In the last part on this series we explored the villains of Kingdom Hearts 2, and to recap:
If you think about it, their one attempt to legitimately menace Sora and the gang was pretty badly thought-out and only really troubled him for a few minutes. Otherwise most of the time they were just pursuing fragmented evil schemes here and there, generally without a lot of regard for the keyblade-wielding hero who outright declared he was going to kick their asses before the game was over and who was mostly responsible for the death of about half of them.
In a crossover series especially a good villain is meant to provide a sense of cohesion--a common thread that somehow takes all these disparate threads and brings them together--but we just don't get anything of the sort here. In the first game everything eventually filtered back to Ansem, making him the biggest bad guy of all time, but here the Organization and Pete and Maleficent have almost nothing to do with each other. It's different, but it almost would've been preferable if Square had re-hashed the old plot. What's more, generally a tale of adventure and its heroes are only as good as the villains they stand up against--or more honestly, the obstacles they overcome, personal or otherwise. This, then, does not bode well for our heroes, who we'll now examine.
It seems best that we start with the central trio of the story--the Trinity, as the game labels them. In this game they cooperate perfectly and never have a single disagreement. In the first game, though, it wasn't all so smooth. Early on especially, Donald and Sora didn't get along and were constantly bickering over whether or not they should go after Sora's friends or search for King Mickey. In the last levels, when Sora actually lost the Keyblade to Riku, Donald and Goofy were actually confronted with whether or not their loyalty should be to who holds the Keyblade or to the friend who had helped them come so far. To nobody's surprise they made the right choice and rejoined Sora, but the conflicts made it interesting and made Donald and Goofy more than throw-away characters in this tale. It was just as much their story as it was Sora's. Here, though, Donald and Goofy almost might as well not be involved at all.
I attribute this mainly to the fact that there's just too many certainties on their part. Donald and Goofy learn very early in the story that King Mickey is okay and pretty much shrug and ask Sora what to do next the rest of the game. They don't really have anything better to do than help their friend. Every so often there's a conflict with Pete, particularly during the chapter that's devoted to his trying to take over Disney Castle, but as discussed earlier Pete's hardly the kind of villain to merit any real sense of conflict or urgency out of these two. Even at that high point the one moment of weakness Donald has over the potential that he could change history is merely glanced over, and that's as strong as the story with him ever gets. While I don't think that Donald and Goofy should steal the spotlight, certainly it seems like they should've had a bigger role in the story, and generally their relationship with Pete in particular seems like a really wasted opportunity.
The main man himself. I'll be blunt: Sora in Kingdom Hearts 2 is the most naive, wooden, and outright boring protagonist I've ever seen in a game, and that includes Squall. Once again I'm going to compare him to the two previous titles.
In Kingdom Hearts 1 Sora sees his whole island destroyed firsthand and is thrust into a strange new world, faced with the challenges of facing its dangers, making new friends, and accepting great responsibility in that he--a thirteen-year-old boy--is suddenly the Keyblade's chosen wielder, whether he wants to be or not. He's effectively made responsible for insuring that what happened to his island and his friends never happens again. There's hardship, loss, mistrust, and self-doubt in the true classic Disney fashion as he struggles to figure out just where he sits in all of this and wonders to himself if anybody from Destiny Islands is okay. Meanwhile Sora's caught between his friend Riku, the responsibility he faces as the key-bearer to his new friends, and his affection for Kairi and desire to see her. He's a very pure hero, to be sure, but clearly conflicted at multiple points in the story, and at the best of times the challenges he faces in each world reflect some aspect of his inner conflict. In the end he learns to face his fears, his friends, and the worst things in peoples' hearts--and I mean the worst as Disney gives us some of the finest villains in animation history to work with here--and comes out stronger for it. The sheer circumstances of this game make him a strong three-dimensional character, and he makes impressive sacrifices for the sake of everybody he cares about. It's a really strong, inspiring story.
In Chain of Memories Sora's desire to find his friends is turned against him, with the Organization employing a fake Riku and Kairi's own nobody, Namine, in an attempt to rid him of his memories and render his heart empty so that they can make him their puppet. It's a lot simpler, but the end scenario is very chilling, with Sora, Donald, and Goofy not even remembering who they are, where they came from, or why they're there. Somehow, though, they still remember that they're friends and they still remember how to tell the difference between good guys and bad guys enough to know that Marluxia is a bad guy who needs to be destroyed. It's a story that says that no matter what, the heart always remembers.
In Kingdom Hearts 2, Sora returns after a solid year of sleep to continue his search for Riku and Kairi.
That's it, that's all he's doing this game. That's his only motivation, apart from the responsibility that's been entrusted to him with the Keyblade, but that's not as interesting any more. Sora's already locked every world from the Heartless, destroyed Ansem, and if he hasn't outright destroyed most of Disney's rogues gallery he's certainly given each and every one of them a good spanking. The fact is that he has no more room for self-doubt or uncertainty, so even when Yensid announces to him (at the beginning of the game, no less, leaving no room for mystery) that there's a new group of enemies he has to worry about it doesn't seem all that big of a deal, even if they're led by Ansem's nobody. Simply put, Sora killed him before and he can kill him again, and he can certainly kill his underlings. The task of slaying Heartless at this point is second nature to him, like riding a bicycle, and he pretty well shows it. Returning to his central motivation of finding Riku and Kairi and the Destiny Islands, he never once seems to question anything he's doing and whether it's getting him any closer to finding them. He's 100% sure that if he just keeps moving forward, keeps thwarting evildoers' plans and being Superman to the Disneyverse, he'll eventually find them. It's as if he knows he's in a video game and that eventually if he beats the final boss then everything will just come together in the end, and that's just boring--one-dimensional and boring. Even Haley Joel Osman's voice acting seems to reflect it. All the feeling that was in "there's no way you're taking Kairi's heart!" is drained out of it, leaving us with the generic and unconvincing cry, "Oh no!" and the all-too-frequently-stated, "Riku!"
Speaking of Riku...
Let's rewind to Chain of Memories for a second. In it, Riku has his own storyline where he has to come to terms with his dark powers after having spent the end of the first game possessed by Ansem--which means drawing Ansem out from himself into the physical world and putting him in his place. Chain of Memories had its problems and probably shouldn't have been so much a major entry into the series as just a fun side-story, but Riku's story in it made me really like his character and really got me rooting for him by the end, at which he walks off down the road to Twilight Town with King Mickey in Organization outfits, ready to infiltrate their ranks and find out what it is they're up to while Sora recovers from his ordeal. "To sunset?" DiZ, who we still don't know who he is, asks, to which Riku replies, "No. To Dawn." It's one of those rare, hokey moments that works because of what we've been through with him, and it gives us a sense of hope and a sense that even though his power comes from darkness, that doesn't necessarily make him evil. Everything about his story suggests there's a greater complexity to peoples' hearts than just the black-and-white of dark-and-light.And then he overuses his dark powers trying to catch Roxas and ends up stuck in Ansem's body in Kingdom Hearts 2.
...
WHAT!?
He underwent all this character development, got set up to be an awesome, shadowy hero in Kingdom Hearts 2--not an ANTIhero, mind you, but a hero who genuinely used the power of darkness for good--only for the game to bitchslap him and go "nope, darkness is bad for you!"? Why!? That makes everything that he did in Chain of Memories completely pointless! What purpose does this serve? Why does this happen to him? No reason apart from the brief and dismissive "darkness is bad for you" explanation is ever presented.
What's more, he spends the entire game being emo and depressed over his predicament, unable to face Sora or Kairi as long as he looks like Ansem, having more or less given up on his own identity. If we were to accept that he had to obtain the power of Ansem in order to corner Roxas, we'd be awfully silly, because as we see in Chain of Memories, Riku BEATS Ansem single-handedly. He doesn't need his power and he knows it! This is just one of many instances where Kingdom Hearts 2 spits in the face of the character development of the previous games. I think it's right that he should've spent most of the game behind the scenes and in the shadows, but there's no reason he couldn't have done it without confidence, strength, dignity, and self-respect. It seems especially stupid to me that he'd let Sora believe that he'd been hurt or captured by the Organization when he knows his best friend well enough to know that could cause problems.
This is like those Clone Saga issues of Spiderman where Peter Parker whines about being a clone and, instead of talking to his wife or his loved ones about his problems, shuns them and decides he should trust the crazy green scientist man with pointy ears called "The Jackal." In short, Riku seriously needed to be whapped with a clue stick here and just stand up for himself and his friends like the righteous guy he was supposed to be, and I'll explain why that should have been the case later. For right now it's just a grating and frustrating degradation of his character.
Oh boy. here we go. This guy was just the worst mistake Square ever made with the series. He first appears to Riku as a mysterious, mystical ninja-like figure in Chain of Memories, aiding him in his quest to rid himself of Ansem's influence once and for all. He's geniunely mysterious and rather interesting. We're still unsure if he really is one of the good guys and what his motives are.
Then, in Kingdom Hearts 2, it turns out that he's Ansem. Apparently, the real Ansem. Yeah, that guy from the last game who kept calling himself Ansem and wrote the Ansem reports? Totally not Ansem. It turns out he's really called Xehanort, and the thing you were fighting was "Xehanort's Heartless," and Xemnas isn't Ansem's Nobody but Xehanort's Nobody. The real Ansem is in fact an old man played by Christopher Lee.
...
WHY!?
This is another one of those "what problem does this solve!?" kind of moments when you have to ask yourself why the writers at Square felt the need to do this. For starters, it's confusing, and by the time this is revealed we've spent two and a half games acclimated to a major villain as Ansem. Secondly, it just dreadfully cheapens that character and everything that we went through fighting him, saying that he was just an overly gung-ho lab assistant rather than the man himself. Great, so this whole time the evil overlord was just an intern who left the plutonium vat open too long and went crazy. I'm not sure I'm getting across the magnitude of this retcon here. This is like, after two and a half whole Star Wars films, getting through Return of the Jedi and being told that Emperor Palpatine wasn't really the evil overlord calling the shots and responsible for corrupting Darth Vader, but rather it was some guy named Fred who decided to wear his robes and the real Emperor Palpatine was a good guy the whole time. Now the character who was "Ansem the Wise," a character with a background and emotional context for who he was and what he was doing, isn't really anybody, and the character who now is Ansem the Wise is just suddenly showing up and wanting revenge, but we've never actually met him before so that doesn't really have any context either. All it's really done is seriously cheapened the story. This doesn't make the plot any deeper, it's just a twist for the sake of a twist because the writers couldn't find a way to make it more exciting and, in true Square fashion, didn't really know who DiZ was when they made him up and just made things up as they went along.
And for what? So that someone could be around to wake Sora up at the beginning and so that someone could be around to blow up Kingdom Hearts at the end and turn Riku back to normal--oh, except Riku shouldn't have had to turn back to normal in the first place! Otherwise he isn't even all that involved with the plot, to the point where even Mickey's really confused as to what he's doing there. He doesn't even interact with Sora in Kingdom Hearts 2 until his reveal at the very end. He just doesn't need to be there. They could have easily found ways to accomplish all these things without adding another character to the already crowded roster for this game and without cheapening all the previous material in the process.
Oy.
Roxas is a real disappointment. He gets five hours of boring and mundane tutorials, minor character development alongside side-characters we won't see or care about for the rest of the game, and cryptic backstory between him and Axel before he's unceremoniously crammed back inside Sora without so much as a peep and little more than an offhand and quickly-dismissed reference from the other Organization members. He finally shows up at the very end of the game, when he throws a short tantrum in the form of either a cutscene or a boss fight depending on which version you happened to play, then goes quietly back inside Sora. The last we hear about him is a reference from Riku that goes something like this:
Sora: "So who's Roxas?"
Riku: "He's your nobody!"
Sora: "Wha-wha-wha-WHAT!? I never turned into a Heartless! ... Oh wait, yeah I did. Well. Huh. So where is he now? I wanna meet him!"
Riku: "Oh, we crammed him back inside you at the beginning of the game, so you won't have to worry about him. :D "
Sora: "... So he's--"
Riku: "Entirely pointless! :D "
Sora: "Huh."
This applies to him and Namine, who both aren't heard from in a substantial fashion for over 40 hours of the game. Namine at least got things done, helping Sora recover his memories and rescuing Kairi from the Organization's clutches, but Roxas, that lazy deadbeat, didn't accomplish anything. Even if we take him as an antagonist rather than a protagonist he was largely ineffectual. The Organization's references to him only confused Sora, and he never noticed his presence inside him until that one moment in the World that Never Was when the two fight. We get the sense that a keyblade-wielder is essential to the Organization's plans, but for all that they barely make any effort to reclaim Roxas, their attempts limited to Axel's vain attempts to re-recruit him in the introduction and Demyx's whining. This wouldn't even necessarily be a problem, but Square had so much riding on this kid, with trailer after trailer making him one of the most beloved and hyped characters in the Kingdom Hearts universe well before his introduction. While I can probably accept that 358/2 days provided more of the Roxas everybody was expecting to see, I can't believe that his role in Kingdom Hearts 2 really satisfied anybody. After seeing him kick so much ass in all those teasers it just doesn't seem fair either to him or the fans that he should have such an underwhelming part in such a major entry into the series.
I have nothing to say against Mickey. Having him be playable during boss fights was an awesome bonus.
That just about wraps it up for the heroes of the Kingdom Hearts universe, and they're just as disappointing and uninteresting to me as the villains, totally lacking in any depth or character development and often times cheapening the foundations laid by the previous games rather than building upon them like a proper narrative. In general the whole story is just a mess, with plot threads being picked up and forgotten frequently and nothing for the worlds themselves to really reflect in our heroes. In part you could attribute a lot of these shortcomings to all the quotas that Square had to fill, including a number of Disney worlds that had to be visited and re-visited and an extremely over-inflated cast of characters that had to be integrated into this plot. Speaking from personal experience, a story of this sheer magnitude is not an easy thing to write, especially given all the concessions for decent gameplay that have to be made, but when I can point out so many holes and shortcomings for so many characters and sub-plots it's just inexcusable.
That said, I don't really attribute this so much to Disney's meddling as Disney's lack of meddling; if they wanted to have so many Disney worlds featured in the game they should have become more involved in the story and left less control of it in the hands of Square. They obviously weren't as involved this time given how much emphasis in the story fell towards Square's characters as opposed to Disney's. Tetsuya Nomura is a man of a lot of good ideas, having helped the Final Fantasy series evolve from a classic tale about finding a bunch of magic rocks to full stories involving emotional engagement and strong character development, but he's really a character designer more than he is a writer and he tends to get really self-indulgent when he's given too much control, adding new characters just to justify the concept art he produces. What's more, he's frequently stated that he's outright uncomfortable working with other peoples' characters out of the fear that he won't represent them well, and when more than half the game's cast is someone else's characters you'd better bet that doesn't mean good things.
Now, this does raise a few questions. First, if this is such an incompetently told story, why does nobody else but me seem to notice? Why is the game's fan base still so strong?
The easy answer that everybody seems to gravitate to is that hormonal teenage girls dig yaoi and slashfics involving bishie boys and that Axel, Roxas, Sora, and Riku, along with the entire Organization, give them a ton of fodder. There's times when the game even seems intent on suggesting yaoi relationships and seems to be actively pandering to this group, with Sora seeming to outright ignore the slightly-more-mature and slightly-more-provacatively-dressed Kairi to tenderly embrace his BFF. Personally I find these trends very alienating, less out of homophobia and more out of the understanding that Sora and Riku were always spiritually more like brothers than anything else, and the idea of these two getting it on is like incest to me. What's more, I'm not sure I believe this is what Square really was going for with this.The answer that I think is more truthful is that when you play a video game you get a certain sense of distortion. It's like taking a piece of artwork, say, a character, and staring at it as closely as possible--through a magnifying glass. You move from piece to piece and each one seems competent enough. That's a very strikingly realistic-looking hand, there, a beautiful set of eyes, a perfect mouth--and then you pull back from the paper to look at the whole thing, and you realize that each of these parts is unbelievably and hilariously disproportionate, with the hand being the size of the person's eyeball and the face looking almost picasso-like. It's a problem that many artists that work too close to the canvas face. Games don't give a lot of opportunities to see the forest for the trees--to pull back from the proverbial drawing, so to speak--and so our perception of them is often very clouded in this fashion. So long as one moment or another seems competent enough in and of itself it's just that easy for us to be distracted or outright ignore its flaws--to the point that I was convinced that Kingdom Hearts 2 was one of the best games ever made for three years before I added things up for myself and realized it was a huge disappointment. Our perception is formed less by the whole of the story and more by the most recent and appealing experience we've faced and the enjoyment we derive from the gameplay.
That, though, shall be the discussion of my next chapter.