Xion takes Beware the Nice Ones to a whole new level...
Unmarked spoilers below!
- Xion is more pitiable than scary, but once her neuroses get into full gear, she shows what a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds can do. Fighting her as the penultimate boss cranks her Humanoid Abomination aspects up.
- Xion's comments during battle imply that she wants Roxas to defeat her. It's implied that she is still in there, and wants Roxas to kill her so she won't have to destroy him.
- The secret reports reveal that she was feigning her insanity. Doesn't make it less scary, though.
- Right before said battle, Roxas goes up to the Clock Tower to angst, when Xion joins him. For some reason or another, she has her hood up. After a rather cryptic monologue, she takes off the hood... cut to Roxas, with a look of shock on his face. Xion continues talking, as we pan up to her face... and she looks just like Sora now, except for the voice. Then she steps off the clock tower into thin air, and turns around, hood up again, with only her eyes visible. Light starts flashing around her and she says, in Creepy Monotone, "You're next, Roxas. I have to make you a part of me too." Then the fight starts.
- Halloween Town has a coffin-like boss, Leechgrave, whose realm of terror extends to that world's entrance — its Combat Tentacles ("Tentaclaws") are everywhere, and it eats heartless through them. Now consider that Leechgrave is actually a Heartless itself... In the mission when you are sent to confront it, your mission briefing states that you are being sent to investigate a serious depletion of Halloween Town’s Heartless population. This thing was eating so many of its own kind that the Organization themselves became concerned about their own Heartless harvest!
- "Snarl of Memories" is perhaps one of the most infamous mind screws in the entire franchise, which is saying something. There are no proper ways to describe the cutscene, so this link
will speak for itself. - "IT'S THERE... IT'S HUNGRY... DON'T TURN AROUND!!" is an inscription in one of the Twilight Town tunnels. It actually had nothing to do with the mission — it was randomly thrown in just for the sake of screwing with the players.
- Not exactly; the sign could be referring to the first powerful Heartless you fight down there, or the Heartless in general. It is nonetheless unnerving.
- Beast has been a one-man protector of his castle, fighting the Heartless without end to prevent his world from falling to darkness again and since no one else in the castle is able to take up arms. Roxas arrives at the gates of his castle only to be met with the Beast being tossed over the wall like a toy. While the answer to what could’ve done this to Beast of all people is quickly given and it lives up to it, seeing Beast’s body flop to the ground like a limp blanket is certainly a major cause for alarm.
- A random glitch can occur at Curly Hill in Halloween Town in which the player can fall inside the hill thanks to Hitbox Dissonance. The free-fall in the void that ensues is thankfully stopped when hitting the bottom, which results in instant death for the player character. Something similar reportedly happened in Agrabah too, and it has happened in Twilight Town as well.
- Anti-Saix. Instead of normal Saix, the Mission Mode version of Mission 91 features his shadow counterpart. It's a lot like Anti-Sora, just without the animal-like movements.
- If you think about it, it's a bit unsettling that the Organization (including Roxas) freely kills their fellow Nobodies for training.
- Axel in this game embodies the childhood fear of a close friend and/or adult figure in your life turning out to be keeping secrets from you and not being at all what you thought they were. Before he became a genuine friend to Roxas and Xion, Axel was a ruthless, manipulative, sociopathic assassin, and his personal fears of losing Roxas and Xion combined with the worsening circumstances cause him revert to that way of life once more at Roxas and Xion's expense. Roxas' diary entries about how he doesn't even recognize Axel anymore just reinforce how chilling this whole situation is.
- From Axel's point of view, his singleminded desire for Roxas and Xion to stay physically safe cause him to overlook their own personal wants, and in the end it tears apart their relationship. It's horrifying and tragic to imagine a situation where you do everything in your power to protect those you care about only to lose them.
- This narration from the manga: In order to pretend that [Nobodies] have hearts like people, they act relying on their "memories" of their time as humans, but they don't actually feel anything.
