Looking Over Kingdom Hearts

I love crossovers. It's for this reason that Project X Zone has eaten over a full 24 hours of my life, and why one of the first fighting games I ever played was Marvel vs Capcom 2, which was followed shortly by Super Smash Bros.

However, I like many others, did not jump onboard the Disney/Final Fantasy mix until everyone had already revealed it was rather good.

I remember being enthralled by the game even after the credits rolled. So naturally, I was one of the many hyped up for Kingdom Hearts 2, and one of those people that ended up trying Chain of Memories. While 2 was a good game, the longer it sat around, the more I began to have problems with the plot. Meanwhile, CoM started to go down hill soon after the first couple of hours. I remember quitting completely around Hollow Bastion, which was one of the best levels of the original.

The series then began to get weirder and weirder for me, as the games started to come out either on systems I didn't own or with increasingly less interesting ideas involved, and the fanbase got worse and worse (it wasn't the shippers either if that's what you're thinking). I began to separate myself from the games as I got into the next console generation, telling myself I'd come back if the third game ever came out.

Instead, someone gave me a PSP and I finally tried out Birth By Sleep.

Something remarkable happened then: somehow I began to enjoy the series again. To truly understand just how remarkable this is, you have to realize that II had begun to really fester as I had time to pick over its every flaw over the years of waiting, and due to its cliffhanger nature, all the small retcons and changes to the direction of the series that it brought made it harder and harder to sit beside the original (a completely self contained narrative). Somehow though, BbS was mending wounds here, and it got me excited for the next game in the series.

When I finally got my 3DS, I decided to check out DDD, and found that it built off of the combined BbS and 2 to correct the course of the series again. Despite its problems in gameplay it got me actually excited about a Kingdom Hearts 3 coming out.

So of course it got announced this year at E3.

I figure now's as good a time as any to really talk about the series as a whole and explain why the two spinoff were somehow a good idea (separating them across systems with no real formal plans to unify the whole thing is a different mistake that we can talk about later).

Note, there may be some spoilers here and there, so read on at your own risk. On the other hand, some of these spoilers may convince you to check out the games, so I don't encourage you guys who haven't played all the entries to leave.

Let's start at the beginning:

-The original Kingdom Hearts is a charming game similar to a lot of PS1/2 era platformers and some JRPGs that did an interesting job of working classic stories of Disney movies into a larger overarching plot. It's all very childlike and magical and there's nothing wrong with that.

If anything, it allowed us to explore lands from our imagination with characters that rarely felt out of place. While the different worlds had hints of their original stories, the central story which had a host of Disney villains forming a secret cabal to enact a dark plan took center stage.

Just as the main cast, comprised of the two sidekicks of THE Disney character and Sora, were a perfect fit to every world, so too were their enemies, who were said to be made of the darkness of people's hearts. It all gave this feeling that every world was in danger, but never felt overly overt about the whole thing. Granted, the lack of supporting characters in many of the worlds started to overemphasize this a little bit, as you only met up with Heartless and heroes wherever you went, things were still relatively balanced.

The fun of the game was how it used both its original content and recognizable characters to create something that never really felt like a crossover game, by having a story that naturally allowed crossovers to occur.

What sold me though was the amazing design work, from enemies to environments, everything was memorable. While I won't say every level was fun to explore (Hollow Bastion was miles above Monstro), most were, and I always loved what I ended up finding in the end.

The ending left me hungry for more, but not feeling cheated by what I got, which is the mark of a good game.

-Along came Chain of Memories then.

The first noticeable problem about the game is that it retreads the same ground as the first game while presenting itself as a sequel. The mechanics and story of the whole thing seems to intend this game to be a quick catch up for those who wanted to jump right into the next one.

The problem is that the story also goes about setting things up for a sequel in its main plot.

To explain, you're sorting through Sora's memories and going through all the stages of the original game, though instead of the main villains being a Disney secret society that serves the purposes of a darker master, all of this is orchestrated by a completely new set of villains known as Organization XIII, with less than half of the 13 appearing here. So most of the "world" plots are retreads, the main villains are scarcely there, and both plots have to contend with each world getting 4 scenes each.

I'm told things get more interesting in Riku's mode, if only because you get an actual new story, but for anyone who's played the original game you'll soon lose interest before then.

The combat sucked, the story sucked, and it was off putting to both newcomers (who wouldn't really care about this cut down version of the original or understand why people loved the crossover when it was hardly there) and fans (who wouldn't care about retreading what they've been through with a hero who is suddenly oblivious to all of it, with less interesting puppet masters who barely have screen time).

-The second game was thankfully much better.

Before I rip into it, I'd like to note that it still managed to do a lot of things right. Combat was better here, the worlds were once fun to explore, that secret society wasn't quite so bad with some actual screen time, Nobodies were an interesting idea, the 1000 Heartless battle (and all leading up to it) is still one of the best horde fights in video games, and it returned to caring about its core cast.

In fact, most of the problems I've come to have with it are things I didn't notice on my first several playthroughs.

However, it did trip up and derail the entire franchise enough that it got stuck cleaning up for years before it could work on a proper sequel.

First off, it got caught up on Ansem.

QUICK SPOILER ALERT Ansem in the original game is the name of the guy that showed up in a cloak on your homeworld and thoroughly screwed it over. He then proceeded to possess your best friend after he began using dark powers, and was shown to be a puppetmaster responsible for most of the problems in the game. As you found letters left by him around the worlds, you learned that he was a king who turned mad scientist after being exposed to the ideas of the heart and other worlds by King Mickey. While he could be seen as an example of why tampering with darkness was bad, it was also to reinforce just how something so innocent as revealing yourself to be a hero really could be. The game went on though to point out that it wasn't the whole "science is bad" philosophy, but rather Ansem only learning about darkness that led to his downfall.
SPOILER ENDS

The problem seemed to stem from CoM introducing Ansem again during Riku's side of things where he was used as a parallel (for good reason), as well as due to the fact that I strongly believe no one had properly planned out what they wanted to do with DiZ (the token Mysterious character in CoM) and they couldn't write in a proper plot with the ingredients they had. Never the less, Ansem gets tossed around all over the place and it ends up changing the entire meaning to his original character when all the revelations are over, in favor of "young and stupid" and "my greatest failure" tropes. It also REALLY doesn't help that the character introduced due to this ends up with a stupid sounding name that doesn't make sense until later in the series.

Moving onto the second problem, certain characters get a lot more preference than others to their expense:
The slash writers do end up having a point for picking up that certain characters have more chemistry than the intended romances flying around.
Kairi gets handed something that should be a huge plot point that should change her entire character off-handedly, and it is never brought up again.
The organization members still don't have enough screen time, and unlike the Disney villains of the previous game don't have some alternate source to help fill in the gaps.
The Final Fantasy cast begins to feel like cameos rather than secondary characters around this point.
The Nobodies get maybe an eight of the screentime as the Heartless and rarely adapt for their "roles" (there are about 8-10 different versions of them as compared to the 30 or so different Heartless).
The long 4 hour intro feels like an excuse to show off a small cast that no one could figure out how to work with Sora.
Malificent returns with a new lackey (creating an amazingly stupid and enjoyable team out of it) and turns out to be one of the few Disney villains that actually turn out to be interesting (most turn out like Hades from the last game).

In addition, the game also began to set the stage for something else, but it never really seemed to understand what that was itself. This direction wouldn't be hammered out until 3D.

-So the first of the games to try to manage the fallout was 358/2 days (not a math expresion, but rather 358 over 2 days, which somewhat makes sense with context).

This game tried to hammer out Nobodies and Organization 13, and while it got a couple of facts out there, it mostly fell into the same trap as CoM, where it wasn't enough new added and a lot of retreading (here was when Agrabah became too much to look at anymore).

To anyone hoping to see a lot of what led to the split between the Castle Oblivion members (CoM team) and the World That Never Was core cast (KHII) like me, you'll be disappointed to know that the game barely gets you through a couple of tutorials with maybe one or two missions with them before they leave forever.

Instead, it's all about Xion, the fourteenth member (yeah, this actually also needed work from one of the following two games) of Org. XIII. One of the biggest problems of the game comes from the fact that all the supposed emotions you see are simply memories of emotions that the Nobodies have (though I don't remember if the game ever talks about the Chinese room thought experiment about smart A.I. that would be appropriate here). Thus a lot of the scenes of "friendship" end up having a hollow undercurrent.

In the end, all this does is give reason to Axel's actions in 2, but we'd already seen enough of that even in the limited screentime he got in that game.

So, great, you gave a game to the person who took up all the prologue we wanted to skip to get to Sora (yeah, I felt bad for the guy, but knowing his life had one good thing in it before it was crushed that led to that bad ending for him DOESN'T make me feel better), and you spent that time working on the fan favorite who could have been the lead instead (which could have helped hammer out his more morally ambiguous actions in his debut game).

Anyways, the game didn't go anywhere of its own, missed out on the reason we bought it, and required further help when it created its own tangle. I kinda stopped caring about Kingdom Hearts spinoff here.

-Thankfully I tried BbS.

Leaping far back in the canon, it decided to explore a lot of ideas that were present in the original game's Ansem while working on the problems of II and Chain of Memories.

First off, while this only appeared in the final mix version of the game, it finally supplied the reason for "Xehanort" being a name. If you remember the naming rules for Nobodies you end up with this: No Heart.

I'm kind of disappointed they didn't point this one out in the actual story, because it makes so much sense when you finally see this character come into his own during this game. I finally began to accept him here because he ends up this truly vile monster that throughout all the storylines of this game you never truly beat.

His motivations begin to mirror the original villains of the first game, and undo a lot of the problems II had when it came to retcons, without too badly retconning again.

Not only that, it works on a little mystery the original game had in it fairly early on, without directly stating it.

The original story it works with as well finally starts working with the mood the series had taken in 2, while walking through 3 protagonists that each mimic the different approaches previous protagonists have taken. Ventus is Sora from the first game, Terra is Riku but interesting, and Aqua acts as a combination of Sora 2.0, Kairi (if she had actually changed in the scene I talked about above), and King Mickey. However, they each end up with different endings to those tales that are downright depressing.

What really works here is that beyond furiously trying to work on fixing together every loose plot thread hanging around (and even some that were just tied together wrong), it still manages to be its own story. It was the first game since the original that I felt finally got it right.

Okay, the 3 storyline thing began to wear on me as I returned to worlds for the third time (though usually it sent me someplace else) and Aqua usually got cheated by having to do fallout management for Ventus and Terra. The game also fails when it comes to the Unversed, an enemy introduced because the Heartless weren't supposed to be around during this time. They had to have a reason for being there and disappearing soon after, so they get tacked onto another character.

However, the good the game does, such as working more with some of the Org XIII to make me actually interested in them, begins to outweigh this.

What really works though is the forward momentum the game creates by salvaging 358/2.

SPOILER If a Heartless of someone (which opposed to the name, actually holds the heart) is destroyed along with the Nobody (the body), the heart reunites with the body END SPOILER

Essentially, the game ends up setting up a villain and a goal for the series.

-So now finally, Dream Drop Distance (3D) is set to move forward the series.

I find it funny that the series used a sequel and a prequel to work everything in between together.

I will say this: I prefer BbS, due to how self contained it was and how even though it stops short of being a complete story, you can enjoy it on your own. Also, it knew it couldn't work with allies so the game adjusted itself accordingly.

The whole thing is a bit complex in its own right. As revealed by BbS and hinted at in I and II, the worlds were governed a lot better by Keyblade Masters in the past, but a large scale civil war that kicked off everything has kind of obliterated all of that. Not to mention the fact that taking care of the Organization didn't really fix everything, so in an effort to kill two birds with one stone, Sora and Riku are sent to become proper Keyblade Masters while at the same time taking care of a couple of worlds that had been taken over by darkness that have yet to return (referred to as "sleeping").

Diving into this dream world, the duo soon discovers that the worlds are trapped in nightmares that cause the past to replay until someone solves the problems of the world. Somehow, the worlds also gets divided in two (with hints that this is all the fault of the first world they enter).

The game takes hints from BBS in trying to set up two plotlines with varying success. The first world is definitely the strongest in this regard, but it doesn't get points for that because it's using The World Ends With You, which already had that as a minor plot element (It does get points for have the most fleshed out characters though, as well as mixing around the rosters there). Other worlds can vary between the Chain of Memories quick refresher about the movies type plots (Tron Legacy world, Riku side is particularly bad here, compared to the creative Sora side) to creating interesting if brief plot lines to simply splitting a single story between the two.

There's something about Dream Eaters, the replacement for Heartless that sometimes work with the level but are more often annoying and unnecessary, rarely carrying so much of same presence as the Unversed of all enemies. Part of the blame here is the fact that they're also party members, rather than BBS's approach to ditch the whole thing. Donald and Goofy are meanwhile relegated to the sidelines (though there is a particularly difficult scene to watch where Sora struggles temporarily with the realization that his best friends' memories don't know him). While I almost always replaced one of them with the newcomers on worlds, it does take a noticeable chunk of Sora's character away from him.

Thankfully the main plot when it's rolling makes up for that. With the bombs dropped in BBS about Xehanort, you now get to see his schemes beginning to unfold again after the setbacks he's suffered.

Part of that is absolutely wrecking Sora, now that he's got no friends along for the ride as well as the things we've learned so far about him, which is a nice change of pace. Sadly, Riku's also still working through his issues, but he's doing much better than previous games so we aren't overloaded with angst here.

But one of the big highlights of this game is Organization XIII, or rather learning what exactly was the whole point of it all (it also explains Xion, hints of some of CoM reworking), and makes you realize just how devious the main villain is.

*For the full story on this (which explains just how Xanatos-y this guy ends up being) here you go*

The game also ends up finally setting things up so that two characters it kept coming back to and missing will finally be ready in Kingdom Hearts 3.

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The end result of this is that I'm excited to see the next entry in the series, and even to see those HD rereleases coming out for the PS3 (Please put a full version of BBS on there instead of Re:coded for 2.5!). However, I'll also admit that it took two games that weren't entirely amazing gameplay-wise to turn things around.

Still, the snarl of continuity is getting straightened out and all they need to do now is to take things home.

Please do not screw this up.

-Sincerely, a returning fan.