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Yeah remember when I said that I edited the KH1 video in a single day? I deceived you all. I actually made TWO videos that day

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Anyone else find it fascinating that whenever we're shown Roxas's feelings through Sora, it's just kind of melancholic and wistful, but the reverse scenario always feels like you just walked into a psychological horror?

Seriously, the way it's presented, it's like we're meant to see Roxas as an old friend that we miss talking to, but Sora - our original "old friend" that we would have reasons to miss - is hardly even shown as a person. The contents of his memories feel less important than the effect they're having on Roxas, which is usually Extreme Distress and/or physical pain.

And it's insane to me because KH1 was so whimsical! The memories that Roxas and Xion are experiencing are literal Disney magic! But the way they're shown, with the fuzzy filters and the glitch effects, sort of removes the emotions you associate with them and makes them come across as eerie and unsettling.

Not to mention, Sora's memories rarely prompt any feelings of happiness, the way Roxas's might make Sora extra fond of the Twilight Town crew... which might say more about how KH1 affected Sora's mental health than anything.

(I personally stand by the idea that the story revisits it so much as an analogy for how repeating events in your head over and over can alter your perception of them)

But like. how wild is it that this series found a way to take its cheerful protagonist, and without changing anything about him, turned him into this constant, unnerving presence that haunts the lives of two other characters?

And I think another reason Roxas doesn't feel like he haunts Sora in the same way is because no one really... treats Sora like a person while he's asleep. He's either a tool or an object of affection, and regardless of which you pick, his feelings are seen as secondary to the goal of waking him up. As a result, the narrative focuses entirely on Roxas and Xion's personhood, and unlike Sora, they never stop being treated like people once they're made inaccessible due to the plot.

It's probably a bit late in the story to bring it up by now, but I still wonder if we'll ever see Sora be upset with Riku for sacrificing people in his name. Sure, it worked out in the end, and I'm not sure if Sora's even aware of what happened (how likely is it that he's properly sifted through all of Roxas's memories at this point?) but there's a list of things he could still conceivably be mad at Riku about that he hasn't processed, and I want this to be one of them

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Well guys, I did it. I cut out all the scenes from KH1 that had music in them and was left with a nearly 2 hour video. Behold, the very quiet fruits of my labor

(This was edited in a single day)

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Why is there so much silence in Deep Jungle

Terrible video idea: a compilation of every Kingdom Hearts moment that doesn't have music

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Terrible video idea: a compilation of every Kingdom Hearts moment that doesn't have music

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I'm so obsessed with the modern Twilight Town gang, you guys

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Strong contender for the highest quality Sonic I've ever drawn at this size (very small)

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And here we have a Sig from all the way back in May that I forgot to upload, somehow

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I think the reputation Kingdom Hearts has is a prime example of something I've been thinking about recently, which is: if you go into a piece of media without taking it seriously from the get-go, any of its attempts to be serious will come across as funny.

Let's be real, KH is viewed by the general public as a bit silly, right? Like, you're telling me there's an RPG series where you play as an anime boy but your party members are Goofy and Donald Freakin' Duck? And it's filled with complicated plotlines about clones and hearts and time travel?

The crux of what makes people not take the game seriously is the fact that it's a Disney game that wants to be taken seriously. Those two things combined instinctively make people want to laugh at it; after all, Disney is just kids' stuff, it's not meant to be taken that seriously. Even if you're a fan of Disney, it's so inherently different from something like Final Fantasy that the tonal clash alone creates a certain expectation.

That expectation being: this is going to be stupid, and funny because it's stupid. The same level of joke as making cute characters swear or use guns, I think.

Kingdom Hearts is, of course, a lot more sincere than that. But if you're not willing to meet it halfway, then its sincerity becomes the joke.

Of course, even KH fans like to laugh at how the dialogue reads when it's taken out of context, which takes me to something I've actually wanted to talk about for a bit:

Data Sora: Mickey! It's Riku. They put bugs in him!

Make no mistake, I'm not saying people are wrong to joke about stuff like this. But the whiplash I felt at seeing this moment become a meme was kind of insane, because it genuinely never struck me as a funny thing to hear Sora say.

Using the term "bug" to refer to a computer bug felt completely natural, and it's a much more tangible term than "glitch" which brings to mind more like, environmental or physics-based glitches. Similar deal with the word "virus," even if that would've sounded cooler.

But either way, by this point in the story, they've been talking about bugs with complete seriousness for over an hour. They've been a corrupting force that you have to fight the whole game, and when Data Riku is injected with the stuff, he screams before freezing up and staring dead-eyed into space, as shown in that screenshot.

That's freaky! And a really scary thing for Sora to have to see happen to his best friend!

So him telling Mickey what happened in a panicked voice didn't even register as a line to take special note of, because why would it? What else was he supposed to say? I was way too invested and stressed out to care about what it would sound like out of context; I was IN the context! And the context had me on the edge of my seat!

This is the case with a lot of lines in this series that get paraded around as evidence that the writing in KH is sooo chaotic, so silly, so embarrassing, so cringe. I'm not saying that every line of dialogue comes across as totally natural, the series is capable of taking me out of the experience because of something being stilted or awkward. But rarely ever when it's trying to be sincere or dramatic.

Replica Riku: Because I'm you. Riku: No, I'M me. Replica Riku: "I'm me," he says.

This is another example. When I actually sit back and watch just that first bit of the cutscene, yeah, it sounds a little ridiculous. The back-and-forth happening here is just redundant enough to follow the "rule of threes" to comedy, so I get why people get a good chuckle out of it when it's isolated to just this.

It did not feel ridiculous after watching the series of harrowing events Replica Riku goes through before getting to that point. It certainly stops being ridiculous when he follows it up with this speech:

Replica Riku: Must be nice being real. A fake like me could never get away with saying that. That's right, I'm a phony, a fake! The way I look, the way I feel, everything I remember! And even this newfound power! I thought by finding some new strength, I could finally be someone - someone who's not at all you! But... nothing changes... I'm still just empty! Everything about me is borrowed. As long as you're around, I'll never be more than a shadow!

I bring this up to segue into another point: even KH's fans have a hard time moving past their perceptions of what it should be as a Respectable Video Game. Particularly whenever it does something that's just a little too weird, or lame, for the average mainstream.

Something like, oh I dunno... putting relevant story content on handhelds?

While this wasn't intentional, both of the examples I've used so far have come from games that were originally made for the Nintendo DS and GBA respectively. I just used screenshots from their Playstation versions because I like how their body language is animated in them.

(I also wasn't intending to make both examples about Riku, it just kind of happened)

But anyway, handheld games are also something that's generally considered to be "less legitimate" than their console counterparts. This isn't to say that handheld gaming isn't extremely popular in its own right, because it is! Series that stick to handhelds, like Pokemon, are loved for their portability.

But outside of some exceptions like Fire Emblem, if a series has games on both types of systems, the handheld ones will always be considered "less mainline" by default, regardless of what's actually in them. For an example of this, I would point to the Zelda series, and how little its handheld titles are talked about compared to its console releases. Furthermore, the Link's Awakening remake (while technically on a handheld-console hybrid) decided to ditch the pixel art in favor of going full 3D, which showcases a slightly different but related stigma.

So what happens when Kingdom Hearts, a game that debuted in 3D on a home console, starts putting the majority of its story onto handhelds?

Well, a massive chunk of the fanbase starts calling them "spinoffs," of course! Even though the ratio of console releases to handheld ones literally looks like this:

(That's a 6:8 ratio, for reference, counting KH4 and Missing Link which haven't been released yet. It's even more slanted in the handheld's favor when you consider the short length of 0.2 and especially Melody of Memory in terms of story content)

And now we still have people talking about how we waited 13+ years for KH3 after KH2, as if nothing really important happened in between those two games, or as if a game arbitrarily having a number 3 on it is going to make it more important than everything else. And this is said by people who DO CARE about the games that were released during that time! What is happening!!

People loooove to act like you can skip over games like Coded or Union Cross and they especially love to complain that a series like this would even consider putting story content on a phone. And in such a cute art style?? A cute 2D art style??? How in the wORLD am I supposed to take something sEriOUsLY when it's on... the most accessible gaming device out there??? For free?????

(I'm willing to bet that some people will be slightly more inclined to play Missing Link because it's in 3D, but most are definitely going to just be asking "why isn't this on consoles" as if the story isn't intertwined with the gameplay format they chose at all)

And so we run into the same problem as the people who haven't even played the games: dismissing something as not really worth investing their time into based on surface-level judgements. Because even if you're down with KH's brand of storytelling, there are other barriers you could have to the series that it will repeatedly ask you to lower, and you might not be willing to.

Kingdom Hearts is a series that demands you get over your biases about what counts as real art to be taken seriously, or it WILL leave you behind in the narrative. Don't want to play a phone game? Don't want to even look up the story on YouTube? Too bad, it's required reading for the next ~Numbered Title~ that you respect so much. Good luck being confused the whole time.

Don't want to play a DS game? And you won't even watch the condensed movie version that we put in our Respectable Console Collection? Okay, but don't come crying to us when its recurring narrative themes seem like they came out of nowhere later on.

This is a series that does not have spinoffs, and trying to explain that to someone who hasn't played it makes it sound absurd. "The mobile games are important?" a non-fan asks, laughing at the concept. "Yeah, it's pretty stupid," the fan responds with a laugh of their own, because even after everything, how can they really engage with this story on its own terms when it makes such silly decisions? When it has such cringey titles? When it's so embarrassing to like?

I think I might've strayed a bit from the initial thesis statement of this post, but my point is that Kingdom Hearts exposes a lot of elitism in people regarding games and art. It pushes the limits of what it can expect its audience to take seriously, delivering purposeful, engaging storytelling no matter if it's 2D or 3D, a Triple-A Video Game on your Playstation console or a free-to-play phone game. Which makes it pretty darn neat, I'd say.

And also sometimes I get thrown off by what becomes a meme, because I get so invested in the story that I forget things can be funny out of context

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Tags from @ladylolalilly:

#…what the christ is this games intro?

I don't know if screenshots can truly do it justice but I'll try

(footage taken from IGN's "First 17 Minutes of Pokemon: Let's Go, Pikachu")

So, Pikachu (or Eevee) jumps out of "your" television with no prior establishing shots, climbs on you, gives you a lil sniff that makes them decide you're Cool, Actually, (or maybe they recognize you?) and then hops right back into the TV, where you follow them seemingly without hesitation:

Then you pick the language you want to play in, and it takes you right into the standard Professor Oak Exposition... with a twist.

"Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border of reality, right? Same as me and that Eevee over there"

I haven't played Skyrim I just saw the opportunity and had to take it

Anyway, the same Pikachu is there when you wake up, and they hang out next to Professor Oak as he gives you the all-too-familiar "welcome to the world of Pokemon" speech. Except this time it seems to actually be happening instead of just being there for the player's benefit.

(OAK STOP BRINGING THE WHOLE FOREST INTO THE POCKET DIMENSION)

I have no idea why he does this, but it'd be easy to just say "he was experimenting with a transporter one day and things got kinda wacky" if not for... the other stuff that usually happens in these sequences.

Trace showing up here as functionally just a character model whose name is chosen by you is a very standard practice for Pokemon games, but since it was just established that we literally walked in here, I have. questions.

Questions like "why is there a physical representation of Trace here" and "did Trace exist before the game started or did we just alter his memory as to what his name is"

Bouncing off of that point, we also get to choose what we look like and what our name is. We have two base options, and a neat thing about this game is that it has multiplayer, so a second person can pop in any time and they show up as whichever character you didn't pick. Weirdly, no one acknowledges the second person, but Trace will recognize you as his friend no matter what you pick, which brings me back to a similar set of two theories:

Both of these kids existed beforehand and you simply nope one of them out of existence, causing everyone to forget them

The world did not exist before you got here, and you're shaping its details as you go along

Both of which are some wild Kingdom Hearts-type plot points, I'm gonna be real with you

(Also Oak WHY ARE YOU FACILITATING THIS. ARE YOU EVEN THE REAL OAK)

Once you're done with all that, you follow Pikachu/Eevee into the Suspiciously Screen-Shaped Light, while Oak hypes up your new adventure.

You enter the light, and...

...you wake up in a lower-poly version of your room from before, in your new body. You look around, confused, and within the next few seconds, Trace announces that he's coming in.

Naturally, you don't recognize the voice, and you just traveled between dimensions at the behest of a pokemon, so you understandably look a little freaked out when he barges up the stairs.

Or at least, that's what's implied by what Trace says:

But, sadly, he immediately brushes it off and starts rambling about how excited he is that the two of you are going to be given a pokemon from Professor Oak that day.

As far as I'm aware, this is the last time the setup of the game is really brought up. Your game-specific partner pokemon latches onto you immediately, presumably because they chose you before you even arrived here, but that's about it.

And it's absolutely bonkers to me that they chose the open the game this way, even if I can sorta understand the thought process. "Aw, wouldn't it be cute and fantasy-fulfilling for the kids for a pokemon to leap out of their screen and bring them into the world of their favorite game?" Which is exactly how it's presented, it's all very whimsical.

But the implications of it are INSANE and not something the game thinks about for even a second, which in turn makes it really funny

The Let's Go games are so cute that it almost makes you forget that you're running around in someone else's body and lying about your identity to their best friend wherever you go

(Granted you didn't MEAN to hijack this random kid's life but I have serious questions about the Pikachu/Eevee that dragged you here. Why can they travel through dimensions via television. What made them choose you. Are they secretly the real gods of their world)

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The Let's Go games are so cute that it almost makes you forget that you're running around in someone else's body and lying about your identity to their best friend wherever you go

(Granted you didn't MEAN to hijack this random kid's life but I have serious questions about the Pikachu/Eevee that dragged you here. Why can they travel through dimensions via television. What made them choose you. Are they secretly the real gods of their world)

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Nikki on stage! What songs will she perform

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This one I'm really proud of because it looks like it's straight out of a fairytale book

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Some photos I took with other peoples' Nikkis before I figured out how to share them in-game

(I'm the one wearing blue)

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I call this one the "retro fantasy fit," or alternatively, "the Soulcalibur"

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Infinity Nikki if it was a horror game

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this post's hypothetical by itself is already ridiculous but the thing that gets me is how the wording implies two very funny things that become funnier in tandem

1. "Accidentally, the pitcher tosses a Christian baby" means this is a mistake on the pitcher's part. i imagine the pitcher is breastfeeding on the field and they pitch and they look down at their hands and they see the ball still in the glove and they go "fuck"

2. hitting the baby will still win you the game