Great video, the ending section really resonated with me. There's a reason that viral posts like "Poorly describe your favorite movie" pop up every so often. The fact that you can easily write an unflattering summary of your favorite movie is, IMO, evidence that unflattering summaries have little bearing on whether the work itself is actually any good. It's a style of criticism that's often funny, but rarely useful.
@Skullmask4281 There was a whole section of the video about that and the nuances one should keep in mind when forming opinions on a thing through several degrees of separation of said thing. You're missing the forest for the gotchas.
My favorite joke about Kingdom Hearts is that everyone is Xehanort and everyone who's not Xehanort is Sora. I don't think it's complicated, I just think it's funny.
I think justapancake summarized it well on kh3. Axel: "shouldn't we all introduce ourselves to each other?" Yensid: "you should know everyone if you already played all of the kingdom hearts games." Axel: "dammit, I only played kingdom hearts 1 and 2."
Which to be fair, is a legitimate criticism of the series I love. I’m not talking about the numbering being a little silly that’s whatever the public eventually figured that out. I’m talking about access to the titles. KH: PS2 COM: GBA KH2: PS2 358/2: DS Coded: Mobile/DS BBS: PSP DDD: 3DS Union Cross: Mobile 2.8: PS4 KH3: PS4 There isn’t another series in existence that is attempting to tell a linear story that asks this much of its fans or even close. 7 (!) 7 devices lol. And even I, a huge fan, who had played most of these game, often years late, wanted to replay them all in the lead up to 3. So I bought 1.5 + 2.5 and oops they aren’t even all on there. And I couldn’t afford 1.5 2.5 2.8 and 3 at the time so I’ve just have never play DDD. Which idk is a pretty important game for the lead up to 3. So yes I absolutely agree that most of this criticism is coming from people who are actively not engaging with the text as presented. But uh idk man it seems pretty clear why they may have missed a game or 3 in the 14 years between 2 and 3. There are plenty of people who believe they are KH fans and don’t even know half of those crucial titles exist. I feel like calling out people making this criticism for not being intellectually honest and fair to the series, without acknowledging the glaring reason that so many people legitimately believe there are holes in the text is KH fans being just as deliberately obtuse as the very people they are criticizing. Honestly maybe more given they have that giant excuse. I imagine if Harry Potter books 4 5 and 6 all released exclusively on 3 different Kindles there would be quite a lot of unfair “where did Horocruxes come from?” And “who the hell is Luna??” Criticism too. (Side note it’s hilarious that these games released on every gaming device known to man yet completely missed the PS3.)
@truthspreader1996 Much to the contrary, Axel is the _only_ character in KH to say a curse word on screen (“hell of a show”, GBA CoM). He also throws up an obscene gesture at Xemnas in KH3 so yes Axel is the designated foulmouth vulgar guy of the cast for sure
@nemesi55 Notice how I said "shouldn't" as in not recommended. It is not a good idea which as you just provided good evidence of, as it is changed in the Re-chain of memory game. The "obscene gesture" is your imagination running wild (just saying).
Yahtzee didn't even use the right wiki, he used fuckin fandom wiki As for Vanitas, I'd say it's less he's actually resonating with the actual future form of Sora and more that, since he already had the physical body of a teenager, his face after Ven and Sora's hearts connected just took on the approximate form of what the latter could look like to match with the body. It's also to have a reversal of Roxas. Roxas had nothing of Sora's and yearned to remain his own person after his one year of existence, only to be backed into a corner of reluctant acceptance that he has to return to the guy while not being able to even maintain much sense of self, only to eventually regain a separate form and take the very mark that tied him down as his own. Vanitas similarly didn't have much from Ventus, but actively sought out to merge with Ventus in order to forge the X-Blade partially cuz that was the only meaning in his life, while also being the dominant persona. Compared to Roxas, Vanitas never looked beyond what he initially was. Right to the very end, he stuck to the chains binding him. He's Darkness. He's the piece of Ventus taken away, only given more definition thanks to Sora. He sees himself as just that, nothing more. Also Sora's Japanese voice actor REALLY wanted to be a bad guy and Nomura just went we ball
Haley Joel Osment also wanted to play a bad guy, as far as I remember. I guess, when you play the same sunshine boy for years, you'd want to hear yourself with a different voice too.
I always thought it was just that the hole vanitas formed happened to be perfectly sora shaped, meaning he looked like Sora because that’s what a heart shaped that way looks like.
@miro.georgiev97 That and villains are fun. They don't deal with moral quanderies or get sad. Disney villains in particular just get to enjoy being bad and chewing on the scenery while doing it.
"KH isn't confusing. Also, here's how Vanitas is resonating with the future form of Sora." Desensitization through overexposure does not retroactively make a convoluted plot understandable to newcomers. Veterans of the franchise have simply lost sight of that.
i always interpreted master xehanorts grand plan as having many plans and different ways to get a version of kingdom hearts because he is a meticulous villain, like if one plan fails he can go to the next one. Another way i like to interpret it is as him being a sore loser. “actually you didn’t beat me this was always part of my plans”.
He had an ultimate macro plan, but diversified his portfolio by seeing if anyone would stop him if he tried to cheat the creation of the X-Blade or make an artificial KH or two
The problem is that it contradicts itself. First you have his wish to get a new body and create the X-Blade. Then, as Ansem, he tries force its way to Kindgom Hearts through the Heartless (But then... What about the X-Blade ?) Then, as Xemnas, who is and isn't the same person, because it's part Xehanort, part Terra and part "Okay, but is he still amnesiac, yes or no ?" he tries to create a whole new Kingdom Hearts to try and creates hearts for him and his goons (But; apparently it wasn't for that, but he seemingly did not drop that charade when he was the sole member of the organisation left in KHII because ?) And then, he re-forms himself because apparently when you split yourself in two and die twice, you just stitch yourself back together and a plan apparently kick started when he was Ansem is put in motion so that he'll go tell his past self about all the shit that he must do to launch the plan forward, but no worries, he won't remember anything so it doesn't create massive holes in the joke of a scenario that is KH3D; this whole plan being to aquire Sora as a new vessel for his big plan: New Organisation XIII, a group created with the sole purpose to be made out of him and him alone to fight 7 lads wielding Keyblades of light, lads who have a hard time forming because he keeps cherry picking new host in his ennemie's group. This whole plan being to forge the X-Blade (the real one, not a counterfeit one Vanitas bought on Wish) to open Kingdom Hearts and free the light from deep within it through a massive use of Darkness. Like. I can understand all the way from BBS to KHII. KHIII makes it explicit that he is meticulous and all, they do mention that Organization XIII is more than XIII just in case. Hell, already in 358/2 days, Xigbar or Xaldin mentions looking for new potential recruits in the first Organization XIII. Hell, Xion is already kind of a back up. But, there's also the line from Xemnas in that same game that goes along the line of "There are only 13 sits in this room, one of them needs to die." (Maybe it was Saix, but since he already has that Xehanort stare; I'd say it's about the same.) But really, in KH3D, you feel that something was lost along the way.
This is the perfect way to describe it. I first got into the series and was surprised by how easy it was to follow. But you're not lying. There is a LOT to remember, especially considering how much the "side" games contain important events and characters. Im sure whenever KH4 come out imma need to rewatch the cutscene movies.
@charlescaulkins8306 I dont think its fair to say that its confusing when the story is easy to follow. When I think of confusing im thinking of complex concepts, a bunch of plot holes, not explaining enough or very vaguely, etc.
I'm remembering way back when Dan Olson, who had no prior experience with the series, played KH3 on stream. A bunch of the viewers were like, "you're gonna be so confused lmao". Then he watched the intro CG cinematic, and pretty much clocked the broad strokes of the series in his speculation on what the story was about. The 2018 AV Club article, "Kingdom Hearts is Disney at its strangest, darkest-and most moving," condenses the whole thing down in three paragraphs. People just aren't looking at the big picture and keep getting bogged down by extraneous details.
I’m now thinking about a video of a girl who went viral for saying she “read 100 books” and what she meant was “read the AI generated summaries of 100 books” which is even worse bc those summaries aren’t written by an actual person who did experience the books. Overall this sort of discussion brings to mind Plato’s allegory of The Cave, and secondhand experiences/wiki reading are just us watching the shadows and actually playing a game would be leaving the cave etc
That is literally the exact opposite of what the allegory of the cave is about. Plato thought that experience itself was a lie and only reason could lead to truth.
Abit unrelated but this is the same situation with Final Fantasy X especially with the fights with Seymour Natus (The 2nd Seymour fight) and Yunalesca from my experience lol.
@ElvenRaptor especially for challenge runs or Combo MAD's "i know the plot, but i think i can beat Xigbar 3 seconds faster this time without touching the floor"
Second-hand media consumption really is a blight. I talked with a big MCU-head friend a few years back about Kingdom Hearts and he at the time was full-on mired in the internet mythos about it being super convoluted and complicated, asked me why there were both numbered games but also side games with subtitles and this has always confused me, multiple people do this but this guy in particular was asking that and clammed up very fast when I pointed out how the MCU works in its consumption, people keep up with that just fine though so?? There are so many fascinating things about Kingdom Hearts we *could* talk about. The religious iconography has always been a favorite, it has holdovers from Christianity, Hinduism, etc. of course since the Final Fantasy baked into its DNA and the classical fantasy inspiration the earlier titles that took just borrowed heavily from all of those aesthetics but something I've always really loved is the series' accidental or intentional ties to Manichaeism, the duality of light and dark being physical real forces that exist inside of all people and all worlds, how religious zealotry took hold after the great calamity happened and the worlds scattered, leading to people like Eraqus, Xehanort, and even *Mickey* to become fanatics for their camp. Mickey learning to confront his internal biases due to talking with Riku who was pumped up on the dark sauce juice and learned it isn't like, literally objectively evil is kinda bangin. I love the cheese.
@Har-d5x Yeah, the big spread-out early on was insane. Thankfully we're almost to a point where the series has had compilations for a longer part of its lifespan than it hasn't- the passage of time is so weird nvm I don't wanna think about that lol
@Har-d5xthey didn't make jt accessible though half of 358's story was not in cutscenes but dialogue during the 358 missions. They didn't bother redoing either ds games
I like how the light and dark themes in Kingdom Hearts can also mirror mental health as well and the acceptance of what we deem as flaws (+) learning to balance 'light' and 'dark' is such a good message
I was one of those who was mostly motivated to get consoles once a Kingdom Hearts game or Smash Bros game came out on them... until kingdom hearts 3 violently shook me of all hope i had for the series
One of its biggest mistakes but also one of its best things it could have done. We wouldn't have as many KH games nor would the games have been allowed to experiment as much as they have were it not for the ability to have smaller scale projects on handhelds. It sucks that it ever inspired confusion, but thankfully its an issue that has been largely rectified for over a decade now so we've had enough time to move on and just appreciate the upsides.
@SomniaCE i feel like that first part entirely depends on if you like any part of what they did with the handheld games, but if you didn't then luckily not much other than confusing plots and a few extra ways to cancel your enemies made it into 3 from all of that experimentation also, a decade ago was when they released the browser game turned mobile game that you kinda need to get through to understand the main plot of the series, and right now sora is canonically stuck in nomura's spite remake of versus xiii, i see absolutely no signs of the confusion being fixed
You got me with that thumbnail! "the wiki-fication of art"? I didn't immediately know what that MEANT, which tbh is rare with text on YT thumbnails in my experience. And with KH in the title, you've got me hooked!
I never even considered that Ansem The Wise's machine blowing up at the end of KH2 might be intended to relate to Riku's getting his own body back. I kind of assumed it was *just* because he runs towards his friends, *just* because in that moment he abandons the darkness in him for the light. The machine exploding was just the... narrative incentive required for him to literally abandon the distance he committed himself to in Days. I wasn't old enough when I first saw the scene to really ask the question of what caused it, but when I played again as an adult that was the explanation that came to mind.
I think I completely agree there. It wasn't any real specific thing the machine itself actually did, it didn't magically undo his change... it was his choice to protect his friends he fled from for so long. Because... "My friends are my power." Or... a worse metaphor "You're not you when you're hungry." Without his friends, who meant so much to him at the start of the journey but he was unable to see it himself, he didn't even LOOK like himself, and instead looked like the very person they were fighting. Pretty on the nose metaphor if you ask me. It says something about Riku, sure, but at the exact same time it says something about Xemnas. Riku looked like the man who abandoned his past connections and his friends for power... because he did the exact same thing. And if you look at Kingdom Hearts as it went on... I don't think that theme for Xehanort ever changed.
I’ve been saying this “kingdom hearts isn’t confusing, is just so absurd that my friend refused to engage with it after Michael Theodore Mouse walking into the room dressed head to toe in a black leather jacket ask about “the door to darkness” It’s just absurd
I think a big problem with the "Feelings of hatred through osmosis" phenomena comes down to extremely vitriolic fandom reactions to a piece of media based on what the fanbase was hoping for. Lot's of newcomers to an IP will have their opinions on games they haven't even played just because of the sheer hatred of it by the related fanbase. Play a game yourself before passing your personal judgement on it.
what ive started to think about recently with this kind of thing is, while sure there's definitely some stuff that's hated just because it's actually bad or poorly made, but if it's a long running story type of thing like this there's a good chance any disappointment they have with it is gonna be multiplied by like 10 cause of all their expectations theyve had following it in real time. not that those feelings aren't valid, but if you're just getting into something listening to what a bunch of angry fans think about it probably won't be that indicitive of the actual experience you would have
As one of 3D's strongest soldiers, the Power of Waking is basically the power to forge and manipulate bonds between Hearts. The name "Waking" seems to be chosen because of how to use it correctly the subject needs to be in some state of sleep, literal or metaphysical, and results in them waking up. However the name leads to some confusion if you take it too literally because it can be used in a lot of different ways if you apply it differently
It's one of those terms I feel like could've had a better name as it crossed over into so metaphorical that every time I hear it mentioned ingame, it just feels like the wrong name for how it winds up being used. Like... in the context of the original game it was introduced in, I thought it was just... the power to literally wake up from the dream state. Which, sure, on SOME level yeah, that is part of it, but it's the mechanism of how it's done that in-universe is applied to so many other areas, but the name just kinda... doesn't do it much service in that regard, I think.
This video's so great, not just for Kingdom Hearts, but as a reaction to the commonly increasing use of wikis/video essays/reviews/etc. as a substitute for engaging with the medium directly. I used to have a co-worker who would annoy me a lot because she would get into discussions or debates about different shows and movies only for it to soon be made apparent that her knowledge of them came entirely from Wikis and she would defend it as "So I mean, I BASICALLY watched/played it." Another recent experience was at my DnD group where one of the other players was feeling FOMO because our whole group gushed over Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But rather than play the game or even watch a RUclips cutscene compilation, she opted to get the wiki summary so she could get a surface-level understanding of what happens, and all of us in the group felt pretty sad by it because she was unknowingly robbed of all the ways that the game's story can move you through the performance, music, visuals, direction, etc. It's why I refuse to ever do a wiki if there's a popular work of fiction I have not experienced yet. To me personally, it is better to remain largely ignorant of a work of fiction than to get the ILLUSION of experiencing it.
I hate discussing media with people who know it secondhand because we aren’t talking about our experiences and how the media made us feel, we are just fact-checking each other about “lore”. I get so wary whenever people say the “lore” word when talking about games.
Vanitas explained to Sora and Ven why he looks like Sora before his death in 3. Vanitas says( and Im paraphrasing slightly) " I'm the piece of Ven that was taken and you( Sora) are the part that he needed to be whole again. So why wouldn't we look exactly the same?" This implies that Ven's heart needed to fill the gap left by Vanitas with something that was similar enough to Vanitas. The novelization of birth by sleep provides an alternative reason, namely that Vanitas and Ven still shared a bond even at a distance and that this bond shaped Vanitas' appearance. Initially Vanitas is described as not having a face, simply a pair of eyes and a shadowed face similar to a heartless but over time his appearance changed to match Sora because of his link to Ven.
Glad someone has pointed this out - I was sure that it was because they were both shaped as the complement to Ventus' broken heart and therefore had to be identical for one to correctly replace the other, but I couldn't source the concept in the ol' brainopedia
ok but like the kh3 explanation does essentially mean that they randomly look similar tho. thats not a cause for them to look similar, thats him saying 'you shouldnt be surprised'. the metaphysical missing part of ven's heart that sora filled just happened to have a physical profile attatched to it. cause vanitas was split first, sora and vanitas were never a part of his heart at the same time, they didnt influence each other, they do just look like that anyways.
That last bit right there I think more or less is a pretty solid explanation. Vanitas grew to look like Sora did later on either through just slowly becoming more of his own person (even if he himself didn't actually intend that, because y'know, his ultimate goal and all that) and it's just entirely coincidental that Sora happened to look exactly like Vanitas as the person he was turning into was just... similar somehow... or as Ventus was slowly growing closer to Sora through their weird connection they had earlier on, Vanitas came to echo the other end of the connection (even though, sure, it's still odd that he looked like the older Sora when Sora himself wasn't even really there yet.)
“What matters is not what the series’ emphasis power of friendship says thematically. It is that Sora keeps giving speeches about how his friends are his power, and that’s not a very hard magic system, now is it? How does ‘friendship’ give you power? Friendship is not a quantifiable unit of energy. That doesn’t make any sense! And it’s cheesy too! What is this, a kid’s game? How cringe” This made me laugh so hard as a KH fan all my life, on top of having Riku talking on screen at the same time. It’s exactly how my husband sees the series, but I love the games anyway because, no matter how confusing and cheesy it can be, friendship is just as powerful as Sora says it is.
"I don't think Kingdom Hearts is confusing, I think a wiki approach to Kingdom Hearts *makes* it confusing" Hell yeah, been saying this for years, glad to see someone else put it this way.
And this is coming from someone who was only on Nintendo consoles for years, and HAD to rely on Let's Plays and wikis to know what happened in the "mainline" titles.
@DaviddeBergerac to be fair, mickey mouse explaining to riku who the answm they fought in kingdom hearts 1 kinda proves basic events are complex. The heartless of xenahort took the name of the real ansem is not simple until the mystery is revealed.
@nobafan7515 the whole ansem xemnas xehanort identity theft aspect of the story is honestly just not very well told / told throughout like 5 hours of gameplay intermittently so I understand people not getting it cleanly every time
When Xehanort takes the comatose Ven to Destiny Islands, his heart connects with that of a newborn Sora, which allows him to heal from the trauma of having his heart split in half. So the connection to Sora happens immediately after the Ventus-Vanitas split.
Oh, true, sometimes I kindof forget the actual timescale of things. For some reason, BBS always feels like it took place a long time ago and not like... literally what, ten years before the first game? Twelve or thirteen at most? I think Sora was supposed to be ~10 in the first game.
3:54 Yeah, makes more sense in Japanese cause the metaphorical Mind/spirit Heart, kororo/shin (心), and the anatomical Heart , shinzou (心臓), are different words. A similar situation to "Cherry" which in English refers to both the tree and fruit, while in Japanese they are Sakura (Cherry Tree) vs Sakuranbou (Cherry fruit)
What's really infuriating is people use second hand knowledge like summaries and wikis for books as well As if the most important thing in a story is what literally happens
yeah it's like those videos that summarize the events of a comic book arc, it kind of takes away all the mystique of reading the comic and just boils it down to a deadpan dude going "and so he got the mcguffin that let him unlock his super ultimate form and beat the bad guy with a really strong punch after a monologue about power and friendship"
I like the logic of Sora giving a portion of light to plug the leak in Ven's heart being reflected in Vanitas being the removed portion of Ven's heart. Square peg for a square hole.
Your thesis is fundamentally true, but when you brought up Vanitas I immediately thought “do they know Vanitas is actually one of the 13 true darknesses and is hundreds if not thousands of years old?” and now I don’t know whether KH is actually that complicated or if I have a very specific mental illness
Till today I still don't fully know wether that info is lore correct or fandom interpretation and the only game I haven't touched are 3D and CoM. KHUX is gacha hell and I'd rather watch the cutscene than play it.
@varnix1006 its lore accurate kinda. Vanitas is that but hes also like a new being just made out of the true darkness kinda since hes got a physical form, heart, and memory loss
I think Kingdom Hearts was pretty understandable up to a point...Then the phone games started happening, and I COMPLETELY lost the plot. Now I'm mainly just in it for the gameplay and vibes, and to see where all the characters I know end up, fully accepting that I will probably never again understand what's going on with the larger world...worlds...You get the point.
Drakengard getting mentioned in a Kingdom Hearts video just tickled me because it's a convergence of interests that I didn't think anyone else besides me would have. Yeah, I'm fascinated by both these games' stories despite never actually playing either.
I think the venn diagram between nier fans and KH fans is practically a circle. The only KH fans who dont like Drakengard and Nier simply havent played them yet.
Great video as usual! Back in the day LPs were magic to my financially constrained childhood, and allowed me to watch a bunch of games that my family never had access to. It helped me feel more included, since a lot of video gaming back in the day followed a handful of annual releases relevant to your social circle. Now that I have access to more of these games in an over-saturated market, I find myself watching less LPs/streams about games I have any curiosity in playing for similar reasons to this video. Usually if I do, it's a game I just have no intent on picking up myself and am fine with an incomplete experience. Sure it's exponentially inflated my backlog (yes, the Kingdom Hearts collection is on that), but I find myself appreciating games the way I did in my childhood more.
Around the 21 minute mark - the idea of first-hand and second-hand you describe here, reminds me of my AP World History class in high school. They used the terms, "primary sources" and "secondary sources" which I think conveys the idea you're talking about more clearly. Watching a no-commentary longplay or cutscene-movie of a game, or listening to an audiobook version of a novel, would both "count" as primary-source-interaction, under this definition. The video essays and reviews and explainers would count as "secondary" because they are written about the topic, by an outside person, presented with bias and separated in time and all that.
No-commentary longplay or cutscene-movie of a game would only apply if you're watching those for the story, which you've intentionally taken out of its context. You're not actually playing the game after all, and I'd argue playing the game is part of the experience of... consuming a game. Otherwise, why even bother playing JRPGs at all?
@davemoore7808 I don't... understand the question? The video WAS about the story, so, yeah, I think cutscene movies count. Without the gameplay, "why even bother playing JRPGs at all?" Ya know what, you're right! I should go eat pizza or go for a walk or something.
@davemoore7808 Ah, you're one of those. If you heard condescension in my chipper and playful tone, that's on you, man. I'm sorry that people in your life have been so cruel to you, that now you expect it from everyone, even strangers. But name-calling at randos on the internet isn't going to make your life happier. I could tell you "you win the argument" if you need a slight mood-boost, but honestly, I think a walk outside and some pizza might help MORE.
That being said, I digress with some points. Per example its not just that Xemnas was subtely hinted to have a hidden agenda before DDD, its even straight up said a few times. Xemnas himself talks about how they experiments with the heartless were linked with this plan and it made sense as well as some developmemts. Per example we can see some members of the organization (most notably Axel) develop more and more over time as they develop their heart over time. This goes in line with Xemnas constantly trying to fool them by making them believe they couldnt have one unless they followed his plan to get KH and that if they were to feel anything it would be just false, just their memories. If you pay a closer look you will see that between the lines he wants to separate characters so they get to develop the relationships that would lead to them taking notice of these things. It all ties with what DDD revealed Same with Xehanort and his plans. He didnt plan everything out, just enough to get him to this point and even then things didnt go acordingly to his plans as seen in the bbs fiasco and Sora defeating Ansem and Xemnas. Its just that he has secondary plans in order to be able to adapt to the situation just in case and he himself said that it was the future that lied outside his knowledge
Now if you want to talk someone who's way over planned everything, you can look at the Master of Masters and the explanation for why he was able to write that book of prophecies. That was honestly pretty silly to me. Like sure, the explanation is logically consistent, but he's a mastermind... except not really, because he just saw the future and wrote it down but just vague enough that it would... uh... help lead to the exact same events that were going to happen anyway. It's kinda silly.
@JetBalroghe didnt plan everything either, he just saw the important stuff and wrote things so the keyblade war would end the way he wanted. He didnt plan much aside that
@Dario-uj6qo Fair enough. I imagine the only things he specifically wrote down were the bits that led to the best outcome for *after* he reunited with his eye/keyblade. Where that leads is still to be seen, though, of course.
Amen about Xemnas! I think a huge thing that people, bafflingly, somehow miss is that _Xemnas is the very archetype of a predatory cult leader._ Think about it. He controls what the members of the Organization wear, how they go about their day to day lives, he employs gaslighting tactics to control what they think-to the point where they become so indoctrinated they perpetuate it amongst themselves and with others, he presents himself as a figure with divine knowledge who is the members’ sole means of survival and/or getting their hearts back, he uses charisma to get his way, he grooms the younger members to grow up into roles he finds useful, he reinforces his hierarchal control with threats and violence, uses spiritualism to reinforce groupthink, does not tolerate questioning of his capabilities or authority in any measure whatsoever… …Yep. That checks off literally every box when it comes to assessing whether a given group is a cult. They even have ominous robes for God’s sake. But where I’m going with this is that Xemnas is a bone-chillingly realistic cult leader. And so the reveal in DDD isn’t even remotely surprising. The depressing part is how many players fell for Xemnas’ fake ass, woe-is-me act in KH2, cos the fact of the matter is, he was using that exact behavior to trick and manipulate the other Organization members into thinking he was a fellow working toward a common goal with them. He was always planning on using them to pull one giant “fantasy Jonestown” moment and effectively kill all the members, himself included, by overwriting them with Xehanort’s consciousness. I guess a deep voice really does absolve all sins.
"Tragedy has an expiration date" is a GREAT phrase, I'm gonna be unpacking that for weeks, that applies to so MANY works! People that want the deths to "stick", it DOES make me wonder, like, do they want the sadness to linger forever? Is that the kind of writing-tone they want for their colorful Japanese-anime-Disney crossover E-10-rated video game...? Just because something is 'over' or 'reversed' doesn't mean it LOSES its meaning. It still HAD an effect on the survivors. If the writers remember to include that, as character-development. Which aint always the case :P
Roxas as a character meant so much to me and a big part of it was his bittersweet ending, which has been undone by KH3. Tragedy does not always have an expiration date nor should it. Think about the ending of Donnie Darko. I's tragic, right? It never stops being tragic when you rewatch it.
@bleedingberryjuice Well, I've never seen Donnie Darko, and quite frankly, if it's THAT sad, it might be better if I don't! It's not good for me to marinate my brain in sadness. I don't like living that way. I want to believe that growth and change and moving on is possible. Mm, I disagree with the word "undone" - Roxas' story, that previously ended with KH2, got a /continuation/ that you and many others don't like. His story wasn't ret-conned out of existence in the KH universe - the KH3 story doesn't pretend that he NEVER merged with Sora, or worse, never existed. (Like the Tarzan world of KH1 that has never been mentioned again) Your love for Roxas wasn't ret-conned out of existence either, it's still there! You can STILL love Roxas' story, just as it was, because it still HAS that ending. You can just reject this new addition. I mean, it's canon, so you can't really declare that it didn't happen in KH3... But you CAN reject its IMPORTANCE. You can write your own ending. That can be very healing for fans disappointed and upset by canon-writer choices. Don't even have to post it, just write it in your own journal, what YOU wanted to see happen instead. Maybe Sora giving him a nice memorial like the BBS trio gave Eraqus, or something like that. Meaning and importance doesn't come from the bigness of the budget of the project - I guarantee there are TONS of huge media properties that you don't care about! Dozens if not hundreds of sports teams the world over, with budgets bigger than all of Square Enix! You care about Kingdom Hearts and Roxas specifically because the story resonated with you. You can do the opposite now. You can take what resonates with you, and make a story. Sure, KH3 will still be canon officially, but you can decide that that fact matters to you as much as, I dunno, this seasons' win record of the Boston Red Sox. (if you DO actually like the Boston Red Sox, substitute for another sports team whose name you can barely spell) You don't have to be just a consumer of media forever. You can become a creator. Even if no one else reads it. You can create meaning for yourself.
@86fifty 358/2 days was very sad due to not only their deaths, but their very being couldn't exist alongside the hero we needed. Almost as if fate itself were tearing them apart - though i am grateful there is no actual "fate" or prophecies in KH (at least til DDD), those often kills sense of the agency of our characters. This group of friends was torn apart by forces outside their control, and those who would care had them erased from memory. How is that not undone by KH3 where they can now peacefully coexist? I think you really underestimate how it can feel like a betrayal when we thought something couldn't be undone and we mourn it, just for them to revive literally every single character. I was invested in the story they were telling, and now I don't trust them to tell the story anymore. I quite think that's losing something actually.
@-JaggedGrace- Oh, I'm with you about Days being sad. I played it on my DS a few years after it came out. And I DID cry several times, it absolutely WAS a sad story, of people trying to stick together, with forces beyond their control tearing them apart, like you said! I guess, you must be right about the "betrayal" part. Betrayal can only exist, where there once was trust, and I don't really /trust/ writers of big franchise sagas. I can HOPE that they'll do xyz with the plot and the characters that they invented and I enjoy, but if they DON'T, I just feel... mild disappointment? Because I know I can find fanfiction on a huge range of alternative outcomes, or write my own, if I need to. I trust the fans more than the official writers! Hah, that's kind of ironic. I personally just don't prefer a profound and finely-crafted Depression Experience over a sloppy happy ending. KH3's wasn't even THAT sloppy compared to some I've seen! ('Somehow, Palpatine returned' for example.) They built it up, made lore about it, had it affect both good guys and bad. and it had SOME plot-holes, sure, but that's pretty standard for KH.
@-JaggedGrace- KH1 ended with Sora separated from his best friends, unable to return to them after closing the door, and the reformation walls between worlds preventing easy travel. The game shows this as a definitive, climactic sacrifice that can't be easily undone. And then KH2 came in and said that Sora can just make new pathways between the worlds, and eventually reunited with his friends and returned to his islands. Does that mean KH2's ending was a betrayal because it undid the bittersweet ending of SoRiKai's story?
(KH3 spoilers in this comment) When KH3 came out I went on a media blackout. I didn't want anything spoiled about it for me. I played it over a week, loved it, and went on YT after to watch other people gush about it too. Imagine my surprise when so many videos I found were about people hating it. I was so confused. I figured it would be divisive, all KH games are, but the vitriol I was seeing was so outrageous I questioned my own feelings about the game. I watched a few videos and noticed a trend, most people seemed to have unrealistic expectations, or had speed played the games leading up to 3. A lot of the people I saw making those videos were the ones who played the games in the last year before 3. They skipped games, only watched some cutscenes of others, and actively mocked the mobile game. And everything fell into place for me. I was raised by this series since '02 when I played KH1 at age 9. I'm not saying my opinion matters more, but I went into 3 in an entirely different way than those people did. I didn't think 3 was perfect, there were things I definitely didn't like, but I still loved it. That should have been the end of that saga, but then I started seeing comments about people saying they wouldn't buy the game based on all those videos and it genuinely hurt my heart. Cause, why would you let others dictate your choices like that? For me, the most moving scene from 3 was "The Light of the Past" scene during the endgame in the Graveyard. It tied the Mobile game in. I played the mobile game, it wasn't great, but I enjoyed the story a lot. So seeing how it was tied to 3 gave me chills. And knowing that the people who didn't so much as look at the mobile game may have felt nothing during that scene makes me feel like they missed something important. I've noticed a resurgence of love for 3 in the last little bit, cause people are playing it with fresh eyes and no expectations. And that makes me happy. The first question I ask now when I hear someone say "KH is confusing" is, "have you played/seen all the games in order?" And not surprisingly the answer is normally "No.". The series isn't for everyone, and that's fine. But people need to learn to just say a game isn't for them, instead of trying to find a way to explain why it's "bad".
Thank you. I'm glad there's other KH fans like me who actually care about the series in its entirety and don't have bogus expectations or an inability to understand the hows and whys of the series
Damn, you not only described my experience with KH3 but also with The Last Jedi. I deftly dodged many spoilers for both, went in with only official trailers, and loved the shit out of both, only to go online and be absolutely BAFFLED at how much hate the two things got. Pokemon S&V is similar, though at least I can understand the performance issues that plagued an otherwise excellent game (and now Switch 2 mitigates those altogether). Idk I’m tired tbh. I fear how many people dismiss games they might actually like bc some rage baiter who never played the game or didn’t care about the series before KH3 beyond maybe 1 & 2 had nasty things to say. I’m tired man.
@Caterfree10 Not saying there isn't a situation of online discourse affecting people's opinions, but for my personal experience, I watched The Last Jedi sometime during the opening week and hadn't seen any reactions at that point. And it was genuiely the first film I had seen in theatre that made me question what I watched. I don't watch much films, which also meant I haven't watched many I consider bad, but boy when I left the cinema, I was so confused, because it was the first time I watched a movie in theatre that I didn't enjoy. And I say this as a fan of Star Wars and Rian Johnson films (seperately though).
For me, I mostly didn’t like 3’s gameplay actually wjdnwkd I liked how the story concluded in it, but I knew right away I shouldn’t. Just in terms of what would normally be good writing choices, so I figured it wouldn’t work for everyone. Still, I’m happy with it on a story level I need to look into the mobile story someday, that was so deeply inaccessible for me
@Caterfree10 It's funny, The Last Jedi is a movie I remember enjoying at first, but watching videos online made me realize how it basically betrayed the universe and characters in so many ways and that's why people were upset. Then I experienced it for myself firsthand in KH3 how it feels for them to destroy everything I love from a universe and leave it feeling empty and cheap.
14:36 what makes it more confusing is that they could have use Loki as an excuse because they literally mentioned in Ragnarok that he wasn't properly overlooking the 9 realms and they went to shit
40:24 Yep, it still hits just as hard as ever. I remember watching this scene as a kid, and being absolutely destroyed. I'd never experienced something like that up to that point in my young life, something so tragic and full of pathos and implication. KH1 and KH2, and 358/2 Days (the fact this never got a proper remaster is a crime for which Squeenix cannot be forgiven), still hold places in my heart that remind me of what great video game storytelling can be. Also, rest in peace Christopher Lee, who gave his full gusto to a game about Anime kids running around with Disney characters. What a performance.
I think the explanation for why Riku returned to normal from the explosion of Ansem's machine is a lot simpler than it seems. Ansem's machine was an attempt to digitize the Kingdom Hearts that Xemnas was making. When the machine explodes, it bursts into a great light. I think what is happening is simply a flood of light like that of the Kingdom Hearts that Ansem made in the first game, and that like in the first game where it had destroyed the physical form of Ansem, this light was strong enough to destroy the physical change in appearance that had overtaken Riku in KHII as a result of what still lingered of Ansem in his own heart's darkness.
One of the advantages of subtext is that you don't have to absorb it consciously to understand what it says, yet part of the un-dramatizing is that you have two ways to deal with subtext in a wiki: exclude it, or render it into text. So the wiki either ends up with less information, or information conveyed through a less-effective medium (text vs music, for example), which add to the illusion of confusion.
23:09 my brother was actually a VA in this fandub (the second part, mainly) as Ventus, since he does a pretty decent Jesse McCartney impression. Check it out, it's good
An interesting supplement to your point about personal experiences forming our opinions on games: The KHUX game was an amazing time for me. Some see it as an annoyingly-long story shoved into a gacha game that's suddenly the most important lore in the series, and they're not 100% wrong, but it was also a place for KH community. My current friend group, the only friends I even talk to these days, were all made from that game. Meeting people on streams about the game, joining discords for the game... as a guild leader, I met up with some of my guildmates irl, and even took photos of them as one proposed to the other! Kingdom Hearts is a series where the core message is the "value of friendship," and it truly doesn't get better than that experience that a video game provided in my life.
You ate very right that Kingdom Hearts is only confusing because the culture around it made it so. When I actually played the games themselves I found the games rather easy to understand. To a western audience it is very differeny from what they are used to but if they put in the effort to understand it then they will get it. I think the reason the games have such a reputation is because of the discourse surrounding it but I also think its because people just don't respect it or have the critical thinking skills to engage with it. I feel like this is true not just for tjis game but Japanese games in general. Which is really sad.
Honestly, KH's story might have problem but "story not explaining itself" is not one of them. I'd even say that KH as a series spends too much time trying to explain its smaller mechanics which really do not need to be explained which in turn waters down the mystery and leads to dull exposition dumps which sound wild on paper but very bland in action. KH is emotion-driven story so it really doesn't need to make that much sense when it comes down to mechanics of its universe.
As a fun example of explaining the mechanics, all of Sora’s restarts in power are all explained - Castle Oblivion forcing Sora to play by its rules (Chain of Memories), being in a coma where you have to reshape your memories correctly thus making everybody forget about you (Kingdom Hearts 2), being in a dream realm (Dream Drop Distance), a sudden rush of being overcome by darkness resetting the connections he made with others (Kingdom Hearts 3), literally being in a in-universe fictional world where nobody remembers him (Kingdom Hearts 4). Usually, losing your powers in the beginning of a game are all unexplained (Metroid, save Dread where there was an explicit stealing of Samus’s powers), but not Kingdom Hearts!
@iantaakalla8180 Metroid has a few other examples of giving an actual explanation for Samus loosing her gear, like Fusion and the first two prime games (granted prime 1 and 2 do have a bit of gameplay before the section your gear is lost, while Fusion and Dread are shown off/explained before first gameplay. But it still happens.) Of course, this doesn't really change the overall point. Just felt like sharing some other Metroid games that did explain or contextualize the loosing of gear at the start (or near the start) of the game.
Ah, right, Fusion’s explains that her being infected with the X parasite necessitated Metroid DNA infusion, meaning that Samus was getting adjusted to being a human/Metroid hybrid. My bad.
@Yurikon3 Honestly, over-explaining the elements in Kingdom Hearts really was probably a detriment the way it was done more or less. Like you said, it's all based around emotions, hence the y'know... hearts and darkness stuff. Literally, the most common threat we deal with are people who have fallen to despair or other negative emotions, and the few who resist all that happen to just embrace their connections to others to resist it. It's almost like the metaphor there matters far more than the actual exact plot details.
Why Vanitas looks like Sora, I think is pretty clear. Vanitas being one of the "True Darkness" isn't bound by the normal KH time-travel rules. Vanitas likely has the ability to perceive darkness on a much higher scale, I'm saying, he probably became aware of Sora/Roxas/Xion/Ventus's entangled existence and then choose to appear as the strongest one.... Sora... Vanitas dog-walks basically everyone before fighting Sora.
I thought it was because when Ventus and Sora’s hearts became linked, Vanitas took the appearance of Sora because now he’s connected to him as well and now has a form he can base himself off of. Even if non canon, the novels confirm Vanitas originally looked like a dark figure with black eyes (similar to the Anti Black Coat Nightmare from DDD)
It's simpler than that. Physical appearance is a trait governed by the heart (hence why Sora's body transforms when Ven's heart is all the remains inside). Vanitas, originally faceless, receives his appearance upon Ventus and Sora's connection. Vanitas has his own heart, and so this borrowed trait becomes etched into his own heart, and is adjusted to match his (physical) age. It's got nothing to do with time or higher perception and it's not something that Vanitas chose for himself. It's just how hearts work.
Those all do sound like plausible interpretations. I always rationalised it as; When Ventus's heart broke, Sora filled the "empty" space that used to be vanitas, so Vanitas being that part that broke off, took the form of / reflected whatever filled that space. I basically just told myself that, if Sora filled the hole, then the hole must be "Sora shaped."
I love the ddd, mobile games, and 3 additions, and I'm used to super shallow dismissals of why people dont like them but you actually have thoughts you explain well and I super respect it! I'm so used to only hearing rage bait, people exaggerating hatred, or straight glazing that its so nice to hear ACTUAL critique of what it does with the story as a whole
Honestly, most of the reason I like DDD is because I really like the Dream Eaters. The plot’s also compelling, and the themes it brings up about Sora and Riku’s relationship are genuinely touching. I just wish some line deliveries were better. I loved KHUX, got to endgame F2P. Sadly I couldn’t get into Dark Road, but its plot is fantastic, quite heavy. And Re:Mind… honestly kinda heartbreaking, in a nice way. Wish they did a little bit more with the second half, but a new Data Organization plus Yozora is still great. Overall I’m fond of the series and am excited for 4 :)
I do wanna point out: theres already a term for when someone else is talking about a thing and that thing is taken as a sorce for informing your opinon on it: Its a secondary source. And oftentime the real issue (as you rightly point out in the video) comes when people build upon secondary sources without consulting the primary source yet claim authority to their claims, which often results in tertiary sources that tend to muddy the waters of discussion
I dunno, I played all the games (Including Union Cross, though not all the way through) except for Dream Drop Distance, and I still find the story and characters to be incredibly confusing and hard to remember. Which is part of what I like about Kingdom Hearts. The whole thing always felt like this weird esoteric mystery that needs to be unraveled.
It's frustrating, but understandable why people would use secondary sources as a substitute for firsthand experiences. It's good to use to inform whether or not someone might enjoy something. However, it's an actual problem when people try to pass this off as actual information. This is how you get stereotypes and it bothers me that people would rather trust the stereotype over actually experiencing things.
Great Video, really put into words something I've always felt about the way people engage with media and discussion. Generally, i make it a rule not to from too strong of an opinion about something didn't engage with or finish personally. Without first hand experience you're misinformed or working with incomplete information at best, or actively misrepresenting at worst
Kingdom Hearts is an A-B Hero’s Journey with religious metaphysics, quantum spookiness, and standard JRPG elements. Honestly, anyone that has trouble following along just simply aren’t paying attention or are only focusing on specific aspects.
just my 2 cents, did you play KH1 before immediately going to KH2 as a kid. That was confusing as hell, neither me nore my parents knew their were other games until a friend mentioned them.
I'm pretty sure no one really has trouble following: most people just don't care to follow it, as "experiencing it first hand" likely requires hundreds of hours of play, and the more you understand it the more glaring the inconsistencies and shllowness become.
They think they're Oh So Clever by taking things out of context, mostly because they simply don't respect Kingdom Hearts on a base level to engage with it on its own terms. Thus they have to cloak themselves in 30 layers of irony to protect themselves from this franchise's simple earnesty that they're trying so hard to reject for whatever reason.
43:07 this actually happens because the scene is literally cut in half. After the first half ends, it returns to gameplay, and you have to walk up to DiZ and interact with him to initiate the second cutscene, it's the _last final prompt_ that separates the Roxas prologue from the rest of the game. Without that last button press, the cut off point where the game transitions from Roxas to Sora would instead be the player walking through the door to that room, not knowing what's on the other side. Making it an interaction prompt the player has to consciously press in a dead end room during what's clearly the end of the prologue's narrative cleanly communicates that "THIS is the point of no return" to the player, even if they aren't aware you'll be playing as Sora after that point. (That's the purpose it serves in the final game, but I personally have a conspiracy theory that it's the result of them cutting a fight with hologram DiZ, there are SEVERAL identical setups all throughout the rest of the game: walk into room, cutscene, cutscene ends and you see a character in front of you, _interact with that character to trigger a fight,_ another cutscene plays once you win. I believe they cut a final fight with DiZ late in development, with the surrounding cutscenes already setup the way they were for it, because it likely messed with the pacing, the Roxas prologue didn't _need_ a final boss.)
my interpretation of KH's story is that any parts that felt confusing to understand were done so on purpose. the entire franchise's VERY FIRST LINE is "I've been having these weird thoughts lately. Like...is any of this for real? or not?" maybe im being overly apologistic about it, but im happy to handwave things that dont make sense to me when i scrutinize them because it seems to me that the series is purposely trying to appear confusing and dreamlike from the outset. like dreams, not all scenes and concepts have proper segues and that's fine because what should be important is the feelings that created the experience in the first place, and the feelings the experience imparts on you.
Ultimately, I can't really argue against the idea that some of the elements are meant to be confusing on purpose... because the overly confusing elements aren't actually important to the story being told. The exact mechanics of how everything works don't actually matter beyond the themes around how they work. The fact that there are two types of heartless primarily is only really significant because it's a way to show that some become Heartless on their own through dark emotions of one type or another, like despair or hate or the like, while others become Heartless because someone else imposed that transformation upon them. The sigil versus non sigil is just a little like "hey, these ones were forced into this, they didn't chose to be that way" and maybe you might think about it as you fight them, perhaps. The weirdness with Namine? I feel like they tried to explain her, sure, and the explanation they gave MOSTLY makes sense to me, but at the same time, I don't think it's really meant to fully make sense. She's just a thematic echo of Kairi the same way that Roxas is a thematic echo of Sora (and later on, retroactively, Ventus, when he was introduced). I could go on for a while but I think I've ran out of steam for examples. In short, yeah. The confusing elements having weird explanations are honestly more or less fine, so long as the themes fit what is going on, it's not too bad.
The dissection of secondhand experiences of games that rely more strongly on player choice than cutscenes to craft their story is really fascinating and also personally relevant to me and my journey with Kingdom Hearts. I got into the series via cutscene compilations, and at the time, I had no consoles of my own nor the ability to obtain any that the KH games were on, so those cutscenes were really all I had to engage with. And for Birth By Sleep specifically, I watched a compilation that actually stitched each of the trio's scenes together in chronological order, NOT segmenting them out into individual character paths like the game itself makes you play out. It actually surprised me when I learned that the gameplay makes you go through the entire story with one character at a time before starting over with another one and doing it all again. That one-at-a-time delivery of the playable game's narrative is something that I theorize actually impacts people's first perceptions and overall feelings towards BBS as a story and how it depicts the journey of its protagonists, because it prevents people from truly seeing the Wayfinder trio as a unit/group of friends and forces them to mostly be perceived as individuals on their own separate paths. Genuinely one of the main criticisms I see from people who aren't as big of fans for BBS is that they don't buy into the friendship between Aqua, Terra, and Ventus, and I truly feel like this narrative presentation is a big part of that dissonance. It's similar but inverse case to that of 358/2 Days having much of its emotional impact weakened by removing the gameplay elements in favor of a cutscene movie, and as someone who never got to play the original Days game and only got to experience that story through watching the movie, I can say that the dissonance I see often expressed towards the Wayfinders as a trio is how I wound up feeling about the Sea Salt trio. I feel like BBS's story and characters made a much stronger impact on me than other people because I experienced the character's arcs actually interweaving with one another as the narrative progressed, as opposed to sitting with just one single character for multiple hours at a time before moving on to the next. It absolutely was a "secondhand experience" as defined by this video, but interestingly enough, I think it was one for the better.
GODDDDD the comparison between KH and the MCU’s massive branching out of storytelling is so damn true tbh. There are plenty of Marvel and even MCU only folks who have zero problem keeping up with the MCU, but KH’s swings between numbered and non numbered titles is the confusing part? seriously? Give me a break! And I also think that the wiki-fication of it all is an excellent point I hadn’t considered before. There’s been this running game in multi fandom spaces of “describe your favorite media badly” and it often rubs against the same thing but more intentionally. We don’t expect people to get interested based on bad summaries, so why does KH constantly get the short end of the stick, even when people are earnestly trying to convey how good the series actually is. And while those of us who’ve been close to the source material for over half our lives (yes, being told that the compilation collections started in 2012 aged me a little) can get a little lost in the weeds, that is very much an on us problem. like, period! Also, in regards to the wiki-fication of it all, when I think of describing Sora, the Sora’s Heart Hotel of it all basically never fucking enters my mind as part of the introduction. It’s usually some variation on how Sora is a brave young man who is friendly to all, loyal to his friends, and fights the darkness with the keyblade. I don’t need to go into the Roxas/Ventus/Vanitas/Xion of it all bc it’s not the key point of his character (although most of those do end up tying into the loyal to friends and friendly to all parts, anyway - the core parts inform the more complicated details that come later!). It’s why I’m so insistent on people playing (or watching LPs) in game release order because that’s how it’s best to obtain all the developing information. It drives me up a wall to see people just overcomplicate things to newbies who are then driven away by the complication of it all. Which, we need new blood in this fandom! This stupidly long lull is a great time to get involved! And yet… -_-; Not to mention, I kind of am resentful of how people refuse to engage with the KH series’ mysteries AS mysteries to be solved. I don’t experience the same “KH is complicated” phenomenon in either the transformative side of the fandom (fanfiction, fan art, etc) or the Lore analysis side of it. We’re too busy observing the lore, extrapolating from it, and, in the case of transformative works, expanding on it with our on interpretations and transformations of the text. Nomura lays all these threads out not only to give himself writing tools to be picked up later, but also to allow us, the players, to engage with the work in our own ways. And entirely too many people insist that franchises explain all the things instead of bother trying to interpret anything. one of my biggest bug bears in fandom tbh. Also well understood about the secondhand knowledge via LPs and video essays tbh. Like, I remember when I didn’t yet have a PS3, I watched a Let’s Play of FFXIII. I would go on to play the game and its sequels later when I did get a PS3, but I definitely remembered more of the plot by actually playing. Not to say some things didn’t stay (Fangnille definitely high among them lol) nor do I think it’s impossible to enjoy a story via a Let’s Play, but I definitely got more from actually playing. It’s why despite the roar of hate toward TLOU2 and later S&V and now Legends ZA, I still worked toward playing them for myself and having a good time (…or “good time” for TLOU2; worth playing but I don’t know if I’d call it fun lmao). And yeah it’s a future thing for ZA given it’s not yet out even as we are less than a month from release, but trailers show me it looks like I’m gonna have a good time so we’ll see how it goes then when I play for myself instead of letting some rage youtube dude turn me off bc of stupid assumptions. It also probably explains why I prefer reaction content when I’ve already experienced the thing being reacted to. Like, I’m probably never going to watch MLP so I’m probably also never going to ever watch MLP reaction content. However, I love the KH series so essays and reactions are fun for me. Same with Steven Universe reactions, or the sheer amount of reactions and analysis I’ve watched of Kpop Demon Hunters, etc and so forth. It’s fun seeing someone new get into a thing I love, kind of like showing a movie or show to a loved one IRL and watching for their reaction to your favorite parts. ALSO ALSO, that last part of how wikis end up stripping emotions from a scene makes me think of my never-ending crusade to get people to play X-2 after FFX to get Yuna’s arc to completion. Hear me out! FFX primarily deals with how do you cope when you learn the religious beliefs and worldview you have grown up in your entire life were built on falsehoods? Yes, the immediate problem of stopping Sin is dealt with in a new way that promises to end the cycle (the post X-2 audio drama can’t hurt meeeeeeeee), but the fallout of how to move on after this is left to interpretation. Until X-2 comes along and we follow Yuna still needing to regain her footing. She’s definitely fallen back onto her need to help people that’s a little too strong - something that is even called out within X-2’s story - and she’s even shown growing into seeing crappy plans requiring sacrifices and ultimately going “I don’t like your plan, it sucks”. Which is another line that sounds dumb out of context, but within the context of Yuna’s whole arc and her sorrow at previously losing Tidus as well as the Aeons (even if it was by the aeons’ request), hell yes she’s going to be rejecting the sacrifice that both her religious life valued too much and what has caused her personal pain. It’s so GOOD and I need more people to play X-2 goddammit. Anyway, brb saving this for slapping into conversations about how “complicated” KH is. Apologies about my wall of text, I am quite passionate about this subject lol.
I think Namine is the sole reason why Ansem The Wise thinks like he does about nobodies, cause she literally shouldn't exist. She doesn't have a body to form from cause she came from Sora turning into a heartless and not Kairi losing her heart, Sora's body is Roxas, so she only have some reminiscent essence of Kairi
I think you point out a lot of what made this serious so hard to follow, but just wave them away through modern reasoning. I was like 8 when i played the first game for the first time. I loved it and read the comic at the library, but the fact that side titles on separate handheld consoles was a huge limiting factor in the early 2000s in America with the coming recession. Then to learn that there was incredibly plot relevant events happening in these that affected 2 had me really upset. Tack on the fact that before the hd remasters and wide accessibility of computers and internet. Characters all often looked the same or had similar names to others. And the internet used to be full of discussions containing misinformation or widely uninformed theories and man, was this series hard to follow as a fan who has been financially limites their whole life. Sure, in retrospect, with all the information readily avaikiable in hd format it might mot seem hard to follow. But lemme tell ya, it was
Having played every Kingdom Hearts game including KHUx (the mobile one), I still don't really understand the minutiae of the Xehanort Saga beyond who each character is and the basic throughline of "Xehanort is bad and Sora is at the center of everything." That's okay, but it does get irritating when you have SO many characters who speak vaguely, or in platitudes, and you need to keep track of so many different characters' motivations in order to understand why they do what they do. I also get the impression that while Nomura has always had plans for where the story will go, a lot of the vagueness is intentional because he hasn't yet finalized what he wants to happen next in the story. What I struggle with most, honestly, is the near-infantilization of Sora as a character. He is constantly characterized in such an immature way that it almost seems like every character remembers what happened in the previous games except for him. In a way this makes sense, as his motivation in any of the games has never really stretched far beyond saving his friends and defeating the darkness. I also can understand this being intentional, as him being a stand-in for a casual player, who probably doesn't understand all the minor details of the plot and just wants to beat up bad guys and experience Disney stories. But it gets especially bad in KH3, where it barely even seems like he's aware of things that happen around him. It makes him feel childishly unimportant and like an empty vessel. And because you are primarily seeing things through his eyes, it undermines the weight of the story. Now, perhaps Sora's immaturity is meant to be an explanation for why he is constantly told, starting in KH2 and basically in every game going forward, that he still has a lot to learn and still isn't ready to become a "Keyblade Master" or whatever. But he has saved the universe multiple times! He has made multiple noble sacrifices! Why is he written as if these things don't matter to his development as an adult? All that being said, I do think people complaining about the story getting confusing is primarily a result of the constant addition of new characters. I played through the whole story of the mobile game and I still have basically no grasp on any of the characters from that game or who the original "founders" who all wear animal masks are, and which of them are good or evil.
Definitely agree that DDD made things more complicated. I do think KH3 did a pretty amazing job given all of that, especially with Remind. Basically giving fans pretty much everything they ever wanted while clearing the board to get things back on track. I will say though that I definitely see the point about death not sticking I do feel it went about it in the best way possible. If you, like me, marathoned through the series during Covid when it came out on PC after abandoning it after 2 as a kid, you might have a particular view of the story. You thought that you were going back to a fun bit of childhood innocence and while that is there you also get a story that forces you to confront your own life and mistakes and yearn for the days of childhood innocence when it didn’t seem like everything was completely insane. All while more likable characters who remind you of you and your friends die or are put in terrible positions. After Days and BBS it’s getting really depressing. Now they definitely could have turned things around without giving us the fairy tale ending but I also respect the method they went with. They put us in Sora’s shoes and the simple emotional viewpoint he has. That’s all super sad and I’ll do whatever I can to give them all a happy ending. And at the end of KH3 we see this wonderful scene of all these people who were once separated, together as this extended family living in a united world that is at peace. But then it gives us the cost: if you truly want to be a hero and make the world a better place and make the lives of people you care about better, you might not be around to enjoy it. It’s honestly a really powerful ending for KH3 that I don’t think is understood well enough. It was a war and Sora wanted his family to make it through so badly that he pushed himself past his breaking point to make it a reality. We don’t always get to live in the better world we create but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for it. At the bare minimum this has cost Sora a year of his life, again, and I don’t think he’ll come back to his family without going through a lot more. I’ll admit this leaves KH4 a lot of work to do but I have some confidence that it can. I’m really hoping 4 gives Sora space to really reflect on himself and his life. KH3 gave us a peek under the mask that Sora has put on for so many years and the potential of exploring all of that is some really great stuff.
Others have said it, but Xehanort norting the other members of Org XIII is kind of an extension of him only valuing followers; they have to be part of him. Which is fantastic as a foil to Sora’s “My friends are my power!” spiel
Man, this was a great video. I can't afford a console or a gaming computer right now, so if I want to know more about a game, I'll often watch a let's play/essay--but I know that isn't a replacement. Back when I had a PS4, I was obsessed with NeiR: Automata, and I got stoked when my favorite streamer at the time started playing the game. But tbh, watching someone else play it didn't even come close to the experience of playing it myself. From that point forward, I really took note of how different each experience is. And yet I see SO many people who've watched one (1) video essay and think they know everything about a piece of media, and it drives me bonkers lol. Like, man, the end of your video highlights it perfectly - the "Looks like my summer vacation is... over" line has lived rent-free in my head since I was a kid!!! But god is it so cringe to hear it in a bland wiki summary.
I think with narrative games its harder to get that sam feeling playing it while watching someone. A lot of people like to say that narrative games are just movies and that implies you don't need to play them to get them. But that is just untrue. Playing them and watching them are different experiences.
I actually have a case for playing Days before KH2. In the Roxas prologue you are meant to see it through Roxas, you are confused and don't know what's going on, but if you played Days first you see it through Axel, not understanding what happened to his friend or why he doesn't remember him. The only things you "lose" are The concepts of Nobodies and the Organization, but they're easily grasped from Days anyway
Funnily enough the other day I read some bits of the story from Guilty Gear in its wiki, another story with a similar "fame". Some bits were a bit hard to grasp fully, but I knew at the moment it was just due to the fact I was just reading it from a wiki instead of seeing the actual context and proper development and because I was only reading bits of it rather than the whole thing and that aside that, it didnt seem complicated. It was then, just a few days before you uploaded this video that I saw this might be the reason why KH or GG among other series have this kind of reputation, because people dont tend to follow the story acordingly. I knew some people had issues paying atention but this explains more why so many of them act like this. They might not even get the story by watching the actual games, after all if you experience something in a way it was not designed to, you most likely won't get the experience that was intended and the understanding of the story and its themes its part of that
26:35 Chuggaconroy actually did do something like this for his Majora's Mask LP - I think for the Anju and Kafei quest - but then RUclips broke it when they got rid of old annotations.
While i do agree in general about second hand media consumption, i think kingdom hearts is indeed confusing even if you manage to play all of them. It is packed With abstract concept and mumbo jumbo explanations, arbitrary powers, retcons, time travel, reincarnarion, multiple versioni of the same characters or multiple characters with the same appearence, and almost any new game changes the rules, introduces new characters and concepts and the fact that crucial l’ore and plot developments are in a mobile or rythm game does not help. I like kingdom hearts but i get that not everyone wants or should put in the effort to make sense of everything.
Although you and I don't agree on everything when it comes to kingdom hearts (re: the lasting effects of certain story choices as the games have gone on for example), this video was an amazing watch that I feel puts into words something I've not only been feeling when it comes to the popular perception of Kingdom Hearts (even by its own fans), but other long running series as well. While I've been struggling with people who take short summaries (esp humorous ones), popular memes, or secondhand accounts of what happened in a particular game (and what matters about it from them) and use this to influence their idea of a story as a whole, how the media in question delivers its themes, and how much the anything in it matters or makes any sense, I had never previously considered the impact that the prevalence of wikis would have on this. But, in hindsight, I do feel as if that makes a lot of sense. When I myself first got into Kingdom Hearts, I played DDD on 3ds first. My preconceived notion based on the game's cover was that it was a Disney game containing anime boys, and although the game itself contained accounts of the literal happenings for all of the games prior, very little of what was there actually stuck when I read it. In fact, I didn't really know which character was Roxas or Axel or Xion before I got into the games proper. I didn't fully get what made thanking Naminé so important. And reading the contents of those games didn't provide me with the necessary experience to really *get* just how everything in Riku's character arc had been building up to certain moments in DDD. But, even I, who played the games wildly out of order and watched cutscene comps for most of it (cause I didn't have a ps4 when kh3 was coming out or when I got into kh), was able to follow along with the story due to experiencing them first hand (or closer to first hand) This is all to say that the ability to read a wiki on a piece of media or watch an analysis video or even a let's play can be a double edged sword, especially when we elevate surface level jokes or short form content or literal summaries of events over experiencing the actual presentation of the media. There's nothing wrong with watching video essays about media you're never going to experience and spouting fun facts about it from time to time, but it is especially with long running series you see the prevalence of fans and non fans alike who see reading a wiki or listening to a summary of a game/movie/etc from a friend who heard about it from a friend who watched a streamer rant about the story or letting a "trusted figure" tell them what is true and important as a replacement for experiencing the media themselves, and then go on to confidently preach about what is canon or true about a series or what isn't. Yes, theoretically one could play all of the kingdom hearts games and still find the story confusing to them personally, but I'm more inclined to believe analysis and opinions about a long running media from people who care about actually engaging in it in good faith, as opposed to people who would rather have their friends or a wiki tell them what they should believe and how they should interpret a media, just so they themselves can go on to deride the media as bad or stupid or confusing or use "canon" as an aimless cudgel. Wikis can be helpful for laying out the facts, getting a refresher on story beats or game mechanics, or even be a useful resource to find things you may have missed in gameplay or within a story. It's similar for video essays. At the end of the day, as you've put it, they're not meant to replace experiencing that media for yourself. They're supplimental material. And if someone who is constantly hearing about how Kingdom Hearts is confusing and makes no sense tries to get all of their info from a wiki...well then of course they're more likely to be confused! This especially goes for people who only engage with kingdom hearts through certain short summary videos that contain "humorous" commentary on how things don't make sense and imply KH is completely dumb and unserious in how they're presented. Anywho, I loved the video. I'll be thinking about what you said here for a long while ... Now, sidenote. The power of waking *is* explained within Kingdom Hearts. Dream Drop Distance presents its usage that aligns with its name in its final moments. Namely, since Riku completed the Mark of Mastery Exam and has gained the power of waking, both he and Mickey are noted as having the ability to wake Sora up after he's fallen deeper into his dreams and been prepared to be the perfect Xehanort vessel. It's because of the power of waking that Riku is able to wake Sora up after diving straight into his dreams. The power of waking is explained in the most detail during the remind dlc for kingdom hearts 3, as Chirithy explains that Sora committed a nature taboo by using the power of waking to traverse worlds to reach certain hearts (ie when he abused it to bring his fallen friends and fellow wielders back to life after they were all taken by the demon tide). An example of Sora using the power of waking correctly is when he accesses Scala ad Caelum in kh3 by using the power of waking on Xehanort to create a portal It has been a while so I could be getting some details wrong, but I do believe kh3 (especially the remind dlc) expands on the power of waking. And I personally believe bits about what it is and its usage aren't fully clear/explored precisely because we're going to see more of the power of waking in the future
This video reminded me of when I excitedly talk about the media I'm into to friends and sometimes they laugh it off and make their own judgement calls about it, how sometimes I wish I could take back what I said, because while I experienced it firsthand and can make jokes about it, they usually only hear if from me and maybe a few other people. This is especially true of longer media series like Dragon Ball, Homestuck, and, yes, Kingdom Hearts. (I've noticed that after this happened a few times, I've shifted my explanations to be vauger, and emphasizing the vibes and emotions felt instead of what happens.) A person explaining their experience consuming some media is not the same as experiencing it for yourself, and it sounds super obvious when spelled out like that, but I wish that was remembered when judements and assigning of value are then done on that media. You don't have to watch something if you feel like it's not for you, or not worth your time/money, but I think we've all been sometimes guilty of casting judgement on a series and its fans or even the kind of story it tells, when we don't firsthand know what it's like, and that without firsthand knowledge of the experience, that critique/judgement can never be as accurate or have as much depth/truth to it. Again, it sounds obvious when spelled out like that, but I just wish this was remembered more often.
A minor point made here that resonates with me is the consequences of making everything part of Xehanort's master plan. Believe me, I'm down for mysteries and long-con schemes, but there comes a point where it feels like a story (or the discussion around it) stops being about its actual events and how it impacts the characters, and instead becomes about how it all fits into some big conspiracy or plan. I remember my brother returning from watching some Marvel movie, his first and only word of opinion being that it was bad because it didn't expand on the multiverse. I'm surely missing a lot of context, but it just struck me as strange that *that* was considered the most significant thing to bring up. That said, I do think Xehanort has more interesting characterization (or at least the potential for it, if I'm just overthinking) as a control freak, with his seeming omniscience being an expression of needing to be on top of every possible outcome. The concept of "Nortification" feels like an even more extreme antithesis to friendship than Xemnas's Organization - beyond seeing others as mere followers, Xehanort reduces them further into extensions of just himself. Granted, I wonder how well that's conveyed when Norted characters retain most of their characterization, but still...
This has been going on for a while now in many medias, where it seems fans only care about the lore and its implication rather than, say, character arcs, narrative and interactions. Sticking to Kingdom Hearts as an example, I wasn't sad that Missing Link was cancelled, nor will I ever be, because I wasn't attached to any of the characters shown in the beta and the gameplay style didn't interest me. Plus, I don't think making an entry with such a "important piece of lore" a live service game was a good idea to begin with. To each, their own, but this is why I didn't like Union Cross and hope that any story beats brought from it in KH IV do so for the sake of a compelling narrative that gives another arc for Sora, and not just expand more on lore and worldbuilding like a history class with anime characters. Also, I agree with you and OP on the whole "Everything was part of Xehanort's plan!" bit. To me, it was a decision that broke my immersion in regards to Xehanort, where he stopped being a character and became just the author's favorite toy
I get your perspective, tbh. When you put so much focus on a certain amount of characters, it kinda undermines the worldbuilding of the setting, because now the threat feels very localized and every connection to the main cast can start to feel contrived, or like the world becomes stagnant without their input or presence on everything. A common criticism towards modern Star Wars for example is that it feels like way too many characters have some relationship with the Skywalkers, which makes the galaxy seem much smaller than it actually is, since everyone knows each other in some form. Good worldbuilding makes you feel like the world can progress even without the main cast's constant involvement. I think Kingdom Hearts has this weird dichotomy, where the worldbuilding struggles and thrives on a case by case basis. On one hand, the lore of Kingdom Hearts itself can feel very self contained at times when it comes to Sora and Xehanort. On the other hand, the Disney worlds make the universe feel lived in. One thing I like is how in Birth by Sleep, Hercules is his younger self, and when Sora meets him again in KH1 and the subsequent games, he's much older. It's a detail that's very unappreciated in the fandom, but the passage of time affecting the worlds even without Sora and the gang being there shows that the Disney characters exist and live their own lives even outside the context of the story. (Kinda irrelevant side note, but I always wondered why Xehanort never kidnapped Rapunzel to use her magic. His whole plan of stealing Terra's body in BBS was to cheat death and live to see his plans come to fruition. So why not use her hair to reverse his age as a contingency, when his original plan backfired?)
@draketrevoroliver5293I like the idea that Xehanrot had a general plan of "get 13 Darknesses that are actually just Xehanort in different times/possessing people to fight 7 Lights," but the individual plots are him going "but if I can just succeed here and now with a shortcut, I might as well give it a shot." So rather than a master plan thay has ever step going perfectly, its more and end goal he's constantly progressing while still trying to get early victories along the way.
@gunnarschlichting9886 That's the part I think it wasn't handled well. So the end product looks less like Xehanort taking a short-cut because he saw an opportunity to do so, and more like Nomura's dotting him, as if going "no, no, you see, his actual plan was always this, and his three first defeats don't really count". The character is not allowed to truly fail and develop from it, he had to have a "plan B for every eventuallity", which, in my opinion, doesn't feel earned, it feels like a cheat code given to him by the narrative. It doesn't help that Ansem and Xemnas actions are recontextualized to fit into his master plan, instead of being allowed to be their own things.
While I agree that Kingdom Hearts isn't confusing in the broad strokes, I feel like there are some aspects of Kingdom Hearts that can be confusing if you get down into the nitty gritty details. For example, Xigbar speaks to Zexion in KH2 during a BBS teaser scene about how Zexion must know about Xemnas' secret plans and how they tie to a search he's apparently been conducting a search for Ventus. The thing is that Zexion is never established to be in the know about Xehanort's secret plans and is likewise never shown to be particularly in the know about anything as the series goes on. Now, this could very well be the result of Nomura changing plans, but it is an example that springs to mind about something that could sew confusion. Another thing is that Kingdom Hearts is a series where you are meant to accept that the characters will operate on flawed information, which not everyone will immediately pick up on. Riku's "There can't be two Keyblade Masters." line is memed on, but that's a great example of how that's something Riku had no way of knowing or stating with definitive fact. He just saw other worlds for the first time last week. What does he know? Similarly, in the same game, Ansem is surprised to learn that Kingdom Hearts is light. And throughout the series, you'll see other characters operate on misinformation. KH3, for example, has Sora, Donald, and Goofy tell everyone that KH1 Riku is in the Organization because they don't remember Riku Replica. So even though the audience might have immediately thought "Oh, that's Riku Replica" when they first saw him, particularly since Replicas kept coming up in the plot, everyone else just takes SDG's word for it, especially since Riku Replica plays along. That being said, at the end of the day, the overall story has always been relatively easy to parse. I don't need to understand every single facet of Xehanort's machinations in KH3 to know that his plan is to obtain Kingdom Hearts and recreate reality in the way that he thinks is best fitting while other characters are searching for a MacGuffin that will be more important in future titles, for example, and that's really the main information you need to know to understand most of the plot.
A good 16 years ago I had a phone that could play custom ringtones (!) and the Destiny Islands melody was simple enough to type in and use. I still startle and look for my phone every time I hear it.
7:11 lol my favorite thing to do when explaining the Ansem bit to my friends is going, "this isn't nearly as confusing as I am going to make it sound- but it's more fun this way"
There's a youtuber called Hamon Beat that periodically does debunking videos for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure; there's a huge amount of misinformation about characters' abilities and motives because so much of the fanbase only engages with the series through memes and tiktok clips. you see a lot of people acting like they're smarter than the creator for supposedly picking up on a plot hole only for them to be directly addressed on the page, that they've never read.
yeah jojos is one of those series as well. The kars one through me for a loop because I watched part 2 and I absolutely understood why Kars never came back, hes functionally dead at the end of that story. not literally dead ofc but his mind is completely broken that if he came back he wouldn't be a threat.
10:40 Vanitas is the parts of Ventus being removed. Sora was able to fit in the hole Vanitas left behind, therefore they must be the same general shape.
A while back I had a short discussion with a fan of the the Legend of Heroes: Trails series, if you're unfamiliar it's a JRPG series that much like Kingdom Hearts has been ongoing for about 20 years and has 13 entries (plus a brand new remake of the first game) that tell a continuous story, have had their games localized and released in the west in a completely wrong order (imagine BBS and Days being localized after KH3), these games contain way more characters than Kingdom Hearts has, multiple organizations and people that shift their allegiances constantly, homonculi with extra bodies, barely explained powers and curses, made up words and terms, a controversial entry with time travel, and their entries are rarely named linearly. The first three games are named First Chapter, Second Chapter and The Third, self explanatory enough, but the next 3 games are Trails from Zero, Trails to Azure and Trails of Cold Steel with no indication which comes next but a 2 minute google search will explain much like with Kingdom Hearts. But even worse is that at least Kingdom Hearts has KH1 as an easy starting point, if you were to see every Trails title laid before you it would be much harder to figure out which game is the first without further context. This fellow Trails fan was somehow not able to see the hypocrisy and clung to their second hand information and rumors they heard on the internet. People are crazy.
I was one of those weird kids who playd kh2 right after kh1. so yeah, that's why its confusing. It's confusing if a game throws something at you that it never explained. I didn't even find out about the ds game until years later. and I thought it was just a card game spin off. It's like if every Naruto/ One Piece movie containted lore or events relevent to the main story.
i think the rise of "anti accounts"-- where they only ever post negatively about a specific series-- is also partially to blame. because they hyperfocus on a series' flaws and make even small, insignificant things seem cataclysmic. and often times even the people to run those accounts haven't engaged with it directly. they just hear about it from the people they follow, read the wiki (or worse, ask chat gpt), then go to town. kingdom hearts CAN be confusing, and not every writing decision is good, but its really only in small bursts. kingdom hearts, to me, is not a story where the logistics matter. its about the characters and the emotions they spark in you. it's perfectly fine if a story like that doesn't appeal to you, but you also have to know the difference between objective faults and your own personal tastes.
I think people have said it's confusing since before it got confusing, but even as a die hard fan I'd argue it starts to get there around Dream Drop, and I'm not sure how to even describe the ending of 3 with the power of waking turning time back and waking the Lingering Will.
Also, popular videos like Barry Kramer, that get all the information from 3rd party first before experiencing himself might added to the over complicated explanation. Not saying that he did a disservice, but hearing a story instead of experiencing is way different on how We interpret the information
First off, I agree with you. Buuuut, I think I'd rather just watch Barry's video than play the games. Far less time commitment. And there are oodles of RPG's I'd rather devote my time to.
Definitely hit all the right notes. I still see people saying the series is confusing, but they never seem to settle on a unified reason as to why. The wikification of it and a ton of other series and art certainly seems to contribute to those kinds of misunderstandings.
something i will always love about KH as someone who painstakingly played all of them (except union cross, fuck that), is that even when the villains and the world gets confusing, i never have to guess how characters feel about each other. friendship is the guiding light of it all, and who needs to understand every painstaking detail when the heart of the story is about saving your friends? making sure everyone lives and gets to be happy? fighting injustice? there are so many points in the series where a character is confused (and im like girl me too) but chooses to push through and do what needs to be done because it means getting to see their loved ones again. sure, ive read wikis to make sense of things after the fact, but my experience as a player mirrors sora's. I dont need to know everything, i just want them to be happy. also, "guess my summer vacation is over" is a phrase my friends and i quote to each other at the end of every summer specifically because of how devastating that scene is
Master Xehanorts plan is about seeing the true miracle of Kingdom Hearts, which needs a clash of true darkness and true light. So when Xehanort revealed that the time-travel and the events of the games were "All part of the plan" was about manifesting both the greatest darkness (Ansem, Xemnas, Saix, Vanitas etc.) and the greatest light (Sora, Riku, Ventus, Aqua etc.) So i feel its less omniscient and more like he is playing a long game of chess.
Yes, he was mostly bluffing, he did planned to have the fight to create the x blade and using kingdom hearts, but he didnt care who was going to be the darkness and the lights, he choose the people that could fill the role as time passed, we need to remember he choose Sora to be one of the darkness and failed, so instead went for a clone.
I think the issue is that while that "plan" can technically work, it is just so long-winded and requires so many characters having kinda loosely explained reasons to be there that player might have hard time to vibe or feel the pressure of it. Just cause something make sense after long winded explanation, doesn't mean it is very engaging.
I've always said Kingdom Hearts was convoluted, not complex. The only thing "confusing" about it is that 90% of what happens in Disney worlds do not matter. When you only look at major plot points, it's a very simple "good vs evil" story. You just gave to ignore all the fluff.
43:25 Actually, as someone who has consumed KH entirely through 2nd hand videos (not wikis), I genuinely found your reading of the wiki entry to be, in some ways, more emotionally resonant to me than watching the scene itself. Although the wiki hardly tells the events in an emotional manner, I heard your reading and imagined the scene in my head. I even recalled the details I absorbed through my 2nd hand experiences, I remembered the location and appearances of characters, voices, recalled parts of what Roxas' experience was prior to this, and a bit of his own characterization. And so, I imagined a scene that had, in my opinion, more natural dialogue, voice acting, body acting and pacing. Some of these criticisms you have already mentioned, but the general flow of the scene felt choppy to me, mainly with Roxas, who's body, voice acting and dialogue felt like it didn't fully transition from different emotions and actions smoothly or naturally. Some parts felt more natural than others, with the moment Roxas opens the, cocoon? Feeling particularly unnatural. Roxas was just angry, trying to stab his keyblade into the man before him, before he notices Sora inside and, within seconds after his strike, calmly, neutrally, matter of factly says "Sora." While still completely in his action pose from just earlier. Ultimately, those moments did genuinely, partially take me out of the scene and the emotions. Even as parts of the whole did benefit my experience, there was enough detracting it too. And I'm sure some of that is constraints within the game's engine. And really, how much can the wiki entry itself be credited for how my imagination took its words and imagined something more? But if anything, though I disagree with your conclusion, it strengthen's your point more. My 2nd, or rather 3rd hand listening of your wiki entry reading created a very different impression in my head than the 2nd hand viewing od the cutscene in isolation, which would then be very different from my 1st hand experience if I actually played the intro of KH2 completely, and spent time with the game, characters and themes. I just thought my differing conclusion offers another layer to this. Your video is very focused on 2nd hand viewings giving a worse impression to its audience than a 1st hand experience would, but it can also create a better experience, or an experience that is neither better nor worse, but simply very different and inaccurate to the game itself.
I see what you mean, but as someone who has played through every KH game (some of them several times) and hasn’t really read much KH wiki, I think it definitely is confusing. Or rather the rules of KH’s internal logic are confusing, and whenever something is explained or a question answered it raises even more questions (e.g. why does Roxas not look like Sora? Because another totally different boy called Ventus is sleeping in his heart, and to understand how and why please play this 30-50 hour prequel). The first KH had it best where light and darkness were vague and didn’t feel like they needed to be explained as substantive, quantifiable forces, but as the series continued it kept trying to explain what they were in a way that made things more confusing than if they’d just continued saying “darkness bad, light good.” All of this came to a head for me (and I think many others) in the final act of KH3 where all of these overcomplicated narrative threads were being concluded in unsatisfying, contrived ways. They left themselves far too many threads to tie up, and by the end I was both bored and bewildered. I don’t mind confusing plots (e.g. I really enjoy MGS and FF7 whose plots feel baffling even though I’ve played them many times), but when the game itself is insisting that it makes sense when it clearly doesn’t, then I have a problem with it.
Where did you get the sense that the series was trying to quantify them? In every game afterward, they're still mostly presented as these vague forces that act as the foundation of the universe and the source of power for the various characters. Certainly nothing like the midichlorians
@garyconstanza3120 Quantify is the wrong word I suppose, I meant more that they kept elaborating upon them to the point where half of KH cutscenes end up as word salad where more than half the words are heart, darkness, light, data and “the power of waking”. The elaboration seemed like it was intended to make things clearer as it went on but it just made things more confused I think. E.g. in a fragmentary passage there’s the bit where Mickey is trying to explain to Aqua that he’s entered the realm of darkness to lock the door to something with a keyblade of darkness because that needs to happen at the same time that Riku locks it from the other side with a keyblade of light or something (??) Whatever it was was convoluted and meant I was more confused than if he’s said almost nothing.
@PyroNebula That's just Mickey explaining how they manage to close the door to darkness and stop the Heartless in KH1. Keyblade of darkness on one side of the door, keyblade of light on the other, activate both of them to lock the door. What's crazy is that that example isn't even the worst of the word salads as you call them, there are more absurd cases in other games.
@garyconstanza3120 That is confusing though, esp since Sora is able to lock and unlock plenty of doors (metaphysical and otherwise) just fine with just his regular keyblade plenty of other times. It simply doesn’t make sense within the internal logic of KH otherwise, and there are heaps of other examples like this, e.g. how come Sora/Riku is “THE chosen wielder” of the keyblade and then it turns out that half the characters get one? How come killing a person’s heartless and nobody makes them come back to life? How can a world sleep? Time travel!? None of these questions (and many more) are given remotely satisfactory answers within the games, and where an attempt at an answer is made it just makes things more incomprehensible.
@PyroNebula This videos premise while having plenty potential and being pretty sound on its own gets completely subverted by the creator's complete lack of self awareness as to how people felt playing through these games before the HD collections came out, he also simply hand-waves away almost all of the confusing points in the plot because he is desensitized to the weirdness, I mean he himself admits he was trawling through the wikis way back when like all fans did, its completely disingenuous. I'd agree with him if his only point was about the second hand sources thing as well as taking the plot's more emotional and thematic meanings as more important than the literal events going on and explanations to get to the endings, but he's also trying to explicity say that outside of a couple of niche things the plot is easily understandable, which is way off-base considering the sheer amount of confusion the KH games produce as a result of ham-fisting twists and turns you wouldnt predict.
I'm not entirely sure i agree with your thoughts on watching lets plays specifically, but i cant tell if this is a gut emotional response or if i have a good reason, so I'm gonna try writing it out here. I think watching a lets play is a first hand experience, or maybe a 1.5 hand experience? Like, would you levvy the same critique on someone who sat next to their friend, who actually played it? I feel its a separation between experincing the story and experiencing the gameplay. At the same time, I definitely agree that the person you watch play something has a HUGE effect on your perception of that thing, and I suppose thats worth thinking about. Idk what I'm trying to say here. When I watch a playthrough of a game, I feel i have experienced the whole story, even if I havent experienced the gameplay. On the other hand my first experiences with Kingdom Hearts were watching playthroughs of each game, up until DDD when I could only find a cutscene compilation, which i was so disappointed in that I went and bought a 3DS to be able to play it myself. So I didn't Play previous games, but I did Experience them. I dunno. I think its complicated and hard to voice, that difference.
i think vanitas looking like sora is a coincidence and that was just the shape the darkness in ventas' heart. and sora's heart just happens to fit that missing part like ventus is piccolo and sora is nail
This video made me better understand a sadness i've been feeling for the last 5 years - none of my friends play the games i enjoy, they at best experience it second hand. And this isn't even about Kingdom Hearts - Hollow Knight, Hades, Clair Obscure, Lies of P, even Elden Ring - my lifelong friends only ever play Rust, Rocket League or Counter Strike. Sucks, man.
@protatype7487 haven't gotten around to buying the dlc yet so i'm only picking one from the base game, but i love Leyndell, and Stormveil Castle's a really close second
@Xirogify You’ve got some killer good ones waiting for you in the DLC, if you end up buying it come back and tell me what you think. Leyndell’s great, I love that’s it’s both open and claustrophobic at the same time, and it’s one of the few areas in Elden Ring that hides a secondary location inside it. Love when they hide stuff like that, it’s always been my favorite of their tricks.
Find friends who do. I know it’s not easy to make friends, trust me. But I also know you can’t turn people into someone else. Instead of lamenting that your life long friends don’t share interests in those games I think you’re better off finding people in those communities you can relate to as well. That way you don’t feel like your losing touch with those lifelong friends, you can get your narrative needs met elsewhere.
@45:33-.-I don't like you bring up how it can be a metaphor for depression or loneliness. This is a problem I like to call "allegory brain-rot", were the assumption is that elements of a story must have a parallel to something in the real world, and to not have it makes it somehow shallow. Zootopia being the biggest victim of this that I know of. Talking about real world issues _is_ the surface level. But talking about the underlying nature of those issues, and the moral principles surrounding them _is_ what deep, and that can be explored in a story without making it a direct allegory.
This video is so awesome, and Is exactly how I feel about the discourse surrounding Zelda as a chronology. I especially love that you called attention to the way people exclusively talk about the timeline of events in a game, when that's a totally incomplete and shallow way to discuss art. Absolutely adored this video
Great video, the ending section really resonated with me. There's a reason that viral posts like "Poorly describe your favorite movie" pop up every so often. The fact that you can easily write an unflattering summary of your favorite movie is, IMO, evidence that unflattering summaries have little bearing on whether the work itself is actually any good. It's a style of criticism that's often funny, but rarely useful.
Ockay but don’t you find it weird he didn’t play dream drop distance or 3 for this video even though this is a video about all the games
Poorly describe your least favorite anime would amuse me
@Skullmask4281 There was a whole section of the video about that and the nuances one should keep in mind when forming opinions on a thing through several degrees of separation of said thing.
You're missing the forest for the gotchas.
I've always viewed it as more parody than criticism personally.
@Skullmask4281I also haven't played Dream Drop Distance or 3, so that's good to know actually.
My favorite joke about Kingdom Hearts is that everyone is Xehanort and everyone who's not Xehanort is Sora. I don't think it's complicated, I just think it's funny.
I think justapancake summarized it well on kh3.
Axel: "shouldn't we all introduce ourselves to each other?"
Yensid: "you should know everyone if you already played all of the kingdom hearts games."
Axel: "dammit, I only played kingdom hearts 1 and 2."
Which to be fair, is a legitimate criticism of the series I love. I’m not talking about the numbering being a little silly that’s whatever the public eventually figured that out. I’m talking about access to the titles.
KH: PS2
COM: GBA
KH2: PS2
358/2: DS
Coded: Mobile/DS
BBS: PSP
DDD: 3DS
Union Cross: Mobile
2.8: PS4
KH3: PS4
There isn’t another series in existence that is attempting to tell a linear story that asks this much of its fans or even close. 7 (!) 7 devices lol.
And even I, a huge fan, who had played most of these game, often years late, wanted to replay them all in the lead up to 3. So I bought 1.5 + 2.5 and oops they aren’t even all on there. And I couldn’t afford 1.5 2.5 2.8 and 3 at the time so I’ve just have never play DDD. Which idk is a pretty important game for the lead up to 3.
So yes I absolutely agree that most of this criticism is coming from people who are actively not engaging with the text as presented. But uh idk man it seems pretty clear why they may have missed a game or 3 in the 14 years between 2 and 3. There are plenty of people who believe they are KH fans and don’t even know half of those crucial titles exist.
I feel like calling out people making this criticism for not being intellectually honest and fair to the series, without acknowledging the glaring reason that so many people legitimately believe there are holes in the text is KH fans being just as deliberately obtuse as the very people they are criticizing. Honestly maybe more given they have that giant excuse.
I imagine if Harry Potter books 4 5 and 6 all released exclusively on 3 different Kindles there would be quite a lot of unfair “where did Horocruxes come from?” And “who the hell is Luna??” Criticism too.
(Side note it’s hilarious that these games released on every gaming device known to man yet completely missed the PS3.)
I miss justapancake
Axel/Lea shouldn't be cursing............
@truthspreader1996 Much to the contrary, Axel is the _only_ character in KH to say a curse word on screen (“hell of a show”, GBA CoM).
He also throws up an obscene gesture at Xemnas in KH3 so yes Axel is the designated foulmouth vulgar guy of the cast for sure
@nemesi55 Notice how I said "shouldn't" as in not recommended. It is not a good idea which as you just provided good evidence of, as it is changed in the Re-chain of memory game.
The "obscene gesture" is your imagination running wild (just saying).
Yahtzee didn't even use the right wiki, he used fuckin fandom wiki
As for Vanitas, I'd say it's less he's actually resonating with the actual future form of Sora and more that, since he already had the physical body of a teenager, his face after Ven and Sora's hearts connected just took on the approximate form of what the latter could look like to match with the body.
It's also to have a reversal of Roxas. Roxas had nothing of Sora's and yearned to remain his own person after his one year of existence, only to be backed into a corner of reluctant acceptance that he has to return to the guy while not being able to even maintain much sense of self, only to eventually regain a separate form and take the very mark that tied him down as his own.
Vanitas similarly didn't have much from Ventus, but actively sought out to merge with Ventus in order to forge the X-Blade partially cuz that was the only meaning in his life, while also being the dominant persona. Compared to Roxas, Vanitas never looked beyond what he initially was. Right to the very end, he stuck to the chains binding him. He's Darkness. He's the piece of Ventus taken away, only given more definition thanks to Sora. He sees himself as just that, nothing more.
Also Sora's Japanese voice actor REALLY wanted to be a bad guy and Nomura just went we ball
Haley Joel Osment also wanted to play a bad guy, as far as I remember. I guess, when you play the same sunshine boy for years, you'd want to hear yourself with a different voice too.
I always thought it was just that the hole vanitas formed happened to be perfectly sora shaped, meaning he looked like Sora because that’s what a heart shaped that way looks like.
@miro.georgiev97 That and villains are fun. They don't deal with moral quanderies or get sad. Disney villains in particular just get to enjoy being bad and chewing on the scenery while doing it.
"KH isn't confusing. Also, here's how Vanitas is resonating with the future form of Sora."
Desensitization through overexposure does not retroactively make a convoluted plot understandable to newcomers. Veterans of the franchise have simply lost sight of that.
@makumasa my one thought going through this comment section lmao
i always interpreted master xehanorts grand plan as having many plans and different ways to get a version of kingdom hearts because he is a meticulous villain, like if one plan fails he can go to the next one. Another way i like to interpret it is as him being a sore loser. “actually you didn’t beat me this was always part of my plans”.
I think DDD and 3 both corroborate this explicitly too
It’s more like Plans A, B, C or even D.
He had an ultimate macro plan, but diversified his portfolio by seeing if anyone would stop him if he tried to cheat the creation of the X-Blade or make an artificial KH or two
The problem is that it contradicts itself.
First you have his wish to get a new body and create the X-Blade.
Then, as Ansem, he tries force its way to Kindgom Hearts through the Heartless (But then... What about the X-Blade ?)
Then, as Xemnas, who is and isn't the same person, because it's part Xehanort, part Terra and part "Okay, but is he still amnesiac, yes or no ?" he tries to create a whole new Kingdom Hearts to try and creates hearts for him and his goons (But; apparently it wasn't for that, but he seemingly did not drop that charade when he was the sole member of the organisation left in KHII because ?)
And then, he re-forms himself because apparently when you split yourself in two and die twice, you just stitch yourself back together and a plan apparently kick started when he was Ansem is put in motion so that he'll go tell his past self about all the shit that he must do to launch the plan forward, but no worries, he won't remember anything so it doesn't create massive holes in the joke of a scenario that is KH3D; this whole plan being to aquire Sora as a new vessel for his big plan:
New Organisation XIII, a group created with the sole purpose to be made out of him and him alone to fight 7 lads wielding Keyblades of light, lads who have a hard time forming because he keeps cherry picking new host in his ennemie's group.
This whole plan being to forge the X-Blade (the real one, not a counterfeit one Vanitas bought on Wish) to open Kingdom Hearts and free the light from deep within it through a massive use of Darkness.
Like. I can understand all the way from BBS to KHII.
KHIII makes it explicit that he is meticulous and all, they do mention that Organization XIII is more than XIII just in case. Hell, already in 358/2 days, Xigbar or Xaldin mentions looking for new potential recruits in the first Organization XIII. Hell, Xion is already kind of a back up. But, there's also the line from Xemnas in that same game that goes along the line of "There are only 13 sits in this room, one of them needs to die." (Maybe it was Saix, but since he already has that Xehanort stare; I'd say it's about the same.)
But really, in KH3D, you feel that something was lost along the way.
Is that not what what was? Do some people not realize that???
To quote a certain youtuber: "Kingdom Hearts isnt confusing its just alot to remember"
got it memorized?
Some people have trouble retaining a lot of memory though. So of course once it reaches a threshold it just becomes confusing.
SuperButterBuns?
This is the perfect way to describe it. I first got into the series and was surprised by how easy it was to follow. But you're not lying. There is a LOT to remember, especially considering how much the "side" games contain important events and characters. Im sure whenever KH4 come out imma need to rewatch the cutscene movies.
@charlescaulkins8306 I dont think its fair to say that its confusing when the story is easy to follow. When I think of confusing im thinking of complex concepts, a bunch of plot holes, not explaining enough or very vaguely, etc.
I'm remembering way back when Dan Olson, who had no prior experience with the series, played KH3 on stream. A bunch of the viewers were like, "you're gonna be so confused lmao". Then he watched the intro CG cinematic, and pretty much clocked the broad strokes of the series in his speculation on what the story was about. The 2018 AV Club article, "Kingdom Hearts is Disney at its strangest, darkest-and most moving," condenses the whole thing down in three paragraphs. People just aren't looking at the big picture and keep getting bogged down by extraneous details.
I’m now thinking about a video of a girl who went viral for saying she “read 100 books” and what she meant was “read the AI generated summaries of 100 books” which is even worse bc those summaries aren’t written by an actual person who did experience the books. Overall this sort of discussion brings to mind Plato’s allegory of The Cave, and secondhand experiences/wiki reading are just us watching the shadows and actually playing a game would be leaving the cave etc
That is literally the exact opposite of what the allegory of the cave is about. Plato thought that experience itself was a lie and only reason could lead to truth.
"i got to Hollow Bastion and watched the rest of the cutscenes"
yep, Riku does that to people, ESPECIALLY before cutscenes were skippable
Especially that Boss Fight with the Ansem-possessed-Riku. Good Lord, I got so tired of the cutscene leading up to that one.
@ElvenRaptor that's the one, yep!
"Kairi's inside me?" is burned into millions of brains
@JohnSmith_1920 The skippable cutscenes the series implemented from the second game forward were such a mercy.
Abit unrelated but this is the same situation with Final Fantasy X especially with the fights with Seymour Natus (The 2nd Seymour fight) and Yunalesca from my experience lol.
@ElvenRaptor especially for challenge runs or Combo MAD's
"i know the plot, but i think i can beat Xigbar 3 seconds faster this time without touching the floor"
Second-hand media consumption really is a blight. I talked with a big MCU-head friend a few years back about Kingdom Hearts and he at the time was full-on mired in the internet mythos about it being super convoluted and complicated, asked me why there were both numbered games but also side games with subtitles and this has always confused me, multiple people do this but this guy in particular was asking that and clammed up very fast when I pointed out how the MCU works in its consumption, people keep up with that just fine though so??
There are so many fascinating things about Kingdom Hearts we *could* talk about. The religious iconography has always been a favorite, it has holdovers from Christianity, Hinduism, etc. of course since the Final Fantasy baked into its DNA and the classical fantasy inspiration the earlier titles that took just borrowed heavily from all of those aesthetics but something I've always really loved is the series' accidental or intentional ties to Manichaeism, the duality of light and dark being physical real forces that exist inside of all people and all worlds, how religious zealotry took hold after the great calamity happened and the worlds scattered, leading to people like Eraqus, Xehanort, and even *Mickey* to become fanatics for their camp. Mickey learning to confront his internal biases due to talking with Riku who was pumped up on the dark sauce juice and learned it isn't like, literally objectively evil is kinda bangin. I love the cheese.
@Har-d5x Yeah, the big spread-out early on was insane. Thankfully we're almost to a point where the series has had compilations for a longer part of its lifespan than it hasn't- the passage of time is so weird nvm I don't wanna think about that lol
Riku still has one of my favorite character arcs in my childhood game library.
@Har-d5xthey didn't make jt accessible though half of 358's story was not in cutscenes but dialogue during the 358 missions. They didn't bother redoing either ds games
I like how the light and dark themes in Kingdom Hearts can also mirror mental health as well and the acceptance of what we deem as flaws
(+) learning to balance 'light' and 'dark' is such a good message
This is an interesting perspective
Whatever one thinks of the lore, I think putting the games on different consoles is one of Kingdom Hearts most grevious mistakes.
I was one of those who was mostly motivated to get consoles once a Kingdom Hearts game or Smash Bros game came out on them... until kingdom hearts 3 violently shook me of all hope i had for the series
We’d probably still be waiting for Dream a drop Distance to releass if they made sure every game was a full PlayStation experience.
@kingleonidas2182 no shot they would have structured the series the way they did if every release had to be a full scale home console game
One of its biggest mistakes but also one of its best things it could have done. We wouldn't have as many KH games nor would the games have been allowed to experiment as much as they have were it not for the ability to have smaller scale projects on handhelds.
It sucks that it ever inspired confusion, but thankfully its an issue that has been largely rectified for over a decade now so we've had enough time to move on and just appreciate the upsides.
@SomniaCE i feel like that first part entirely depends on if you like any part of what they did with the handheld games, but if you didn't then luckily not much other than confusing plots and a few extra ways to cancel your enemies made it into 3 from all of that experimentation
also, a decade ago was when they released the browser game turned mobile game that you kinda need to get through to understand the main plot of the series, and right now sora is canonically stuck in nomura's spite remake of versus xiii, i see absolutely no signs of the confusion being fixed
You got me with that thumbnail! "the wiki-fication of art"? I didn't immediately know what that MEANT, which tbh is rare with text on YT thumbnails in my experience. And with KH in the title, you've got me hooked!
I understood what it meant, because I, am a genius.
I never even considered that Ansem The Wise's machine blowing up at the end of KH2 might be intended to relate to Riku's getting his own body back. I kind of assumed it was *just* because he runs towards his friends, *just* because in that moment he abandons the darkness in him for the light. The machine exploding was just the... narrative incentive required for him to literally abandon the distance he committed himself to in Days. I wasn't old enough when I first saw the scene to really ask the question of what caused it, but when I played again as an adult that was the explanation that came to mind.
I think I completely agree there. It wasn't any real specific thing the machine itself actually did, it didn't magically undo his change... it was his choice to protect his friends he fled from for so long. Because... "My friends are my power." Or... a worse metaphor "You're not you when you're hungry." Without his friends, who meant so much to him at the start of the journey but he was unable to see it himself, he didn't even LOOK like himself, and instead looked like the very person they were fighting. Pretty on the nose metaphor if you ask me. It says something about Riku, sure, but at the exact same time it says something about Xemnas. Riku looked like the man who abandoned his past connections and his friends for power... because he did the exact same thing. And if you look at Kingdom Hearts as it went on... I don't think that theme for Xehanort ever changed.
I’ve been saying this “kingdom hearts isn’t confusing, is just so absurd that my friend refused to engage with it after Michael Theodore Mouse walking into the room dressed head to toe in a black leather jacket ask about “the door to darkness”
It’s just absurd
I think a big problem with the "Feelings of hatred through osmosis" phenomena comes down to extremely vitriolic fandom reactions to a piece of media based on what the fanbase was hoping for. Lot's of newcomers to an IP will have their opinions on games they haven't even played just because of the sheer hatred of it by the related fanbase. Play a game yourself before passing your personal judgement on it.
what ive started to think about recently with this kind of thing is, while sure there's definitely some stuff that's hated just because it's actually bad or poorly made, but if it's a long running story type of thing like this there's a good chance any disappointment they have with it is gonna be multiplied by like 10 cause of all their expectations theyve had following it in real time. not that those feelings aren't valid, but if you're just getting into something listening to what a bunch of angry fans think about it probably won't be that indicitive of the actual experience you would have
As one of 3D's strongest soldiers, the Power of Waking is basically the power to forge and manipulate bonds between Hearts. The name "Waking" seems to be chosen because of how to use it correctly the subject needs to be in some state of sleep, literal or metaphysical, and results in them waking up.
However the name leads to some confusion if you take it too literally because it can be used in a lot of different ways if you apply it differently
It's one of those terms I feel like could've had a better name as it crossed over into so metaphorical that every time I hear it mentioned ingame, it just feels like the wrong name for how it winds up being used. Like... in the context of the original game it was introduced in, I thought it was just... the power to literally wake up from the dream state. Which, sure, on SOME level yeah, that is part of it, but it's the mechanism of how it's done that in-universe is applied to so many other areas, but the name just kinda... doesn't do it much service in that regard, I think.
Basically it’s the power to turn a heart “on” or “off”. Pretty simple.
This video's so great, not just for Kingdom Hearts, but as a reaction to the commonly increasing use of wikis/video essays/reviews/etc. as a substitute for engaging with the medium directly. I used to have a co-worker who would annoy me a lot because she would get into discussions or debates about different shows and movies only for it to soon be made apparent that her knowledge of them came entirely from Wikis and she would defend it as "So I mean, I BASICALLY watched/played it."
Another recent experience was at my DnD group where one of the other players was feeling FOMO because our whole group gushed over Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But rather than play the game or even watch a RUclips cutscene compilation, she opted to get the wiki summary so she could get a surface-level understanding of what happens, and all of us in the group felt pretty sad by it because she was unknowingly robbed of all the ways that the game's story can move you through the performance, music, visuals, direction, etc. It's why I refuse to ever do a wiki if there's a popular work of fiction I have not experienced yet. To me personally, it is better to remain largely ignorant of a work of fiction than to get the ILLUSION of experiencing it.
I hate discussing media with people who know it secondhand because we aren’t talking about our experiences and how the media made us feel, we are just fact-checking each other about “lore”.
I get so wary whenever people say the “lore” word when talking about games.
6:30 My favorite way of putting Heartless and Shadows is like if you die, you have a ghost and a zombie.
Vanitas explained to Sora and Ven why he looks like Sora before his death in 3. Vanitas says( and Im paraphrasing slightly) " I'm the piece of Ven that was taken and you( Sora) are the part that he needed to be whole again. So why wouldn't we look exactly the same?" This implies that Ven's heart needed to fill the gap left by Vanitas with something that was similar enough to Vanitas.
The novelization of birth by sleep provides an alternative reason, namely that Vanitas and Ven still shared a bond even at a distance and that this bond shaped Vanitas' appearance. Initially Vanitas is described as not having a face, simply a pair of eyes and a shadowed face similar to a heartless but over time his appearance changed to match Sora because of his link to Ven.
them sharing a bond post separation doesn't contradict the first statement it's true in both and necessary for it to function
Glad someone has pointed this out - I was sure that it was because they were both shaped as the complement to Ventus' broken heart and therefore had to be identical for one to correctly replace the other, but I couldn't source the concept in the ol' brainopedia
ok but like the kh3 explanation does essentially mean that they randomly look similar tho. thats not a cause for them to look similar, thats him saying 'you shouldnt be surprised'. the metaphysical missing part of ven's heart that sora filled just happened to have a physical profile attatched to it. cause vanitas was split first, sora and vanitas were never a part of his heart at the same time, they didnt influence each other, they do just look like that anyways.
So according to KH3, Vanitas doesn't look like Sora, it's Sora that looks like Vanitas
That last bit right there I think more or less is a pretty solid explanation. Vanitas grew to look like Sora did later on either through just slowly becoming more of his own person (even if he himself didn't actually intend that, because y'know, his ultimate goal and all that) and it's just entirely coincidental that Sora happened to look exactly like Vanitas as the person he was turning into was just... similar somehow... or as Ventus was slowly growing closer to Sora through their weird connection they had earlier on, Vanitas came to echo the other end of the connection (even though, sure, it's still odd that he looked like the older Sora when Sora himself wasn't even really there yet.)
“What matters is not what the series’ emphasis power of friendship says thematically. It is that Sora keeps giving speeches about how his friends are his power, and that’s not a very hard magic system, now is it? How does ‘friendship’ give you power? Friendship is not a quantifiable unit of energy. That doesn’t make any sense! And it’s cheesy too! What is this, a kid’s game? How cringe”
This made me laugh so hard as a KH fan all my life, on top of having Riku talking on screen at the same time. It’s exactly how my husband sees the series, but I love the games anyway because, no matter how confusing and cheesy it can be, friendship is just as powerful as Sora says it is.
"I don't think Kingdom Hearts is confusing, I think a wiki approach to Kingdom Hearts *makes* it confusing"
Hell yeah, been saying this for years, glad to see someone else put it this way.
And this is coming from someone who was only on Nintendo consoles for years, and HAD to rely on Let's Plays and wikis to know what happened in the "mainline" titles.
Does the need to keep track of how all the games connect to each other make it confusing...?
@nobafan7515 it's the "need" to concretely understand every facet of every game
@DaviddeBergerac to be fair, mickey mouse explaining to riku who the answm they fought in kingdom hearts 1 kinda proves basic events are complex. The heartless of xenahort took the name of the real ansem is not simple until the mystery is revealed.
@nobafan7515 the whole ansem xemnas xehanort identity theft aspect of the story is honestly just not very well told / told throughout like 5 hours of gameplay intermittently so I understand people not getting it cleanly every time
When Xehanort takes the comatose Ven to Destiny Islands, his heart connects with that of a newborn Sora, which allows him to heal from the trauma of having his heart split in half. So the connection to Sora happens immediately after the Ventus-Vanitas split.
Oh, true, sometimes I kindof forget the actual timescale of things. For some reason, BBS always feels like it took place a long time ago and not like... literally what, ten years before the first game? Twelve or thirteen at most? I think Sora was supposed to be ~10 in the first game.
3:54 Yeah, makes more sense in Japanese cause the metaphorical Mind/spirit Heart, kororo/shin (心), and the anatomical Heart , shinzou (心臓), are different words. A similar situation to "Cherry" which in English refers to both the tree and fruit, while in Japanese they are Sakura (Cherry Tree) vs Sakuranbou (Cherry fruit)
Thanks. I was gonna comment the same thing. Didn't know about the cherry thing though.
It's so fascinating to think about how many of these "plot holes" just come from differences in translation or mistranslation
What's really infuriating is people use second hand knowledge like summaries and wikis for books as well
As if the most important thing in a story is what literally happens
These words on a page are great, but these fewer words on a page are even better.
yeah it's like those videos that summarize the events of a comic book arc, it kind of takes away all the mystique of reading the comic and just boils it down to a deadpan dude going "and so he got the mcguffin that let him unlock his super ultimate form and beat the bad guy with a really strong punch after a monologue about power and friendship"
@NdieCityyeah it's the worst
I like the logic of Sora giving a portion of light to plug the leak in Ven's heart being reflected in Vanitas being the removed portion of Ven's heart. Square peg for a square hole.
Your thesis is fundamentally true, but when you brought up Vanitas I immediately thought “do they know Vanitas is actually one of the 13 true darknesses and is hundreds if not thousands of years old?” and now I don’t know whether KH is actually that complicated or if I have a very specific mental illness
the tism touches us all in different ways
Till today I still don't fully know wether that info is lore correct or fandom interpretation and the only game I haven't touched are 3D and CoM. KHUX is gacha hell and I'd rather watch the cutscene than play it.
@varnix1006 its lore accurate kinda. Vanitas is that but hes also like a new being just made out of the true darkness kinda since hes got a physical form, heart, and memory loss
@varnix1006 Good news! You can’t play it it’s already had its EoS. It was one of the better ones, though, I got to endgame fully F2P.
I think Kingdom Hearts was pretty understandable up to a point...Then the phone games started happening, and I COMPLETELY lost the plot. Now I'm mainly just in it for the gameplay and vibes, and to see where all the characters I know end up, fully accepting that I will probably never again understand what's going on with the larger world...worlds...You get the point.
3:21 and clean
This deserves more votes
Drakengard getting mentioned in a Kingdom Hearts video just tickled me because it's a convergence of interests that I didn't think anyone else besides me would have. Yeah, I'm fascinated by both these games' stories despite never actually playing either.
Wow, you’re interested in two Action RPGs made by Square Enix at the same time? What are the odds?
@LordYoshoy Well, they're two games with very different stories with a reputation for convolution being one of the only things they share in common.
ayyyy same (except i've played all entries in both series')
I think the venn diagram between nier fans and KH fans is practically a circle. The only KH fans who dont like Drakengard and Nier simply havent played them yet.
Great video as usual!
Back in the day LPs were magic to my financially constrained childhood, and allowed me to watch a bunch of games that my family never had access to. It helped me feel more included, since a lot of video gaming back in the day followed a handful of annual releases relevant to your social circle. Now that I have access to more of these games in an over-saturated market, I find myself watching less LPs/streams about games I have any curiosity in playing for similar reasons to this video. Usually if I do, it's a game I just have no intent on picking up myself and am fine with an incomplete experience. Sure it's exponentially inflated my backlog (yes, the Kingdom Hearts collection is on that), but I find myself appreciating games the way I did in my childhood more.
Around the 21 minute mark - the idea of first-hand and second-hand you describe here, reminds me of my AP World History class in high school. They used the terms, "primary sources" and "secondary sources" which I think conveys the idea you're talking about more clearly. Watching a no-commentary longplay or cutscene-movie of a game, or listening to an audiobook version of a novel, would both "count" as primary-source-interaction, under this definition. The video essays and reviews and explainers would count as "secondary" because they are written about the topic, by an outside person, presented with bias and separated in time and all that.
No-commentary longplay or cutscene-movie of a game would only apply if you're watching those for the story, which you've intentionally taken out of its context. You're not actually playing the game after all, and I'd argue playing the game is part of the experience of... consuming a game.
Otherwise, why even bother playing JRPGs at all?
@davemoore7808 I don't... understand the question? The video WAS about the story, so, yeah, I think cutscene movies count.
Without the gameplay, "why even bother playing JRPGs at all?" Ya know what, you're right! I should go eat pizza or go for a walk or something.
@86fifty No need to be a condescending asshole. Keep watching the video, he makes literally the same argument I'm making here.
@davemoore7808 Ah, you're one of those. If you heard condescension in my chipper and playful tone, that's on you, man.
I'm sorry that people in your life have been so cruel to you, that now you expect it from everyone, even strangers.
But name-calling at randos on the internet isn't going to make your life happier.
I could tell you "you win the argument" if you need a slight mood-boost, but honestly, I think a walk outside and some pizza might help MORE.
@86fifty Did you watch the entire video?
That being said, I digress with some points. Per example its not just that Xemnas was subtely hinted to have a hidden agenda before DDD, its even straight up said a few times. Xemnas himself talks about how they experiments with the heartless were linked with this plan and it made sense as well as some developmemts. Per example we can see some members of the organization (most notably Axel) develop more and more over time as they develop their heart over time. This goes in line with Xemnas constantly trying to fool them by making them believe they couldnt have one unless they followed his plan to get KH and that if they were to feel anything it would be just false, just their memories. If you pay a closer look you will see that between the lines he wants to separate characters so they get to develop the relationships that would lead to them taking notice of these things. It all ties with what DDD revealed
Same with Xehanort and his plans. He didnt plan everything out, just enough to get him to this point and even then things didnt go acordingly to his plans as seen in the bbs fiasco and Sora defeating Ansem and Xemnas. Its just that he has secondary plans in order to be able to adapt to the situation just in case and he himself said that it was the future that lied outside his knowledge
Now if you want to talk someone who's way over planned everything, you can look at the Master of Masters and the explanation for why he was able to write that book of prophecies. That was honestly pretty silly to me. Like sure, the explanation is logically consistent, but he's a mastermind... except not really, because he just saw the future and wrote it down but just vague enough that it would... uh... help lead to the exact same events that were going to happen anyway. It's kinda silly.
@JetBalroghe didnt plan everything either, he just saw the important stuff and wrote things so the keyblade war would end the way he wanted. He didnt plan much aside that
@Dario-uj6qo Fair enough. I imagine the only things he specifically wrote down were the bits that led to the best outcome for *after* he reunited with his eye/keyblade. Where that leads is still to be seen, though, of course.
@JetBalrogyeah, the main idea was for him to be able to go to the future and plant the seeds of doubt
Amen about Xemnas!
I think a huge thing that people, bafflingly, somehow miss is that _Xemnas is the very archetype of a predatory cult leader._
Think about it. He controls what the members of the Organization wear, how they go about their day to day lives, he employs gaslighting tactics to control what they think-to the point where they become so indoctrinated they perpetuate it amongst themselves and with others, he presents himself as a figure with divine knowledge who is the members’ sole means of survival and/or getting their hearts back, he uses charisma to get his way, he grooms the younger members to grow up into roles he finds useful, he reinforces his hierarchal control with threats and violence, uses spiritualism to reinforce groupthink, does not tolerate questioning of his capabilities or authority in any measure whatsoever…
…Yep. That checks off literally every box when it comes to assessing whether a given group is a cult. They even have ominous robes for God’s sake. But where I’m going with this is that Xemnas is a bone-chillingly realistic cult leader. And so the reveal in DDD isn’t even remotely surprising.
The depressing part is how many players fell for Xemnas’ fake ass, woe-is-me act in KH2, cos the fact of the matter is, he was using that exact behavior to trick and manipulate the other Organization members into thinking he was a fellow working toward a common goal with them. He was always planning on using them to pull one giant “fantasy Jonestown” moment and effectively kill all the members, himself included, by overwriting them with Xehanort’s consciousness. I guess a deep voice really does absolve all sins.
"Tragedy has an expiration date" is a GREAT phrase, I'm gonna be unpacking that for weeks, that applies to so MANY works! People that want the deths to "stick", it DOES make me wonder, like, do they want the sadness to linger forever? Is that the kind of writing-tone they want for their colorful Japanese-anime-Disney crossover E-10-rated video game...?
Just because something is 'over' or 'reversed' doesn't mean it LOSES its meaning. It still HAD an effect on the survivors. If the writers remember to include that, as character-development. Which aint always the case :P
Roxas as a character meant so much to me and a big part of it was his bittersweet ending, which has been undone by KH3. Tragedy does not always have an expiration date nor should it.
Think about the ending of Donnie Darko. I's tragic, right? It never stops being tragic when you rewatch it.
@bleedingberryjuice Well, I've never seen Donnie Darko, and quite frankly, if it's THAT sad, it might be better if I don't! It's not good for me to marinate my brain in sadness. I don't like living that way. I want to believe that growth and change and moving on is possible.
Mm, I disagree with the word "undone" - Roxas' story, that previously ended with KH2, got a /continuation/ that you and many others don't like. His story wasn't ret-conned out of existence in the KH universe - the KH3 story doesn't pretend that he NEVER merged with Sora, or worse, never existed. (Like the Tarzan world of KH1 that has never been mentioned again)
Your love for Roxas wasn't ret-conned out of existence either, it's still there! You can STILL love Roxas' story, just as it was, because it still HAS that ending. You can just reject this new addition. I mean, it's canon, so you can't really declare that it didn't happen in KH3... But you CAN reject its IMPORTANCE. You can write your own ending. That can be very healing for fans disappointed and upset by canon-writer choices. Don't even have to post it, just write it in your own journal, what YOU wanted to see happen instead. Maybe Sora giving him a nice memorial like the BBS trio gave Eraqus, or something like that.
Meaning and importance doesn't come from the bigness of the budget of the project - I guarantee there are TONS of huge media properties that you don't care about! Dozens if not hundreds of sports teams the world over, with budgets bigger than all of Square Enix! You care about Kingdom Hearts and Roxas specifically because the story resonated with you.
You can do the opposite now. You can take what resonates with you, and make a story. Sure, KH3 will still be canon officially, but you can decide that that fact matters to you as much as, I dunno, this seasons' win record of the Boston Red Sox. (if you DO actually like the Boston Red Sox, substitute for another sports team whose name you can barely spell)
You don't have to be just a consumer of media forever. You can become a creator. Even if no one else reads it. You can create meaning for yourself.
@86fifty 358/2 days was very sad due to not only their deaths, but their very being couldn't exist alongside the hero we needed. Almost as if fate itself were tearing them apart - though i am grateful there is no actual "fate" or prophecies in KH (at least til DDD), those often kills sense of the agency of our characters.
This group of friends was torn apart by forces outside their control, and those who would care had them erased from memory. How is that not undone by KH3 where they can now peacefully coexist? I think you really underestimate how it can feel like a betrayal when we thought something couldn't be undone and we mourn it, just for them to revive literally every single character.
I was invested in the story they were telling, and now I don't trust them to tell the story anymore. I quite think that's losing something actually.
@-JaggedGrace- Oh, I'm with you about Days being sad. I played it on my DS a few years after it came out. And I DID cry several times, it absolutely WAS a sad story, of people trying to stick together, with forces beyond their control tearing them apart, like you said!
I guess, you must be right about the "betrayal" part. Betrayal can only exist, where there once was trust, and I don't really /trust/ writers of big franchise sagas. I can HOPE that they'll do xyz with the plot and the characters that they invented and I enjoy, but if they DON'T, I just feel... mild disappointment? Because I know I can find fanfiction on a huge range of alternative outcomes, or write my own, if I need to. I trust the fans more than the official writers! Hah, that's kind of ironic.
I personally just don't prefer a profound and finely-crafted Depression Experience over a sloppy happy ending. KH3's wasn't even THAT sloppy compared to some I've seen! ('Somehow, Palpatine returned' for example.) They built it up, made lore about it, had it affect both good guys and bad. and it had SOME plot-holes, sure, but that's pretty standard for KH.
@-JaggedGrace- KH1 ended with Sora separated from his best friends, unable to return to them after closing the door, and the reformation walls between worlds preventing easy travel. The game shows this as a definitive, climactic sacrifice that can't be easily undone. And then KH2 came in and said that Sora can just make new pathways between the worlds, and eventually reunited with his friends and returned to his islands. Does that mean KH2's ending was a betrayal because it undid the bittersweet ending of SoRiKai's story?
stopping KH1 at hollow bastion is wild, it's like buying an oreo and only eating the biscuit
(KH3 spoilers in this comment) When KH3 came out I went on a media blackout. I didn't want anything spoiled about it for me. I played it over a week, loved it, and went on YT after to watch other people gush about it too. Imagine my surprise when so many videos I found were about people hating it. I was so confused. I figured it would be divisive, all KH games are, but the vitriol I was seeing was so outrageous I questioned my own feelings about the game. I watched a few videos and noticed a trend, most people seemed to have unrealistic expectations, or had speed played the games leading up to 3. A lot of the people I saw making those videos were the ones who played the games in the last year before 3. They skipped games, only watched some cutscenes of others, and actively mocked the mobile game. And everything fell into place for me. I was raised by this series since '02 when I played KH1 at age 9. I'm not saying my opinion matters more, but I went into 3 in an entirely different way than those people did. I didn't think 3 was perfect, there were things I definitely didn't like, but I still loved it. That should have been the end of that saga, but then I started seeing comments about people saying they wouldn't buy the game based on all those videos and it genuinely hurt my heart. Cause, why would you let others dictate your choices like that? For me, the most moving scene from 3 was "The Light of the Past" scene during the endgame in the Graveyard. It tied the Mobile game in. I played the mobile game, it wasn't great, but I enjoyed the story a lot. So seeing how it was tied to 3 gave me chills. And knowing that the people who didn't so much as look at the mobile game may have felt nothing during that scene makes me feel like they missed something important. I've noticed a resurgence of love for 3 in the last little bit, cause people are playing it with fresh eyes and no expectations. And that makes me happy. The first question I ask now when I hear someone say "KH is confusing" is, "have you played/seen all the games in order?" And not surprisingly the answer is normally "No.". The series isn't for everyone, and that's fine. But people need to learn to just say a game isn't for them, instead of trying to find a way to explain why it's "bad".
Thank you. I'm glad there's other KH fans like me who actually care about the series in its entirety and don't have bogus expectations or an inability to understand the hows and whys of the series
Damn, you not only described my experience with KH3 but also with The Last Jedi. I deftly dodged many spoilers for both, went in with only official trailers, and loved the shit out of both, only to go online and be absolutely BAFFLED at how much hate the two things got. Pokemon S&V is similar, though at least I can understand the performance issues that plagued an otherwise excellent game (and now Switch 2 mitigates those altogether).
Idk I’m tired tbh. I fear how many people dismiss games they might actually like bc some rage baiter who never played the game or didn’t care about the series before KH3 beyond maybe 1 & 2 had nasty things to say. I’m tired man.
@Caterfree10 Not saying there isn't a situation of online discourse affecting people's opinions, but for my personal experience, I watched The Last Jedi sometime during the opening week and hadn't seen any reactions at that point.
And it was genuiely the first film I had seen in theatre that made me question what I watched. I don't watch much films, which also meant I haven't watched many I consider bad, but boy when I left the cinema, I was so confused, because it was the first time I watched a movie in theatre that I didn't enjoy.
And I say this as a fan of Star Wars and Rian Johnson films (seperately though).
For me, I mostly didn’t like 3’s gameplay actually wjdnwkd I liked how the story concluded in it, but I knew right away I shouldn’t. Just in terms of what would normally be good writing choices, so I figured it wouldn’t work for everyone.
Still, I’m happy with it on a story level
I need to look into the mobile story someday, that was so deeply inaccessible for me
@Caterfree10 It's funny, The Last Jedi is a movie I remember enjoying at first, but watching videos online made me realize how it basically betrayed the universe and characters in so many ways and that's why people were upset. Then I experienced it for myself firsthand in KH3 how it feels for them to destroy everything I love from a universe and leave it feeling empty and cheap.
14:36 what makes it more confusing is that they could have use Loki as an excuse because they literally mentioned in Ragnarok that he wasn't properly overlooking the 9 realms and they went to shit
40:24 Yep, it still hits just as hard as ever. I remember watching this scene as a kid, and being absolutely destroyed. I'd never experienced something like that up to that point in my young life, something so tragic and full of pathos and implication. KH1 and KH2, and 358/2 Days (the fact this never got a proper remaster is a crime for which Squeenix cannot be forgiven), still hold places in my heart that remind me of what great video game storytelling can be. Also, rest in peace Christopher Lee, who gave his full gusto to a game about Anime kids running around with Disney characters. What a performance.
I think the explanation for why Riku returned to normal from the explosion of Ansem's machine is a lot simpler than it seems. Ansem's machine was an attempt to digitize the Kingdom Hearts that Xemnas was making. When the machine explodes, it bursts into a great light. I think what is happening is simply a flood of light like that of the Kingdom Hearts that Ansem made in the first game, and that like in the first game where it had destroyed the physical form of Ansem, this light was strong enough to destroy the physical change in appearance that had overtaken Riku in KHII as a result of what still lingered of Ansem in his own heart's darkness.
One of the advantages of subtext is that you don't have to absorb it consciously to understand what it says, yet part of the un-dramatizing is that you have two ways to deal with subtext in a wiki: exclude it, or render it into text. So the wiki either ends up with less information, or information conveyed through a less-effective medium (text vs music, for example), which add to the illusion of confusion.
moral of the story: just play the games dawg
23:09 my brother was actually a VA in this fandub (the second part, mainly) as Ventus, since he does a pretty decent Jesse McCartney impression. Check it out, it's good
An interesting supplement to your point about personal experiences forming our opinions on games: The KHUX game was an amazing time for me. Some see it as an annoyingly-long story shoved into a gacha game that's suddenly the most important lore in the series, and they're not 100% wrong, but it was also a place for KH community.
My current friend group, the only friends I even talk to these days, were all made from that game. Meeting people on streams about the game, joining discords for the game... as a guild leader, I met up with some of my guildmates irl, and even took photos of them as one proposed to the other! Kingdom Hearts is a series where the core message is the "value of friendship," and it truly doesn't get better than that experience that a video game provided in my life.
You ate very right that Kingdom Hearts is only confusing because the culture around it made it so. When I actually played the games themselves I found the games rather easy to understand. To a western audience it is very differeny from what they are used to but if they put in the effort to understand it then they will get it.
I think the reason the games have such a reputation is because of the discourse surrounding it but I also think its because people just don't respect it or have the critical thinking skills to engage with it.
I feel like this is true not just for tjis game but Japanese games in general.
Which is really sad.
Honestly, KH's story might have problem but "story not explaining itself" is not one of them. I'd even say that KH as a series spends too much time trying to explain its smaller mechanics which really do not need to be explained which in turn waters down the mystery and leads to dull exposition dumps which sound wild on paper but very bland in action. KH is emotion-driven story so it really doesn't need to make that much sense when it comes down to mechanics of its universe.
As a fun example of explaining the mechanics, all of Sora’s restarts in power are all explained - Castle Oblivion forcing Sora to play by its rules (Chain of Memories), being in a coma where you have to reshape your memories correctly thus making everybody forget about you (Kingdom Hearts 2), being in a dream realm (Dream Drop Distance), a sudden rush of being overcome by darkness resetting the connections he made with others (Kingdom Hearts 3), literally being in a in-universe fictional world where nobody remembers him (Kingdom Hearts 4). Usually, losing your powers in the beginning of a game are all unexplained (Metroid, save Dread where there was an explicit stealing of Samus’s powers), but not Kingdom Hearts!
@iantaakalla8180 Metroid has a few other examples of giving an actual explanation for Samus loosing her gear, like Fusion and the first two prime games (granted prime 1 and 2 do have a bit of gameplay before the section your gear is lost, while Fusion and Dread are shown off/explained before first gameplay. But it still happens.) Of course, this doesn't really change the overall point. Just felt like sharing some other Metroid games that did explain or contextualize the loosing of gear at the start (or near the start) of the game.
Ah, right, Fusion’s explains that her being infected with the X parasite necessitated Metroid DNA infusion, meaning that Samus was getting adjusted to being a human/Metroid hybrid. My bad.
@Yurikon3 Honestly, over-explaining the elements in Kingdom Hearts really was probably a detriment the way it was done more or less. Like you said, it's all based around emotions, hence the y'know... hearts and darkness stuff. Literally, the most common threat we deal with are people who have fallen to despair or other negative emotions, and the few who resist all that happen to just embrace their connections to others to resist it. It's almost like the metaphor there matters far more than the actual exact plot details.
I love how this video evolved from talking about Kingdom Hearts to a really valuable analyst on second hand experiences. Honestly bravo Echo!
Why Vanitas looks like Sora, I think is pretty clear.
Vanitas being one of the "True Darkness" isn't bound by the normal KH time-travel rules. Vanitas likely has the ability to perceive darkness on a much higher scale, I'm saying, he probably became aware of Sora/Roxas/Xion/Ventus's entangled existence and then choose to appear as the strongest one.... Sora... Vanitas dog-walks basically everyone before fighting Sora.
I thought it was because when Ventus and Sora’s hearts became linked, Vanitas took the appearance of Sora because now he’s connected to him as well and now has a form he can base himself off of. Even if non canon, the novels confirm Vanitas originally looked like a dark figure with black eyes (similar to the Anti Black Coat Nightmare from DDD)
It's simpler than that. Physical appearance is a trait governed by the heart (hence why Sora's body transforms when Ven's heart is all the remains inside).
Vanitas, originally faceless, receives his appearance upon Ventus and Sora's connection. Vanitas has his own heart, and so this borrowed trait becomes etched into his own heart, and is adjusted to match his (physical) age. It's got nothing to do with time or higher perception and it's not something that Vanitas chose for himself. It's just how hearts work.
Those all do sound like plausible interpretations. I always rationalised it as; When Ventus's heart broke, Sora filled the "empty" space that used to be vanitas, so Vanitas being that part that broke off, took the form of / reflected whatever filled that space. I basically just told myself that, if Sora filled the hole, then the hole must be "Sora shaped."
pretty clear by kingdom hearts standards is still wild, do you genuinely not see the words that you use when talking about this?
I love the ddd, mobile games, and 3 additions, and I'm used to super shallow dismissals of why people dont like them but you actually have thoughts you explain well and I super respect it! I'm so used to only hearing rage bait, people exaggerating hatred, or straight glazing that its so nice to hear ACTUAL critique of what it does with the story as a whole
Honestly, most of the reason I like DDD is because I really like the Dream Eaters. The plot’s also compelling, and the themes it brings up about Sora and Riku’s relationship are genuinely touching. I just wish some line deliveries were better. I loved KHUX, got to endgame F2P. Sadly I couldn’t get into Dark Road, but its plot is fantastic, quite heavy. And Re:Mind… honestly kinda heartbreaking, in a nice way. Wish they did a little bit more with the second half, but a new Data Organization plus Yozora is still great. Overall I’m fond of the series and am excited for 4 :)
I do wanna point out: theres already a term for when someone else is talking about a thing and that thing is taken as a sorce for informing your opinon on it: Its a secondary source. And oftentime the real issue (as you rightly point out in the video) comes when people build upon secondary sources without consulting the primary source yet claim authority to their claims, which often results in tertiary sources that tend to muddy the waters of discussion
I dunno, I played all the games (Including Union Cross, though not all the way through) except for Dream Drop Distance, and I still find the story and characters to be incredibly confusing and hard to remember. Which is part of what I like about Kingdom Hearts. The whole thing always felt like this weird esoteric mystery that needs to be unraveled.
It's frustrating, but understandable why people would use secondary sources as a substitute for firsthand experiences. It's good to use to inform whether or not someone might enjoy something. However, it's an actual problem when people try to pass this off as actual information. This is how you get stereotypes and it bothers me that people would rather trust the stereotype over actually experiencing things.
Great Video, really put into words something I've always felt about the way people engage with media and discussion. Generally, i make it a rule not to from too strong of an opinion about something didn't engage with or finish personally.
Without first hand experience you're misinformed or working with incomplete information at best, or actively misrepresenting at worst
Kingdom Hearts is an A-B Hero’s Journey with religious metaphysics, quantum spookiness, and standard JRPG elements.
Honestly, anyone that has trouble following along just simply aren’t paying attention or are only focusing on specific aspects.
Don’t know if you’re trolling, but you’re correct, right down to the protagonist’s name being an allusion to Chaoskampf (Sora= Diespiter).
Brian David Gilbert proved this
just my 2 cents, did you play KH1 before immediately going to KH2 as a kid. That was confusing as hell, neither me nore my parents knew their were other games until a friend mentioned them.
I'm pretty sure no one really has trouble following: most people just don't care to follow it, as "experiencing it first hand" likely requires hundreds of hours of play, and the more you understand it the more glaring the inconsistencies and shllowness become.
They think they're Oh So Clever by taking things out of context, mostly because they simply don't respect Kingdom Hearts on a base level to engage with it on its own terms. Thus they have to cloak themselves in 30 layers of irony to protect themselves from this franchise's simple earnesty that they're trying so hard to reject for whatever reason.
43:07 this actually happens because the scene is literally cut in half.
After the first half ends, it returns to gameplay, and you have to walk up to DiZ and interact with him to initiate the second cutscene, it's the _last final prompt_ that separates the Roxas prologue from the rest of the game.
Without that last button press, the cut off point where the game transitions from Roxas to Sora would instead be the player walking through the door to that room, not knowing what's on the other side.
Making it an interaction prompt the player has to consciously press in a dead end room during what's clearly the end of the prologue's narrative cleanly communicates that "THIS is the point of no return" to the player, even if they aren't aware you'll be playing as Sora after that point.
(That's the purpose it serves in the final game, but I personally have a conspiracy theory that it's the result of them cutting a fight with hologram DiZ, there are SEVERAL identical setups all throughout the rest of the game: walk into room, cutscene, cutscene ends and you see a character in front of you, _interact with that character to trigger a fight,_ another cutscene plays once you win.
I believe they cut a final fight with DiZ late in development, with the surrounding cutscenes already setup the way they were for it, because it likely messed with the pacing, the Roxas prologue didn't _need_ a final boss.)
my interpretation of KH's story is that any parts that felt confusing to understand were done so on purpose. the entire franchise's VERY FIRST LINE is "I've been having these weird thoughts lately. Like...is any of this for real? or not?"
maybe im being overly apologistic about it, but im happy to handwave things that dont make sense to me when i scrutinize them because it seems to me that the series is purposely trying to appear confusing and dreamlike from the outset. like dreams, not all scenes and concepts have proper segues and that's fine because what should be important is the feelings that created the experience in the first place, and the feelings the experience imparts on you.
Ultimately, I can't really argue against the idea that some of the elements are meant to be confusing on purpose... because the overly confusing elements aren't actually important to the story being told. The exact mechanics of how everything works don't actually matter beyond the themes around how they work. The fact that there are two types of heartless primarily is only really significant because it's a way to show that some become Heartless on their own through dark emotions of one type or another, like despair or hate or the like, while others become Heartless because someone else imposed that transformation upon them. The sigil versus non sigil is just a little like "hey, these ones were forced into this, they didn't chose to be that way" and maybe you might think about it as you fight them, perhaps.
The weirdness with Namine? I feel like they tried to explain her, sure, and the explanation they gave MOSTLY makes sense to me, but at the same time, I don't think it's really meant to fully make sense. She's just a thematic echo of Kairi the same way that Roxas is a thematic echo of Sora (and later on, retroactively, Ventus, when he was introduced). I could go on for a while but I think I've ran out of steam for examples.
In short, yeah. The confusing elements having weird explanations are honestly more or less fine, so long as the themes fit what is going on, it's not too bad.
The dissection of secondhand experiences of games that rely more strongly on player choice than cutscenes to craft their story is really fascinating and also personally relevant to me and my journey with Kingdom Hearts. I got into the series via cutscene compilations, and at the time, I had no consoles of my own nor the ability to obtain any that the KH games were on, so those cutscenes were really all I had to engage with. And for Birth By Sleep specifically, I watched a compilation that actually stitched each of the trio's scenes together in chronological order, NOT segmenting them out into individual character paths like the game itself makes you play out. It actually surprised me when I learned that the gameplay makes you go through the entire story with one character at a time before starting over with another one and doing it all again.
That one-at-a-time delivery of the playable game's narrative is something that I theorize actually impacts people's first perceptions and overall feelings towards BBS as a story and how it depicts the journey of its protagonists, because it prevents people from truly seeing the Wayfinder trio as a unit/group of friends and forces them to mostly be perceived as individuals on their own separate paths. Genuinely one of the main criticisms I see from people who aren't as big of fans for BBS is that they don't buy into the friendship between Aqua, Terra, and Ventus, and I truly feel like this narrative presentation is a big part of that dissonance. It's similar but inverse case to that of 358/2 Days having much of its emotional impact weakened by removing the gameplay elements in favor of a cutscene movie, and as someone who never got to play the original Days game and only got to experience that story through watching the movie, I can say that the dissonance I see often expressed towards the Wayfinders as a trio is how I wound up feeling about the Sea Salt trio.
I feel like BBS's story and characters made a much stronger impact on me than other people because I experienced the character's arcs actually interweaving with one another as the narrative progressed, as opposed to sitting with just one single character for multiple hours at a time before moving on to the next. It absolutely was a "secondhand experience" as defined by this video, but interestingly enough, I think it was one for the better.
GODDDDD the comparison between KH and the MCU’s massive branching out of storytelling is so damn true tbh. There are plenty of Marvel and even MCU only folks who have zero problem keeping up with the MCU, but KH’s swings between numbered and non numbered titles is the confusing part? seriously? Give me a break! And I also think that the wiki-fication of it all is an excellent point I hadn’t considered before. There’s been this running game in multi fandom spaces of “describe your favorite media badly” and it often rubs against the same thing but more intentionally. We don’t expect people to get interested based on bad summaries, so why does KH constantly get the short end of the stick, even when people are earnestly trying to convey how good the series actually is. And while those of us who’ve been close to the source material for over half our lives (yes, being told that the compilation collections started in 2012 aged me a little) can get a little lost in the weeds, that is very much an on us problem. like, period!
Also, in regards to the wiki-fication of it all, when I think of describing Sora, the Sora’s Heart Hotel of it all basically never fucking enters my mind as part of the introduction. It’s usually some variation on how Sora is a brave young man who is friendly to all, loyal to his friends, and fights the darkness with the keyblade. I don’t need to go into the Roxas/Ventus/Vanitas/Xion of it all bc it’s not the key point of his character (although most of those do end up tying into the loyal to friends and friendly to all parts, anyway - the core parts inform the more complicated details that come later!). It’s why I’m so insistent on people playing (or watching LPs) in game release order because that’s how it’s best to obtain all the developing information. It drives me up a wall to see people just overcomplicate things to newbies who are then driven away by the complication of it all. Which, we need new blood in this fandom! This stupidly long lull is a great time to get involved! And yet… -_-;
Not to mention, I kind of am resentful of how people refuse to engage with the KH series’ mysteries AS mysteries to be solved. I don’t experience the same “KH is complicated” phenomenon in either the transformative side of the fandom (fanfiction, fan art, etc) or the Lore analysis side of it. We’re too busy observing the lore, extrapolating from it, and, in the case of transformative works, expanding on it with our on interpretations and transformations of the text. Nomura lays all these threads out not only to give himself writing tools to be picked up later, but also to allow us, the players, to engage with the work in our own ways. And entirely too many people insist that franchises explain all the things instead of bother trying to interpret anything. one of my biggest bug bears in fandom tbh.
Also well understood about the secondhand knowledge via LPs and video essays tbh. Like, I remember when I didn’t yet have a PS3, I watched a Let’s Play of FFXIII. I would go on to play the game and its sequels later when I did get a PS3, but I definitely remembered more of the plot by actually playing. Not to say some things didn’t stay (Fangnille definitely high among them lol) nor do I think it’s impossible to enjoy a story via a Let’s Play, but I definitely got more from actually playing. It’s why despite the roar of hate toward TLOU2 and later S&V and now Legends ZA, I still worked toward playing them for myself and having a good time (…or “good time” for TLOU2; worth playing but I don’t know if I’d call it fun lmao). And yeah it’s a future thing for ZA given it’s not yet out even as we are less than a month from release, but trailers show me it looks like I’m gonna have a good time so we’ll see how it goes then when I play for myself instead of letting some rage youtube dude turn me off bc of stupid assumptions.
It also probably explains why I prefer reaction content when I’ve already experienced the thing being reacted to. Like, I’m probably never going to watch MLP so I’m probably also never going to ever watch MLP reaction content. However, I love the KH series so essays and reactions are fun for me. Same with Steven Universe reactions, or the sheer amount of reactions and analysis I’ve watched of Kpop Demon Hunters, etc and so forth. It’s fun seeing someone new get into a thing I love, kind of like showing a movie or show to a loved one IRL and watching for their reaction to your favorite parts.
ALSO ALSO, that last part of how wikis end up stripping emotions from a scene makes me think of my never-ending crusade to get people to play X-2 after FFX to get Yuna’s arc to completion. Hear me out! FFX primarily deals with how do you cope when you learn the religious beliefs and worldview you have grown up in your entire life were built on falsehoods? Yes, the immediate problem of stopping Sin is dealt with in a new way that promises to end the cycle (the post X-2 audio drama can’t hurt meeeeeeeee), but the fallout of how to move on after this is left to interpretation. Until X-2 comes along and we follow Yuna still needing to regain her footing. She’s definitely fallen back onto her need to help people that’s a little too strong - something that is even called out within X-2’s story - and she’s even shown growing into seeing crappy plans requiring sacrifices and ultimately going “I don’t like your plan, it sucks”. Which is another line that sounds dumb out of context, but within the context of Yuna’s whole arc and her sorrow at previously losing Tidus as well as the Aeons (even if it was by the aeons’ request), hell yes she’s going to be rejecting the sacrifice that both her religious life valued too much and what has caused her personal pain. It’s so GOOD and I need more people to play X-2 goddammit.
Anyway, brb saving this for slapping into conversations about how “complicated” KH is. Apologies about my wall of text, I am quite passionate about this subject lol.
I think Namine is the sole reason why Ansem The Wise thinks like he does about nobodies, cause she literally shouldn't exist. She doesn't have a body to form from cause she came from Sora turning into a heartless and not Kairi losing her heart, Sora's body is Roxas, so she only have some reminiscent essence of Kairi
45:24 it’s neat to know that someone else also considered Riku’s arc to be a metaphor for addiction
I think you point out a lot of what made this serious so hard to follow, but just wave them away through modern reasoning. I was like 8 when i played the first game for the first time. I loved it and read the comic at the library, but the fact that side titles on separate handheld consoles was a huge limiting factor in the early 2000s in America with the coming recession. Then to learn that there was incredibly plot relevant events happening in these that affected 2 had me really upset. Tack on the fact that before the hd remasters and wide accessibility of computers and internet. Characters all often looked the same or had similar names to others. And the internet used to be full of discussions containing misinformation or widely uninformed theories and man, was this series hard to follow as a fan who has been financially limites their whole life. Sure, in retrospect, with all the information readily avaikiable in hd format it might mot seem hard to follow. But lemme tell ya, it was
Great video by the way and I do majorly agree with your premise
Having played every Kingdom Hearts game including KHUx (the mobile one), I still don't really understand the minutiae of the Xehanort Saga beyond who each character is and the basic throughline of "Xehanort is bad and Sora is at the center of everything." That's okay, but it does get irritating when you have SO many characters who speak vaguely, or in platitudes, and you need to keep track of so many different characters' motivations in order to understand why they do what they do. I also get the impression that while Nomura has always had plans for where the story will go, a lot of the vagueness is intentional because he hasn't yet finalized what he wants to happen next in the story.
What I struggle with most, honestly, is the near-infantilization of Sora as a character. He is constantly characterized in such an immature way that it almost seems like every character remembers what happened in the previous games except for him. In a way this makes sense, as his motivation in any of the games has never really stretched far beyond saving his friends and defeating the darkness. I also can understand this being intentional, as him being a stand-in for a casual player, who probably doesn't understand all the minor details of the plot and just wants to beat up bad guys and experience Disney stories. But it gets especially bad in KH3, where it barely even seems like he's aware of things that happen around him. It makes him feel childishly unimportant and like an empty vessel. And because you are primarily seeing things through his eyes, it undermines the weight of the story.
Now, perhaps Sora's immaturity is meant to be an explanation for why he is constantly told, starting in KH2 and basically in every game going forward, that he still has a lot to learn and still isn't ready to become a "Keyblade Master" or whatever. But he has saved the universe multiple times! He has made multiple noble sacrifices! Why is he written as if these things don't matter to his development as an adult?
All that being said, I do think people complaining about the story getting confusing is primarily a result of the constant addition of new characters. I played through the whole story of the mobile game and I still have basically no grasp on any of the characters from that game or who the original "founders" who all wear animal masks are, and which of them are good or evil.
Definitely agree that DDD made things more complicated. I do think KH3 did a pretty amazing job given all of that, especially with Remind. Basically giving fans pretty much everything they ever wanted while clearing the board to get things back on track. I will say though that I definitely see the point about death not sticking I do feel it went about it in the best way possible.
If you, like me, marathoned through the series during Covid when it came out on PC after abandoning it after 2 as a kid, you might have a particular view of the story. You thought that you were going back to a fun bit of childhood innocence and while that is there you also get a story that forces you to confront your own life and mistakes and yearn for the days of childhood innocence when it didn’t seem like everything was completely insane. All while more likable characters who remind you of you and your friends die or are put in terrible positions. After Days and BBS it’s getting really depressing. Now they definitely could have turned things around without giving us the fairy tale ending but I also respect the method they went with.
They put us in Sora’s shoes and the simple emotional viewpoint he has. That’s all super sad and I’ll do whatever I can to give them all a happy ending. And at the end of KH3 we see this wonderful scene of all these people who were once separated, together as this extended family living in a united world that is at peace. But then it gives us the cost: if you truly want to be a hero and make the world a better place and make the lives of people you care about better, you might not be around to enjoy it.
It’s honestly a really powerful ending for KH3 that I don’t think is understood well enough. It was a war and Sora wanted his family to make it through so badly that he pushed himself past his breaking point to make it a reality. We don’t always get to live in the better world we create but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for it.
At the bare minimum this has cost Sora a year of his life, again, and I don’t think he’ll come back to his family without going through a lot more. I’ll admit this leaves KH4 a lot of work to do but I have some confidence that it can. I’m really hoping 4 gives Sora space to really reflect on himself and his life. KH3 gave us a peek under the mask that Sora has put on for so many years and the potential of exploring all of that is some really great stuff.
Others have said it, but Xehanort norting the other members of Org XIII is kind of an extension of him only valuing followers; they have to be part of him.
Which is fantastic as a foil to Sora’s “My friends are my power!” spiel
Man, this was a great video. I can't afford a console or a gaming computer right now, so if I want to know more about a game, I'll often watch a let's play/essay--but I know that isn't a replacement.
Back when I had a PS4, I was obsessed with NeiR: Automata, and I got stoked when my favorite streamer at the time started playing the game. But tbh, watching someone else play it didn't even come close to the experience of playing it myself. From that point forward, I really took note of how different each experience is. And yet I see SO many people who've watched one (1) video essay and think they know everything about a piece of media, and it drives me bonkers lol. Like, man, the end of your video highlights it perfectly - the "Looks like my summer vacation is... over" line has lived rent-free in my head since I was a kid!!! But god is it so cringe to hear it in a bland wiki summary.
I think with narrative games its harder to get that sam feeling playing it while watching someone. A lot of people like to say that narrative games are just movies and that implies you don't need to play them to get them. But that is just untrue. Playing them and watching them are different experiences.
@Knight1029 Agreed! Games are just a completely different medium than movies, but I'm not sure how many people get that tbh
@RevenantPoet I think its because those people are listening to others who have no idea what they are talking about.
@Knight1029 Lmao good point
@RevenantPoet thank you!
I actually have a case for playing Days before KH2.
In the Roxas prologue you are meant to see it through Roxas, you are confused and don't know what's going on, but if you played Days first you see it through Axel, not understanding what happened to his friend or why he doesn't remember him. The only things you "lose" are The concepts of Nobodies and the Organization, but they're easily grasped from Days anyway
Funnily enough the other day I read some bits of the story from Guilty Gear in its wiki, another story with a similar "fame". Some bits were a bit hard to grasp fully, but I knew at the moment it was just due to the fact I was just reading it from a wiki instead of seeing the actual context and proper development and because I was only reading bits of it rather than the whole thing and that aside that, it didnt seem complicated. It was then, just a few days before you uploaded this video that I saw this might be the reason why KH or GG among other series have this kind of reputation, because people dont tend to follow the story acordingly. I knew some people had issues paying atention but this explains more why so many of them act like this. They might not even get the story by watching the actual games, after all if you experience something in a way it was not designed to, you most likely won't get the experience that was intended and the understanding of the story and its themes its part of that
26:35 Chuggaconroy actually did do something like this for his Majora's Mask LP - I think for the Anju and Kafei quest - but then RUclips broke it when they got rid of old annotations.
While i do agree in general about second hand media consumption, i think kingdom hearts is indeed confusing even if you manage to play all of them. It is packed With abstract concept and mumbo jumbo explanations, arbitrary powers, retcons, time travel, reincarnarion, multiple versioni of the same characters or multiple characters with the same appearence, and almost any new game changes the rules, introduces new characters and concepts and the fact that crucial l’ore and plot developments are in a mobile or rythm game does not help. I like kingdom hearts but i get that not everyone wants or should put in the effort to make sense of everything.
"My summer vaction is over." That line was so impactful for me i didnt need you to play the scene to hear it.
Although you and I don't agree on everything when it comes to kingdom hearts (re: the lasting effects of certain story choices as the games have gone on for example), this video was an amazing watch that I feel puts into words something I've not only been feeling when it comes to the popular perception of Kingdom Hearts (even by its own fans), but other long running series as well. While I've been struggling with people who take short summaries (esp humorous ones), popular memes, or secondhand accounts of what happened in a particular game (and what matters about it from them) and use this to influence their idea of a story as a whole, how the media in question delivers its themes, and how much the anything in it matters or makes any sense, I had never previously considered the impact that the prevalence of wikis would have on this. But, in hindsight, I do feel as if that makes a lot of sense. When I myself first got into Kingdom Hearts, I played DDD on 3ds first. My preconceived notion based on the game's cover was that it was a Disney game containing anime boys, and although the game itself contained accounts of the literal happenings for all of the games prior, very little of what was there actually stuck when I read it. In fact, I didn't really know which character was Roxas or Axel or Xion before I got into the games proper. I didn't fully get what made thanking Naminé so important. And reading the contents of those games didn't provide me with the necessary experience to really *get* just how everything in Riku's character arc had been building up to certain moments in DDD. But, even I, who played the games wildly out of order and watched cutscene comps for most of it (cause I didn't have a ps4 when kh3 was coming out or when I got into kh), was able to follow along with the story due to experiencing them first hand (or closer to first hand)
This is all to say that the ability to read a wiki on a piece of media or watch an analysis video or even a let's play can be a double edged sword, especially when we elevate surface level jokes or short form content or literal summaries of events over experiencing the actual presentation of the media. There's nothing wrong with watching video essays about media you're never going to experience and spouting fun facts about it from time to time, but it is especially with long running series you see the prevalence of fans and non fans alike who see reading a wiki or listening to a summary of a game/movie/etc from a friend who heard about it from a friend who watched a streamer rant about the story or letting a "trusted figure" tell them what is true and important as a replacement for experiencing the media themselves, and then go on to confidently preach about what is canon or true about a series or what isn't. Yes, theoretically one could play all of the kingdom hearts games and still find the story confusing to them personally, but I'm more inclined to believe analysis and opinions about a long running media from people who care about actually engaging in it in good faith, as opposed to people who would rather have their friends or a wiki tell them what they should believe and how they should interpret a media, just so they themselves can go on to deride the media as bad or stupid or confusing or use "canon" as an aimless cudgel. Wikis can be helpful for laying out the facts, getting a refresher on story beats or game mechanics, or even be a useful resource to find things you may have missed in gameplay or within a story. It's similar for video essays. At the end of the day, as you've put it, they're not meant to replace experiencing that media for yourself. They're supplimental material. And if someone who is constantly hearing about how Kingdom Hearts is confusing and makes no sense tries to get all of their info from a wiki...well then of course they're more likely to be confused! This especially goes for people who only engage with kingdom hearts through certain short summary videos that contain "humorous" commentary on how things don't make sense and imply KH is completely dumb and unserious in how they're presented.
Anywho, I loved the video. I'll be thinking about what you said here for a long while
...
Now, sidenote. The power of waking *is* explained within Kingdom Hearts. Dream Drop Distance presents its usage that aligns with its name in its final moments. Namely, since Riku completed the Mark of Mastery Exam and has gained the power of waking, both he and Mickey are noted as having the ability to wake Sora up after he's fallen deeper into his dreams and been prepared to be the perfect Xehanort vessel. It's because of the power of waking that Riku is able to wake Sora up after diving straight into his dreams. The power of waking is explained in the most detail during the remind dlc for kingdom hearts 3, as Chirithy explains that Sora committed a nature taboo by using the power of waking to traverse worlds to reach certain hearts (ie when he abused it to bring his fallen friends and fellow wielders back to life after they were all taken by the demon tide). An example of Sora using the power of waking correctly is when he accesses Scala ad Caelum in kh3 by using the power of waking on Xehanort to create a portal
It has been a while so I could be getting some details wrong, but I do believe kh3 (especially the remind dlc) expands on the power of waking. And I personally believe bits about what it is and its usage aren't fully clear/explored precisely because we're going to see more of the power of waking in the future
This video reminded me of when I excitedly talk about the media I'm into to friends and sometimes they laugh it off and make their own judgement calls about it, how sometimes I wish I could take back what I said, because while I experienced it firsthand and can make jokes about it, they usually only hear if from me and maybe a few other people. This is especially true of longer media series like Dragon Ball, Homestuck, and, yes, Kingdom Hearts.
(I've noticed that after this happened a few times, I've shifted my explanations to be vauger, and emphasizing the vibes and emotions felt instead of what happens.)
A person explaining their experience consuming some media is not the same as experiencing it for yourself, and it sounds super obvious when spelled out like that, but I wish that was remembered when judements and assigning of value are then done on that media.
You don't have to watch something if you feel like it's not for you, or not worth your time/money, but I think we've all been sometimes guilty of casting judgement on a series and its fans or even the kind of story it tells, when we don't firsthand know what it's like, and that without firsthand knowledge of the experience, that critique/judgement can never be as accurate or have as much depth/truth to it.
Again, it sounds obvious when spelled out like that, but I just wish this was remembered more often.
A minor point made here that resonates with me is the consequences of making everything part of Xehanort's master plan.
Believe me, I'm down for mysteries and long-con schemes, but there comes a point where it feels like a story (or the discussion around it) stops being about its actual events and how it impacts the characters, and instead becomes about how it all fits into some big conspiracy or plan.
I remember my brother returning from watching some Marvel movie, his first and only word of opinion being that it was bad because it didn't expand on the multiverse. I'm surely missing a lot of context, but it just struck me as strange that *that* was considered the most significant thing to bring up.
That said, I do think Xehanort has more interesting characterization (or at least the potential for it, if I'm just overthinking) as a control freak, with his seeming omniscience being an expression of needing to be on top of every possible outcome. The concept of "Nortification" feels like an even more extreme antithesis to friendship than Xemnas's Organization - beyond seeing others as mere followers, Xehanort reduces them further into extensions of just himself. Granted, I wonder how well that's conveyed when Norted characters retain most of their characterization, but still...
This has been going on for a while now in many medias, where it seems fans only care about the lore and its implication rather than, say, character arcs, narrative and interactions.
Sticking to Kingdom Hearts as an example, I wasn't sad that Missing Link was cancelled, nor will I ever be, because I wasn't attached to any of the characters shown in the beta and the gameplay style didn't interest me. Plus, I don't think making an entry with such a "important piece of lore" a live service game was a good idea to begin with.
To each, their own, but this is why I didn't like Union Cross and hope that any story beats brought from it in KH IV do so for the sake of a compelling narrative that gives another arc for Sora, and not just expand more on lore and worldbuilding like a history class with anime characters.
Also, I agree with you and OP on the whole "Everything was part of Xehanort's plan!" bit. To me, it was a decision that broke my immersion in regards to Xehanort, where he stopped being a character and became just the author's favorite toy
@draketrevoroliver5293 Honestly I would've loved to play Missing Link personally but yeah
I get your perspective, tbh. When you put so much focus on a certain amount of characters, it kinda undermines the worldbuilding of the setting, because now the threat feels very localized and every connection to the main cast can start to feel contrived, or like the world becomes stagnant without their input or presence on everything. A common criticism towards modern Star Wars for example is that it feels like way too many characters have some relationship with the Skywalkers, which makes the galaxy seem much smaller than it actually is, since everyone knows each other in some form. Good worldbuilding makes you feel like the world can progress even without the main cast's constant involvement.
I think Kingdom Hearts has this weird dichotomy, where the worldbuilding struggles and thrives on a case by case basis. On one hand, the lore of Kingdom Hearts itself can feel very self contained at times when it comes to Sora and Xehanort. On the other hand, the Disney worlds make the universe feel lived in. One thing I like is how in Birth by Sleep, Hercules is his younger self, and when Sora meets him again in KH1 and the subsequent games, he's much older. It's a detail that's very unappreciated in the fandom, but the passage of time affecting the worlds even without Sora and the gang being there shows that the Disney characters exist and live their own lives even outside the context of the story.
(Kinda irrelevant side note, but I always wondered why Xehanort never kidnapped Rapunzel to use her magic. His whole plan of stealing Terra's body in BBS was to cheat death and live to see his plans come to fruition. So why not use her hair to reverse his age as a contingency, when his original plan backfired?)
@draketrevoroliver5293I like the idea that Xehanrot had a general plan of "get 13 Darknesses that are actually just Xehanort in different times/possessing people to fight 7 Lights," but the individual plots are him going "but if I can just succeed here and now with a shortcut, I might as well give it a shot."
So rather than a master plan thay has ever step going perfectly, its more and end goal he's constantly progressing while still trying to get early victories along the way.
@gunnarschlichting9886 That's the part I think it wasn't handled well. So the end product looks less like Xehanort taking a short-cut because he saw an opportunity to do so, and more like Nomura's dotting him, as if going "no, no, you see, his actual plan was always this, and his three first defeats don't really count". The character is not allowed to truly fail and develop from it, he had to have a "plan B for every eventuallity", which, in my opinion, doesn't feel earned, it feels like a cheat code given to him by the narrative.
It doesn't help that Ansem and Xemnas actions are recontextualized to fit into his master plan, instead of being allowed to be their own things.
Def be watching this later, shame about Disney indeed.
While I agree that Kingdom Hearts isn't confusing in the broad strokes, I feel like there are some aspects of Kingdom Hearts that can be confusing if you get down into the nitty gritty details.
For example, Xigbar speaks to Zexion in KH2 during a BBS teaser scene about how Zexion must know about Xemnas' secret plans and how they tie to a search he's apparently been conducting a search for Ventus. The thing is that Zexion is never established to be in the know about Xehanort's secret plans and is likewise never shown to be particularly in the know about anything as the series goes on. Now, this could very well be the result of Nomura changing plans, but it is an example that springs to mind about something that could sew confusion.
Another thing is that Kingdom Hearts is a series where you are meant to accept that the characters will operate on flawed information, which not everyone will immediately pick up on. Riku's "There can't be two Keyblade Masters." line is memed on, but that's a great example of how that's something Riku had no way of knowing or stating with definitive fact. He just saw other worlds for the first time last week. What does he know? Similarly, in the same game, Ansem is surprised to learn that Kingdom Hearts is light. And throughout the series, you'll see other characters operate on misinformation. KH3, for example, has Sora, Donald, and Goofy tell everyone that KH1 Riku is in the Organization because they don't remember Riku Replica. So even though the audience might have immediately thought "Oh, that's Riku Replica" when they first saw him, particularly since Replicas kept coming up in the plot, everyone else just takes SDG's word for it, especially since Riku Replica plays along.
That being said, at the end of the day, the overall story has always been relatively easy to parse. I don't need to understand every single facet of Xehanort's machinations in KH3 to know that his plan is to obtain Kingdom Hearts and recreate reality in the way that he thinks is best fitting while other characters are searching for a MacGuffin that will be more important in future titles, for example, and that's really the main information you need to know to understand most of the plot.
A good 16 years ago I had a phone that could play custom ringtones (!) and the Destiny Islands melody was simple enough to type in and use.
I still startle and look for my phone every time I hear it.
You are 100% correct, and once someone says that to me I know they haven't played the games
7:11 lol my favorite thing to do when explaining the Ansem bit to my friends is going, "this isn't nearly as confusing as I am going to make it sound- but it's more fun this way"
7:29 and clean
I mean it makes sense except for like brain+luxu and xehanort's shenanigans
There's a youtuber called Hamon Beat that periodically does debunking videos for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure; there's a huge amount of misinformation about characters' abilities and motives because so much of the fanbase only engages with the series through memes and tiktok clips. you see a lot of people acting like they're smarter than the creator for supposedly picking up on a plot hole only for them to be directly addressed on the page, that they've never read.
yeah jojos is one of those series as well. The kars one through me for a loop because I watched part 2 and I absolutely understood why Kars never came back, hes functionally dead at the end of that story. not literally dead ofc but his mind is completely broken that if he came back he wouldn't be a threat.
10:40 Vanitas is the parts of Ventus being removed. Sora was able to fit in the hole Vanitas left behind, therefore they must be the same general shape.
You can argue sora looks like ventus due to his baby soul connecting with him.
@sarthakarora3212Sora doesn't look like Ventus. Roxas does but they've never actually addressed that.
A while back I had a short discussion with a fan of the the Legend of Heroes: Trails series, if you're unfamiliar it's a JRPG series that much like Kingdom Hearts has been ongoing for about 20 years and has 13 entries (plus a brand new remake of the first game) that tell a continuous story, have had their games localized and released in the west in a completely wrong order (imagine BBS and Days being localized after KH3), these games contain way more characters than Kingdom Hearts has, multiple organizations and people that shift their allegiances constantly, homonculi with extra bodies, barely explained powers and curses, made up words and terms, a controversial entry with time travel, and their entries are rarely named linearly. The first three games are named First Chapter, Second Chapter and The Third, self explanatory enough, but the next 3 games are Trails from Zero, Trails to Azure and Trails of Cold Steel with no indication which comes next but a 2 minute google search will explain much like with Kingdom Hearts. But even worse is that at least Kingdom Hearts has KH1 as an easy starting point, if you were to see every Trails title laid before you it would be much harder to figure out which game is the first without further context.
This fellow Trails fan was somehow not able to see the hypocrisy and clung to their second hand information and rumors they heard on the internet. People are crazy.
I was one of those weird kids who playd kh2 right after kh1. so yeah, that's why its confusing. It's confusing if a game throws something at you that it never explained. I didn't even find out about the ds game until years later. and I thought it was just a card game spin off.
It's like if every Naruto/ One Piece movie containted lore or events relevent to the main story.
i think the rise of "anti accounts"-- where they only ever post negatively about a specific series-- is also partially to blame. because they hyperfocus on a series' flaws and make even small, insignificant things seem cataclysmic. and often times even the people to run those accounts haven't engaged with it directly. they just hear about it from the people they follow, read the wiki (or worse, ask chat gpt), then go to town.
kingdom hearts CAN be confusing, and not every writing decision is good, but its really only in small bursts. kingdom hearts, to me, is not a story where the logistics matter. its about the characters and the emotions they spark in you. it's perfectly fine if a story like that doesn't appeal to you, but you also have to know the difference between objective faults and your own personal tastes.
I think people have said it's confusing since before it got confusing, but even as a die hard fan I'd argue it starts to get there around Dream Drop, and I'm not sure how to even describe the ending of 3 with the power of waking turning time back and waking the Lingering Will.
Also, popular videos like Barry Kramer, that get all the information from 3rd party first before experiencing himself might added to the over complicated explanation.
Not saying that he did a disservice, but hearing a story instead of experiencing is way different on how We interpret the information
First off, I agree with you. Buuuut, I think I'd rather just watch Barry's video than play the games. Far less time commitment. And there are oodles of RPG's I'd rather devote my time to.
Loved the Raid Shadow Legends video, and I loved this one too. Amazing work as always ❤
Definitely hit all the right notes. I still see people saying the series is confusing, but they never seem to settle on a unified reason as to why. The wikification of it and a ton of other series and art certainly seems to contribute to those kinds of misunderstandings.
1:24 my exact story bar for bar 1:40 1:52
34:02 reminding me of the Rules of Roses forced controversy/ full one lies about its content making it banned in several countries...
something i will always love about KH as someone who painstakingly played all of them (except union cross, fuck that), is that even when the villains and the world gets confusing, i never have to guess how characters feel about each other. friendship is the guiding light of it all, and who needs to understand every painstaking detail when the heart of the story is about saving your friends? making sure everyone lives and gets to be happy? fighting injustice? there are so many points in the series where a character is confused (and im like girl me too) but chooses to push through and do what needs to be done because it means getting to see their loved ones again. sure, ive read wikis to make sense of things after the fact, but my experience as a player mirrors sora's. I dont need to know everything, i just want them to be happy.
also, "guess my summer vacation is over" is a phrase my friends and i quote to each other at the end of every summer specifically because of how devastating that scene is
Master Xehanorts plan is about seeing the true miracle of Kingdom Hearts, which needs a clash of true darkness and true light.
So when Xehanort revealed that the time-travel and the events of the games were "All part of the plan" was about manifesting both the greatest darkness (Ansem, Xemnas, Saix, Vanitas etc.) and the greatest light (Sora, Riku, Ventus, Aqua etc.)
So i feel its less omniscient and more like he is playing a long game of chess.
Yes, he was mostly bluffing, he did planned to have the fight to create the x blade and using kingdom hearts, but he didnt care who was going to be the darkness and the lights, he choose the people that could fill the role as time passed, we need to remember he choose Sora to be one of the darkness and failed, so instead went for a clone.
I think the issue is that while that "plan" can technically work, it is just so long-winded and requires so many characters having kinda loosely explained reasons to be there that player might have hard time to vibe or feel the pressure of it. Just cause something make sense after long winded explanation, doesn't mean it is very engaging.
I've always said Kingdom Hearts was convoluted, not complex. The only thing "confusing" about it is that 90% of what happens in Disney worlds do not matter. When you only look at major plot points, it's a very simple "good vs evil" story. You just gave to ignore all the fluff.
43:25 Actually, as someone who has consumed KH entirely through 2nd hand videos (not wikis), I genuinely found your reading of the wiki entry to be, in some ways, more emotionally resonant to me than watching the scene itself.
Although the wiki hardly tells the events in an emotional manner, I heard your reading and imagined the scene in my head. I even recalled the details I absorbed through my 2nd hand experiences, I remembered the location and appearances of characters, voices, recalled parts of what Roxas' experience was prior to this, and a bit of his own characterization. And so, I imagined a scene that had, in my opinion, more natural dialogue, voice acting, body acting and pacing.
Some of these criticisms you have already mentioned, but the general flow of the scene felt choppy to me, mainly with Roxas, who's body, voice acting and dialogue felt like it didn't fully transition from different emotions and actions smoothly or naturally. Some parts felt more natural than others, with the moment Roxas opens the, cocoon? Feeling particularly unnatural. Roxas was just angry, trying to stab his keyblade into the man before him, before he notices Sora inside and, within seconds after his strike, calmly, neutrally, matter of factly says "Sora." While still completely in his action pose from just earlier. Ultimately, those moments did genuinely, partially take me out of the scene and the emotions. Even as parts of the whole did benefit my experience, there was enough detracting it too.
And I'm sure some of that is constraints within the game's engine. And really, how much can the wiki entry itself be credited for how my imagination took its words and imagined something more? But if anything, though I disagree with your conclusion, it strengthen's your point more.
My 2nd, or rather 3rd hand listening of your wiki entry reading created a very different impression in my head than the 2nd hand viewing od the cutscene in isolation, which would then be very different from my 1st hand experience if I actually played the intro of KH2 completely, and spent time with the game, characters and themes. I just thought my differing conclusion offers another layer to this. Your video is very focused on 2nd hand viewings giving a worse impression to its audience than a 1st hand experience would, but it can also create a better experience, or an experience that is neither better nor worse, but simply very different and inaccurate to the game itself.
Comment to boost the algorithm, still watching the video
I see what you mean, but as someone who has played through every KH game (some of them several times) and hasn’t really read much KH wiki, I think it definitely is confusing. Or rather the rules of KH’s internal logic are confusing, and whenever something is explained or a question answered it raises even more questions (e.g. why does Roxas not look like Sora? Because another totally different boy called Ventus is sleeping in his heart, and to understand how and why please play this 30-50 hour prequel). The first KH had it best where light and darkness were vague and didn’t feel like they needed to be explained as substantive, quantifiable forces, but as the series continued it kept trying to explain what they were in a way that made things more confusing than if they’d just continued saying “darkness bad, light good.” All of this came to a head for me (and I think many others) in the final act of KH3 where all of these overcomplicated narrative threads were being concluded in unsatisfying, contrived ways. They left themselves far too many threads to tie up, and by the end I was both bored and bewildered. I don’t mind confusing plots (e.g. I really enjoy MGS and FF7 whose plots feel baffling even though I’ve played them many times), but when the game itself is insisting that it makes sense when it clearly doesn’t, then I have a problem with it.
Where did you get the sense that the series was trying to quantify them? In every game afterward, they're still mostly presented as these vague forces that act as the foundation of the universe and the source of power for the various characters. Certainly nothing like the midichlorians
@garyconstanza3120 Quantify is the wrong word I suppose, I meant more that they kept elaborating upon them to the point where half of KH cutscenes end up as word salad where more than half the words are heart, darkness, light, data and “the power of waking”. The elaboration seemed like it was intended to make things clearer as it went on but it just made things more confused I think. E.g. in a fragmentary passage there’s the bit where Mickey is trying to explain to Aqua that he’s entered the realm of darkness to lock the door to something with a keyblade of darkness because that needs to happen at the same time that Riku locks it from the other side with a keyblade of light or something (??) Whatever it was was convoluted and meant I was more confused than if he’s said almost nothing.
@PyroNebula That's just Mickey explaining how they manage to close the door to darkness and stop the Heartless in KH1. Keyblade of darkness on one side of the door, keyblade of light on the other, activate both of them to lock the door.
What's crazy is that that example isn't even the worst of the word salads as you call them, there are more absurd cases in other games.
@garyconstanza3120 That is confusing though, esp since Sora is able to lock and unlock plenty of doors (metaphysical and otherwise) just fine with just his regular keyblade plenty of other times. It simply doesn’t make sense within the internal logic of KH otherwise, and there are heaps of other examples like this, e.g. how come Sora/Riku is “THE chosen wielder” of the keyblade and then it turns out that half the characters get one? How come killing a person’s heartless and nobody makes them come back to life? How can a world sleep? Time travel!? None of these questions (and many more) are given remotely satisfactory answers within the games, and where an attempt at an answer is made it just makes things more incomprehensible.
@PyroNebula This videos premise while having plenty potential and being pretty sound on its own gets completely subverted by the creator's complete lack of self awareness as to how people felt playing through these games before the HD collections came out, he also simply hand-waves away almost all of the confusing points in the plot because he is desensitized to the weirdness, I mean he himself admits he was trawling through the wikis way back when like all fans did, its completely disingenuous.
I'd agree with him if his only point was about the second hand sources thing as well as taking the plot's more emotional and thematic meanings as more important than the literal events going on and explanations to get to the endings, but he's also trying to explicity say that outside of a couple of niche things the plot is easily understandable, which is way off-base considering the sheer amount of confusion the KH games produce as a result of ham-fisting twists and turns you wouldnt predict.
The power of waking seems to be a few things that all stem from the same principle. To bring back those that were lost.
I'm not entirely sure i agree with your thoughts on watching lets plays specifically, but i cant tell if this is a gut emotional response or if i have a good reason, so I'm gonna try writing it out here.
I think watching a lets play is a first hand experience, or maybe a 1.5 hand experience? Like, would you levvy the same critique on someone who sat next to their friend, who actually played it? I feel its a separation between experincing the story and experiencing the gameplay. At the same time, I definitely agree that the person you watch play something has a HUGE effect on your perception of that thing, and I suppose thats worth thinking about. Idk what I'm trying to say here. When I watch a playthrough of a game, I feel i have experienced the whole story, even if I havent experienced the gameplay. On the other hand my first experiences with Kingdom Hearts were watching playthroughs of each game, up until DDD when I could only find a cutscene compilation, which i was so disappointed in that I went and bought a 3DS to be able to play it myself. So I didn't Play previous games, but I did Experience them. I dunno. I think its complicated and hard to voice, that difference.
i think vanitas looking like sora is a coincidence and that was just the shape the darkness in ventas' heart. and sora's heart just happens to fit that missing part like ventus is piccolo and sora is nail
This video made me better understand a sadness i've been feeling for the last 5 years - none of my friends play the games i enjoy, they at best experience it second hand. And this isn't even about Kingdom Hearts - Hollow Knight, Hades, Clair Obscure, Lies of P, even Elden Ring - my lifelong friends only ever play Rust, Rocket League or Counter Strike. Sucks, man.
Which is your favorite major dungeon in Elden Ring?
Oh my lord, I feel the exact same about my friends. My heart goes out to you
@protatype7487 haven't gotten around to buying the dlc yet so i'm only picking one from the base game, but i love Leyndell, and Stormveil Castle's a really close second
@Xirogify You’ve got some killer good ones waiting for you in the DLC, if you end up buying it come back and tell me what you think. Leyndell’s great, I love that’s it’s both open and claustrophobic at the same time, and it’s one of the few areas in Elden Ring that hides a secondary location inside it. Love when they hide stuff like that, it’s always been my favorite of their tricks.
Find friends who do. I know it’s not easy to make friends, trust me. But I also know you can’t turn people into someone else.
Instead of lamenting that your life long friends don’t share interests in those games I think you’re better off finding people in those communities you can relate to as well.
That way you don’t feel like your losing touch with those lifelong friends, you can get your narrative needs met elsewhere.
Christopher Lee's voice could make even a Fanwiki Article sound like Shakespeare.
@45:33-.-I don't like you bring up how it can be a metaphor for depression or loneliness. This is a problem I like to call "allegory brain-rot", were the assumption is that elements of a story must have a parallel to something in the real world, and to not have it makes it somehow shallow. Zootopia being the biggest victim of this that I know of.
Talking about real world issues _is_ the surface level. But talking about the underlying nature of those issues, and the moral principles surrounding them _is_ what deep, and that can be explored in a story without making it a direct allegory.
This video is so awesome, and Is exactly how I feel about the discourse surrounding Zelda as a chronology. I especially love that you called attention to the way people exclusively talk about the timeline of events in a game, when that's a totally incomplete and shallow way to discuss art. Absolutely adored this video