#sception watches khbc

[gamesception]

You know, for all I love the kingdom hearts series, I never did get around to watching this, or even reading up on the lore from the phone game on wiki or whatever, so I know basically nothing about it.  I guess it’s about the olden days keyblade war?  I don’t know.  It’s probably terrible, but maybe in an enjoyable way.  Let’s give it a try.

Ok, so, fucking first of all, in like the very first seconds of this, I’m being assaulted with a boatload of exposition in awkward sentence fragments confusingly and distractingly arrayed over images from this phone game in like seconds at a time, and, like, am I expected to even be reading this?  Like, I can’t imagine I am, but whatever, lets pause every 30 seconds and write it out:

The world was pure darkness.  But I was born into a radiant world enveloped in a brilliant light.

Ok, yes.  This is that good kingdom hearts bullshit I was looking for.  Nice to see we’re off to a good start here.  But anyway...

From within that light, my master gazed upon me and smiled.  Before he disappeared, the one who made me bestowed names on his 6 apprentices, and passed down the Book of Prophecies to 5 who came to be known as the foretellers.  The 5 read the manuscript and were shocked by the final entry.  The fated land will be the battleground for a great war.  Light will see defeat and expire, while darkness prevails evermore.  They decided to draw on the powers of the book to prevent that from happening.  They harness unimaginable forces from the future to protect light and keep the world safe from darkness.  You should know that they share the same goal,but they don’t follow the same path.  Don’t lose sight of yours, okay?  The world was pure darkness.  But I was born into a radiant world enveloped in brilliant light.  From within that..

ok, now it’s just repeating itself?

While all that exposition is happening, there’s different clips playing from the phone game and... well, I’m glad I don’t have to play it.  It doesn’t really look super good.  The art style feels very off brand from Kingdom Hearts generally.  Has that sort of paper-doll sort of animation that one associates with cheap app store games.  I mean, clearly with more work/production value put into it than went into ‘Princess Frozen’s first Tracheotomy’ or whatever, but still.

And, I mean, I know what I’m getting into here.  I watched the ‘movie’ recaps of days and coded, even though I actually played both of those games on the DS.  So I know this is going to be a series of cut scenes sort of taped together with clumbsy exposition dumps rather than an actual cohesively presented narrative or whatever.  I just hope that the cut scenes involved aren’t in this same style, and that the narrative dumps aren’t all going to flicker past in this unreadable, random-font business.

the same text keeps flickering by over scenes from the Disney films and characters the series has already visited.  Is that the gimmick of the game?  The ‘book of prophecies’ or whatever lets the game rehash old narrative territory through precognition the way the way castle oblivion did in chain of memories by revisiting sora’s memories?  So the game actually takes place in the pre-fall world leading up to / during the original keyblade war, but the game contrives a way to spend all its time rehashing material covered in previous games instead?

That /would/ be a pretty KH move, if that’s what I’m in for.  Would also pretty much negate the point of liveblogging it.

Oh, fuck, I’ve been at this for like 10 minutes, and I’m only 30 seconds into this mess, lets get on with it...

The master sounds like a bit of a douchebag.  So I take it Luxu is the apprentice who /isn’t/ one of the 5 ‘foretellers’?  Also, I thought mysterious keyblade masters in this period wore animal masks, do distinguish them from the cloaks worn in the modern period which is, what, centuries later?  millenia?

So yeah, this takes place before all the worlds were split off into their own little planets.  And this is ‘daybreak town’, ans we’re basically being told the same stuff about the master who can see the future, wrote it down in a book, and gave it to 5 of his six apprentices.  I guess Luxu has a different job.

Not menacing at all.

Oh, and the cut scenes, at least in the back cover movie version, are not in the same art style as the game, thankfully enough.

Seriously, though, I would have expected this master of master’s (hft ‘mom’) guy to be more... dignified?  Wise?  It doesn’t come across in the still images, but he feels like a goofball jerk villain, like Xigbar or Axel.  Or Greed from FMA.

Mom: You read my cool ass prophecy book?  Fuckin sweet, right?”

Unicorn Fursona, distressed:  Yes, master, but... is the world really going to be destroyed?  Is there nothig we can do?

Mom: Oh, that?  It’s a Bummer, huh?  (like, no serioutly, a literal line from the fucking movie), nah, everything’s gonna disappear.  Also, I’d never up and leave you all, but if I totally do exactly that you’ll keep it real, right?  

So, if I’m gathering correctly:

kingdom hearts binds all the fairy tale worlds together into one world.

if kingdom hearts were lost they’ll split apart into different worlds, which we know from the other games in the series is exactly what happens.

Mom predicts the coming calamity, and is focused on what happens after.

Mom tells his apprentices about it, gives them keyblades, goads unicorn man into recruiting more keyblade wielders, with the apprentices’ efforts probably causing the war/calamity they’re trying to prevent, which Mom probably expects and is deliberately bringing about.

And he more or less says as much to Unicorn guy?  I mean, minus the ‘I am manipulating you into causing exactly this disaster’ part, so as per usual in this series we’re not exactly dealing with the brightest bulbs on team face.

As for the plan and master himself... it’s a very Xehanort plot, to the point that I’d say this just is Xehanort in some fashion, but his attitude and disposition aren’t norty at all.  Again, he reads much more like a Xigbar or Axel type.

Oooh, apprentice role call:

Unicorn guy is Ira, the designated leader of the group, chosen by Mom for his gullibility reliability.

Snake girl is Invi.  She’s super virtuous.  I guess that’s why her astral beast is a Snake.  Her job is to watch over the others.  Like a mediator for the group, I guess.

“fearless” Aced the Bear.  Not much of a distinct role, he just ‘supports Ira’.

“prudent” Ava, with a fox fursona.  Her job is to ‘prepare keyblade wielders for the world after’.

Gula the ‘cool headed’ the leapord, researches the book.

Luxu, the only apprentice who doesn’t have an animal mask, disappears, presumably sometime after the master.  Who is definitely not hiding in that box.  Luxu was ‘the first apprentice to be given his role’, but the narration doesn’t say what that role is.  Hopefully the movie eventually will, and this won’t be another Kingdom Hearts spinoff game that introduced another tangled mess of unresolved mysteries and plot threads to a series that has too many of those already, without actually resolving anything.

whoops, I guess Mom isn’t in the box, since Luxu left first.  Ok, whatever.

It’s getting late, so I’m going to take a break here, but so far?

The premise is interesting enough.  I feel like I see where the overall story is going, but I’m still pretty invested in the ‘who exactly is the master’ and ‘what’s Luxu doing’ questions.  Hopefully they actually get some resolution.

The designs at least for the main cast work well enough, though I wish mom and Luxu weren’t just dressed in exactly the same darkness robes from elsewhen in the series.  I honestly would have loved to play a kingdom hearts spinoff game where these apprentices were the main characters.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t what this game was.  I hope this movie recap of the game focuses more on these characters and not so much on the army of generic phone game mmo protagonists.

[gamesception]

Your descriptions of the foretellers in one of your khux liveblog posts are killing me lmao. I have to assume you must have watched more than 20 minutes of back cover because you really have them all down pat. Also, what do you think of the characters on the actual title screen for khux?

To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how much of back cover I watched.  I was trying to live blog it at one point (tagged/sception-watches-khbc), and then I ended up watching more than I meant to in a sitting and getting way ahead of the blog, so I stopped some unknown distance from the end to wait until my reaction blog caught up, which of course it never did.

Actually, there was one bit that was in my short lived back cover blog that I had forgotten, but that in retrospect heavily informed my eventual take on the foretellers and their assignments from Mom.  It was in the flashback scene early on when Mom was initially explaining how Chirithy works:

So if a keyblade wielder’s astral beast turns into a nightmare, that means the keyblade wielder has embraced darkness.  Also the nightmare can corrupt others?  I’m not sure why that’s needed narratively, since that’s basically just what hardless do.  Anyway, Aced says he’ll just kill any nightmares he sees, while Ava and Gula find that cruel.

Which works as the beginnings of a conflict in the group in terms of how they confront darkness, with the more puritanical Ira and Aced (and Invi, from where she’s standing/how she’s framed in this scene, though she hasn’t said anything yet) feeling that any nightmares (and presumably by extention any keyblade wielders who fall to darkness) should be destroyed/killed due to the risk of darkness spreading, while Ava and Gula think that’s cruel and would prefer attempts at reformation and healing.

Here we see Ira, Aced, and Invi as hard hearted, puritanical, and inflexible.  They know what they’re trying to do is important, they know the costs of failure are apocalyptic, they’re not going to let sentiment get in the way of doing what they think needs to be done.  By contrast, Ava and Gula are compassionate, and are inclined to seek reconciliation and healing.  This scene is the main foundation of my “Fox and Cat can effectively people, Horse, Bear, and Snake cannot” reading of the characters.

Which in turn informs my readings of why Mom chose each foreteller’s specific role.  There will inevitably be disagreements between the foretellers on what exactly ‘needs to be done’.  How will they respond to those disagreements?  Well, inflexible Ira, Aced, & Invi, not valuing compassion, and convinced that the stakes are so great as to justify any action, will tend towards outright conflict.  So of course they’re the people that Mom puts in charge of the main operation.

If left to their own devices, Ava and Gula, who do value compassion, might be able to smooth over any disagreements before they turn to conflict, so they get special assignments outside of the main operation specifically designed to distract and divide them from the others, with Gula having to look at the others with suspicion as he hunts a (nonexistent?) traitor, and Ava having to keep her head down as she surreptitiously steals the best keyblade wielders from all the unions for her special secret team to survive the keyblade war and, I presume, both become the children whose light sustains the world after its fall to darkness and found the post war line of keyblade wielders that will eventually lead to Eraquis, Xehanort, and all the main line series business.

As for the KHUx title screen characters….  eh, this response is getting long.  I’ll make a separate post about that later on.

[gamesception]

Alright, I’ve got a few minutes, time to make it a bit further into this business.  So far we’ve met Mom (the master of masters), Luxu the mysterious apprentice who disappeared, and the 5 ‘foreteller’ apprentices who are trying to use mom’s prophecy book to prevent the keyblade war, by collecting and training an army of keyblade wielders, because we are playing hard into the (probably deliberately) self fulfilling prophecy trope - Ira (the reliable unicorn), Invi (the virtuous snake), Aced (the fearless bear), Ava (the prudent fox), and Gula (the cool-headed leapord).

This time, we’re picking up with...

You!  Generic unnamed and unimportant phone mmo protagonist, one of a million just like you!  Yeah, I’m not sure an mmo with a custom protagonist was a good fit for this very silly but for all that still very character and narrative driven series.

So... what, like pokemon go teams, each with a different leader?  Did players pick which apprentice they wanted to follow?  Regardless, we’re “defeating heartless to gather light”.

But the next scene isn’t that, we’re going straight into some conflict within the furry squad, as Ira suspects a traiter.  The army of generic unnamed protagonists is nowhere to be seen here.  I’m beginning to suspect that ‘You’ weren’t actually all that important to this particular narrative.

Otherwise, though...  these fmvs weren’t actually part of the original game, were they?  It doesn’t feel like it.  This feels like something put together after the fact, in which case it might hopefully be a bit more cohesive than the Days and Coded ‘movie’ recaps.

Anyway, Ira’s suspicions are because he found a cat.

Specifically a “dark chirithy’ or ‘nightmare’ as the other apprentices call it.  Basically one of the random dream eater enemies from 3d.

Are dream eaters actually going to have some sort of narrative significance now?  Because they really didn’t before.

I say this might be more cohesive, but 30 seconds into the first sceen that isn’t prolog, and we’re cutting to a flashback.

Again, it doesn’t really come accross in text/screencap form, but every single line the master says sounds like it’s positively drowning in sarcasm.  I honestly hope he doesn’t turn out to be a string pulling villain, because it would just be such a hilarious subversion if he were actually on the level.

Or... maybe they aren’t dream eaters?  I mean, the music is clearly implying that it’s a dream eater, but maybe it just fills a similar sidekick role, and it’s not actually related to the dream eaters and nightmares from 3d?

So if a keyblade wielder’s astral beast turns into a nightmare, that means the keyblade wielder has embraced darkness.  Also the nightmare can corrupt others?  I’m not sure why that’s needed narratively, since that’s basically just what hardless do.  Anyway, Aced says he’ll just kill any nightmares he sees, while Ava and Gula find that cruel.

Which works as the beginnings of a conflict in the group in terms of how they confront darkness, with the more puritanical Ira and Aced (and Invi, from where she’s standing/how she’s framed in this scene, though she hasn’t said anything yet) feeling that any nightmares (and presumably by extention any keyblade wielders who fall to darkness) should be destroyed/killed due to the risk of darkness spreading, while Ava and Gula think that’s cruel and would prefer attempts at reformation and healing.

I mean, it works as a conflict.  Literally the same conflict has worked elsewhere in the series.  It’s a pretty classic D&D conflict, particularly within paladin orders.  It especially works since, if Darkness does start to spread, both sides can reasonably suspect the other, with the more puritanical side risking corrupting their own hearts through their callousness, while the more forgiving side risks letting evil grow unchecked.  And both can waste their efforts blaming the other while obvious villains stand around in their obvious villain robes largely unchecked in their obvious villainy.  As is the case with Mom here.

Anyway, yeah, classic/simplistic D&D morality stuff.  I can dig it.

Anyway, they have a cute moment where Ava and Mom poke fun at Aced, and... it’s cute.  Only more making me hope that obvious villain Mom turns out to not be a villain after all.

back to the present, Gula suggests that they just summon their spirits and see whose is corrupted, but Iria says the traitor could just summon an uncorrupted spirit from someone in their respective legion (so yeah, pokemon team leaders), but... so far no one has suggested that maybe none of them are a traitor and the corrupted spirit belongs to one of those many followers instead.

wait, no, I spoke too soon.

Apparently that can’t be, but the reasoning behind why that is... is kind of glossed over and doesn’t make much sense?

Something to do with ‘bangles’, equipment the dream eaters use to ‘collect dark energy’ which is ‘ok as long as they don’t use that power’?  which, ok, is dumb on its own, but seetting that aside nothing there really explains why it the corrupted spirit couldn’t be one of the random union members acting alone.

Aced is pissed that Ira would suggest one of them was a traitor without any real evidence pointing to any one of them in particular, sowing distrust in the group with no real benefit, and that maybe the master was wrong to make Ira the leader, which I would agree with if I didn’t think Ira being a bad leader was exactly why mom picked him for the role, but at the same time Aced’s only listed job was to ‘Support Ira’, so really he’s the one failing hardest in this particular scene.

Everyone leaves but Ira and Invi, and Ira reveals that he’s most concerned because his prophecy book doesn’t have any prediction about this.  Invi’s doesn’t either, and they suspect that either the Master was planning something he didn’t tell them about (which is a rather more astute suspicion than I expected a protagonist in a kingdom hearts game to be capable of), or else their traitor has somehow stolen a page from their books, or maybe both, maybe one of the apprentices had a book with an extra page through which Mom is giving them duplicitous directions.

Ok, sure.

Next is another flashback, this time to Invi getting her list of chores from Mom:

So a mediator between the apprentices, but also a spy on them.  tasks which seem likely to conflict somewhat.  Mom also kind of preys on Invi’s insecurities.  She says training armies of keyblade wielders without mom or Luxu (who we’ve seen very little of) seems like a task that’s maybe beyond their skills, but then Mom implies that if she doesn’t keep up with the other apprentices they’re going to leave her behind and she’ll be all alone, which, yeah, Mom’s kind of more than a douche bag than usual in this scene.  Boardering on douche canoe.  My already fleeting hopes that he might not just be the obvious puppet strings villain that he seems to be are fading fast.

....

Guess this is it for the moment.  One scene at a time seems to be all I’ve got in me.