Seeing how there was no lock on the door and there was no reason for it to be locked in the first place, I guess the first thought that would come to mind is, "Wtf isn't my door, that's never locked, opening?" instead of "Derp, my door that is never locked is locked. Lmao KEYBLADE TIME BISHES!"
You've got your derp all wrong.
He SHOULD have thought, "Gee, the door won't open, it might be locked, let's use this key which can unlock any door to see if that will do anything," instead of "LET'S PUSH ON THE DOOR ONCE AND THEN GIVE UP HERP, GUESS THAT'S IT AND WE'LL HAVE TO LET HEARTLESS ATTACK MY CASTLE DERP."
Thats besides the point anyway. The point was to show that there was nothing beyond the room they were in because they weren't in their castle. That's like saying why didn't Roxas use a corridor of darkness to pop right in TCTNW, and hell even in Xemnas' bedroom, if he wanted to fight Xemnas? It's not the point they were trying to get across.
You're right, it is like saying that, because that's another example of the writers failing to consider another angle from the logic of the KH universe.
If the "point" you're trying to make undermines the logic of the actions taken, then you have to wonder whether it's a point worth making.
And in any case, there WAS something beyond the room, the datascape (plus Sora opens it from the outside meaning that, yes, IT'S STILL A DOOR AND IT CAN BE OPENED). The only reason why the writers locked them in was to drag out the plot.
we've already established that Re:Coded doesn't make it up the list because of it's plot. there isn't much of a plot but a long as explanation to mickey to forward and info to forward to Riku and Sora. Plot alone doesn't make a game amazing and if it is to you that is the source of your butt hurt
Uh, I don't know about you, but half the reason I play these games is for the plot, so if the plot in itself is horrible, then no matter how great the gameplay is, it isn't going to reconcile that, so the game will be far from "amazing."
You're right as far as there not being much to the plot goes, which is why I don't hold this game to the same standard as the others. Nevertheless, a shitty plot is a shitty plot. So the only difference is that while I do recognize this game's story is bad, I don't really care simply because it doesn't matter that much.
But, hey, while we're on the subject of what makes me butthurt, why don't I just give you a more comprehensive impression of the game:
To get the praise out of the way, I loved the gameplay. The controls were more refined than Days and the command system translated from BbS as well. Even if the command system was overall watered down in the same way that Days was a watered down KH1/2 copy, it actually did some things better than BbS. For starters, I love that you can experiment and don't have to permanently meld like in BbS (also, commands that can be fused with the current one are highlighted in yellow which, while small, saves a lot of time and drudgery). I liked the CPU Matrix too (and the "cheats" were clever), though I thought the panel system in Days was a bit better. I just enjoy those puzzles as opposed to automatically leveling up. Lastly, I was glad to see some of the better translations of dialogue return, even if the story is weak as hell and idiotic.
And all of the different system were like-able enough. The shmup portion was fun, the side scrolling platforming was ok, and I think I enjoyed the rudimentary turn-based battles a bit too much.
Now that that's out of the way, on to plot.
I know this shouldn't be the first thing on my list of points, but it's been on my mind: What the freak is with Donald, Goofy, and Mickey being Sora's cheering squad? It pisses me off. The whole, "WE'RE ROOTING FOR YOU" "OH WE CAN'T STOP YOU, THAT'S SORA FOR YA!" seriously grinds my gears. It's used excessively. It wouldn't bother me, actually, if it weren't for the fact that they're so goddamn passive, even when they have the chance to act. Yeah, Mickey comes in at the critical moments, and there's Donald and Goofy in Hollow Bastion. I even understand that they needed to use them as little as possible because the party system wouldn't work out.
However, it doesn't excuse the many times when they could have helped. The most blatant issue is when Sora decides to go in Riku's data. He pulls the classic "I have to do this on my own" bullshit without giving any justifiable excuse and you know what? Mickey and co. just roll with it. "Remember: You're not going in there alone." No, Mickey, he is. What happened to the Donald and Goofy of KH2, the ones who said, "You're coming with us whether you want to or not"?
I know you might think I overreact to this, but the message this gives off just sickens me. That they can be there in "heart" instead of ACTUALLY being there with their friend, even when they have the choice to go. They ignored the king's orders in KH2 because they wanted to be there for their friends, regardless of the stakes. They didn't say, "We'll be with the others in heart." The message that evokes isn't true to life because it shouldn't work like that. Friendship is about making oneself vulnerable. By standing aside and letting someone do something on their own, using that symbolic bullshit just seems hollow.
Ok. Now that that's out of the way, here are some other points:
- The plot as a whole. Seriously, I still say this is an unnecessary game. Why? Because it could all be condensed to one scene in, say, KH3D. I know there are people that will say, "But if you didn't have coded, you wouldn't be able to blah." Let me give you a scenario: There are no bugs. Just the message. They analyze the message and find it was left by Namine. Bam. That's it. There are plenty of ways to do it. Hell, skip right over that. If Jiminy really missed an entire page with a mysterious message on it until after KH2, I'm sure instead of being cryptic Namine could have used up that page and wrote in detail what Data-Namine essentially said at the end of Re:coded. The bugs ultimately were just to stretch out what shouldn't have even been a game in the first place (their explanation is contrived, as I'll point out). Really, what it comes out to is that they made a game out of something as simple as Mickey finding out that Sora has some "hurt" in him. Sounds like the beginning of a game, not an entire thing. It's padded with filter and stretched to the point where it should tear. And ultimately, the end product is the message sent to Sora. So we're left where we were in the KH2 prologue. You know. In 2005/2006.
- Pete and Maleficent. Villains of the week. Also meant to drag out the plot. They were jokes and Maleficent has been degraded to a comic relief. She went from a legitimate threat in the first, to an ancillary villain in the second, and now this. Trying to take over... a journal. How the mighty have fallen. I much would have preferred she died in KH2. KH1 for that matter. And what happened to the whole TCTNW ordeal anyway? They were supposed to take it over, how's that working out for them? Oh, yeah, and the way Pete infiltrates the data? Hilariously stupid. So... he can just sneak into a castle in a WORLD that he was banished from? Shit, if only it were that easy with Hollow Bastion!
- An interesting note that makes a large chunk of the game laughable: Data-Riku imports Mickey and co. fairly early in the story. Yet they aren't needed in the data until Hollow Bastion. Because all they were doing up to that point was the SAME thing they were doing in the outside: sitting on their asses, letting Data Sora do the work, playing freaking solitaire on that absurd desktop. Oh, and total dunce moment for Mickey (ie failed script): They get locked into the room. And he tries pushing on the door and gives up. Uh, Mickey, you have A freakING KEY WHICH CAN UNLOCK ANYTHING. Christ.
- Back to the whole bug ordeal, the explanation is, oh wait here comes the magic word for Kingdom Hearts, convoluted. So... Namine inserting the hurt into the journal caused the bugs. Ok. Well it was just fine until they digitized it, so they essentially created their own problem, but whatever. But wait. So the bugs are actually accumulating and evolving in Sora's heartless? Wait, what? How does that work? Why? Completely random. The explanation Riku gives is nonsense (and it drags on, rather hilariously, as Sora's heartless just sits there for some time and lets Riku do the explaining). The heartless "minds" go to Sora's Heartless? Uh... what? Why couldn't it have just been, "The data- hearts released from the data-heartless are fake, and since there is no Kingdom Hearts in the journal, they accumulated in the form of Sora's heartless." HEARTS would have still worked better than MINDS. I also like how Riku "deduces" this when he has a eureka moment. I would like to know what form of logic he was using when he arrived at that conclusion. Just the idea of the bugs being caused by the hurt is idiotic. I mean, it wasn't the real hurt (which is deep in Sora's actual heart), just a copy. Why would what she freaking writes down cause bugs? Jesus. I could think of a better idea for the bugs on the spot: Since the journal is about Sora, it has two accounts of events: From Sora's perspective and from Roxas' perspective (since the journal is deeply linked to Sora, it should also be linked to Roxas). That is, it has to process two alternate accounts of Agrabah and Wonderland and whatnot. That would also explain why Roxas was in the game (which, you know, wasn't explained, he was just thrown in there).
- The episodic nature of this game really leaks through even in re:coded. I like how in Hollow Bastion, we essentially have a recap of each world and then, oh look, another freaking recap of each world in Castle Oblivion. Wow. Not like that wasn't old the first time. Not like you're trying to stretch the plot out any further. On the note of the Castle Oblivion recaps, boy was that stupid. Offering the illusion of choice. Roxas said Sora could do whatever he wanted. Initially, I figured this would mean we could do one of three things: The right thing (what Sora would normally do), a neutral alternate thing, or a bad thing.
But of course this really wasn't the case in hardly any of the worlds. For example: Traverse town only had different cards depending on the order you saved the twins. Lame. It should have been: Save them in the right order, save them in the wrong order, don't save them. Some kind of moral decision making. You should have ACTUALLY been able to steal the White Rabbit's watch or let the card soldier die. And the rest are pretty much time-based. You get different cards based on how long you take to finish certain tasks. Haha, wow, "Anything I want," Roxas?
- Unsurprisingly, there was virtually no sense of exploration in this game. Really, really, really boring. Different objectives, same places. Even the "new" places were boring because there was no variety. A maze in Wonderland? A maze in the coliseum? Just walls, walls, and more walls. Then for the system sectors, they get old fast because, gee, every room looks the same and it has the same drawling music (though I do like the battle music).
- I probably would be a little more forgiving of this game if they had found a way to base it in the KH2 journal (easily imaginable). Re:com and Days already repeated KH1 worlds, let's have some non-repeats, like Mulan, the Lion King, PotC, and freakING TRON WHICH WAS MADE FOR RE:CODED GODDAMMIT. Also, if it was based on the KH1 journal, why didn't we see a bugged Ansem SoD? I would have much preferred that than the comedy that Maleficent dished out.
So they even fail to utilize the good gameplay in any meaningful way because there isn't any sense of exploration. I got bored almost immediately.
way I see it they needed to bring Mickey and the others up to speed and chose to do it using the journal (seeing how the journal has already been known to be full of secrets to Sora and Co since Namine's memory fiasco) why not go with it? What might be necessary to you, the gamer, might not be as necessary to Nomura or Square. the journal was wiped clean, they had no idea why or how before, and now they needed a way to explain to Mickey that through Sora's memories (which the journal is comprised of) there are things that link back to BBS and Days that they weren't aware of. Plus they were introducing the notion that if the journal represents Sora's memory and there's entries of Riku's memories in their than a possible conclusion is that Sora is holding some of Riku's memories. They were killing a couple birds with one stone and racking up cash by doing so. As a company I think it pretty well justifies it whether some people feel butt hurt about the way they went about doing it or not.
Haha, if you honestly think digitizing Jiminy's journal is the only (or best) way for Mickey and co. to get clued in on this "hurt" crap then you aren't very imaginative. But it
sure as hell wasn't necessary, to Nomura or anyone else.
But, you know what? You're right.
If Square can take something that would normally only take a few cutscenes to explain, and stretch it out, and load it with filler and nonsense, and slap a title on it, who are we to say that they're wrong? Who cares about the integrity of plot when you can make a quick buck? It's just good business, and business takes precedence over the story.
For example, I have a lot of problems with suspension of disbelief regarding the Journal datarising machine and the reasoning behind needing a data world and how Namine could have ever planned for that in the first place.
This was such garbage.
Soooo.... she writes a vague, mysterious message and fully anticipates them to digitize the journal and search for... a data copy of her which will explain it? How else did she expect them to do it?
As I've pointed out, if Jiminy really missed that entire page in his journal, then that means she could have actually.... WRITTEN OUT ALL OF THAT EXPOSITION on that very page, instead of leaving that one sentence. Then, bam, no coded.
Or (because I know this would be brought up even though it's a bullshit excuse), if she didn't want Sora to worry about that since he had to deal with Xemnas, then she could have simply wrote, "Find DiZ." Granted, he's stuck in the dark realm, but then he would be the first to be saved and he could clue them in. Which sounds a hell of a lot better than digitizing a fucking journal.
I also have no idea why they bothered with the whole, finish kh1, reset journal, Mickey leaves Journal. NEW MESSAGE. Goes back into Journal, thing at the end. It was just a repetition of the start of the game, not to mention that the data kids have to forget everything they've done so far, including the friends they have made along the way. Omg have we had that plot before? I DON'T THINK SO
I wonder if they actually thought the seventh episode was the last one and then they were like, "Wait, but the explanation for the bugs didn't make sense and nothing was really accomplished... but, whoops, we made Sora forget about everything, hmmm."
Ok, so, no, I'm sure some parts of the final episode were intended to be in the plot, but it's pretty obvious they tacked a lot of it on last minute. We know for a fact that even the final boss, they were unsure about (they were going to make it AXEL).
And I mean, the way they presented the whole bug thing didn't make sense.
Riku said Sora's heartless, for whatever awful reason, was the source of the bugs. Which is just not true. It was where the bugs ended up, it was in effect, a part of the bugs, but not the source. So they offer two different reasons for why the bugs exist.
And the Dark Beach scene is still not quite a sign of friendship as much as forgiveness,
As much as forgiveness? Or how about both equally?
They say it right there- the whole "having you for a friend" thing.
Sure they don't need those weird, deep heart-to-heart but the mutual concern and teasing Re:Coded had really helped fleshed out SoRi's interaction and friendship.
No, not really, the relation between Data-Sora and Journal-Riku doesn't really reflect or enhance the actual Sora and Riku relationship:
Who was the person taken from the data of Jiminy’s Journal that took the form of Riku in the data world?
Nomura: That wasn’t someone from the real world’s data, more like that was the data itself taking on the body of Riku in order to avoid being eroded by the bugs.
So Data-Riku wasn't even trying to mimic the persona of the real Riku, he was his own character as the personification of the journal, with the one purpose of trying to find out the source of the message. You could argue that it enhances real Sora and real Jiminy's journal's relationship, then.
But, you know what, I will say that some of Riku's personality leaks into Data-Riku, it's just that the writers were confused about what Riku to use. He acted far more comparable to KH2 Riku than he did KH1 Riku. You might argue that it's trying to personify CoM Riku, but the journal has no record of CoM Riku. In any case, the VAST majority of entries on Riku in Jiminy's original journal were of the asshole ultra-competitive version, so one would figure we'd be seeing more of that. But instead, we get the apologetic and mopey one (ESPECIALLY when Sora is fixing his data- he fucking apologizes constantly for the same thing).
Riku was cited in the novels to only see Kairi as a means for him and Sora to leave the islands, something that more than adds up with the games, and didn't seem to bother too much until his jealousy issues kicked in. Kairi wanted to take the raft and go alone with Sora and said Riku could take care of himself even after he was possessed by XH and it was his Darkness to begin with that got the universe at large screwed. They'll see Riku again but once she remembers Sora waiting isn't good enough, and it doesn't seem like Kairi's too important to Riku post KH1 beyond being the girl he thinks Sora cares for.
At this point I dare say that if RiKai get more than 3 lines between each other per-game that aren't arguably hostile it will be contradictory to a lot of what was shown in the series so far.
If that's your conception of Riku and Kairi's relationship, then it's far from a friendship.
Nevermind that Riku clearly regretted his actions and was entirely concerned with getting Kairi's heart back.
Nevermind that Riku told Sora to take care of her.
Nevermind that Namine came to Riku in the form of Kairi.
Or that he was watching her enough to save her (initially) from being captured by Axel.
Or that when she did end up being captured, he showed up in TCTNW (Why do you think he was there? Do you think it's a coincidence that Namine ended up rescuing Kairi and then told Riku that he could take it from there?).
Or that he gave her a keyblade which he felt belonged to her.