Anybody else getting heart palpitations over the impending, full release of Kingdom Hearts III? I know I am.
Hard to believe that the day’s almost here -- less than a week, by the time this post goes up. Anyone who’s excited is justified in the hype. Anyone who’s disdainful is justified in the skepticism. I think that, speaking personally, my MO for now is to go in with the mindset that it’s a new day and a new game. Clean slate. Breathe deep, play, and enjoy. Or…try to enjoy. There are dozens of ways for the game to go wrong, but the only way to know for sure is to face it head-on. Because if nothing else? If we’re lucky -- if we’re blessed by the overlords at Squeenix Keep -- this storyline is going to have a definitive end. The slate’s going to get even cleaner.
We’ll see what the future holds. But before that, there’s one more thing we -- or I -- have to do. Let’s talk about Kingdom Hearts 0.2.
…Featuring the only wrestler theme song that can possibly fit the context. Inasmuch as a wrestler theme song can.
Been holding onto this one since the start. And one for KHIII, but we’ll get there when we get there.
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, then you’ll know that I don’t hold Birth By Sleep in high esteem. In fact, I absolutely hate it -- loathe it, even. That’s purely based on the story, yes, but gameplay can’t save a game that by necessity revolves around a fixed narrative. That was the point (for me, at least) where KH as a whole went on life support, if not flat-out died.
The charisma levels bottomed out. Everyone turned into an idiot. The plot only happened because no one could talk to each other for ten, or even five minutes. It tried to go for tragedy without justifying the downfall of its cast. The “evil genius” of a villain largely won by way of letting a bunch of morons self-destruct. The canon twisted into material that would have made the Star Wars prequels Oscar-worthy. And because it’s a KH game, it’s got more padding than a California King -- with plenty of maudlin and/or awkward dialogue to prove it.
It’s with no small exaggeration that I say Aqua was the best and only good thing to come out of BBS. Except maybe Eraqus’ design, but he’s dead for now -- and also, he was a card-carrying member of the Dumb-Dumb Club. Aqua was the least dumb of the cast; she wasn’t bereft of bad choices/actions and her character as a whole wasn’t exactly award-winning, but her role in the plot was quite literally to clean up the messes caused by her comrades, even when they dumped on her for not mindlessly going along with their “plans”. Naturally, her reward for being the best character was to get trapped in the realm of darkness, and stay there for more than a decade.
That right there was the real tragedy. Not in-universe, oh no; it’s because Nomura and crew, in their infinite wisdom, threw Aqua under the bus, the barge, and the Boeing 747. Because…I don’t know. I don’t want to keep saying “Squeenix hates women”; maybe they’re just horrifically incompetent with writing female characters and would rather shuffle them off to the corner somewhere. No one can complain about you botching female characters if you reduce their presence to the bare minimum.
But I will -- begrudgingly, and with teeth clenched tight enough to bend steel -- give them credit. Nomura, the crew, and Squeenix in general tried to make things right. And in some ways, they succeeded.
The name of that (partial) success? Kingdom Hearts 0.2.
…No, I REFUSE to type out the full name.
If nothing else, the game -- or at least the vertical slice of what’s to come -- deserves credit for giving the franchise its first, undisputed female lead. Not sharing a screen with the boys. Not being an extra playable character alongside the boys. Aqua is the one and only playable character, and the leading lady to end all debate. Kairi, Namine, and Xion (and Larxene too, I guess) can all get rekt. The queen bee is here, and she loves the color blue.
The story picks up in what is, admittedly, an awkward place -- something that makes me suspect Squeenix doesn’t understand what a framing device is. Basically, it “starts” shortly after the end of 3D, with Riku and Kairi getting instructions from Yen Sid. Mickey chimes in and says that he met Aqua (or saw her for the last time, at least) in the Dark Realm. After that? Cut to Aqua’s perspective, wherein she’s still wandering the abyssal depths alone. By that point? It’s firmly past the events of BBS, but or less syncs up with KHI by the very end. The sync-up is…unsatisfying, to say the least, but whatever. There are more important things to worry about.
Namely, 0.2 succeeds because it’s Ground Zeroes: Anime Arrange.
Back in the day, Ground Zeroes was a taste test for Metal Gear Solid V -- albeit one with a controversial $40 price tag. It still had replay value, granted, but it still comes off as an eyebrow-raising tactic, especially given that the replay value came (in part) from taking advantage of content that, scope-wise, paled in comparison to other games (and from MGSV itself, naturally). In the interest in not plunging scissors into old scars, I’ll say that for me, 0.2 fares somewhat better because I hadn’t played 3D up to that point. Or watched Back Cover, but the less said about that, the better.
This is going to sound bizarre, so I’ll go ahead and make my claim now: drastically cutting down the amount of game in the game (0.2, that is) ended up making it far stronger than a full-priced, full-fledged title. All the padding, all the chaff, all the faffing about -- virtually all of it got excised from Aqua’s Great Big Hellscape Adventures. It was a maneuver that -- in what I’m partially-convinced was accidental, because Squeenix -- decisively dealt with one of the ever-prevalent problems with KH. Yes, 0.2 told -- and still tells -- as concise a story as it can within a reasonable amount of time, with proper pacing. This is the first game in years that actually focuses on something.
Aqua is trapped in a nightmare world, one whose rules are as incomprehensible as its limits are sprawling. She can’t escape. She can’t advance. She doesn’t know where she’s going, or how long it’ll take, or how much time passes. All she can do is walk and fight. Walk and fight. Walk and fight. Walk and fight. Again, and again, and again, in a realm where her only company is the band of hellions itching to devour her soul. Her hopes are dwindling, with prospects that grow direr by the “day”. You can hear it in her voice. See it in her face. Read it in her subtitles. She’s dying inside, but still alive regardless -- a slave to her hopes and ideals.
To put it simply, Aqua is fucked. And in more ways than one. Honestly, I wish the devs had gone even farther than what’s in the game. The idea is that the Dark Realm prevents her from aging, but there’s a part of me (one that I’m in no rush to hide) that wanted her to show a deeper physical transformation than what we got. Would that include an older Aqua? If I had any say, then yes. Absolutely. But that would also include steps to make her look more haggard and ravaged -- not to the point where she’s bloody and scarred (because this is a generally E10+ rated franchise), but at least with an outfit that’s not as prim, pristine, and fresh from the dryer as when she dropped in. To the game’s credit, you can change pieces of her outfit to make it look like she’s been through some shit; tweak the colors so that there’s black with brown, dirt-like gradients. Better than cat ears, IMHO.
While we’re on the subject of “what I’d change”, I would drop a not-insignificant portion of the dialogue. In my own writing adventures (writeventures, if you will), I’ve found that in some cases, having characters say nothing is more potent than saying, well, anything. Given that this is still a KH game, 0.2 can’t escape the specter -- so yes, there’s some hokey, clumsy dialogue embedded throughout. Lines are said that mean next to nothing, or otherwise spell out what’s already understood or implied. I mean, KH is still half-built on Disney properties. Why not let the audio and visuals convey ideas instead of rambling about hearts again, as countless Disney productions have done before?
With all that in mind, I still think that 0.2 does the best it can with what it’s got (and who’s at the helm in glacier-infested waters). Focusing on one character and one story does wonders. It’s almost entirely Aqua’s story, studying what sort of toll endless darkness can take on a person. It is ultimately a story about hope and perseverance in the face of adversity, but it handles those themes in the right way -- i.e. forcing the lead to fight their hardest, against near-insurmountable odds, to keep their hope alive. All the while, there’s the question of how badly Aqua’s been broken by her ordeal. Has she gone insane? Has her heart been corrupted? Has she become so dedicated to her ideals that the strain is fracturing her soul far more than if she’d simply given up?
I know there was a big hullabaloo over her getting norted (at least, it sure looks that way), but you can’t really blame her, can you?
In 0.2, Aqua’s greatest enemy is herself. Maybe that’s kind of what BBS was going for, in the sense that it built up its Keyblade wielders as fighters while utterly ignoring the sanctity and fragility of their psyches. I doubt that because Terra, but it’s now a part of my headcanon. (Though that’s a theory I’ve seen elsewhere online, so it’s not 100% mine.) Aqua was only physically prepared to fight the darkness, not mentally, So when it comes to preserving her psychological health, she never stood a chance -- doubly so because she only just became a Keyblade Master before everything went belly-up.
Outside of Ventus and Terra, and maybe Eraqus, she never had anyone to confide in -- and maybe not even them, given the majority of their onscreen interactions. So the only way for her to reflect is to do so with brute force, never really solving anything besides winning a fight. Literally, at that; the player has to beat her chilling doppelganger, Phantom Aqua, in order to progress through the game. Multiple times, in fact, with each iteration growing stronger and stronger. All the while, she mocks Aqua incessantly, laying every last one of her fears and insecurities bare. What’s Aqua’s answer? Bash her with a Keyblade. Well, after brazenly claiming that her heart is still strong, but…come on, man. Who are you gonna believe?
Here’s a question: based purely on what we see of her in 0.2, what does Aqua accomplish? Beats some Heartless. Beats some Heartless. Beats some Heartless. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand beats some Heartless. A win against Phantom Aqua barely even counts; at the end of the day, the shadow won the war instead of some piddly little duel. At most, she gives Mickey the opening he needs to get where he needs to be. After that, it’s right back to the darkness. Aqua says she’ll keep fighting and believing and waiting and hoping and all that good stuff, so there’s some glimmer of hope. Some better prospects ahead.
Except Aqua doesn’t solve shit. Even from a charitable perspective, another full year, at least, passes with her stuck in the realm of darkness. She’s supposed to believe in Sora (and Riku, to a lesser extent -- get rekt again, Kairi), but by the time they reach her, she might be a pile of bones. Given that? Not only is it not a surprise that Aqua got norted, but also the prime logical step for her character. I’m actually impressed with Squeenix for going through with it, especially in a franchise like this. Sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes one sunny little turn of events isn’t enough to undo years of suffering and torment. People relapse. Mental illnesses just don’t go away because of one teeny blip on the proverbial radar. So with Dark Aqua, it was never a question of “if”, but “when”.
On that note? I hope to all the gods that Dark Aqua is the real deal and not just some gimmick for a trailer (like, say, it’s just an evil projection of her). I swear, if Squeenix chickens out and decides to run it back, I’m gonna be pissed. More so than usual when it comes to them.
…I will, however, restrain my fury if the real Aqua takes out the fake in a very specific fashion.
If I could leave it there, I would. But I can’t, unfortunately. KH gonna KH, which means that those aspects inevitably hurt 0.2. Maybe the reason I like it so much is because of how unlike KH it generally is -- which means that the more it becomes like KH (and by extension tries to link to the overarching canon), the worse it gets. Case in point: this is a story about Aqua struggling with the crushing loneliness and despair of her harsh home, plagued by the insanity slowly poisoning her mind. So obviously, you’d want to grind that story to a halt so she can pal around with Mickey Mouse.
The instant Mickey shows up is also the instant when the quality takes a decisive downturn. More of the clumsy dialogue shows up. There’s a need to both over-explain and under-explain everything. Like, apparently Mickey needed to find the Keyblade of darkness/in the dark realm, AKA the gold one he had at the end of KHI, but I thought that “Keyblade” and “darkness” were mutually exclusive? Then again, The Xehanort Experience feat. Xehanort managed to get their hands on some real monsters, soooooooooooooo…ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh?
What starts off as Aqua’s story ends up having to pull triple duty -- has to tell Aqua’s story, has to “close the loop” and explain what happened at the end of KHI, and has to set up KHIII. Three guesses as to which one I put the most stock in, especially since “closing the loop” is so messy I’d swear the devs just jammed it in the night before release day. So it turns out Aqua was just offscreen the whole time during KHI’s ending, and Mickey only just now brought her up? And the reason Mickey was shirtless there wasn’t because he was wearing his classic outfit, but because his shirt -- and ONLY his shirt -- got destroyed by a Heartless attack? Ignoring the fact that in KHI he had his classic outfit, but in 0.2 he’s wearing something culled straight from the unholy folds of Nomura’s fashion line?
They didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to close the loop. As far as I’m concerned, at least; most attempts to explain stuff in KH or otherwise flesh out the story/world end up exacerbating the problems. Like, I didn’t need to know the origin of Mickey’s lost shirt, or the who/what/where/when/why/how of his time in the realm of darkness (the Wayfarer Stone in BBS pretty much signaled that the writers will do anything to get characters where they need to be). I didn’t need to know how this thing and that thing connected to the other thing. I just want a simple and clean story, which is what -- at its best -- 0.2 provides.
But it can’t be that simple. It just can’t. At this stage, I would be genuinely surprised if Nomura, the KH team(s), and Squeenix as a whole have had the franchise’s story trajectory planned in advance and set in stone from day one. I wouldn’t believe them even if they dropped an 800-pound binder full of notes a foot in front of me. And even if they did have everything planned perfectly, the execution of those plans is always the problem. Always.
Always trying to make things fit, even if it’s like jamming a Jenga piece into a jigsaw puzzle. Always trying to have everything make sense, in a series that revolves around giant weaponized keys. Always holding back content and explanations for sequels, so that the devs can try their hand at being J.J. Abrams -- the worst version of him, at least. Always losing sight of the story they’re working on, because there’s another story they have to release years down the line. By the way, shout-outs to Yen Sid casually explaining to Sora at the end of 0.2 that he’s back at Level 1 as a result of 3D’s events…which retroactively defeats the entire purpose of 3D and just exemplifies how much bullshit swirled around his Mark of Mastery “exam”.
Being a KH fan is suffering.
But whatever. Whatever. Whatever. This franchise is finally going to have some semblance of an ending, however brief. However fleeting, in the wake of the money Squeenix has yet to scoop up via brand recognition and nostalgia-baiting. For one brief, glorious moment, KHIII is going to start, progress, and end, with a culmination of nearly two decades’ worth of storytelling. Its chances of coherence and quality are…debatable. But at the very least? It’s almost over. It’s almost over. No matter what happens, just remember: it’s almost over.
And yet, with all that in mind? Notice my word choice above. Its chances are debatable. Not slim. Not nonexistent. There’s a real possibility that KHIII is going to deliver -- that it’ll be the game we’ve been waiting for, and not just because of the endless delays it’s suffered en route to January 29th. Maybe a few weeks from now -- if that -- the game will be heralded as the greatest game in the franchise. And not just because of the production values or the chance to go “boosh boosh boosh a million hits and angel wings”. Maybe this will be the one to focus. Explore more than just surface-level themes. Tell a good story.
My faith doesn’t come from the people behind the wheel. It comes from 0.2. Was it simply an accident, or a hint of what’s to come? I guess pretty soon, we’re going to find out. Conclusively.
So. I’ll see you in the ring.
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