Heh, looks like another cutie, but this time with Hoodie.

Seriously though, he looks like a fine mix. Similarities to various other characters yet also having a unique note.

He was also in Xehanort's and Eraqus' class wasn't he? It was his sister who was with the upperclassmen if I recall correctly.

Of course my first reaction is that it’s just Ravus and I’m waiting for the missing students to be the Verum Rex kids

Another white haired and silver eyed character interesting. Like his design, wish we had a Nomura Render of him though.

Does anyone have ideas for a name for his Sister?
To my knowledge Odin in mythology didn't have any daughters, so that's a dead end. My current guesses are Sif or Freya, but i also don't know too many goddesses of Norse Myth.

English videos are up!

Interesting story beats to be sure. So according to Odin's explanations there are two different kinds of "Darkness" even if Eraqus claims it all the same, the (possibly sentient) kind that came from "somewhere" and "infected" people using them as vessels and the kind born from within people's hearts themselves, although it seems the latter form was not always a thing.

The whole issue about "Darkness" in the past controlling people's emotions also reeks of at least a connection to the Unversed.
They are said to be negative emotions given form after all.
Their symbol being in Scala ad Caelum also points towards it. Maybe the "Unversed symbol" is actually the sigil of "Darkness" as it can be interpreted as depicting a heart captured within Darkness.

Looking at Eraqus and Xehanort analyzing the Queen of Hearts it seems like they're at least partly indeed going for the whole seven deadly sins theme.
That monster they faced as a boss there tough, is that supposed to be a Heartless or one of those "Darkness" beings?

I also had to crack up at Young Eraqus behaving like Ventus and Sora with the whole arms-behind-head gesture multiple times.

[ATTACH type="full"]13301[/ATTACH]

Btw, did Vor say the same thing in Japanese, around the third video, about the Tweedles not having any darkness? I thought only princesses are naturally capable of that.

They mentioned that Eraqus's grandfather fought Darkness...could that have been Brain? Just trying to keep up.

The new character, Baldr had a cool design, and the way he described the Mark of Mastery sounds like a setup. Not sure what to think about it, however I have a theory. His sister will be corrupt by the darkness and have the same dark suit that Dark Riku and Vanitas wear. Why do I think that? Just because. These KH mobile games are not very nice to sisters.

Vor remains my favorite new character and I want to see even more of her.

I wonder what the significance is of mentioning the Deadly Sins as sources of darkness, after having named the Master's pupils after those sins.

It seems like Eraqus' lineage might wind up being relevant. Obviously we're all thinking Brain, but could UX and DR really only be separated by a scant few decades between grandfather and grandson?
Odin knows way too much about "ancient times" and the period of time supposedly so uncertain as to be compared to a fairytale.

They did note that Heartless shouldn't be around, right? Because they have some knowledge of the Book of Prophecies and know Heartless appear in the future. But why does Odin talk like they've been around for a while?

At any rate, the upperclassmen definitely met some kind of cruel fate. I think Odin expects this to be the case, which is why Baldr is distracted with some other errand. I do wonder what Odin's thinking, though. If their Mark of Mastery exam was expected to be dangerous, and they might not come back, why send out the younger class to search for those who didn't? Something's up.

The Final Fantasy Versus XIII influences are really bleeding into this game with [S]Ravus[/S] Baldr.

And the Mark of Mastery exam that Baldur's sister is participating in feels rigged... ?

So this story is in part about the kids not actually understanding the way the world works since they've never actually interacted with it before, right? Hence why they conclude that the Tweedles don't have any darkness in them even though that's not how this works at all? I think all their speculation on what darkness is is annoying (characters treating a vague made up concept as if it follows concrete rules, my least favorite kind of writing) if it isn't supposed to demonstrate that.

I really enjoy how the last part encourages us to be suspicious of Odin and the test, though. And Odin knowing about MoM-era "darkness" has me more inclined to think of a connection to MoM since the MoM/Luxu scene made it seem like MoM was the only one who knew about that era and never talked about it to maintain his narrative of being "the master of masters".

YEraqus characterization is like Sora if Sora had a brain and any convictions about the world at all. I love it. Eraqus has basically a darkness hate-boner but he very clearly thinks highly of his friends and light-based characters oui Sora. Keep up the great work KHDR, hopefully we get another story update for december

So, there's a lot for me to talk about with these updates, but I'll try and keep my thoughts brief:
1) I like that we're getting backstory on Eraqus' absolutist anti-darkness ideology. And also, no, there's no way his grandfather is Brain like some people are saying. Brain and the Union X people existed hundreds, maybe even thousands of years ago. We've never gotten a concrete number, but all references to the Age of Fairy Tales are always couched in phrases like "ancient," "long ago", and "antiquity." Going back three generations does not line up with that kind of massive timejump. Whoever Eraqus' grandfather was, it'll be a new character.
2) I'm conflicted with how they're treating darkness in this story. I mean, it's Kingdom Hearts, and darkness has always been this quasi-metaphysical abstract yet also concrete emotional/cosmic force, but I feel like this story is starting to push the bounds even further. I mean, I see the connections they're trying to make to the Union X developments, but I have some reservations about where they're going with this. Mainly, I'm not sure the idea they're setting up with how darkness and the evil in people's hearts interact is a good message. In the past, darkness could manifest itself as strange powers or as Heartless, which is fine enough, but there was always an underlying understanding that said darkness originated from deep character flaws that would eventually be the undoing of the person who succumbed to their own darkness. The Disney villains in KH1 and 2, for example, all gained control of the Heartless because of darkness in their hearts that germinated from emotions like greed, envy, rage, etc. And they're sort of following that pattern here with the Queen of Hearts, but I don't think I jive with this idea that darkness is some kind of alien presence that entered human hearts and now just sort of co-evolved with them. That implies that everyone in Age of Fairy Tales was always pure of heart, which is demonstrably not the case. Furthermore, it sends (I think) a very questionable message to kids that evil is not something that grows out of your own failings, actions, or insecurities, but that it's something external to you, that you don't have complete control of your own actions regarding it. Maybe I'm giving it too much weight, but that kind of message just struck me as particularly off-putting.
3) I'm getting kind of ambivalent about how they're handling Xehanort in this game. I can see where they're going with his development, but it's very hard to take his journey seriously when one minute he's talking in these super-broody monologues about darkness and the next he and his friends are having conversations with Tweedledum and Tweedledee about walruses and carpenters. Nomura needs to work the story around Xehanort's character a bit better. Xehanort is NOT Sora. Going on adventures like this works for someone like Sora because Sora's childlike, carefree, lighthearted, and inquisitive personality meshes really well with the Disney aesthetic and characters. But Xehanort is a more dour, somber, contemplative, and mature character, and they need storylines and environments that help foster his development regarding his personality. It's just too jarring for the main character to be constantly talking about darkness while also having these abundant silly moments with the other characters. They had this same problem in Birth by Sleep as well—you can't just toss in these soliloquies about how people become corrupted and how characters struggle with internal moral conflicts, while in the next breath showing those same characters balling around in Disney Town and riding go-karts. It just doesn't work. Terra's storyline was an especially bad example of this. KH1, CoM, and to a lesser extent KH2 all managed this balance a lot better than subsequent games, CoM most of all imo. At some point, Nomura started treating each Disney world as an opportunity for simplistic hamfisted moral lessons. KH1 and CoM were better at just incorporating the worlds into the broader development of the character and their journey, showing us rather than telling us what they were supposed to learn from their encounters and experiences, and their journeys were more relatable, whereas Terra's and now Xehanort's are far too muddy and abstract. If we're going to go the route of showing a character build up from a curious youth into a disillusioned villain, then you have to do things to build the bridge between Point A and Point B that resonate on an emotional level with normal people. You can keep the light-dark cosmology for the sake of worldbuilding, but you need to put Xehanort through real, actual, relatable hardships instead of focusing on the mechanics of how evil works. And they probably will, to be fair. We know that Xehanort's friends die at some point, which is a good, mature example of what to do right in building Xehanort's character, but I hope there will be a buildup of smaller, gradually increasing losses, hardships, and frustrations leading up to that, because if they just throw that at him as the singular reason for why he turns evil and replace the rest of his development with all these other flights of pseudo-metaphysical ponderings, it's going to feel very blunt and unrelatable, like Anakin's turn to the dark side in the Star Wars prequels.
At the end of the day, I know it's still Kingdom Hearts and I shouldn't expect them to get too serious, but the earlier games always had this sense of groundedness to their characters—the light/darkness jargon needs to get toned down and replaced with words that real people would actually use to describe what they're feeling.

^But that is exactly what evil is. It is a force that binds to people. And it IS a matter of perspective (situation dependant). IRL for example, party preservation is good for my party's purposes but it may come at the cost of outside party's well being which is bad for them but not my party's concern. An outsider looking in would say my party is bad for not "looking at the big picture". My party would disagree.

Truth is - and I'm glad KHDR and UX are steering in this direction - humankind is complicated asf and judging events is not objective no matter how much we try to divorce ourselves from personal biases.

///

Xehanort (and characters like him) deserve to be explored no matter the bs Disney backgrounds. The deeper KH gets, the better.

I kind of object to the "Disney background is BS" argument considering how well written the Disney stuff is in this chapter. The stuff between how they break down the politics of the world to the poem they cite from the movie/book is actually pretty good.

Fwiw, it's not impossible for the Age of Fairy Tales to be many lifetimes ago (which it was, see Luxu's report), and for Brain to be Eraqus's grandfather. We know that some of the Five union leaders ended up far in the future like Ventus so it's possible that Brain travelled to the future and then had kids and grandkids. I think I still favour the idea of Brain receiving the Gazing Eye from Luxu and starting a line of Keyblade Wielders after they get out of the Data Cage in UX and thus being a distant ancestor of Eraqus but him time traveling wouldn't be implausible, relatively speaking.

I liked the insight we got more insight into Eraqus' family. The trauma of possibly losing his grandfather to darkness must of stuck with him into adulthood. Would explain a lot of his actions in BBS.

Also the heartless the Queen conjured was badass

Huh, I'm surprised we didn't get another flashforward at the end of this episode, instead we got a flashback.

Personally I'm in the camp of those that don't believe that Eraqus' grandfather was Brain, but like him a descendant of Brain. My main reason for that is that there seems to be too much history in Scala for it all to have been established and collapse in just two generations. The only way that could work for me is if he time traveled like the other Union Leaders.
I'm more under the impression that ever since the age of fairy tales the Keyblade wielders and Darkness in its many forms clashed and that's probably how most of the other towns ended up deserted.

It's also interesting to see that Eraqus has a strong anti-darkness stance from basically the beginning even when he was more of a goofball happy go lucky type.

It is interesting that UX introduced us to characters named after the sinns and now DR is telling us that the 7 sins are the root of darkness. Part of me wonders, if there are 6 more sins to get it up to the much beloved 13.

Do we know if the upperclass man share the same master as our class does? It'd seem odd for Odin to send the Upperclassmen on a dangerous mission not expecting them all to return and then send the younger class to find them afterwards unless he's aiming to destroy the Keyblade Wielders.

What if Master Odin - the Allfather - is actually a bodyhopping Master of Masters? Or a bodyhopping Luxu? Guyses I am worried for the future of these characters. Remember, Xehanort was handpicked by Luxu as THE Keyblade Master of Darkness. Nothing was done on accident.

When Baldr mentioned that his sis was sent on basically a suicide mission where only the atrong survived, we have to ask WHO sent her and her team on that mention.

We know Odin sent Team Xehanort on a similar mention of retrieval, which inherently would get the pensive Xehanort questioning more and more. Do you think Odin was a bodyholper?

Oh, hi Ravus!
Another great character design for this game. Nomura is not holding back.

If Odin's method of choosing masters is the "see who lives" method, it's no wonder that after Xehanort and Eraqus' class, that there's basically no keyblade wielders left.

Unless we assume Luxu has possessed Odin at this point, and is working towards helping Xehanort understand his purpose/ using his bonds and friendships with the other wielders as a tool to just get Xehanort to the point where he's ready to start the next keyblade war... I don't know what else could be happening.

Sooo... Let me get this straight:
[LIST]
[*]Light and Darkness have always existed, but, there was a time where hearts were devoid of Darkness and only had Light in them.
[*]At some point in time, Darkness decided to multiply by spreading itself to people's hearts
[*]Darkness grew by taking advantage of people's emotions
[*]Darkness became so attached to people's hearts that hearts were started to be born with Darkness and started creating beings out of their hearts: Heartless
[*]With that in mind, we can say that Heartless are the original Unversed: beings born from the negative emotions out of people's hearts
[*]The difference between Heartless and Unversed is that Heartless come from the Darkness of people's hearts while the Unversed come from the Darkness of an anomaly (Vanitas, the second half of someone else's heart, a second half that is pure darkness)
[/LIST]
Also, a random thought: Baldr mentioning Eraqus' grandpa makes me think that he's an important figure and could have been the founder of Scala ad Caelum. And since Eraqus and Brain are very alike, is Brain Eraqus' grandpa AND founder of Sala? other than that, since we're talking about grandparents: could Ephemer be Baldr's grandfather?

By the way, the Mark of Mastery Odin ordered to Baldr's sister and the upperclassmen sounds very fishy.

Perhaps the "unnatural" Princesses of Heart are more natural than we think.

That luscious hair though...

So if we don't know what the 13 pieces of darkness are, and Xehanort didn't use whatever the original 13 pieces of darkness were, does this mean that the X-Blade that Sora is currently holding now isn't the original X-Blade?

Yeah, it's only been stated that Subject X disappeared in the year of Apprentice Xehanort's stay in the castle. This doesn't mean, she didn't first appear there 4 years prior, when Ven first showed up in the current timeline.

If anything BBS implies she's already in the castle.

The only thing that speaks against her first appearing 4 years pre-BBS is that she, Lea and Isa are all the same age and she already looks to be 15ish in UX.

I think there's a secret report that implies that Subject X was found after Apprentice Xehanort.

I got ninja’d but yeah, [USER=256623]@Clue.Less[/USER] is right. The secret report says Subject X was found by Apprentice Xehanort. None of them arrived at the exact same time and place.

I looked it up and you are right.

That said everyone else looks like they would, if they were 10~15 years older, so i think it's somewhat save to thnk that most of the union leaders, confirmed to have traveled into the future, appeared within the 4/5 years between Ven and Skuld.

What if they all arrived at the same time but then got separated? And something happened to Skuld that turned her into "something else" (since she doesn't seem to know "what" she is). I can see Lauriam and Elrena roaming around in tandem for a few years before they were turned into Nobodies and found.

But back on topic:
I really liked this chapter. I thought the Disney part was very good—I'm realizing that maybe watching it with the sound turned off helped take whatever lightness there might be to Wonderland away. The tweedles always creeped me out as a child, and that scene felt particularly threatening, as we know that, in the numbered games, curiosity / the pursuit of knowledge is linked to taking the dark road. So the scene really felt like a cautionary tale and not just a filler, absurd cameo.

The flash animations are gorgeous. Vor hitting Eraqus is hilarious. (What happens if it's another character on the team?) I also liked the Scala part that goes from blinding light in the sky to the shadows under the characters.

Then of course, reading the names of the seven deadly sins is very interesting. I wonder if there is an in-universe explanation for the Foretellers having those names. Did the MoM give them those names and the masks to hide their faces? Is it part of the plan that they are named after sins, if Darkness latches on those negative traits?

I like the non-goofball side of Eraqus starting to show. I can get how he and Xehanort could part ways. I can't wait to see the friends start realizing they're not sharing the same views.

That Mark of Mastery mission sounds very fishy, and Odin is looking suspicious. I hope the missing sister turns out to be a badass character and not just a missing girl/sister again.

(...)

The opening scene, too. It's beautiful.

The Disney stuff would probably work even better if telephones hadn't killed video games and this was done with 3D cutscenes on a console. Seeing characters do Their Bit From The Movie! in text lines doesn't do anything for me, but if it felt like we were actually in that bit with voice acting and cinematic direction and all, I think I'd quite like it. Especially with us meeting characters who've never actually appeared in the series before (the disney stuff in X doesn't really count since "the book of prophecies generated the plot of the movie a bajillion years before it happened" is pretty explicitly an excuse to make Content for the Gacha; I suspect most of that would be cut in a remake, while every scene here in Dark Road is still part of the narrative).

Do people really think baldr is connected to ravus even though Nomura didn't design Ravus?

He probably designed the Versus XIII character who Ravus resembles, though. Which is I assume what people really mean, we just don't know if that character would have had a different name or what.

Semi-relatedly I wonder if there is still hope for Yen Sid to get a mention (I assume they're not allowed to give him a young design, if he's not secretly one of the ones we've seen)

Riku descending from someone of Scala is something I wouldn't be surprised with. Especially now that Riku is another Not!Noctis and being from Scala could be defined as KH's closeness to royalty

Anything’s far too early to tell at this point. Baldr is cute though.

That’s why I said hypothesized. They’ll sooner throw Nomura under the bus than lose those sweet Franklins and Washingtons. Any entrepreneur with common sense would do the same thing to a liability, ethics be damned, I know I would.

Back to topic though, I’m really curious now about what the upperclassmen look like. And the order thing…hmmm…

Hmmm…maybe. I did say it was just a hypothetical scenario.

The Avengers thing was something that just came to mind over how Disney can be ruthless with financial losses and might hold it over their heads. Well, whatever the case, there’s a lot of recycled character designs going around. Sora’s a prime example of it.

Btw, why is everyone assuming I’m “dude” and “guy” all of a sudden? Eh whatever.

Any word when chapter 4 is coming or are we just going to presume that they’ve moved updates from end to start of the months instead now?

I must confess these days I've been waiting for some Baldr artwork from Nomura, since he wasn't in the other key visual with the group,

Spoilers

I don't know why I read that.

Uhh... I recommend to preface spoiler tags with the name of the game you're talking about to minimize accidental spoiling. If we could try to keep these threads free of MoM spoilers until December 13th, that'd be cool too.

JP-translated videos are up in the OP, as always thanks to goldpanner <3

Is there any hint about when the next DR/UX story update should come out ?