without having experienced the series in full. You should not expect players to have experienced hard to access bonus bosses, optional ending cutscenes, or even any prior Kingdom Hearts game if all they wanted to do was spend time with Elsa or Buzz Lightyear.

The KH2-era casts, comfortably together as primarily boring friends.

On the note of those characters, I feel like the implementation of the Disney worlds also reached some series highs and lows. Toy Box was one of the strongest worlds in the history of Kingdom Hearts, and it, Corona, and Monstropolis leveraged strong characters very well. It was also respectably inventive, as were the Caribbean and San Fransokyo. But we also had some series-worst worlds, like Arendelle and Olympus, and even the best parts of the game went on too long for their own good. I’ll go further and say that while Toy Box may be great, and Corona good, those two are the only worlds I’d put in the positive column. And this roster of settings were as mixed as stories as they were as avenues for gameplay. Many were incoherent, but they also felt more incidental—more disconnected from a plot that increasingly prioritized the series’ original characters—than the worlds of prior games.

Much of this can be laid at the feet of Tetsuya Nomura and his attempt to give everyone (except newcomers) everything (except a good story for Kairi). But Disney did have a role in it. As Kingdom Hearts has gotten more popular, more recognized, and more able to replicate the look of the movies that inspire it, Disney has only gotten more controlling and restrictive. The biggest reason for this is that it has allowed the studios who made these modern movies a greater say in how their films are adapted, which is generally a very good thing! But it also adds one more set of cooks. Sometimes, that worked out; Pixar demanding that KH3 not retell Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. led to worlds with better-told stories. Other times, it’s not, which is why we got a Frozen level that stopped the characters, story, and even level design from reaching a level of basic quality. But it’s an exacerbation of an issue we’ve seen from the start: this is a game with many masters who all do deserve a say, and it’s never been elegant at accommodating all of them.

I suppose in the end, KH3 was a game of mostly small triumphs over mostly large failings, but I would not want to take away from those triumphs. The game is wildly ambitious (at times, too ambitious); it doesn’t rest on its laurels. It manages to have most of the series’ good vocal performances. Even with the bad final boss fight and fairly shallow combat, it’s probably got the most accessible gameplay in the series. That’s a lot for a series notorious for its crushing difficulty spikes. Two of its worlds are among my favorite in the series. And I would be remiss to not highlight the Lucky Emblem hunt, which is probably one of the series’ single greatest and most well-executed ideas. I looked up a few, and hot damn the ones from Toy Box and Twilight Town that I missed are both brilliant. Like, I ain’t even mad that I couldn’t find them.

Final Thoughts: While we have one more week left of “Dispatch from the Dive,” this is essentially the ending. Next week’s going to be more of an epilogue as we trace the start of the series’ new narrative direction. Because of that, I want to take the opportunity to think about the experience of writing this series.

A lot of time was spent making images in Pixlr.

Actually, that’s the impetus for the admittedly overstuffed header, which tried to encapsulate the entire journey I’ve taken. Many of the characters are important in KH3 specifically, but they’re meant to represent my overall favorites—or in the case of Marluxia and Chirithy, specific games. I couldn’t get everyone; I wanted to also have Sally, Flynn Rider, Philocretes, the Beagle Boys, Demyx, DiZ (more to honor Christopher Lee’s role), and one of the floating stained glasses you see in the Dive to the Heart. There was really no room left on the villain side, though, and after a few hours I was happy not trying to stuff in more characters. I did make a last minute exception for Buzz, Mother Gothel, Sulley, Timeless River Donald, and the Shadow Heartless, who collectively put the number at twenty-one good guys and sixteen bad guys together. Took about three hours for the first draft, and a couple more just for those secondary characters and reorganizing everyone bit by bit.

The process of writing the series and playing the games in this way was an intense and extreme experience. I’ve logged in dozens of hours, all for games I often found enjoyable and noxious and tiring in equal measure. It’s not a good way to play a game for leisure, and while I treated this as games journalism first and leisure second, both will always intertwine if you write about games. But that mix of complicated and not wholly happy emotions is a natural emotional response even if you don’t power through entry after entry. This is a truly insane thing, this Kingdom Hearts. It challenges your understanding of how stories work despite being owned by and featuring the characters of a company like Disney. It has a truly labyrinthine plot as thorny and difficult as any article from the Dune Wiki. And it demands you take in every detail it has to offer and remember them over the course of years.

I’ve been open that I came into this project with many suspicions. I had already known about many of Kingdom Hearts‘ plots and tropes. I still planned to meet the game halfway—something that I followed for all twenty-two of these weeks—but I couldn’t not think about things like Sora getting trapped in a video game or two “Organization XIIIs” or the constant refrain about how little the Disney worlds truly mattered. But I did like Sora in Smash. And more than that, there was always that beautiful box art for Kingdom Hearts I. There’s no “norting,” no terrible final bosses, no Winnie the Pooh astral projection. It was just some anime kids and Disney animals relaxing atop a city at night. I saw that years and years ago, and it was always a little captivating.

Tragically, those kinds of tranquil urban nightscapes are not indicative of what Kingdom Hearts is, and even less indicative of its tone. But the game surprised me constantly, sometimes in bad ways but far from exclusively. I got to reconnect with many fictional characters from my youth, and it felt a lot better than I expected. I got to see a video game series twist and expand and evolve over fifteen years in a fraction of the time. And while I sometimes got tired, I never got bored. There was always some inscrutable bit of design or plotting that would fascinate me.

As for the “Dark Seeker Saga,” the storyline of every entry in Kingdom Hearts that I experienced? It’s pretty weak. I’ve seen the series use its original characters and premise better in some games and worse in others, but I end Kingdom Hearts III with only somewhat greater interest in its story than when I began. Sora is a perfectly adequate lead and little else. Many of the characters struggle to be distinct, whether they’re a sweet and determined hero or a smug, self-satisfied villain. Everyone speaks the same way. I can’t imagine that Sora’s adventures in the setting of Verum Rex are going to break the mold, whether that’s in the DLC or the next game.

It’s funny, in a way. I’ve always heard that the story of Kingdom Hearts makes absolutely no sense, that it is impossible to understand. I don’t think that’s necessarily true—or rather, not in a “technical” sense. And that’s because I think I actually do understand the story of Kingdom Hearts. In fact, that’s the problem. These games go out of their way to over-explain every plot thread and detail after they happen. They can’t leave things alone. And that leads to bad stories like coded becoming central to the plot, or sequels going out of their way to include even tertiary characters. The “logic” of Kingdom Hearts, for want of a better term, is a warped and limited view of conventional modern storytelling. That’s part of why it’s so weird. It knows about tropes like secret conspiracies and the power of friendship, but I don’t think it understands how and why they get deployed. And that leads to this weird situation where learning more about this franchise, figuring out its plots and secrets, doesn’t inherently laud to a better experience or appreciation. It’s why I like to think of KH1 as perhaps the “purest” expression of Kingdom Hearts. It’s the most removed.

We’ve got one more week of “Dispatch from the Dive.” Think of it as an epilogue that will see the start of the “Lost Master Saga,” the second “trilogy” of the series. Hopefully that one won’t take twelve games to tell this time. But after that, is it the end? Not necessarily. I’d like to continue the series, but maybe only with the eventual release of Kingdom Hearts IV (so presumably I’d actually play Missing-Link, Dark Road, and any others beforehand). I’d like to reuse this space for that, and I ultimately find Kingdom Hearts captivating in a way that’s more “fascinating” than “good,” so bringing this back whenever relevant seems like a fine idea.

The box art for Kingdom Hearts III. Mickey is finally included, and the number of main original characters has tripled.

Especially since this really did give me so much. I love games writing, games journalism, games criticism; it’s incredibly satisfying. But it can be tiring, especially when the focus is so squarely on the medium. Sometimes, it’s nice to write about other things. This forced me to also talk about Disney and film tropes, but more than that, its looser, casual structure let me just goof around and add in whatever silly asides came to my head. I’m very grateful to “Dispatch from the Dive” for that, and I do hope people got at least something out of whatever silly pop culture references or turns of phrase I made. Maybe I’ll try to throw in a Road House reference next week; it is my favorite movie.

There is, though, one other thing. This was a substantial and at times overwhelming undertaking, and not just because it was a full-course immersion therapy into a truly bizarre world. It was a weekly series, one that was meant to be a side project but turned into some of the most intensive and creatively stimulating writing I’ve ever done. It overshadowed everything else I wrote; it dominated how I played games for the first half of 2022. And although I need time to do something, anything else, I absolutely intend to come to write another weekly series. But for what?

There are possibilities. Maybe I could study the history of a company. Maybe I could adapt something like our “Adaptation Fixation” podcast and write about game adaptations. But it seems like the most natural thing to do would be to explore another series I’ve never played. Yakuza, maybe? I’d be interested in hearing any ideas from anyone who read this series. But whatever form that series takes, it’ll come long after this one. For now, let’s just enjoy the good times of Kingdom Hearts, mock the bad, and take a moment to relax.

Until next week, at least. Still got ground to cover.

Overall progress: Crushed Kingdom Hearts III, and by extension the “Dark Seeker Saga,” in my mighty fist.

Other games played: