Kingdom Hearts…But First, Advent Children

Before we get started, I’d like to make a correction and apology.

Posted on May 24, 2012:

“Kingdom Hearts 2 is not an awful game by any stretch.  It’s just full of things that make it hover dangerously close to the edge.  Roxas and his pain-inducing prologue, the disorganized Organization XIII, the shift from the east/west hybridization to cookie-cutter anime fare, the segregated plot, the still-piddling minigames, the absurd gameplay decisions, the unevenness of Reaction Commands, the mash-happy nature, the handling of the worlds…there’s a lot to discuss, and I will in due time.  But for everything the game does wrong, there are just a number of things that it does so right.”

In retrospect, that’s not fair to anime.  As you can guess, I hold anime in high esteem -- it has plenty of amazing elements, its fair share of faults, and stories ranging from magical to mediocre.  To knock something just because it has anime and manga influences is utterly wrong; I used to rag on the Teen Titans cartoon before it came out because it tried to copy anime, and yet by series’ end it became one of my favorite shows.  To even insinuate that anything with certain tropes, styles, and mannerisms is automatically bad because of it is something that I would like to avoid -- hence, my correction.

What I should have said is this:

“It’s just full of things that make it hover dangerously close to the edge…the disorganized Organization XIII, the shift from the east/west hybridization to Advent Children-style schlock…”

There we go.  That about sums things up -- and makes the final hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 so genuinely painful.

So let’s pretend you've never seen Advent Children (in which case I envy you).  You go in expecting to see exactly what you hoped for: a continuation of the Final Fantasy VII mythos.  Ignoring the fact that for the most part the loose ends and narrative were all wrapped up -- though that would be more of an issue when Dirge of Cerberus came around…brrrrr -- you’d expect for the movie to give you a glimpse of what became of the characters after Meteor nearly wipes out the planet.  Likewise, you’d expect for bad guys and monsters to show up, and battles to occur rather frequently.  And you’d expect the movie to follow the game and its internal logic far more closely than, say, The Spirits Within.

And you’d be right.  Too bad that all those elements can’t save the movie from being shit.

If you’re a fan of Cid, Yuffie, Red XIII, Barret, or Cait Sith, you’re out of luck.  Outside of about six minutes in the total hundred-one minute runtime, they’re pointless.   (Vincent fares slightly better, for good or for ill).  Having cleared the original game I know that Midgar and the connected slums weren’t exactly a colorful place, but the rest of the world managed to be vibrant and varied; here you just get washed-out, dystopian images and palettes.  The new villains end up having their plan upended by a “much-needed” confrontation with Sephiroth, begging the question why he wasn’t just the villain in the first place -- especially considering that he’s on the movie’s cover.  The plot manages to add exactly nothing to the continuity or world, with the stakes being not much more than “beat these guys” and all the other elements that made FF7 so great being shuffled aside.  And what in God’s name happened to Cloud?  What happened to Reno?  What happened to Aerith?  Why is Rufus suddenly alive after being blown up by a Weapon’s attack and ostensibly having a skyscraper collapse on him?  Is Geostigma really just a disease that makes people sad?  Why did we need an extended scene of Cloud’s cell phone sinking into the water?

It’s all just a ruse to shuttle viewers from one fight to the next -- and therein lays a major fault with Square-Enix as of late.  Final Fantasy has never been a perfect franchise, but (up until 13) it had a few consistent elements.  It had a sprawling world, deep and meaningful and for the most part inviting players to explore.  It infused spiritual elements with the mundane, from crystals to spirits to ancient societies to powerful magic.  It brought crazy casts together, allowing them to bounce ideas and worldviews and rivalries off each other -- and gave you a party to follow and use to fight the hordes of evil with at your leisure.  There was, and always will be, an emphasis on the battles…buuuuuuuut there was a difference between having the battles as a part of the game and having the battles be the whole purpose of the game.  You could argue that it was just due to limitations of the hardware, forcing the FF team to reign in their designs -- and considering what Squeenix does when they have free reign with technology, money, and resources…

…Yeah.  You know what they say about how absolute power.

Advent Children apparently hands out a slew of maxed-out, game-breaking Materia, because now everyone can fly, leap around as fast as a speeding train, cut through buildings and motorcycles, deflect bullets with sunglasses, and can survive getting stabbed and shot with no discernible damage to their clothes.  I’ve heard that the crew behind the movie purposely decided not to worry about physics and make the fights as cool as possible.  The problem with this approach is that when you just make the fights cool, you forgo everything else -- plausibility, sense, personality, tension, stakes, risk and reward, impact on the characters, impact on the plot, actually being able to tell what's going on, etc.  Fight scenes aren’t exactly world-class literature, but they still have a decorum that you can’t afford to ignore, regardless of your medium.

In spite of that, I’d assume that Advent Children sold like hotcakes coated in a cocktail of drugs and peppermint.  And even if it wasn’t, Squeenix would be content with taking the lessons learned -- over-the-top fights, high-end graphics and melodrama are good -- and applying them elsewhere.  Advent Children's contribution to the canon was just giving fans footage to make AMVs to; the plot was (if you can believe it) simultaneously bare-bones and byzantine, so much so that there had to be prequel novels and an updated version of the movie to make more money promote Final Fantasy XIII give a satisfying conclusion explain what was going on make more money.

With that preamble out of the way, we’re finally ready to talk about Kingdom Hearts 2.  Stay tuned.