Kingdom Hearts

True - I think Riku's side could have had a Frollo fight, at least. It even seems to be building up to one.

Well, to be clear, I still find why some things are different in Riku's side vs. Sora's side to be confusing. Why does it play out like the movie on Sora's end, but then Riku just watches Frollo randomly get the most anti-climactic death ever?

I could go into a lot of depth with why I hated KH 3 D's Notre Dame world. It legitimately got me to stop playing the game until the HD Remaster and that I had to force myself to power through with podcasts.

I suppose my major complaint just boils down to it lacked any of the original film's depth. I know Kingdom Hearts has had that issue before and it's kind of just been there, but it didn't really hurt the resulting adaptation as much as when it came to Hunchback. Frollo just walks down a street, sees Sora in 'odd' clothes (which is stranger when you consider how his anachronistic clothes never got commented on before this world), accuses him of being an ethnic minority, and then goes into a very random Motive Rant? Uhhhh...

Hell, I think Esmerelda running up to Riku and simply saying "I'm Esmerelda. I'm a gypsy." encapsulates everything I hated about 3D's version.

Hunchback was dark. It was serious. It handled some pretty complex issues and some of which really can resonate with people today compared to 96. It deals with justice for the oppressed, the madonna-whore complex, sexuality within religion, racism, sexual assault, and other things. It had one of the greatest scores in all of Disney History. That was all that made it a GREAT movie.

The game just removes all of that. And when you cut out everything that made it great and made it beloved for me, you just don't have anything left. It had all of the problems of Kindom Hearts' frequent problem of adapting these films and none of the pros.

Star Wars world as a Bonus Dungeon would be pretty awesome.

So... 3D did what every KH has done with the Disney worlds for the most part. And the only "pros" in every game was interacting with the world and its characters, even if both of those elements are shallow and hollow in the end (which I'd argue has always been present in the series, but didn't start getting bad until II).

I mean, Hunchback is among my favorite Disney movies of all time, and seeing it in 3D as a barebones Sleeping World (which in my opinion, also seemed to be a sort of Hand Wave for why those worlds felt barren) with none of the charm hurt. But only kinda, because by 3D I had figured not to set my expectations for those worlds very high. Granted, I'm also one of those people who never desired a direct boss fight with Frollo and was fine with him sending a giant mook at you instead (personally, I think that fits his character better than suddenly developing Heartless or Darkness magic powers and being subjected to anime flippy keyblade battles).

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to III is because they've been implying that the Disney worlds will be more substantial than they ever have been. The Big Hero 6 world being set after the movie's end brings me a bit of hope, one that also wishes for the other worlds (all of them, even the returning ones, of which I hope the Sleeping Worlds are among them) to be given the same treatment. Now I won't be disappointed if they botch it in the end, but at the very least it's one of the other things that's got me excited about the game (aside from new music).

edited 15th Dec '17 6:54:03 PM by Customer

KH1 did a good job of it. All the Disney worlds were well integrated.

BBS was okay at it too.

Which, I mean, it just feels like as time goes on the reasons to like this series have been gradually stripped away. Now unless you're a diehard fan of its original content you're kind of left out to rot.

Meanwhile, KH3 having more involved Disney stories is part of why I'm excited for it.

edited 15th Dec '17 6:55:50 PM by Mr.Badguy

Except Wonderland.

I hated going back there. Place was so damned empty and creepy. And the story there ended with, "Alice vanished for reasons no one could explain."

Alice's kidnapping is where we get the first hint at the Princesses of Heart's disappearance.

I though the story there ended with a Jump Scare and the Trickmaster boss

And I think a Door to Darkness spawned in Alice's cage, while Sora was fighting the card soldiers.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:49:23 PM by MorningStar1337

x5

True, but there's some what of a difference. I could forgive Pride Lands for being a bit basic on the plot of that movie. Maybe its just me being 'meh' towards Lion King (mostly due to family who were obsessed with it), but I didn't feel like they left too much out. And Little Mermaid can be kind of shrunk down to what they did in KH 1 and 2. All the pieces are there so it doesn't feel like too much is missing, if just not told as well as it probably should be. Even when BBS didn't dig too deeply into them, they still felt apart of a larger whole so I could forgive the shallowness.

Hunchback just had a lot more going on under the surface so that face value adaptation just rung so much more hollow than a lot of the others do.

Huh, rung hollow. Hunchback. Belltower. lol

Even if Frollo turned into a giant heartless or something, I'd have been fine. But, instead we just get this goofy technicolor thing while the actual villain literally fell out of the plot. It just felt so out of tone with the spirit of the original. More so than the others because at least the goofiness didn't feel too terrible out of tone or place.

I'm excited to hear that KH 3 is going to do a lot more with trying to tell new stories and be truer to the spirit of the original movies, I just hope I can find a world to rally behind and get myself excited for. Hell, I'll take Frozen at this point if it means I just get some awesome set pieces and boss battles: Having a giant blizzard boss battle on the frozen fjord would be amazing.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:46:19 PM by InkDagger

That's always been one of my main critiques; like, it's nice fanservice seeing all these iconic Disney characters but the actual stories told in the worlds tend to be either cliffs notes versions of the movie featuring SDG, or original stories that are just sorta bland and underwhelming. In that regard it really feels like a waste of potential.

There have been a few pretty decent/reasonably satisfying ones (TRON, Timeless River, etc), but it's not that many.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:49:16 PM by Draghinazzo

That too. I hate to beat the dead horse, but for a crossover franchise, it hardly does any actual crossing over. Its almost like thanksgiving dinner and someone is clearly way too terrified of their peas getting in the mashed potatoes.

I remember someone here describing Space Paranoids as having the distinction of being a better story than its source material and I find myself agreeing with them.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:56:56 PM by Mr.Badguy

I've never seen the original TRON myself so I have no opinion either way. It's still one of the better worlds regardless.

TRON was basically a very expensive tech demo.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:59:35 PM by LordVatek

The first Tron movie was not especially good as a story. Heck, it took about 20 minutes before I had any idea what the plot even was.

It was very much a Dancing Bear kind of thing, and one that hasn’t aged well at all. So yes, I’d agree that the KH2 take on the movie was better.

Then again, this is coming from someone who didn’t see the first one until after seeing the sequel (which I very much enjoyed), so maybe it’d be different for someone who saw it when it was still new.

TRON is iconic. It has incredibly memorable and very influential scenes, ideas, and cinematography even to this day.

The story was fine enough imo, but TRON's legacy is more important than the movie itself. If nothing else it deserves respect for the influence it's had on the industry and a ton of media.

Tron Legacy, on the other hand, was sadly among the list of movies that tried to be a sequel to a really old movie and do something cool but ended up falling really flat.

You're right, it definitely deserves respect for its influence on the film industry, particularly in regards to special effects and CGI. It was a real groundbreaker in that regard.

I guess calling it a Dancing Bear was rather dismissive. Maybe Seinfeld Is Unfunny would be more accurate.

edited 16th Dec '17 4:51:54 PM by SapphireBlue

Nothing ever suggested Hook died.

Tron is a movie with a very unique look. The graphics are pretty dated now, but the uniqueness of Tron's whole aesthetic still makes it cool to look at. It's not a very well written movie, though. The Kingdom Hearts take on the movie is arguably better written due to being more streamlined, giving Tron far more personality than he had in the movie, and adding heightened dramatic stakes to the MCP's plan.

The handling of Disney worlds in the series has arguably never been optimal, but I do feel they were better integrated in the first game. Thing is, it's one thing for no massive plot development to happen in a given level, and quite another for the level to feel outright irrelevant or disconnected from the larger story. The first game is closer to the former while KHII and especially Dream Drop Distance fall into the latter category.

It's the small things that prevent the Disney stuff from coming off as irrelevant. It definitely helps that for most of the first game, Maleficent and her team of Disney baddies are the main antagonists of the game, so when you fight one of them or see them plotting together it feels important. By contrast, in the second game Maleficent is transparently just a B-plot, so any time she or Pete appear helping the local villain, it instead makes fighting them seem less important because we can surmise it won't ultimately have any effect on the greater story.

Also, something I feel illustrates the greater care put into integrating the world in the first game is that, depending on which order you play them in, events will often unfold slightly differently. For example, if you complete Monstro after Hollow Bastion, Sora's reaction to Riku will be completely different. If you complete Deep Jungle before Wonderland you'll see Snow White in Hollow Bastion rather than Alice; if you complete Olympus Colisseum really late Maleficent won't show up to speak with Hades.

By contrast, in the second game all Disney worlds are self-contained enough than events will never play out any differently regardless of which order you play them in. There's at least one instance where this can potentially result in a Plot Hole depending on the playing order — when you first visit Agrabah, Sora and Goofy will suggest they might find Riku or Mickey with Aladdin. Only it's possible for this cutscene to play out during a point in the story when the three know that Mickey is in Hollow Bastion. I feel like this is something the first game would have accounted for, but here it's just one more thing that makes the Disney world feel really disconnected from the main plot.

Incidentally, I always found myself agreeing with Donald's "Keep dreaming, you two!" reaction to Sora and Goofy suggesting that they might find Riku or Mickey with Aladdin, because at that point in the game you fucking know they're not going to find either of them in a Disney world. Another point of contrast with the first game, where Sora would run into Riku in several of the Disney worlds and Riku would interact with some of the local Disney characters.

Dream Drop Distance is the absolute worst about integrating the Disney worlds. To begin with, the idea of "Sleeping Worlds" is a lame one because it means that nothing we're seeing unfold in these worlds is even actually happening — and the series has pulled this several times, in Chain of Memories, coded and in Chi. Making the Disney worlds straight-up illusions mariginalises them even further.

In 3D, the Disney worlds don't even come off as compatible with the main story half the time. In particular, any attempt to make sense of the Musketeer world in the series' continuity results in a Continuity Snarl — is it supposed to be the past? An alternate dimension? Did Donald and Goofy not originall hail from Disney Castle? Are these alternate versions of them? Then why does Mickey indicate to Sora that he is from another world? It makes absolutely no sense, and the game's Grid world is only slightly better. That world basically forgets or ignores that by the game's own logic, this is entierly different system to the one Sora visited in II and that Rinzler is not the same Tron Sora made friends with in that game.

Not true at all

Sleeping Worlds' events are happening. The issue is that the darkness plaguing them is preventing them from waking up,keeping them in an endless loop of the events right before they fell into darkness. The entire point is that you're allowing these worlds to end the loop and thus awakening them.

I'll give you COM, but in Re:Coded it's explained that Data Sora is fixing the journal, so that is happening.

And Chi takes place before the series. What's happening in Chi s, in fact, happening. Now, Union Cross on the other hand... (being serious, Union Cross is the only instance where nothing is happening, and that's because your character is part of the loop... but even then the loop is being broken as your character starts to become aware that something is wrong).

Well to be fair in the series' weird metaphysics being friends with one version of Tron connects him with the other version because of hearts or something.

Yeah, it's "happening", but it's happening to imagined alternate versions of the characters created by data or dreams or some such schpiel, giving me little reason to care about them. I know that the stuff Data Sora does in coded is technically happening, but it's happening in a virtual simulation that's entirely separate from the "real" version of the world. And I thought the Disney worlds in chi were illusions made real by the Book of Prophecies? Why should I be invested in completely alternate versions of the character the series has previously spent time establishing?

I think KH is the rare series that would benefit from more executive meddling to keep things simple and easy to understand.

Tetsuya Nomura is an objectively bad storyteller.

He only really comes up with the broad plot points for the most part (his most active role in writing was Days, which honestly was pretty decent compared to the other games). As I pointed out in the FF thread though, him being the director does give him final say on everything so it is fair to blame his leadership for a lot of the problems.

I try not to be too hard on him because I think he barely gets credit for the things he actually is pretty good at, but I definitely take issue with his decisions in regards to KH in particular.

Seriously, though, what was up with the Musketeer world? How is that even explained in the context of the game?