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rallamajoopAs I was saying, we recently finished playing Birth by Sleep – the latest Kingdom Hearts instalment – in Japanese, of course, as the English release isn't due out for months, but my PSP now connects up to the TV so ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pinneagig can translate as we go without one of us having to peer over the other's shoulder the whole time. This was a game with a lot of expectations riding on it. I have been looking forward to playing it ever since seeing the closed theatre preview at TGS '08 well over a year ago, and after the misery of 358/2 Days, a Kingdom Hearts game that doesn't make me fear the whole franchise has gone to hell is way overdue.
My brief summary was: the loading times suck, the story is based around some good ideas and some great moments but falls down badly in the execution in a lot of places, the characters are thoroughly likeable, and the gameplay is beyond excellent. Here's the long version, point by point. Contains spoilers, but I've tried to keep them vague where the details aren't crucial, and whited out anything important. Highlight the text to read it.
Loading Times
Very much not a highlight. Less than half a dozen scenes into the game, already we were learning to loathe the little rotating heart that means the next scene is loading, and still loading, and your PSP has totally not frozen up lookit the little rotating heart that proves it's still going, guys! Did you just see it vanish indicating it's done? Nope, there it is back again! AHAHAHA. I'd swear some of the loading screens have been longer than the scenes they were loading. Whenever you switch into a new form, you have to wait several extra seconds for that to load, and if you use magic too soon after entering a new screen, sometimes you have to wait for that to load too. In a couple of paragraphs I'm about to go on at length about our problems with the content of the opening scenes, and let me also say that being forced to sit for ages looking at a blank screen between those lackluster scenes did not help our feelings towards them.
The most puzzling thing is that we've seen Squeenix do so much better. There's a lot packed into this game, but Dissidia and Crisis Core had similar graphical quality and style and they loaded in no time flat compared to BBS. It doesn't seem to make much difference what's loading either – cutscene, new area, battle sequence, the only difference is between slow and slower. I don't know enough about the technical aspects of putting together a PSP game to speculate about what's making the difference – there is a lot packed into this game – but whatever it was I hope it was worth it.
Battle system
The battle system for BBS is the one aspect that two thumbs up – gameplay is awesomely fun. It's not without a few clunky issue – the target lock is a little hard to switch off and has an occasional habit of locking you on to a nearby lamp post in the middle of combat, and every so often you find yourself knocking an enemy into the air only to find that the combo finisher we have equipped only works on the ground (a real dud of a problem that never came up in KH1 or 2). On the other hand, mid-battle targeting has never been better – if an enemy gets taken out halfway through a multiple-hit move, your character switches straight on to attack the next one without missing a beat. And you get plenty of moves where this applies – BBS is the first KH series game where you fight 90% of your battles with no party for support, and it compensates by equiping each character to kick major quantities of booty even while solo.
The main new gimmick are your Deck Commands, which include pretty much anything you'd need MP for in previous games. Commands can equipped into any of several deck slots and are activated by hitting triangle. It's a bit like a hybrid between the deck system of Chain of Memories (commands/cards in your deck cycle through in the order you equipped them, when you hit the 'attack' button you use whatever is next on the deck and it goes back to the bottom) and the pin deck from The World Ends With You (once used you have to wait for commands to recharge individually before you can use them again, small deck, commands get exp as you use them), with the added difference that in BBS your regular 'attack' command isn't part of the deck and can be used as much as you like, cleaning up one of the few big frustrations of the CoM system. You can use the arrow key pad to cycle through the deck and find the command you want, but most of the time you're good just using them in sequence, and as long as you're not going overboard the first command in the deck will probably be recharged again by the time you get back to it.
In a more functional sense, the deck is a similar feature to the customisable shortcuts from previous KH games (which require a second set of L/R buttons that are absent on the PSP) in that it gives you an easy way to get to the commands you use often without wasting time hunting through complicated menus mid-battle to find the one you want. But there's more to it than that, because in similar fashion to the evolving pins in TWEWY (have I mentioned lately how much I loved that battle system? Imagine how thrilled I was to find BBS has many of the same strengths) once your commands have leveled up a few times, you can combine them together to make a new one – eg, two blizzards will get you a blizzara, a strike raid and a blizzara will get you freeze raid, etc. Unlike commands that can be bought or obtained as loot, the ones you combine can also be made to give you abilities like 'luck up' or 'fire defence up'. So unlike a lot of games where you quickly wind up picking one or two powerful attacks and never using anything else, this means BBS gives you new moves to try out regularly, and real incentive to keep leveling up different attacks to see what you can make out of them, and that makes combat a lot more interesting. It can be frustrating trying to figure out which combinations get you those useful abilities, but it's a pretty minor quibble in an otherwise great game.
Here's a few examples of some of my personal favourite commands you can pick up later in the game:
Time Slicer: Casts 'stop' on everything in range, then you spend the duration of the spell teleporting from one enemy to the next and slicing them to ribbons.
Raging Storm: Surrounds you with four giant, circling pillars of fire while you hover at the centre. Lasts a good long while too. (Sometimes makes it a little tricky to steer.)
Ice Barrage: Giant pillar of ice bursts out of the floor. Right under your enemy's feet.
Detonate Square: Sets several glowing circles on the floor around you. Any enemy that wanders over one of these in the next minute or so gets blown sky high. (Few things in life are more satisfying than catching the final bosses with this one.)
Detonate Chaser: Like Detonate Square, only now the glowing circles move and target the enemy.
Flare: There is this big white flash, and suddenly everything you were fighting has mysteriously disappeared. (I hear they're toning this one down for the English version of the game, and I can't really blame them.)
Fire Glide: It is like Glide, but you are – get this – on fire. No really, you get this halo of fire over Ven while he's gliding, and any enemy he runs gets too close to takes damage – and not just a couple of hit points either. I watchedpinneagig clear whole rooms of Unversed doing nothing but fly around, and if you think that would get old fast, you are grossly underestimating the novelty value of this one. Technically an ability rather than a Deck Command, but you get create it a similar way.
And that's just one feature.
The battle system in BBS is seriously gauge-tastic. In addition to all those recharging deck commands, you've got the Focus gauge (goes up when you hit things) which you can use to target lock multiple enemies for a long range attack, the D-Link gauge (goes up when you collect little stars that the enemies drop) which lets you temporarily take on attributes from one of your allies, and the finishing move gauge (goes up when you do damage, down when you've taken too long between doing damage). The most interesting of those (IMO) is the last one, because once you've filled it up a couple of times in one fight, your character switches into a mode rather like the Drive Forms of KHII, which makes them glow pretty colours and pick up a bunch of nifty extra abilities including an extra-shiny finishing move which activates if they fill up yet another gauge – unless you've used a particular Deck Command while in that Form that shifts you up to yet another Form which takes the gauge up even higher... anyway, you get the idea. There's good variety in the forms you can get too – one for each main element, plus a couple that are unique to each character, and they're easy enough to get and last long enough to be incredibly useful, and unlike Sora's, none of them come with disadvantages like disabling your magic until they run out. Did I mention the incredible shiny? We are are talking really gorgeously shiny here.
Among the most satisfying things about playing BBS is that most of the few (minor) gripes I had about the KHII combat system have been fixed. Most of your various gauge-controlled abilities don't actually have to be used to level up, which rids the game of a lot of the grind involved in getting Sora's Forms up to a level where the useful stuff was unlocked. Dive roll (or equivalent dodge move) is available from the start of the game, and the retargeting mid-combo is a really nice change.
I am a little bitter that only Ven ever learns Glide though – it was just about my favourite ability ever in KH1 and 2, and double jump or air slide just aren't the same. Mind you, the low gravity sections in Stitch's world come very close to making up for it.
So we've established the battle system is basically awesome, but for me it's always going to be a secondary selling point next to the big deal, which is the story. That brings us to the important sections: character and plot.
In The Beginning...
The opening scenes... look, it goes without saying how much I wanted to like this game, but the opening did not get us off to a good start. The introduction was so short and uninformative it felt like we'd been thrown straight into the action before we had more than the faintest idea who any of these characters were, or why we were meant to care about them – and that's doubly disappointing when every previous instalment of the series did such a better job. Sora was a regular kid living on an island somewhere with dreams about seeing other worlds, who then got the universe pulled out from under him and was sent off to save it. Roxas was a regular kid living in a town with his friends, until he gradually discovers that he isn't such a regular kid after all. Both had several scenes in their homes with their friends, littered with hints that something odd was going on, before the story got started. Terra, Aqua and Ven, by contrast, are not regular kids, they're in the middle of training to become (presumably) some kind of Disney-mulitverse equivalent of the Jedi Knights – plus there's three of them, and they're all going to have playable roles. These characters need introduction more than Sora or Roxas ever did. All they get are a couple of uncomfortably forced scenes trying to draw parallels between them and the Sora/Riku/Kairi trio – and the parallels are there, but they're a lot weaker than the opening would have you believe, and not in any way a substitute for a proper introduction.
Look guys! I made us lucky charms! Now we can be even more like Sora, Riku and Kairi!
By the end of the opening scenes, all we know about them is that Terra and Aqua are about to take the exam to become Keyblade Masters, and they all want to stay together. Why they should be worried about being split up is left to the imagination of the player. Presumably, their lives are going to change if the older two get that promotion, but we don't know that, because the game hasn't bothered to say even a handful of words about what it means to be a 'Master' in this world, and little of what previous games have told us on the subject is any help. In KH1, Sora was chosen to be a Keyblade 'Master' when the Keyblade appeared in his hands, in a response to the threat of the Heartless – as explained to us at length once you reach Traverse Town (later stuff involving Riku and Mickey complicates this a lot, but the premise remains pretty sound). In BBS there aren't any Heartless – or Nobodies, or even any Unversed yet – but Keyblade users appear to be numerous, and even have an established hierarchy of masters and students. What exactly is it they do in this world? How does one get a Keyblade? Do they appear in random kids' hands like Sora's did? Does a master come by, declare you a suitable student and teach you how to summon it? Did these kids dream of becoming Keyblade Masters or was it an uncomfortable duty that was thrust upon them? How long have they been training together? Unlike Sora and Roxas, there's nothing said about who these kids were before the Keyblades came into their lives, and next to nothing shown of their relationship except that snippet to show that they're 'just like Sora, Riku and Kairi'. Seriously – they're not.
If anything, that opening scene even contradicts the few decent pieces of information we get about their past later in the game. 'Haven't we always been together?' says Aqua when Ven mentions a vague memory of having once seen a different sky. Later, it's revealed in flashback that Ven only joined them (at most) a few years earlier, amnesic and borderline catatonic. No, Aqua, you haven't been, and don't you think him remembering something like that might be just a little bit important?
The game does redeem itself eventually by answering most of these questions as it goes along, but they're such minor plot points when revealed that I just... I mean, why couldn't they have been fitted in at the start? There's good reason why the writers might have wanted to keep the introduction brief – it means less delay before you get to select which character you want to play first – but the frustrating thing is that it would have taken so little more to make the difference. One or two flashbacks, a few lines of dialogue of the characters recalling how they first got their Keyblades – even a couple of paragraphs of cliched movie-style opening prologue starting with the words, 'In a world where...' - really would have made a world of difference.
I think it also bears mentioning that even when we do get the backstory, a lot of it never appears outside the Xehanort reports. I liked the way the reports worked in KH1 and 2, but between BBS, TWEWY and some of the early reviews about FFXIII, I worry that Squeenix are starting to lean way too much on giving the player huge chunks of text they can access via the menu system as a way of getting out of actually telling the story. Not a promising trend.
Opening over with, it's time to pick which of the characters you want to play first.
Terra
Terra is terribly sweet, but a bit dense, and painfully bad with people. He's the game's designated 'character who will spend his story struggling with his own darkness', and has connections to Riku, though he's got little if any of the same arrogance and smugness. It's something of a mystery where the darkness to his character is supposed to come from (see above complaints about the introduction), and that made him rather hard to relate to through the early worlds in his story – though it does play a role in making him distinct. While Riku dived head-first into his own fling with evil and had to spend much of the next two games digging himself out again, Terra spends the game fighting it unsuccessfully, torn between Xehanort and his own master's contradictory advice. It's not much of a spoiler to say it doesn't end well for him; the tragedy is that it's hard to picture how he could have done much better.
I could complain about his lacking emotional range and tendency to walk right up to suspicious figures in long black cloaks and horned hats and politely ask for directions, but I think it'd be fairer to talk about him as a guy who must've spent a very long time training to be a Keyblade master because it is painfully obvious that Keyblades are the only thing he understands. The only times he seems to be in his depth are when he's talking to other Keyblade users – his friends, Xehanort and Yen Sid (plus one other example I probably should not say much about for spoiler reasons). The rest of the time he just sort of bumbles around, trusting basically whoever he runs into first in new worlds, which tends to go badly for him because Terra nearly always runs into the bad guys. Considering that he looks like the oldest and most mature, it's sorta fascinating just how badly equipped he is to deal with life beyond school. He doesn't come across as stupid, just badly naïve – arguably his biggest failing is that he lacks the cynicism to know evil when he sees it. I can only assume all those years being told that Xehanort is one of the good guys has damaged his bad-news-radar beyond repair. Ultimately I did find myself liking him a lot as a character, and some of his scenes towards the end of the game are heartbreakingly effective. The whole 'Come To The Dark Side' schtick has been done a million times before, but I don't think it's ever been done to a character who's such an utter sweetheart as Terra. Despite initial misgivings about the intro, his story was by far my favourite out of the the three. The way a lot of details tie back into hints dropped in KHII and Final Mix worked beautifully – with just the right mix of that makes so much sense and I never would have seen that coming.
Ven
Ven is the mysterious one, and also the cute one – I did like Terra, but after a whole game's worth of his polite stoicism, Ven was a real breath of fresh air. I might even go as far as recommending him as the one people should play first (despite what the game seems to want you to do), since his story is easier to get into, and gives you enough introduction to the other two leads to mitigate some of the problems early in the plot. He's got more in common with Sora than either version of Roxas, particularly all the enthusiasm and wonder for each new world he visits, but his backstory and motivations are still different enough that he still feels like a new and different character to either of them. Between his odd reverse-grip and focus on speed, his fighting style is pretty distinctive too.
This is a bit confusing, because there are points where the game does seem to be pushing the idea that he and Roxas are effectively one and the same, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It seems likely that both Ven and Roxas will be back in some form when we finally get KH3. I hope the plan isn't to merge them into one being, because I like them both too much as individuals, and I can't see a hybrid version working well.
Much like Terra's nasty ending, it's not much of a spoiler that there's some bad stuff lurking in Ven's missing memories (the very opening scene tells you as much). It would have been easy to picture the writers throwing him headfirst into the role of helpless cutie, to be mope around until he can be rescued by his devoted big brother and/or sister. But even despite his own set of heartbreaking scenes, and how very close he (justifiably) gets to giving up towards the end of the game, he never does hit the Heroic BSOD level, and quite plainly refuses to play straight into his enemies hands until there's no option left. Under all the cuteness he's got some real guts, and I like that.
Ultimately though, I found Ven's ending a lot less satisfying than Terra's – it just felt like we'd been promised so much more than what was delivered. For example, [vague spoilers follow]Terra and Aqua's stories both include scenes where they meet widdle!Sora and Riku on Destiny Islands, after which they both receive Plot Relevant Keyblades – ie, the ones we saw them using in the KHII secret ending, similar but subtly different to their initial equipment. Said scenes are absolutely, BRAIN MELTINGLY ADORABLE on a level that has to be seen to be believed, but neither are actually all that important to the plot. By contrast, we know from the very first scene that Ven has a connection with Sora, giving the impression that the two of them are pretty much buddy-breathing with Sora's soul (and I am just saying, that ended really badly in Tsubasa and are you sure you kids have thought this through?), so clearly what is going on here is that Ven is going to have a huge plot-relevant scene with widdle!Sora in about the same part of his story, and the Destiny Island scenes for the other two characters were included mostly for symmetry, right?
In point of fact, Ven does not ever get a scene with widdle!Sora. He doesn't even get his Plot Relevant Keyblade. The opening scene with Sora goes unremarked on until the very end of the very last scene of the game, which left me with the uncomfortable feeling that you could just lop off the start and end of the story without impacting on anything in the middle, and I don't think I'd call that a sign of good storytelling. Especially when the link between Ven and Sora is one of the biggest mysteries of the game.
Ven's story is also unfortunately central to my main issue with the ending, or more to the point, with a rather large plothole that five different endings never got around to filling in. Some context here: among the promises made about the plot of BBS is that a key point would be the explanation for why Keyblade users were common ten years ago, but Sora is considered rare and unusual in the present. Actually, this is such a big irritant for me that I'm going to quote the whole statement:
[Rather bigger spoilers to follow] So first, we play through Terra's story, and while we only catch glimpses of what's going on with Ven, it's strongly hinted that 1) Xehanort's plans include creating some kind of uber-powerful Keyblade, called something like the X-Blade, 2) Ven is part of this plan. We don't find out the details in Terra's story, but it doesn't seem like too much to imagine that it's going to be somehow related to the creation of Sora's Keyblade – and possibly even the nullification of a lot of other Keyblades as well – and that's just more incentive to move straight on to Ven, right? So we play Ven's story, and indeed, we learn the X-Blade may destroy the universe just by existing, and we get to the final boss battle and we get to see it, and low and behold it looks like a crazy art project with Sora and Mickey's keys stuck in the middle! Ven's story kinda fades out before we find out quite what happens to it though. Anyway, on to Aqua's story, which is supposed to be the one that tidies up all the loose ends, and her final battle includes a fight against someone holding this nasty X-Blade. She wins the battle, the X-Blade vanishes, cue credits.
Apparently we've missed something.
Five minutes on the web proved to us that we had – there's a bit more plot on the end that you have to play through all three characters' story modes to unlock, but which you only get if you happened to fight a particular optional boss in Terra's mode to receive the last Secret Report. We hadn't, so we loaded up Terra's story again, finished that last detail, fought his final boss again, and loaded up the extra episode.
Stuff happens, one minor detail from KHII:Final Mix is explained, the Evil X-Blade of Doom is never mentioned. The universe appears undamaged, Aqua's Keyblade still appears to be functioning fine, Mickey and his Master are clearly still doing just as fine – there's not so much as a cutscene showing the X-Blade breaking into significantly shaped pieces before it disappears. The story still feels oddly incomplete.
Five more minutes on the Internet, and we discover there's another secret ending, that you have to do god-knows-what to unlock. At this point we say, screw it, and go straight to youtube. So we watch the extra ending, and get to see some nice hints dropped about the likely content of KH3. The X-Blade remains conspicuous in how utterly and completely everyone has forgotten about it.
Thanks to the ending, a handful of Keyblade users are out of action, but Mickey's still around, and the game heavily implied there are more out there in the universe. What, if anything, has changed here?
Maybe some of this disappointment is my own fault for latching on to that detail so hard, but when the director says a game will cover Plot Point X, it's hard not to feel ripped off when the game goes straight from W to Y.
If there is any mitigating factor to all this, it's going back to the Internet and finding another interview with Nomura, which mentions plans to change some scenes in the English version of the game to clarify things – maybe even turn out a Final Mix version. I'm just going to have to hope he's thinking about the same 'unclear' plot points I am.
Aqua
And at last we get to Aqua – otherwise known as a good 50% of the reason I was so excited about this game, dating all the way back to a certain trailer from TGS 08. In evidence we present my con report from the time, in which the game I was excited about might be better described as “The story of this AWESOME girl called Aqua, and these two guys who might be sorta interesting or something.” The KH series has been badly short in the kickarse heroine department for years, and that trailer left everyone in our group that day with the the strong impression that Aqua was going to be that girl – so you can imagine how much of a let-down it was when every trailer released after that made her look successively more generically girly. My expectations had dropped a long way by the time we actually got hold of the game, my few remaining hopes pinned on the slim chance the newer trailer had caught her at a bad moment.
Finally we get to play the game, and her role in that introduction I was ranting about a few paragraphs back is close to painful, with a lot of giggling at nothing and rhapsodising on about staying with her friends. Several key bits of voice acting from that first trailer that impressed me so much had actually been rerecorded to sound (IMO) less effective when we finally got to them in the game, which is a crying shame*. But once you're past the opening and into the game proper, it does become apparent that Aqua is usually a whole lot better than that intro would have us believe, and, more importantly, has the kind of serious side you could crush rocks on. There's something fascinatingly soldier-like about Aqua – she takes orders, asks the right questions and gets the job done. She still has her girly moments, but they tend to show up in scenes like (eg, minor spoiler?) when she runs up to greet an (obviously) possessed ally, almost-but-not-quite gets herself into real danger, takes two steps back, whips out her keyblade and makes it very clear she's going to knock said friend back to his senses using as much violence as necessary. It's an odd combination of character traits and I'm having a hard time thinking of anywhere I've seen it before. A couple of the more series magical girl anime are the closest analogue that springs to mind, but they tend to have to fight their villains with the ~power of love~ rather than a magic sword, and rarely share the same playing field as the guys. Hm. Lina Inverse, maybe?
The most important thing about Aqua might be that the game doesn't treat her like a girl. She's equal – if not superior – in skill to her male companions, not the least inclined to fainting or panicking at the first sign of danger, and is no more likely than the others to have to be rescued, or suffer the indignity of being told to stay out of things because it's too dangerous (if anything, that's Ven's role, and there mostly because he's the youngest). She's arguably even more capable than the boys in a several key respects (whereas Terra gets a round of applause whenever he spots the bad guys before it's too late, Aqua only has to walk past Cinderella's evil step-family in the corridor to know they're bad news). She's refreshingly unromantic, showing nothing beyond platonic affection for either of her male friends, nor any more fascination with the happily-ever-afters of all the Disney princes and princesses than the satisfaction of knowing she helped save the day. Heck, she once rescues a prince. For almost all intents and purposes, her gender is completely irrelevant.
She's still girlier than I'd prefer at points, but taking a broader perspective, it might not be a bad thing that the game gives us a female who can be a little girly but still utterly competent where it counts. What I'm basically getting at here is that she's not the character I hoped she would be, but the character she is doesn't lack for redeeming features and a good quota of moments of awesome.
Putting her character aside, the real disappointment I had about Aqua's story – and after all the effort I spent ripping into Days I'd be a bit of a hypocrite not to bring this up – is it's just a little too easy to imagine how the whole game could have played out, still covering every major plot point – without her in it. Unlike Terra and Ven, who both feature crucially in Xehanort's plans, he never pays any attention to Aqua, nor does her story arc reveal anything much that wasn't in the other two. She's important in the sense that the dynamic between the three main characters is a big part of the story that couldn't have been the same with two rather than three, and she does have a big role to play at the end – there's at least one post-game interview out there where Nomura makes the case that it's arguably more her story than either of the boys, and I can see where he's coming from. But when her big moment of glory is [More vague spoilers] to be the one left on her feet to fight one last battle against each of the boys' final bosses at the end – y'know, that works as a purpose for her in theory, but in practice it would have worked a lot better if Terra and Ven's stories hadn't given us the impression that both those bosses had already been defeated (or at least beaten into a state of plot-relevant amnesia) in the first round. Given everything the boys had been put through by that point, there was far more emotional resonance in their victories than in Aqua's, so declaring that the Big Bads weren't quite down so that she could step in and finish them off – that achieved... what, exactly? The game never really bothers to give us an answer. When the game had so many plot elements that were underdeveloped or unresolved, it seems like such a waste that so little was done with Aqua's story. It's another case where I think I can see what they were trying to do, but the execution came off lacking.
* I'm just saying, there's a big difference between the line, 'Ven mo shiteru desshou', (“'You should know that too, Ven.”) delivered to sound like 'you should know better than to doubt our friend', and delivered to sound like she's comforting a nervous little kid. No prizes for guessing which I preferred.
Xehanort
Is not a playable character, but gets a separate section because in a lot of ways, he's what ties the whole story together – and back into the KH series, despite coming across as a very different character to any of his other incarnations. He's the chessmaster of the story, guiding his hapless pawns around the board, and a lot of the tragedy of the story is that no-one realises until it's too late. Like the other characters, it would've been nice to get a better introduction to him outside the Xehanort Reports, but since we knew him from previous games it's less jarring. Not much more interesting as a character than he's ever been before, but functional as a villain.
Final story thoughs
So I think I've established now that the story has it's problems, and the issues we had with the start and the end are just the big ones. The plot is uncomfortably tail-heavy, revealing almost nothing until the final scenes, and then doing so in such a rush that a lot doesn't get explained at all. The 'seven princesses of light' plot point introduced in the first three worlds doesn't really go anywhere, except as vague foreshadowing for events in KH1. The last four worlds have very little relevance to the overall story, and yet unlike several optional worlds in KH1 and 2, the game will not let you advance until you've completed them. The mysterious title 'Birth by Sleep' is never explained, nor even mentioned save for a single throwaway line in the secret ending which doesn't really clarify anything. The whole explanation for the existence of the Unversed – when you finally get to it – is about a sentence long, and not very convincing. The measures that keep the three main characters traveling separately are inevitably contrived – one can't help but wonder how much trouble could have been saved if they'd just sat down and traded notes – and the moral lessons Terra picks up on his travels tend to be delivered with all the grace and subtlety of an anvil from the sky. The constant repetition of how important the trio are to each other is suffers from the ol' show-and-tell problem too.
At the heart of it all, I suspect that most of the problems weren't with the BBS story itself, but the requirement that it be split it up it up between three protagonists – and made to work as a complete narrative no matter which order the player chooses them. Not an impossible challenge for a good writer, but it would have to make the job of telling the story much harder, and a lot of the pacing issues BBS was left with are probably the direct result of the writers not knowing quite how to structure it all. On top of that, KHII was so very satisfying as a story that it's a tough act to follow. It didn't leave them all that much to work with either, in the sense of unresolved plot points that future instalments could pick up on, and the few hooks they've left themselves have required making the mythology even more convoluted with every new game.
On the other hand, the connection to KHII is also what gives the story a lot of its best moments. Getting to visit Radiant Garden in all its former glory is a big highlight – even seeing Mickey training with Yen Sid was kinda neat. The cameos of the human Organisation members may have been a bit fanservicy, but I liked them (they certainly do a much better job of filling in the Org's backstory than anything in Days) and the ending more than justifies their inclusion. A lot of our favourite moments – in Terra's story in particular – came from the little things that tie back into offhand comments or random details from KHII in creative and unexpected ways. A few of those tie-ins felt clumsier than others (Aqua's armour being left with Xehanort and Castle Oblivion in particular), but on the whole those moments went a long way to making up for the elements that didn't work so well.
I still do have some hopes that the changes they're making for the English version will clear up a few of those issues, though I'm sure it's far too much to hope for major changes. Still, a few tweaks can go a long way, so I'll at least be withholding final judgement on the plot until I can see what they add.
Very curious about how the manga version of this one will turn out too. Sure, the KH mangas are always cheesy and dumb, but in a fun way, and they tend to give more space for cute character moments than the games do.
In Conclusion
So that was my Birth by Sleep experience. There are a lot of things I really liked about it, and a lot of things I really didn't like about it – I'd have a really tough time deciding how to rate it overall. Heck, I could just as easily get into a big debate with someone who loved it or who hated it. I feel like there was a lot of promise in the concept that the game just didn't live up to – but we're not talking hours of my life I want back. It's a game that's frustrating because it was so close to being a lot better.
I guess the other big question is, between this and other recent instalments to the KH series, how are things looking for the next big one, the inevitable KH3?
Seriously, between this, and what little I've read about Coded, and the sludgepile that was Days, the mythology of the series is getting so convoluted it's getting close to impenetrable. That's not a great start. The final scene of that secret ending leaves us with a big hint about KH3 – [More spoilers!] so now we know that that letter from Mickey we saw at the end of KH2 was all about the events of BBS, and Sora appears to be off on a mission to rescue the BBS leads – all well and good. I'm not quite sure if I can see that carrying a full game, and compared to the action-heavy teasers at the end of KH1 and KH2, it falls a bit flat – 'let's clean up some loose ends from some other game' just isn't as exciting a premise as 'ohshit, gotta go save the world'. It feels a bit like what probably should be the 'big reveal' of the next game from Sora's POV – ie that there were Keyblade Masters before his time, and they need his help – has already happened, off-screen, without us even getting to see his reaction to the news. It's all perfectly logical for post-KH2 events, it's just a bit... dull.
What they really need for KH3 is a new villain, and it's going to take a lot to make me buy it if it's Xehanort again (who's been more effectively pulversied and incinerated than GLADOS by this point). To be fair though, I had similar misgivings to the idea that KH2 was going to centre around conflict between the good guys and a big team of black-coated pretty boys, so hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
More importantly, Sora, if you think you're leaving Riku and Kairi behind to go running off this time, we are going to have words. D<
But KH3 is still so far over the horizon at this stage that it's probably useless to speculate too much. Best I can say for BBS itself is that it's well worth picking up, but probably best to go in without your expectations too high where plot coherency is involved.
pinneagig can translate as we go without one of us having to peer over the other's shoulder the whole time. This was a game with a lot of expectations riding on it. I have been looking forward to playing it ever since seeing the closed theatre preview at TGS '08 well over a year ago, and after the misery of 358/2 Days, a Kingdom Hearts game that doesn't make me fear the whole franchise has gone to hell is way overdue. My brief summary was: the loading times suck, the story is based around some good ideas and some great moments but falls down badly in the execution in a lot of places, the characters are thoroughly likeable, and the gameplay is beyond excellent. Here's the long version, point by point. Contains spoilers, but I've tried to keep them vague where the details aren't crucial, and whited out anything important. Highlight the text to read it.
Loading Times
Very much not a highlight. Less than half a dozen scenes into the game, already we were learning to loathe the little rotating heart that means the next scene is loading, and still loading, and your PSP has totally not frozen up lookit the little rotating heart that proves it's still going, guys! Did you just see it vanish indicating it's done? Nope, there it is back again! AHAHAHA. I'd swear some of the loading screens have been longer than the scenes they were loading. Whenever you switch into a new form, you have to wait several extra seconds for that to load, and if you use magic too soon after entering a new screen, sometimes you have to wait for that to load too. In a couple of paragraphs I'm about to go on at length about our problems with the content of the opening scenes, and let me also say that being forced to sit for ages looking at a blank screen between those lackluster scenes did not help our feelings towards them.
The most puzzling thing is that we've seen Squeenix do so much better. There's a lot packed into this game, but Dissidia and Crisis Core had similar graphical quality and style and they loaded in no time flat compared to BBS. It doesn't seem to make much difference what's loading either – cutscene, new area, battle sequence, the only difference is between slow and slower. I don't know enough about the technical aspects of putting together a PSP game to speculate about what's making the difference – there is a lot packed into this game – but whatever it was I hope it was worth it.
Battle system
The battle system for BBS is the one aspect that two thumbs up – gameplay is awesomely fun. It's not without a few clunky issue – the target lock is a little hard to switch off and has an occasional habit of locking you on to a nearby lamp post in the middle of combat, and every so often you find yourself knocking an enemy into the air only to find that the combo finisher we have equipped only works on the ground (a real dud of a problem that never came up in KH1 or 2). On the other hand, mid-battle targeting has never been better – if an enemy gets taken out halfway through a multiple-hit move, your character switches straight on to attack the next one without missing a beat. And you get plenty of moves where this applies – BBS is the first KH series game where you fight 90% of your battles with no party for support, and it compensates by equiping each character to kick major quantities of booty even while solo.
The main new gimmick are your Deck Commands, which include pretty much anything you'd need MP for in previous games. Commands can equipped into any of several deck slots and are activated by hitting triangle. It's a bit like a hybrid between the deck system of Chain of Memories (commands/cards in your deck cycle through in the order you equipped them, when you hit the 'attack' button you use whatever is next on the deck and it goes back to the bottom) and the pin deck from The World Ends With You (once used you have to wait for commands to recharge individually before you can use them again, small deck, commands get exp as you use them), with the added difference that in BBS your regular 'attack' command isn't part of the deck and can be used as much as you like, cleaning up one of the few big frustrations of the CoM system. You can use the arrow key pad to cycle through the deck and find the command you want, but most of the time you're good just using them in sequence, and as long as you're not going overboard the first command in the deck will probably be recharged again by the time you get back to it.
In a more functional sense, the deck is a similar feature to the customisable shortcuts from previous KH games (which require a second set of L/R buttons that are absent on the PSP) in that it gives you an easy way to get to the commands you use often without wasting time hunting through complicated menus mid-battle to find the one you want. But there's more to it than that, because in similar fashion to the evolving pins in TWEWY (have I mentioned lately how much I loved that battle system? Imagine how thrilled I was to find BBS has many of the same strengths) once your commands have leveled up a few times, you can combine them together to make a new one – eg, two blizzards will get you a blizzara, a strike raid and a blizzara will get you freeze raid, etc. Unlike commands that can be bought or obtained as loot, the ones you combine can also be made to give you abilities like 'luck up' or 'fire defence up'. So unlike a lot of games where you quickly wind up picking one or two powerful attacks and never using anything else, this means BBS gives you new moves to try out regularly, and real incentive to keep leveling up different attacks to see what you can make out of them, and that makes combat a lot more interesting. It can be frustrating trying to figure out which combinations get you those useful abilities, but it's a pretty minor quibble in an otherwise great game.
Here's a few examples of some of my personal favourite commands you can pick up later in the game:
Time Slicer: Casts 'stop' on everything in range, then you spend the duration of the spell teleporting from one enemy to the next and slicing them to ribbons.
Raging Storm: Surrounds you with four giant, circling pillars of fire while you hover at the centre. Lasts a good long while too. (Sometimes makes it a little tricky to steer.)
Ice Barrage: Giant pillar of ice bursts out of the floor. Right under your enemy's feet.
Detonate Square: Sets several glowing circles on the floor around you. Any enemy that wanders over one of these in the next minute or so gets blown sky high. (Few things in life are more satisfying than catching the final bosses with this one.)
Detonate Chaser: Like Detonate Square, only now the glowing circles move and target the enemy.
Flare: There is this big white flash, and suddenly everything you were fighting has mysteriously disappeared. (I hear they're toning this one down for the English version of the game, and I can't really blame them.)
Fire Glide: It is like Glide, but you are – get this – on fire. No really, you get this halo of fire over Ven while he's gliding, and any enemy he runs gets too close to takes damage – and not just a couple of hit points either. I watched
pinneagig clear whole rooms of Unversed doing nothing but fly around, and if you think that would get old fast, you are grossly underestimating the novelty value of this one. Technically an ability rather than a Deck Command, but you get create it a similar way. And that's just one feature.
The battle system in BBS is seriously gauge-tastic. In addition to all those recharging deck commands, you've got the Focus gauge (goes up when you hit things) which you can use to target lock multiple enemies for a long range attack, the D-Link gauge (goes up when you collect little stars that the enemies drop) which lets you temporarily take on attributes from one of your allies, and the finishing move gauge (goes up when you do damage, down when you've taken too long between doing damage). The most interesting of those (IMO) is the last one, because once you've filled it up a couple of times in one fight, your character switches into a mode rather like the Drive Forms of KHII, which makes them glow pretty colours and pick up a bunch of nifty extra abilities including an extra-shiny finishing move which activates if they fill up yet another gauge – unless you've used a particular Deck Command while in that Form that shifts you up to yet another Form which takes the gauge up even higher... anyway, you get the idea. There's good variety in the forms you can get too – one for each main element, plus a couple that are unique to each character, and they're easy enough to get and last long enough to be incredibly useful, and unlike Sora's, none of them come with disadvantages like disabling your magic until they run out. Did I mention the incredible shiny? We are are talking really gorgeously shiny here.
Among the most satisfying things about playing BBS is that most of the few (minor) gripes I had about the KHII combat system have been fixed. Most of your various gauge-controlled abilities don't actually have to be used to level up, which rids the game of a lot of the grind involved in getting Sora's Forms up to a level where the useful stuff was unlocked. Dive roll (or equivalent dodge move) is available from the start of the game, and the retargeting mid-combo is a really nice change.
I am a little bitter that only Ven ever learns Glide though – it was just about my favourite ability ever in KH1 and 2, and double jump or air slide just aren't the same. Mind you, the low gravity sections in Stitch's world come very close to making up for it.
So we've established the battle system is basically awesome, but for me it's always going to be a secondary selling point next to the big deal, which is the story. That brings us to the important sections: character and plot.
In The Beginning...
The opening scenes... look, it goes without saying how much I wanted to like this game, but the opening did not get us off to a good start. The introduction was so short and uninformative it felt like we'd been thrown straight into the action before we had more than the faintest idea who any of these characters were, or why we were meant to care about them – and that's doubly disappointing when every previous instalment of the series did such a better job. Sora was a regular kid living on an island somewhere with dreams about seeing other worlds, who then got the universe pulled out from under him and was sent off to save it. Roxas was a regular kid living in a town with his friends, until he gradually discovers that he isn't such a regular kid after all. Both had several scenes in their homes with their friends, littered with hints that something odd was going on, before the story got started. Terra, Aqua and Ven, by contrast, are not regular kids, they're in the middle of training to become (presumably) some kind of Disney-mulitverse equivalent of the Jedi Knights – plus there's three of them, and they're all going to have playable roles. These characters need introduction more than Sora or Roxas ever did. All they get are a couple of uncomfortably forced scenes trying to draw parallels between them and the Sora/Riku/Kairi trio – and the parallels are there, but they're a lot weaker than the opening would have you believe, and not in any way a substitute for a proper introduction.
Look guys! I made us lucky charms! Now we can be even more like Sora, Riku and Kairi!
By the end of the opening scenes, all we know about them is that Terra and Aqua are about to take the exam to become Keyblade Masters, and they all want to stay together. Why they should be worried about being split up is left to the imagination of the player. Presumably, their lives are going to change if the older two get that promotion, but we don't know that, because the game hasn't bothered to say even a handful of words about what it means to be a 'Master' in this world, and little of what previous games have told us on the subject is any help. In KH1, Sora was chosen to be a Keyblade 'Master' when the Keyblade appeared in his hands, in a response to the threat of the Heartless – as explained to us at length once you reach Traverse Town (later stuff involving Riku and Mickey complicates this a lot, but the premise remains pretty sound). In BBS there aren't any Heartless – or Nobodies, or even any Unversed yet – but Keyblade users appear to be numerous, and even have an established hierarchy of masters and students. What exactly is it they do in this world? How does one get a Keyblade? Do they appear in random kids' hands like Sora's did? Does a master come by, declare you a suitable student and teach you how to summon it? Did these kids dream of becoming Keyblade Masters or was it an uncomfortable duty that was thrust upon them? How long have they been training together? Unlike Sora and Roxas, there's nothing said about who these kids were before the Keyblades came into their lives, and next to nothing shown of their relationship except that snippet to show that they're 'just like Sora, Riku and Kairi'. Seriously – they're not.
If anything, that opening scene even contradicts the few decent pieces of information we get about their past later in the game. 'Haven't we always been together?' says Aqua when Ven mentions a vague memory of having once seen a different sky. Later, it's revealed in flashback that Ven only joined them (at most) a few years earlier, amnesic and borderline catatonic. No, Aqua, you haven't been, and don't you think him remembering something like that might be just a little bit important?
The game does redeem itself eventually by answering most of these questions as it goes along, but they're such minor plot points when revealed that I just... I mean, why couldn't they have been fitted in at the start? There's good reason why the writers might have wanted to keep the introduction brief – it means less delay before you get to select which character you want to play first – but the frustrating thing is that it would have taken so little more to make the difference. One or two flashbacks, a few lines of dialogue of the characters recalling how they first got their Keyblades – even a couple of paragraphs of cliched movie-style opening prologue starting with the words, 'In a world where...' - really would have made a world of difference.
I think it also bears mentioning that even when we do get the backstory, a lot of it never appears outside the Xehanort reports. I liked the way the reports worked in KH1 and 2, but between BBS, TWEWY and some of the early reviews about FFXIII, I worry that Squeenix are starting to lean way too much on giving the player huge chunks of text they can access via the menu system as a way of getting out of actually telling the story. Not a promising trend.
Opening over with, it's time to pick which of the characters you want to play first.
TerraTerra is terribly sweet, but a bit dense, and painfully bad with people. He's the game's designated 'character who will spend his story struggling with his own darkness', and has connections to Riku, though he's got little if any of the same arrogance and smugness. It's something of a mystery where the darkness to his character is supposed to come from (see above complaints about the introduction), and that made him rather hard to relate to through the early worlds in his story – though it does play a role in making him distinct. While Riku dived head-first into his own fling with evil and had to spend much of the next two games digging himself out again, Terra spends the game fighting it unsuccessfully, torn between Xehanort and his own master's contradictory advice. It's not much of a spoiler to say it doesn't end well for him; the tragedy is that it's hard to picture how he could have done much better.
I could complain about his lacking emotional range and tendency to walk right up to suspicious figures in long black cloaks and horned hats and politely ask for directions, but I think it'd be fairer to talk about him as a guy who must've spent a very long time training to be a Keyblade master because it is painfully obvious that Keyblades are the only thing he understands. The only times he seems to be in his depth are when he's talking to other Keyblade users – his friends, Xehanort and Yen Sid (plus one other example I probably should not say much about for spoiler reasons). The rest of the time he just sort of bumbles around, trusting basically whoever he runs into first in new worlds, which tends to go badly for him because Terra nearly always runs into the bad guys. Considering that he looks like the oldest and most mature, it's sorta fascinating just how badly equipped he is to deal with life beyond school. He doesn't come across as stupid, just badly naïve – arguably his biggest failing is that he lacks the cynicism to know evil when he sees it. I can only assume all those years being told that Xehanort is one of the good guys has damaged his bad-news-radar beyond repair. Ultimately I did find myself liking him a lot as a character, and some of his scenes towards the end of the game are heartbreakingly effective. The whole 'Come To The Dark Side' schtick has been done a million times before, but I don't think it's ever been done to a character who's such an utter sweetheart as Terra. Despite initial misgivings about the intro, his story was by far my favourite out of the the three. The way a lot of details tie back into hints dropped in KHII and Final Mix worked beautifully – with just the right mix of that makes so much sense and I never would have seen that coming.
VenVen is the mysterious one, and also the cute one – I did like Terra, but after a whole game's worth of his polite stoicism, Ven was a real breath of fresh air. I might even go as far as recommending him as the one people should play first (despite what the game seems to want you to do), since his story is easier to get into, and gives you enough introduction to the other two leads to mitigate some of the problems early in the plot. He's got more in common with Sora than either version of Roxas, particularly all the enthusiasm and wonder for each new world he visits, but his backstory and motivations are still different enough that he still feels like a new and different character to either of them. Between his odd reverse-grip and focus on speed, his fighting style is pretty distinctive too.
This is a bit confusing, because there are points where the game does seem to be pushing the idea that he and Roxas are effectively one and the same, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It seems likely that both Ven and Roxas will be back in some form when we finally get KH3. I hope the plan isn't to merge them into one being, because I like them both too much as individuals, and I can't see a hybrid version working well.
Much like Terra's nasty ending, it's not much of a spoiler that there's some bad stuff lurking in Ven's missing memories (the very opening scene tells you as much). It would have been easy to picture the writers throwing him headfirst into the role of helpless cutie, to be mope around until he can be rescued by his devoted big brother and/or sister. But even despite his own set of heartbreaking scenes, and how very close he (justifiably) gets to giving up towards the end of the game, he never does hit the Heroic BSOD level, and quite plainly refuses to play straight into his enemies hands until there's no option left. Under all the cuteness he's got some real guts, and I like that.
Ultimately though, I found Ven's ending a lot less satisfying than Terra's – it just felt like we'd been promised so much more than what was delivered. For example, [vague spoilers follow]Terra and Aqua's stories both include scenes where they meet widdle!Sora and Riku on Destiny Islands, after which they both receive Plot Relevant Keyblades – ie, the ones we saw them using in the KHII secret ending, similar but subtly different to their initial equipment. Said scenes are absolutely, BRAIN MELTINGLY ADORABLE on a level that has to be seen to be believed, but neither are actually all that important to the plot. By contrast, we know from the very first scene that Ven has a connection with Sora, giving the impression that the two of them are pretty much buddy-breathing with Sora's soul (and I am just saying, that ended really badly in Tsubasa and are you sure you kids have thought this through?), so clearly what is going on here is that Ven is going to have a huge plot-relevant scene with widdle!Sora in about the same part of his story, and the Destiny Island scenes for the other two characters were included mostly for symmetry, right?
In point of fact, Ven does not ever get a scene with widdle!Sora. He doesn't even get his Plot Relevant Keyblade. The opening scene with Sora goes unremarked on until the very end of the very last scene of the game, which left me with the uncomfortable feeling that you could just lop off the start and end of the story without impacting on anything in the middle, and I don't think I'd call that a sign of good storytelling. Especially when the link between Ven and Sora is one of the biggest mysteries of the game.
Ven's story is also unfortunately central to my main issue with the ending, or more to the point, with a rather large plothole that five different endings never got around to filling in. Some context here: among the promises made about the plot of BBS is that a key point would be the explanation for why Keyblade users were common ten years ago, but Sora is considered rare and unusual in the present. Actually, this is such a big irritant for me that I'm going to quote the whole statement:
- Interviewer: [...] So there were some things I wanted to ask you about Birth by Sleep, it seems that in this game Keyblades become a point of interest in the story.
Nomura: Indeed. However, in order for the story to proceed, I got the feeling that we needed to explain what exactly this thing that is shrouded in mysteries called a Keyblade really was. In the world of Birth by Sleep, multiple people can use a Keyblade, why is it that this sort of activity has disappeared from Sora’s world, those sorts of concealed secrets are revealed in this title. This time it is established in the story that Terra, Ventus, and Aqua are pupils being raised as successors of a Keyblade Master. From there those three’s story begins.
[Rather bigger spoilers to follow] So first, we play through Terra's story, and while we only catch glimpses of what's going on with Ven, it's strongly hinted that 1) Xehanort's plans include creating some kind of uber-powerful Keyblade, called something like the X-Blade, 2) Ven is part of this plan. We don't find out the details in Terra's story, but it doesn't seem like too much to imagine that it's going to be somehow related to the creation of Sora's Keyblade – and possibly even the nullification of a lot of other Keyblades as well – and that's just more incentive to move straight on to Ven, right? So we play Ven's story, and indeed, we learn the X-Blade may destroy the universe just by existing, and we get to the final boss battle and we get to see it, and low and behold it looks like a crazy art project with Sora and Mickey's keys stuck in the middle! Ven's story kinda fades out before we find out quite what happens to it though. Anyway, on to Aqua's story, which is supposed to be the one that tidies up all the loose ends, and her final battle includes a fight against someone holding this nasty X-Blade. She wins the battle, the X-Blade vanishes, cue credits.
Apparently we've missed something.
Five minutes on the web proved to us that we had – there's a bit more plot on the end that you have to play through all three characters' story modes to unlock, but which you only get if you happened to fight a particular optional boss in Terra's mode to receive the last Secret Report. We hadn't, so we loaded up Terra's story again, finished that last detail, fought his final boss again, and loaded up the extra episode.
Stuff happens, one minor detail from KHII:Final Mix is explained, the Evil X-Blade of Doom is never mentioned. The universe appears undamaged, Aqua's Keyblade still appears to be functioning fine, Mickey and his Master are clearly still doing just as fine – there's not so much as a cutscene showing the X-Blade breaking into significantly shaped pieces before it disappears. The story still feels oddly incomplete.
Five more minutes on the Internet, and we discover there's another secret ending, that you have to do god-knows-what to unlock. At this point we say, screw it, and go straight to youtube. So we watch the extra ending, and get to see some nice hints dropped about the likely content of KH3. The X-Blade remains conspicuous in how utterly and completely everyone has forgotten about it.
Thanks to the ending, a handful of Keyblade users are out of action, but Mickey's still around, and the game heavily implied there are more out there in the universe. What, if anything, has changed here?
Maybe some of this disappointment is my own fault for latching on to that detail so hard, but when the director says a game will cover Plot Point X, it's hard not to feel ripped off when the game goes straight from W to Y.
If there is any mitigating factor to all this, it's going back to the Internet and finding another interview with Nomura, which mentions plans to change some scenes in the English version of the game to clarify things – maybe even turn out a Final Mix version. I'm just going to have to hope he's thinking about the same 'unclear' plot points I am.
AquaAnd at last we get to Aqua – otherwise known as a good 50% of the reason I was so excited about this game, dating all the way back to a certain trailer from TGS 08. In evidence we present my con report from the time, in which the game I was excited about might be better described as “The story of this AWESOME girl called Aqua, and these two guys who might be sorta interesting or something.” The KH series has been badly short in the kickarse heroine department for years, and that trailer left everyone in our group that day with the the strong impression that Aqua was going to be that girl – so you can imagine how much of a let-down it was when every trailer released after that made her look successively more generically girly. My expectations had dropped a long way by the time we actually got hold of the game, my few remaining hopes pinned on the slim chance the newer trailer had caught her at a bad moment.
Finally we get to play the game, and her role in that introduction I was ranting about a few paragraphs back is close to painful, with a lot of giggling at nothing and rhapsodising on about staying with her friends. Several key bits of voice acting from that first trailer that impressed me so much had actually been rerecorded to sound (IMO) less effective when we finally got to them in the game, which is a crying shame*. But once you're past the opening and into the game proper, it does become apparent that Aqua is usually a whole lot better than that intro would have us believe, and, more importantly, has the kind of serious side you could crush rocks on. There's something fascinatingly soldier-like about Aqua – she takes orders, asks the right questions and gets the job done. She still has her girly moments, but they tend to show up in scenes like (eg, minor spoiler?) when she runs up to greet an (obviously) possessed ally, almost-but-not-quite gets herself into real danger, takes two steps back, whips out her keyblade and makes it very clear she's going to knock said friend back to his senses using as much violence as necessary. It's an odd combination of character traits and I'm having a hard time thinking of anywhere I've seen it before. A couple of the more series magical girl anime are the closest analogue that springs to mind, but they tend to have to fight their villains with the ~power of love~ rather than a magic sword, and rarely share the same playing field as the guys. Hm. Lina Inverse, maybe?
The most important thing about Aqua might be that the game doesn't treat her like a girl. She's equal – if not superior – in skill to her male companions, not the least inclined to fainting or panicking at the first sign of danger, and is no more likely than the others to have to be rescued, or suffer the indignity of being told to stay out of things because it's too dangerous (if anything, that's Ven's role, and there mostly because he's the youngest). She's arguably even more capable than the boys in a several key respects (whereas Terra gets a round of applause whenever he spots the bad guys before it's too late, Aqua only has to walk past Cinderella's evil step-family in the corridor to know they're bad news). She's refreshingly unromantic, showing nothing beyond platonic affection for either of her male friends, nor any more fascination with the happily-ever-afters of all the Disney princes and princesses than the satisfaction of knowing she helped save the day. Heck, she once rescues a prince. For almost all intents and purposes, her gender is completely irrelevant.
She's still girlier than I'd prefer at points, but taking a broader perspective, it might not be a bad thing that the game gives us a female who can be a little girly but still utterly competent where it counts. What I'm basically getting at here is that she's not the character I hoped she would be, but the character she is doesn't lack for redeeming features and a good quota of moments of awesome.
Putting her character aside, the real disappointment I had about Aqua's story – and after all the effort I spent ripping into Days I'd be a bit of a hypocrite not to bring this up – is it's just a little too easy to imagine how the whole game could have played out, still covering every major plot point – without her in it. Unlike Terra and Ven, who both feature crucially in Xehanort's plans, he never pays any attention to Aqua, nor does her story arc reveal anything much that wasn't in the other two. She's important in the sense that the dynamic between the three main characters is a big part of the story that couldn't have been the same with two rather than three, and she does have a big role to play at the end – there's at least one post-game interview out there where Nomura makes the case that it's arguably more her story than either of the boys, and I can see where he's coming from. But when her big moment of glory is [More vague spoilers] to be the one left on her feet to fight one last battle against each of the boys' final bosses at the end – y'know, that works as a purpose for her in theory, but in practice it would have worked a lot better if Terra and Ven's stories hadn't given us the impression that both those bosses had already been defeated (or at least beaten into a state of plot-relevant amnesia) in the first round. Given everything the boys had been put through by that point, there was far more emotional resonance in their victories than in Aqua's, so declaring that the Big Bads weren't quite down so that she could step in and finish them off – that achieved... what, exactly? The game never really bothers to give us an answer. When the game had so many plot elements that were underdeveloped or unresolved, it seems like such a waste that so little was done with Aqua's story. It's another case where I think I can see what they were trying to do, but the execution came off lacking.
* I'm just saying, there's a big difference between the line, 'Ven mo shiteru desshou', (“'You should know that too, Ven.”) delivered to sound like 'you should know better than to doubt our friend', and delivered to sound like she's comforting a nervous little kid. No prizes for guessing which I preferred.
Xehanort
Is not a playable character, but gets a separate section because in a lot of ways, he's what ties the whole story together – and back into the KH series, despite coming across as a very different character to any of his other incarnations. He's the chessmaster of the story, guiding his hapless pawns around the board, and a lot of the tragedy of the story is that no-one realises until it's too late. Like the other characters, it would've been nice to get a better introduction to him outside the Xehanort Reports, but since we knew him from previous games it's less jarring. Not much more interesting as a character than he's ever been before, but functional as a villain.
Final story thoughs
So I think I've established now that the story has it's problems, and the issues we had with the start and the end are just the big ones. The plot is uncomfortably tail-heavy, revealing almost nothing until the final scenes, and then doing so in such a rush that a lot doesn't get explained at all. The 'seven princesses of light' plot point introduced in the first three worlds doesn't really go anywhere, except as vague foreshadowing for events in KH1. The last four worlds have very little relevance to the overall story, and yet unlike several optional worlds in KH1 and 2, the game will not let you advance until you've completed them. The mysterious title 'Birth by Sleep' is never explained, nor even mentioned save for a single throwaway line in the secret ending which doesn't really clarify anything. The whole explanation for the existence of the Unversed – when you finally get to it – is about a sentence long, and not very convincing. The measures that keep the three main characters traveling separately are inevitably contrived – one can't help but wonder how much trouble could have been saved if they'd just sat down and traded notes – and the moral lessons Terra picks up on his travels tend to be delivered with all the grace and subtlety of an anvil from the sky. The constant repetition of how important the trio are to each other is suffers from the ol' show-and-tell problem too.
At the heart of it all, I suspect that most of the problems weren't with the BBS story itself, but the requirement that it be split it up it up between three protagonists – and made to work as a complete narrative no matter which order the player chooses them. Not an impossible challenge for a good writer, but it would have to make the job of telling the story much harder, and a lot of the pacing issues BBS was left with are probably the direct result of the writers not knowing quite how to structure it all. On top of that, KHII was so very satisfying as a story that it's a tough act to follow. It didn't leave them all that much to work with either, in the sense of unresolved plot points that future instalments could pick up on, and the few hooks they've left themselves have required making the mythology even more convoluted with every new game.
On the other hand, the connection to KHII is also what gives the story a lot of its best moments. Getting to visit Radiant Garden in all its former glory is a big highlight – even seeing Mickey training with Yen Sid was kinda neat. The cameos of the human Organisation members may have been a bit fanservicy, but I liked them (they certainly do a much better job of filling in the Org's backstory than anything in Days) and the ending more than justifies their inclusion. A lot of our favourite moments – in Terra's story in particular – came from the little things that tie back into offhand comments or random details from KHII in creative and unexpected ways. A few of those tie-ins felt clumsier than others (Aqua's armour being left with Xehanort and Castle Oblivion in particular), but on the whole those moments went a long way to making up for the elements that didn't work so well.
I still do have some hopes that the changes they're making for the English version will clear up a few of those issues, though I'm sure it's far too much to hope for major changes. Still, a few tweaks can go a long way, so I'll at least be withholding final judgement on the plot until I can see what they add.
Very curious about how the manga version of this one will turn out too. Sure, the KH mangas are always cheesy and dumb, but in a fun way, and they tend to give more space for cute character moments than the games do.
In Conclusion
So that was my Birth by Sleep experience. There are a lot of things I really liked about it, and a lot of things I really didn't like about it – I'd have a really tough time deciding how to rate it overall. Heck, I could just as easily get into a big debate with someone who loved it or who hated it. I feel like there was a lot of promise in the concept that the game just didn't live up to – but we're not talking hours of my life I want back. It's a game that's frustrating because it was so close to being a lot better.
I guess the other big question is, between this and other recent instalments to the KH series, how are things looking for the next big one, the inevitable KH3?
Seriously, between this, and what little I've read about Coded, and the sludgepile that was Days, the mythology of the series is getting so convoluted it's getting close to impenetrable. That's not a great start. The final scene of that secret ending leaves us with a big hint about KH3 – [More spoilers!] so now we know that that letter from Mickey we saw at the end of KH2 was all about the events of BBS, and Sora appears to be off on a mission to rescue the BBS leads – all well and good. I'm not quite sure if I can see that carrying a full game, and compared to the action-heavy teasers at the end of KH1 and KH2, it falls a bit flat – 'let's clean up some loose ends from some other game' just isn't as exciting a premise as 'ohshit, gotta go save the world'. It feels a bit like what probably should be the 'big reveal' of the next game from Sora's POV – ie that there were Keyblade Masters before his time, and they need his help – has already happened, off-screen, without us even getting to see his reaction to the news. It's all perfectly logical for post-KH2 events, it's just a bit... dull.
What they really need for KH3 is a new villain, and it's going to take a lot to make me buy it if it's Xehanort again (who's been more effectively pulversied and incinerated than GLADOS by this point). To be fair though, I had similar misgivings to the idea that KH2 was going to centre around conflict between the good guys and a big team of black-coated pretty boys, so hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
More importantly, Sora, if you think you're leaving Riku and Kairi behind to go running off this time, we are going to have words. D<
But KH3 is still so far over the horizon at this stage that it's probably useless to speculate too much. Best I can say for BBS itself is that it's well worth picking up, but probably best to go in without your expectations too high where plot coherency is involved.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-19 07:23 pm (UTC)Ok, I still haven't played this game, but is it just me, or do all KH games except KH2 (which still had a huge body count... I'm especially bitter about Axel's and Demyx's deaths, and frankly I think Roxas' and Naminè's fate is de facto a form of death) have a depressing ending?
KH1 ends with the main character's best friend inexplicably deciding to stay behind the Door (supposedly he couldn't get out, but they never explain that in the game itself, so that scene always baffled me), which looked for all the world like a rather pointless and WTF-inducing Heroic Sacrifice. And the main character is then separated from his other best friend, for reasons they once again don't bother to explain.
In Chain of Memories, Sora goes to sleep and he loses all his memories of the adventure, as well as waste a whole year of his life. And poor Riku Replica...
Then there is 358/2 Days, which I refused to play because it was a foregone conclusion that all the characters would die.
It's The Thing that has been seriously bothering me as a KH fan. I was (unreasonably, I know) hoping that Birth By Sleep would let its characters get a happy ending, ala the Sora/Riku/Kairi reunion in KH2.
What they really need for KH3 is a new villain, and it's going to take a lot to make me buy it if it's Xehanort again (who's been more effectively pulversied and incinerated than GLADOS by this point).
On the one side, I'm sick and tired of him too.
But on the other hand, if both his Heartless and his nobody have been destroyed, doesn't that mean that he should come back to life the a whole human being he once was?
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 12:58 pm (UTC)KH1 ends with the main character's best friend inexplicably deciding to stay behind the Door (supposedly he couldn't get out, but they never explain that in the game itself, so that scene always baffled me), which looked for all the world like a rather pointless and WTF-inducing Heroic Sacrifice. And the main character is then separated from his other best friend, for reasons they once again don't bother to explain.
Yeah, on that point I'm in full agreement, the whole ending of KH1 was so ridiculous we were laughing out loud at it. (To close the door, you need one guy on the light side, to hold up the key and push it closed - and two guys on the other side, to hold up the key and push it closed! Perfect sense, right?) Honestly, those scenes are a big part of why I was so surprised the KH2 plot was so much better - or at the very least, more internally consistent.
In Chain of Memories, Sora goes to sleep and he loses all his memories of the adventure, as well as waste a whole year of his life. And poor Riku Replica...
I thought that was quite a poignant ending, personally. The Riku Replica did get a raw deal though, poor thing.
It's The Thing that has been seriously bothering me as a KH fan. I was (unreasonably, I know) hoping that Birth By Sleep would let its characters get a happy ending, ala the Sora/Riku/Kairi reunion in KH2.
There, I wouldn't worry, since it's pretty damn obvious that the whole point of KH3 is going to be to rescue and reunite them. KH1 and BBS were both just part one of a two part story - we've got to wait for the next part to find out how Han Solo gets out of his Carbonite prison, kind of thing. There's even some vague implications we'll be seeing characters like Axel and Roxas back (and, heaven forbid, Xion), which I'm not sure I'm as happy about.
But on the other hand, if both his Heartless and his nobody have been destroyed, doesn't that mean that he should come back to life the a whole human being he once was?
Personally I'd interpret it as meaning his body and heart have both been separately pulverised. Unless there's still some of him left in Riku (which is vaguely implied despite the number of times you fight him), he seems very, very dead.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 10:44 pm (UTC)I'm still not sure whether or not I'd give it a try--it worries me as well that with the KH series that they've overworked the mythos, and while I thought I might give it a try for Aqua alone, what you say about her character and actual importance to the plot makes me sad.
Also, the fact that they had to make her more girly before actually releasing the game. >_<;; Argh. That seems to be a trend with some of my favorite female protagonists these days.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-22 03:24 am (UTC)What can I say, I finished the game with so many confused thoughts and strong opinions about it I pretty much had to write it all down just to get it out of my system. ^^;
it worries me as well that with the KH series that they've overworked the mythos
Especially considering that the mythos was always so handwavy from the start, and that so many of the interesting points (particularly the whole history of the Keyblade-users) got so glossed over so briefly in this game. Sometimes it all links up really well, other times it's a bit too obvious they're making up the rules as they go, and the more rules they add, the messier it gets.
and actual importance to the plot.
That's a really weird one, honestly. You can tell the producers genuinely wanted her to be an important character with a major role (perhaps even the major role) and they do present her as such. It's just when you step back and ask yourself why she needed to be there at the end, the only clear answer is 'because the writers decided she did, but didn't really bother to justify it'. I can definitely recommend the game for the gameplay, but I'm seriously conflicted about the plot.
Also, the fact that they had to make her more girly before actually releasing the game. >_<;; Argh. That seems to be a trend with some of my favorite female protagonists these days.
Yeah, tell me about it. I'm still a little bitter about how Terra/Tina came across in Dissidia, and I was never even much of an FFVI fan to begin with. I suspect the trailer was the kind of thing that gets rushed out in a hurry before the story is fully formed and that the voice acting in those scenes was done just for the trailer, but it sucked to find out that part of what attracted me to the game wasn't actually in the final product.
It seems like there were a lot of people looking forward to the game because of her - and in a fandom known for bashing established female leads like Kairi that was really nice to see. I do still like Aqua a lot, just not as much as I was expecting to.
Very nice
Date: 2010-09-04 05:54 am (UTC)I dared to play "Days"(my brother got the game thus played it first), or really, continue to play "Days" even after I read the review for it. In fact...I haven't even finished the game due to Xion being the most annoying being in the world(but I do plan to finish what I started before I play BBS).
And since everything you stated was pretty much a fact, I trust your word more than anything so I'm pleased to hear that BBS isn't near what Days was. I'm especially pleased about your review of Aqua. I learned not to have high expectations on females of KH after Xion>.>
So as cool and awesome Aqua looked, I avoided making any assumptions in case I was let down again.
I'm extremely happy to know the game didn't treat her according to her gender.
Thank you vey much for this review!
-ShadowYin-Yang
Re: Very nice
Date: 2010-09-04 04:10 pm (UTC)Ha, very much like my story then, since my sister bought Days, and I might have gone on to play it after her if I hadn't seen and heard enough by then to know those were hours of my life I wouldn't be getting back. (You probably don't need to finish it, really - I don't think there's anything in there that really matters to BBS.)
And since everything you stated was pretty much a fact, I trust your word more than anything so I'm pleased to hear that BBS isn't near what Days was.
^^; YMMV and all that - my reviews are always going to be a bit opinionated. Really, BBS has it's flaws, but it's worth the cover price for the gameplay alone.
I'm extremely happy to know the game didn't treat her according to her gender.
*nodnod* As I said above, she's still girlier than I'd like, but she's definitely not in any way 'the girl' or 'the princess' - after characters like Kairi (we will not speak of Xion) she's a very nice change. And I always love to see how much KH fandom as a whole seems to be looking foward to getting a game with a strong female lead like her. :3
Thank you vey much for this review!
Thank you for reading it all the way through. ^^; I really got carried away with this one.
Re: Very nice
Date: 2011-01-15 10:47 pm (UTC)Took me a month after I even got BBS to even play and when I beat it(secret ending and all) my computer died; got it back forever later, took another while to get it updated and stuff, and here I am after all that time to do a small chat about BBS with you if possible.
So I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts on Vanitas and Eraqus if anything? Vanitas ended up as my favorite KH antagonist not to mention after a few discussions with friends even thought of a possible idea to why he has that face.
Oh and will you be doing a review for Re:Coded?
Re: Very nice
Date: 2011-01-15 10:48 pm (UTC)Took me a month after I even got BBS to even play and when I beat it(secret ending and all) my computer died; got it back forever later, took another while to get it updated and stuff, and here I am after all that time to do a small chat about BBS with you if possible.
So I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts on Vanitas and Eraqus if anything? Vanitas ended up as my favorite KH antagonist not to mention after a few discussions with friends even thought of a possible idea to why he has that face.
Oh and will you be doing a review for Re:Coded?
-ShadowYin-Yang
no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 06:03 am (UTC)Days i must agree... was a bit of a disappointment, though i played through it just for the satisfaction of having beat another KH game and getting more story... Xion i did actually like enough that it made me rather sad when she "Died" but i think they really should have left her out... the only real point she had(to me) was to give Roxas his ability to dual wield with her going back to him and Sora....
As for BBS. i am still currently playing though but i played through two full stories to get the gist of it. Ven was interesting and i did enjoy who he was and his story, though i saw him more like Sora and slowly turned into Roxas by the end by how he acted. Terra, i agree with you, outside of his world... hes like a lost child and how he ended... just makes me sad for him. as for Aqua... I'm still playing through.. but i really like her for being different from the other original females for the series. I just have trouble playing as her, so i wind up dieing a lot with her. But from what i seen... she is more of the one who ties it all together.
It explains why Xemnas was so interested in the armor that resembled hers. why the sentiment looked like Terra's armor. as well as why Ven and Roxas are similar.
by far my favorite would have to be Vanitas, as well as to the fact he gets his own music score, making him an even more unique villain. Though i doubt it one of my friends does presume that he will be back.... i feel that he is back to how he was before but another side nags at the feeling we haven't seen the last of him.
As for Xehanort... its already been stated that he will be back... as his heartless and nobody were destroyed in the correct order.... him... i think they really need to delve a little further into besides his reports.... and even though he said that there were no relations between characters other then what is shown.... i feel that Xehanort is related to Riku i thought that when i saw the young Xehanort at the beginning... then the cutsceen from Terra's story on Destiny Islands just solidified my theory on that, as well as how often Riku interacts with Xehanort... it just hints there is a family relationship there somewhere...
The keyblade mytho is really starting to get a little to large... but i think its somewhat decent....
I just find it rather funny that Xehanort is at the heart of all the problems in each game... he is the reason for the unversed, the reason for the heartless invasion.... and in relation the start of the nobodies.
but he will be coming back in the next major title that features Sora either as Master Xehanort or the Xehanort we saw in the KH2 cut-scene will be determined later....
As for if Sora leaves Riku and Kairi again... he may and team up with Donald and Goofy again. or since Riku now has a Keyblade of his own and Kairi is now known to be able to use one.... he may very well team up with them in the "KH3"
anyway... love your reviews and cant wait to read more of the KH review
-just wish i could learn Japanese enough to be able to read it and play the Final Mix Versions-
~Vanitas