June 12, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 23: Yozora’s Big Score

I completed Kingdom Hearts III last week, marking the end of the series’ “Dark Seeker Saga” and, in a way, “Dispatch from the Dive” itself. However, we have two more marks of mastery to hit. There’s Re Mind, the downloadable content expansion for Kingdom Hearts III, and the rhythm (?) game Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory. Let’s jump right in.

June 5: Started Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind, played up until entering Scala ad Caelum.

Okay. Oooooooookay. Where to begin?

So the pitch for the DLC pack—the very first bit of media in Kingdom Hearts’ new “Lost Master Saga”—is that it covers KH3’s biggest unanswered question*: what happened with Sora and Kairi? At the end of the game, Kairi’s heart and body are both destroyed (death doesn’t seem to exist in Kingdom Hearts), and Sora sacrifices himself to save her. She winds up back with everyone else while he winds up trapped in the setting of a video game. But how that sacrifice happens, what it is, was kept completely and deliberately vague. In theory, this will help us with that.

* Well, second-biggest after “what do Mickey’s ears taste like?”

What actually happened? Well, Sora goes right back to The Final World, speaks to Chirithy, and decides to go back in time as a spirit and seek her spirit (?) while the last battle is raging. He’ll bring her back while losing his own powers. Or… maybe he’s rewriting the past before he rewrote it in the main game? Except that he watches himself die and restart the fight with Terra-Xehanort… ?

Re Mind did include a few additional features, like a complex photography station, but I focused entirely on its story content.

I gotta level with you; within minutes this became the most opaque and unclear that Kingdom Hearts has ever been for me. Me, the guy who bragged that he understood Kingdom Hearts. And it’s unclear for many reasons, but the most deceptively large is the fact that in practice, it’s doing this over a ton of recycled material. I spent my session today going through the exact same boss rush against the Real Organization XIII that I fought last week. I cannot stress enough that the only gameplay I experienced was two hours of fighting the same twelve-man squad. I mean, it wasn’t all different. This time, in the tag team match with Riku, I beat Dark / Replica Riku before Xigbar! But it’s an awful way to start, and going through the same beats makes the weird timeline stuff even more confusing.

I’m maybe being a bit too facetious. There is one good new feature, in that you can play as one of the other Guardians for each fight. I got to use Riku, Aqua, and Roxas (Mickey gets shafted, tragically), and each has mechanics straight from their games. That’s neat. The explanation is that Sora is “tracing” the hearts of the different Keyblade wielders, even if that means he spends most of the time “tracing” himself to do what he and I already did. But it’s still the same teams, the same bosses, and the same general order. My gut hypothesis would be that this started as some kind of boss rush or co-op thing with a large character roster, and it just spiraled out of control.

Taken as a story, and not a painfully artificial attempt to increase runtime, the beginning of Re Mind is something of a director’s cut. In this edit, Riku sees Demyx take the replica, Luxord reveals that Xigbar was behind the search for the black box, and Axel discovers a French colonial plantation. The main new footage is “Ending Sora” watching everything happen, so you occasionally get him narrating over the dialogue. Some additions were fine —I liked Xion, Roxas, and Axel taking back the “X’s” Xemnas gave them and Young Xehanort’s unhinged chat with the Master of Masters—but most are badly-told answers to questions that didn’t need them. The game finally, explicitly states how the Organization got all its members together, but that’s so beside the point by now that it doesn’t merit a write up.

You get a bit more context for each fight, but not enough for it to feel particularly worthwhile.

It was smart to start Re Mind early. I had a hunch this might happen, since you should never expect Kingdom Hearts to throw anything but a curveball. As always, Dalton’s first rule, “expect the unexpected,” holds true.

June 6: Completed Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind?

I made a promise before starting: I was gonna see some substantial new content. I ended the last session in the same save point that I ended the main game in: the start of Scala ad Caelum. The only thing after that in the main game is the final fight against Xehanort (now voiced by Christopher Llyod, as Rutger Hauer passed before the release of the DLC), and I was scared that it was going to just throw me into the same battle. Fortunately, after that point there was all new stuff, if largely not enjoyable stuff.

Scala ad Caelum is now a sandbox with simple but fun puzzles. One of them got me to use Aeroga, which I’ve only used once since Dream Drop Distance. There’s an overwhelming fight against a gang of Xehanorts, an unwieldy but innovative battle where you play as the collective might of the Guardians, a terrible QTE sequence where Mickey struggles to force his way to a magical door, and an exhausting final boss. In the latter, I got to actually play as Kairi! Her health and magic are painfully low, so it’s ultimately more of a handicap for anyone who likes her character, but at least it exists.

It’s not as though it was all new, since right after beating the new final boss, you see the same ending and credits, which… why? Some of the cutscenes are edited to have Sora, Kairi, and Chirithy in them, but c’mon. Sora also still hasn’t overtly disappeared, though that will presumably be finally dealt with in Limitcut. See, beating this alternate version of the KH3 climax unlocked a new episode—which I understand to be a collection of extra-hard remixes of the Organization XIII fights—and behind that is the secret ending. Of course there’s a secret ending.

I’ll confess I’m a bit worried about these fights. I was told from two separate sources that the bare minimum level for these fights is to be maxed out at 99. I’m 52 as of the DLC, and there is no way I’m going to grind the rest of the way. If I find it too hard, I’m not going through all of them or finding the ultra secret Keyblade. I’m just not. Consider it a great way to reconnect with my struggles with Chain of Memories months ago, where I had to rely on YouTube playthroughs.

The sole gameplay room of the Limitcut episode. Beating eleven fights unlock Xion and Xehanort, and beating them unlocks the secret fourteenth fight.

It’s an awful thing to make a package of DLC like this, you know. It’s supposed to be a continuation of the story, but it mostly just sticks Sora in the nosebleed section watching the ending. Its secrets are supposedly central for the plot going forward, but they’re hidden behind fights that may very well only be accessible for the hardest of the hardcore. And while I do truly hate to be That Guy with how awful and gross the discourse about “game value” is, this should not be worth half the full prince cost of Kingdom Hearts III (since I got the game used, the DLC might have actually cost more than the regular game).

June 7: Attempted two Limitcut bosses, failed, and watched the rest of Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind on YouTube.

I’ve played video games for most of my life. A lot of them, and all of different quality, uniqueness, and artistic ambition. More than a few were bad (I’ve even got a series on them). Many were unmemorable. But I’ve never found a gaming experience to be detrimental to my being. Movies, I could name a few, but oddly not one game. I’ve never felt like one cost grossly above its asking price. If a game is bad, it is merely bad, and I always find a way to get something out of it. But as of last night, I have to make a confession: this is the first time as a games journalist or a player that I’ve come out of a game—or DLC in this case—with a net mental loss. Re Mind is just that aggravating.

The audacity. The temerity. The idea of selling what is essentially just a challenge pack without identifying it as such in the online store. The gating of “essential” story content behind bosses most players could never even attempt. That very story content being a set of unsatisfying embellishments that add nothing of substance. Spending the first two hours in the exact same boss rush that closed out the first game. This is the angriest I have been at a game that I’ve played since Yooka-Laylee. It’s awful that this is one of my last Kingdom Hearts experiences.

If you judge it by what it is—an extra-hard difficulty setting—Re Mind delivers greatly. Kingdom Hearts has always been weirdly hardcore, at times too much so and in a way that belies the Disneyland premise. Some people like it that way, which is more than fair, as was their frustration when KH3 moved to be more casually focused. I think it was for the best in the end, but there was a loss. This fixes that, and giving those fans that opportunity is good! The Limitcut bosses are something else. But they’re all Re Mind is other than meaningless real time retcons and an admittedly cute photography mode, and Square should have been clearer about it. Here’s the PlayStation Store description:

Determined to rescue Kairi, Sora travels to the Keyblade Graveyard a short time before the final battle was to take place. Lacking a corporeal form, he traces the hearts of the seven guardians of light. Through experiencing their personal battles firsthand, Sora is about to discover truths that he has never before imagined.

Not a word about how this should probably only be attempted by people who are actively seeking a challenge on the level of Critical Mode. Also, it is true that Sora experiences his friends’ battles, but most of those battles were ones he was already in. And those “truths” are largely meaningless, especially the revelation that he was helping everyone from the back the whole time, which was already the case. He literally helps every other person in that fight! Multiple times!

I tried Young Xehanort once and Larxene twice. I got a couple of their health bars each time, but it was clear within seconds that this was beyond my abilities. So, as I’ve done before, I watched a playthrough. Some of these are truly nightmarish bosses. I don’t know how people who could only play on Easy Mode were expected to do it. Though I’ll also give Re Mind credit; a couple of these (particularly Luxord’s) are very imaginative. The bosses have a ton of new abilities. I just wish they could have been approached at a difficulty that was even a bit manageable for me. And, you know, that they had not cost a fourth of the money I spent on this entire project.

This isn’t the one I watched initially, but it’s the one that has the cutscenes.

That’s Riku playing as Sora in a computer game, FYI. He’s doing his part, like everyone else. It’s been a year since Sora’s disappearance (which I still didn’t clearly see), and the gang is pooling its resources to find him. Aqua, Terra, and Ventus are searching the Realm of Darkness, Roxas and Xion are having their hearts studied, Kairi lets herself get put to sleep lest she have too much agency, and Mickey is investigating every previous Disney world. Some of these could make for inventive DLC adventures—apparently, one of those is the premise of my next game. Instead, Riku’s contribution is to beat a literal bonus boss rush mode that Cid accidentally built. Yep, this is pulling out all the stops by giving the Final Fantasy characters cameos once more.

Only upon the defeat of all thirteen bosses do we discover that KH3’s inscrutable secret ending, the one where Sora winds up in the setting of the Verum Rex video game, was Riku’s dream. It’s a non-ending and non-explanation that exists to justify the Limitcut bosses from a narrative perspective. Nothing else bridges it with the actual secret boss and ending, where Sora meets—and subsequently fights—Yozora, the hero of Verum Rex whose name I cannot hear in any voice but Wallace Shawn’s. Putting aside the issue of this being just one more layer of absurdly hard boss, each other just to hide its story, this is at least enjoyably dopey as a concept.

We end with Sora back at the Final World, Yozora waking up back in his limo, and both having dreamt of each other. And… that’s it! That’s the ending to this George Lucas director’s cut of a bonus story. Dear lord. Well, if nothing else, it gives me more time to cut a swath through Melody of Memory. It also does mean we will have to talk about Verum Rex, but that was a conversation we were gonna have to have once I stepped into Toy Box. We can save it for another day.

June 8: Started Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory, went through the Kingdom Hearts I, Chain of Memories, and 358/2 worlds and about two thirds of the Kingdom Hearts II worlds.

Ah, now this is better. Easy, digestible, shallow, propulsive.

In a way, Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory, the latest mainline Kingdom Hearts, is partially responsible for this entire project. When Sora was added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, he came with a song you could only unlock with another game’s save data. The song was a swing remix of the classic KH menu theme “Dearly Beloved;” the game was the Switch version of Melody. Now, I was never going to buy Melody of Memory just to get one solitary song out of a tracklist of 1,068, nor was I going to do a project solely to justify buying it. But I can admit it did sweeten the pot just a bit. I’d write “Dispatch from the Dive,” get a bunch of articles out of it, and enjoy the reward at the end (which I have).

Well, things certainly got out of hand, didn’t they? Instead of being an easy job, “Dispatch” ballooned in size beyond my wildest expectations. Kingdom Hearts became one of my biggest artistic fascinations in years, if often of the morbid kind. Instead of being a nice dessert, Melody is my last hope to end this series on a high—or even “high-ish”—note after dealing with the worst of Kingdom Hearts III. So far, things are doing alright on that front!

Melody of Memory‘s first level is, fittingly, a take on Destiny Islands. You can summon Mickey for help in any level, but I haven’t so far.

Divorced from that personal context, Melody of Memory is the series’ greatest mechanical departure by moving from an action-RPG to a rhythm game. Sora, Donald, and Goofy hit enemies on a music staff, backed by the worlds and songs of prior Kingdom Hearts games (except for Tarzan due to rights issues with the Burroughs estate, Pirates of the Caribbean, Winnie the Pooh, and Fantasia). It’s very slight yet even more wide. You can gain levels, collect and synthesize items, and there’s a ton of bonus items, playable characters, levels, and artwork. Some of those extra levels are based around the themes to other Kingdom Hearts games or songs from Disney movies. The game can apparently be beaten in under ten hours, but it has enough content to last dozens. I intend to play at a “normal” pace and hit the credits before the week is out, but this is the first time where I’m kind of interested in playing after “Dispatch” finally concludes. That’d be wild, right?

Unfortunately, the story is… pretty bad. It’s so far nothing but Kairi’s stale, slumbering retelling of four of the first five Kingdom Hearts games, and a cursory examination of the world map suggests we’re due for similar trips into Birth by Sleep, Dream Drop Distance, and KH3. Kingdom Hearts has made remakes like this—Chain of Memories and coded were also cut down versions of KH1—but this lacks any conflict or drive. If this is why Kairi needed to be put to sleep for a whole year, color me unconvinced.

Because the story is so nonexistent and the gameplay so shallow (if fun!), I’m now stuck discussing tertiary stuff, which is weird after weeks of trying to parse Kingdom Hearts plotting. It was a bit hard figuring out how to access some features or move through the menus, if only at first. Also, it’s nonsense that the game lets you team up with Aladdin, Ariel, Pan, Mulan, and even Stitch, but not Jack Skellington or any of the KH3 party members. But that’s kind of it so far, just because Melody is very simple. It only does a couple things, it does them well, and there’s not much more to say.

Side note: there are boss fights in this game! They are stupendously weird and not very fun, since it’s hard to see the meter. But the view of characters shuffling about like a bad theatrical action scene is priceless.

And yes, I do realize the irony of saying that after a page-length response.

June 9: Went through the Kingdom Hearts II, coded, Birth by Sleep, 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, and Dream Drop Distance worlds.

Yesterday’s section was written in the mid-afternoon, after I had gotten through about half of the Kingdom Hearts I worlds. Then, at night, I finished them. Even later, I ended up playing through all of the worlds for two other games, then about two-thirds of the way through the KH2 levels. It’s a very addictive game! Levels are fast, loading is short, and there’s that whole Skinner box feature of wanting to hit the right marks and get to the next level. I am playing more aggressively than I might otherwise just to make sure I hit the ending credits by Saturday, but Melody definitely goes down easy.

My best friend pointed out something about the story that I really appreciated, that this is the best recap that Kingdom Hearts has ever had. Which is insane, but it honestly does work better than going through the whole Dark Seeker Saga. I mean, some of the cutscenes actually explained important plot points of Chain of Memories and 358/2 Days that completely flew by me. But it’s exceptionally dry, about as well written as the terrible text recaps that I decried from the latter day KH games, and not a good depiction of an admittedly bad story. As always, it’s ultimately better for series veterans than newcomers.

One of the wrinkles in this that goes in both directions is how cutscenes, openings, and montages are regularly employed as bonus levels with… limited context.

You know, I had this whole thing planned out for talking about Verum Rex. But I’ve got to hold off until tomorrow because of story material that’s completely unrelated to Melody of Memory. Since Melody’s story contributions are so far nonexistent, especially with regard to characters, I’ve been exploring the Kingdom Hearts Wiki. It’s not like there are anymore bombshell spoilers I need to avoid, right? Mostly it’s looking into Organization XIII people since they’re at least silly. But looking has led me to finding some wild secrets, all of which have to do with stuff I glossed over from that demented far-off prequel Kingdom Hearts χ.

Namely: Ventus is in it! So are Larxene and Marluxia! And in Ventus’ case, it doesn’t even really matter. He can be from the distant past or never really die, because the idea of “continuity” doesn’t really exist in these games. Things don’t simply stop, end, and get supplanted by new things; they just stay around forever and only disappear from our sights as players.

It’s so odd trying to contextualize this. Ventus was from the Land of Departure, except he wasn’t from the Land of Departure; he’s from another world that’s maybe Radiant Garden. Actually, wait; he’s from Daybreak Town from the time before the Keyblade War. Like, it doesn’t really alter how I even think about Ventus, honestly. It’s just weird and dumb. It at least gives some reason for why some of the Organization members had ties to the time from χ, but that only makes the subplot even more strange and tonally out of place. Though I guess I at least appreciate that even Kingdom Hearts III, a game that was so devoted to ruthlessly explaining everything, decided that people didn’t need to be told about this.

June 10: Played through the Kingdom Hearts III worlds up to Scala ad Caelum.

Okay, now it’s time to talk about Verum Rex.

Taken without context, the very concept of Verum Rex—a fictional video game set within the world of Toy Story (and not even the movies, just its Kingdom Hearts III incarnation), and Sora’s current purgatory—is insane even by the standards of Kingdom Hearts. It introduces itself and Toy Box through a lavishly produced fake trailer that comes out of nowhere. It sets up the world’s surprisingly frequent, not at all Toy Story-inspired mech combat. There’s a part where Sora is thrown into the game and has to play a deathmatch round. And that jump foreshadows the secret ending to KH3, where Sora finds himself in Verum Rex’s metropolis of Quadratum. Is he in the actual game, like what happened in Toy Box? Or is he in a real life setting that inspired the video game, like how the superheroes of comic book crossovers tended to read their rival’s comic? And why is a video game about Anna and Elsa doing this?

Well, like a lot of phenomenally demented creative decisions, there’s a history behind it—and in this case, it goes all the way back to 2006. That’s when Square Enix began production on and announced Final Fantasy XIII Versus, a game that was not necessarily set within the world of FF13 (which began production around the same time and was announced the same day) but would be thematically tied to it. Together, they would theoretically make XIII a pillar for the franchise. Both games were hyped, but Versus caught extra buzz thanks to its dark tone, realistic graphics, Shakespeare quotes, skyscrapers, and angsty hero, Prince Noctis. It excited fans, as did its pedigree; Tetsuya Nomura was directing it alongside his various other projects: The World Ends with You, butchering Yoshitaka Amano’s art as character designer for Dissidia Final Fantasy, and, of course, the Kingdom Hearts series.

Over the years, the press got few details about Versus. There weren’t many to share, as the project struggled to get any momentum. As a rule, Square likes to announce their games early on, and while that can start a long hype cycle it also makes any cancellation a lot more public. And, well, something similar happened to Versus. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, “canceled;” it was still about a prince named Noctis. But when the game reappeared in 2013, it wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t Versus. It had been upgraded from spinoff game to the mainline Final Fantasy XV, the story was a bro-y road trip, and Hajime Tabata was director. Square saw it as FF’s formal debut on PS4 and Xbox One, and making it a more overtly “new” entry seemed the way to go.

While Nomura was still on the project as co-director once XV was rebranded in 2012, he was no longer in the driver’s seat (his contributions appear to have been a mix of keeping the project somewhat faithful to his idea and attempting to turn it into a Les Miz-inspired musical). Square reassigned him to other projects, notably Kingdom Hearts III which was going through a troubled production of its own. Seven years later, KH3 was released, followed a year later by Re Mind, Melody of Memory, and Nomura’s Final Fantasy VII REMAKE. As for FF15, the road didn’t get less rocky, and it launched without a lot of amenities—like an ending, for one thing. But Square and Tabata (who left the company in 2018) made substantial additions, and over time the game did build a stellar reputation. But as itself, not the reanimated Final Fantasy XIII Versus.

And this is where Verum Rex comes in. Because for all intents and purposes, it is Final Fantasy XIII Versus. Yozora is pretty much that original version of Noctis Lucis Caelum with the serial numbers filed off. The darker, more realistic setting is right out of those early trailers; Yozora even relaxes in the same limo. It is immensely—perhaps too—easy to come to one conclusion: Nomura’s desperately trying to recreate his old game in his new one, as though he’s bringing it back as one of Organization XIII’s Nobodies. But that only takes us down odder streets.

For instance, how do we first see Verum Rex? Through a literal trailer. And right afterwards, that trailer and brand get some very effusive praise courtesy of Toy Story’s unimpeachable Rex and Hamm. Sora also has nice things to say about the game, and if that’s the case, is… is Nomura just shilling his own dead project? At the very least, we know he’s invested in it, as he has openly mentioned wanting to turn Verum Rex into a game on its own—one that would assuredly be as time-consuming and expensive as his latest blockbusters. However, Square and Nomura agreed his attention would be best spent on getting Kingdom Hearts IV out the door in a reasonable timeframe and not split between the sequel to a Disney game that sold millions of copies and an inscrutable reimagining of another franchise’s axed spin-off.

I don’t even know how I feel about this, beyond appreciating the audacity a lot more than Re Mind’s. I try to reuse old material a lot, too, and I hate thinking of all the half-finished projects I’ve done for Souce Gaming that’ll never see the light of day (and those usually took a few days to write, not six years). I also kind of respect the desire to create this weird, multi-pronged universe where Sora’s original adventures bleed out into the world the way the Disney stuff bleeds in. But it’s also kind of hard to not make this glib psychoanalytical reading and assume that Nomura, that sentient pair of jorts of a man, is trying to will Versus back into existence. And given that Verum Rex is symbolic of KH3’s needless excess, it being on his mind is maybe not a great sign whether or not KH4 comes out in a timely manner.

The one (one) Toy Box level. Kinda hard to keep attention on the beat, honestly.

I have now come to understand why the game has none of the KH3 partners. It’s because it has barely any KH3 stuff in general. Instead of walking along the musical stand with the world in the background like every other level, they’re set over cutscenes. Presumably, they didn’t want to graphically downgrade or cut up the giant worlds they had, since everything else is made of material from the remastered games. It’s kind of amazing how much mileage Square has been able to get out of that older material. In general, Melody of Memory is pretty good at keeping its button prompts readable (though that gets tested in Proud Mode), but it’s noticeably harder to read the notes when you’re watching a short movie. And only one movie, so each KH3 world—of which both the Caribbean and its version of Olympus are excluded—provides only one song instead of two or three.

Really makes Kingdom Hearts III feel like much more of an afterthought. Though it does one thing good, which is that the recaps of this part of the story actually mention the levels themselves. In every other part of Melody, the Disney stuff is completely ignored, as it should be; it has never been important to the series’ dumb overarching plot. But the KH3 section does work to suggest that each world was important to the quest overall. I criticized III for making its worlds feel less important than ever, but Melody makes a decent case for them. Toy Box and San Fransokyo seeded the replicas, Corona and Arendelle foreshadowed the New Pure Hearts, Monstropolis is where Sora learned about Ventus, and Sora’s last trip to Olympus is referenced despite lacking a level. That’s better than I gave the game credit for.

June 11: Completed the story of Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory.

I did other things today, too. I spent a few hours just getting the scant few stars I needed to unlock the levels based on super-hard KH2 fights: Sephiroth, Roxas, and the Lingering Will. But despite that, I haven’t played them.

Melody of Memory’s story ends, unsurprisingly, in an unsatisfying way. Kairi dreams of Xehanort as the final boss fight, and afterwards he reveals that since Sora’s voice can’t be heard, he’s obviously not in the realms of Light, Darkness, data, or dreams, but the realm on the opposite side of all of them: fiction. And since Riku’s dream shows Sora in a metropolis, then that must be the setting of whatever fiction he’s in. And instead of finding out about Verum Rex from any of the Toy Story characters, Kairi, Riku, and the Fairy Godmother from Cinderella hear about it from the Nameless Star in the Final World.

Part of the ending, when Kairi wakes from her year-long sleep.

When I began this project, I had been under the assumption that Melody was an attempt to really push for Kairi to have a more active presence. I mean, she’s on the cover, and I knew that Sora was stuck in Quadratum by this point. But while it tries to identify her as important, Kairi does very little. There are four sets of three-person teams, but the only time you can play as her is in part of the final level. She dreams up Sora to fight the final boss for her, and he’s the one who goes through the credits. Riku goes off to find Quadratum on his own, so she can continue her seemingly endless “training.”

This is a problem we’ve been dealing with since Kingdom Hearts II, that Kairi is not a good, interesting, rich, or additive character. She essentially exists solely to motivate Sora, whether by being a kidnap victim or inspiration. Her personality is vague and flat. Oh, all the games try to posit her as important, whether through her status as a Princess of Heart or her past (in this one, one of the clues comes from something Terra-Xehanort said to her as a child). And they always tell us that she’s right on the cusp of being a hero in her own right. But it’s always a passive importance, and she never goes past the cusp. Even in this game, none of her memories are really her memories; they’re Sora’s, and she’s just in the peanut gallery. So of course a sequel trying to take her perspective would struggle to give her agency.

Of course, I do have criticisms of the gameplay, too. The biggest is that on a fundamental level, Melody is way more overproduced than it ever needed to be. Its backgrounds are sumptuous, the music is great, but maybe a rhythm game didn’t need a leveling system or crafting or farming for items. Many objectives require playing levels upwards of six times; many items you can synthesize—most notably the levels based on the Disney songs—require going through other levels just as much. The game’s also coy on where you can find specific items, as it is on a lot of features. At worst these are actively detrimental, but at best they still add nothing.

Creatively, I’m also disappointed by certain music choices—and not just that Corona’s song should’ve been its battle theme. Shafting Kingdom Hearts III in general feels weird when its most uncompromised virtue was its music, though I’m more frustrated with the use of original Disney songs. You can unlock levels based on them, but only five: “Part of your World” (the middling KH2 version, I think), “Beauty and the Beast,” “A Whole New World,” “Circle of Life,” and “Let It Go” (which is Arendelle’s only musical contribution). Most of these are romantic ballads, not the kinds of high tempo songs that would be more fun to play. It’s a real shame, since even one song from Mulan, Tangled, or Hercules would’ve made for a great level. I would place the blame at Disney for being controlling over their music, but it was Disney who proposed this project in the first place!

And… you know what, screw it. It’s weird that the series keeps using Riku’s shorter KH1 model. He got a huge growth spurt in the third game—of which this is the fourteenth—but he keeps reverting to his younger look. It’s like the series is anxious about his character development. It can’t just be that the remastered version of his 2002 model is easier to use, right? Because they still have that older Riku model from KH2.

And yet, this is the first Kingdom Hearts that I want to keep playing—not to 100% completion, but past the credits. Had I been playing normally instead of in this intense, protracted way, I might have done that for a couple games, for a bit. Like, I did do it for Dream Drop Distance, if only to get the secret ending. But in a normal situation, I would’ve in all likelihood put each one down the moment I got whatever post-credits scenes I had earned, just as I did. But not Melody, and not because it’s the last one. If there had been another “final” game, I’d probably have gone back to this one after the project was done. Because it’s really nice to play.

Final Thoughts: This is such an odd way to start the “Lost Master” Saga. Xehanort is gone, but he’s the main villain in both Re Mind and Melody of Memory. Most of the worlds and spaces I experienced are taken directly from older games, not any new worlds. Both entries do go out of their way to highlight Quadratum as the next big jump for this series, but does “fiction” really feel that much more different in practice than any of the other realms that imperiled Sora? More to the point, though, neither are good at charting what this saga will look like and how it will differ from the thirteen other games in this series.

Another question: how, if at all, will Kairi’s role evolve or expand as the series’ female lead?

That’s bad. And yet, is it weird? Because the game that directly followed Kingdom Hearts I was Chain of Memories, which was effectively a remake of KH1. After Kingdom Hearts II, we had coded (which was effectively a remake of Chain of Memories, so a double remake), and 358/2 Days (which was a prequel and largely reused the same locations). So really, these two new entries fit very well in the series charter.

As has become very clear on my part, I don’t like this method of storytelling or franchise building. And I can’t deny feeling a bit sad that Kingdom Hearts seems largely incapable of learning from too many of its own mistakes. But I also can’t deny that Melody of Memory was a great way for me to close out this project. It’s a genuinely fun game, but it’s also a fun way to engage with this experience I’ve been on. I can go through the songs of these games and just enjoy the music, the settings, and the general vibe. It’s not exactly “nostalgia” I’m feeling for the past five months, but it’s something not dissimilar.

Anyway, here’s a tentative list of games, listed favorite to least favorite:

Kingdom Hearts II
Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories
Kingdom Hearts I
Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep
Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory
Kingdom Hearts 3D Dream Drop Distance
Kingdom Hearts III
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage
Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover
Kingdom Hearts coded

And the tentative one for Disney worlds. For ones that appeared in multiple games, I’m treating them as a collective entity. I’m not sure why I decided to write explanations for them and not the games, but here they are:

Halloween Town: It’s the best of everything: visuals, music, style, structure, and use of its resident Disney characters.
Mysterious Tower / Symphony of Sorcery: Exactly what the Kingdom Hearts take Disney’s grandest work of cinema needed to be. Mysterious Tower’s okay, too, I suppose.
Toy Box: The one great KH3 world (and just as great characters) but more importantly, it’s the one KH3 world that excellently executes its attempt at much larger level design.
Country of the Musketeers: Just really, really fun.
Timeless River: The mini-games are awful, but it’s charming out the wazoo.
Kingdom of Corona: The one good Kingdom Hearts III level and the game’s best use of its Disney flock.
Agrabah: Other than the awful Jafar fight in KH2, every appearance is like a platonic ideal of a Kingdom Hearts world.
Neverland: This one really crept up on me over time.
La Cité des Cloches: Pretty, dramatic; it’s main problem is that it’s too big, in a way that kind of foreshadows the level bloat of KH3.
Olympus Coliseum / Underworld / Olympus: The KH3 version drags things down, but the rest of its time in the sun (or the underworld) has been a delight.
Enchanted Dominion: It’s weird; its best feature (its pretty look and visuals) are still kind of a pale imitation of the much prettier movie on which it is based.
Disney Town: Mini-games are terrible, but the world itself is fun.
San Fransokyo: Kinda bland, but it’s sandbox attempt is interesting.
Monstro / Prankster’s Paradise: Monstro is genuinely terrible, and Prankster’s Paradise is the only thing keeping it this high up. But Prankster’s Paradise is really good.
Port Royal / the Caribbean: this would be a few spots higher just for the island hopping in the Caribbean, were it not for the turgid story that’s also in the Caribbean.
Castle of Dreams: What sinks this is the part in Ventus’ story where you’re shrunk down to the size of a mouse. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly adequate castle level.
Dwarf Woodlands: It’s not really a great level, and I don’t like the dungeon, but I like how digestible it is. The forest, too.
Monstropolis: Factory levels really are hard to get right, huh?
Pride Lands: Way too empty, way too big—and yet, not nearly as big as the KH3 worlds.
Beast’s Castle: This would normally be a fine level, but the mammoth difficulty spike in the return visit goes too far.
Deep Jungle: The climbing and swinging mechanics are not very good.
Atlantica: Some of the worst movement in the series, but I also can’t help but enjoy how stupid the song mini-games were.
Land of Dragons: Boring. Just deeply, deeply boring.
Wonderland: I still haven’t forgotten you, Trickmaster.
Deep Space: Ugly environments, boring mechanics, and bland gameplay design.
Disney Castle: I was shocked that this exciting visit to Mickey’s home turned into this terrible escort mission.
Space Paranoids / The Grid: The apotheosis of the “boring Kingdom Hearts level,” where soulless characters, an uninspired visual palette, and terrible mini-games mix.
100 Acre Wood: Speaking of terrible mini-games…
Arendelle: Almost everything bad about KH3 in a nutshell, really.

And… fine, let’s do the original worlds, too—albeit without the description. I’m not sure I have as much to say on them:

Hollow Bastion / Radiant Garden
Traverse Town
Dive to the Heart
The World that Never Was
Twilight Town
Scala ad Caelum
Keyblade Graveyard
Destiny Islands
The Final World
Land of Departure
End of the World
Datascape

It’s interesting to me how a lot of the worlds from KH2, the one I think is the best game in the series by far, are also worlds I put very low on the list. I think their general shortness made the weaker ones a lot easier to take.

And with that, goodbye for now (except for, of course, my regular Source Gaming writing, which will of course be continuing). Whether the next weekly project is a continuation of “Dispatch” or a new series, I look forward to having a nice, long break before it. Thanks so much for sticking with me on this journey.

Overall progress: Completed the main story of Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind, watched the bonus Limitcut Episode, and started and finished the story of Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory.

Other games played: