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Harrow posted:I want so badly to get the full story of how this happened to Kingdom Hearts, like how it got this astoundingly convoluted. Like, this is a story that conscious human beings are writing, and other conscious human beings are still huge fans of, and I will just never understand either side of that equation. I think??? It was supposed to be a gateway Ansem was summoning at the beginning of the first game and then...uuuhhhhh....I don't loving know anymore. The villain has like four versions of himself running around and his lieutenant is actually the mole who's making sure destiny is following it's intended course and....Apparently alternate versions of yourself can exist if people just believe in them enough and.....God man just GOD! Thinking about it is making me smell burnt toast. It's an aneurism, a Jacob's ladder-esque dying dream made into game form but with disney liberally sprinkled throughout. What the gently caress was even the point? Why did Axel exist when he couldn't more blatantly just be Reno with a different name??? Why not just use Reno? He's an FF character why bother making a new version of him and then calling it your original character Nomura!? Flopsy fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:16
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And then Riku shows up
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Apr 22, 2020 23:21
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:And then Riku shows up Which version? In his own body or in Ansem's? Or was it the clone version that came back at the end? Flopsy fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:22
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Honestly if I were more pessimistic I would take the ending of the KH3 DLC to go "yep this franchise is hosed"
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Apr 22, 2020 23:25
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Honestly if I were more pessimistic I would take the ending of the KH3 DLC to go "yep this franchise is hosed" It's not?
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Apr 22, 2020 23:26
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I meant the FF7R franchise
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Apr 22, 2020 23:28
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KH still delivers very cool Mansex and friends fights, so it will be fine for a while regardless of the stupid plot
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Apr 22, 2020 23:29
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lezard_valeth posted:idk about this. I think this scene is pretty clear that Sephiroth is drinking the Whisper juice after you defeat them my read on the final confrontation was that sephiroth duped the party into fighting the whispers, waited until the battle was done and they were all weakened, and then sucked the whispers up and tried to use their power to wipe the whole party at once, hence why he nearly nuked everyone with the "memory" of Meteor at the end of his battle he fails, but still wins, because his "defeat" purges the whispers and their influence from the plotline completely and gives him another shot at total victory. he tries briefly to coerce cloud into helping him out, but when cloud refuses he just shrugs and goes off to do his own thing, probably because cloud is still full of jenova juice and sephiroth can manipulate him in subtler ways
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Apr 22, 2020 23:30
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I just keep thinking about how crazy good the writing for the characters was, and think back to what I've read about how bonkers some of the original drafts of FF7 were (and how Nomura had a hand in putting it back on track), and like... maybe Kingdom Hearts is bad but not necessarily Nomura's direction as a whole, y'know? It'd be wild to go from how good the writing is for 95% of this remake into total nonsense from here, even if this ending was a very strange moment on its own. Who knows! Out of curiosity, what happened in the KH3 DLC that was so egregious? All I've seen is there's some dude who looks like Noctis. Oxxidation posted:my read on the final confrontation was that sephiroth duped the party into fighting the whispers, waited until the battle was done and they were all weakened, and then sucked the whispers up and tried to use their power to wipe the whole party at once, hence why he nearly nuked everyone with the "memory" of Meteor at the end of his battle See, I figure the group wasn't necessarily duped into fighting the Whispers, if only because Aerith seems to know what she's doing. If nothing else, maybe Aerith and Sephiroth each have their own reasons for wanting the Whispers gone. Also, why would the Whispers been trying to stop the group from leaving Midgar at that point, anyway? That's when they're supposed to leave Midgar--why form a huge wall? If I'm honest the part of the ending that confuses me the most is the part that takes place before stepping through the portal, when the Whispers are trapping the group in Midgar and Aerith turns Sephiroth's portal golden for some reason and... yeah I'm really not sure exactly what's going on there. Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:30
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lezard_valeth posted:KH still delivers very cool Mansex and friends fights, so it will be fine for a while regardless of the stupid plot The eternal question of why are their feet so loving big will never be answered. CharlieFoxtrot posted:I meant the FF7R franchise I may end up eating these words but I don't think it's possible to gently caress FF7R over as bad as they did with Kingdom Hearts. FF7 at least has concrete plot structure in place to refer to, defined characters ( a lot of them), and isn't visiting alternate worlds or universes (as far as we can tell) As long as it doesn't go full linear universe lets get real loving surreal in here folks! I think it'll be okay. Nomura isn't the main writer thank Christ.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:33
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So the chapter select is basically the NG+ for this right? Finished it today and might want to go through it again at some point, possibly on hard. If I want to use all my poo poo on hard would I want to grind up before and then select hard using chapter select after I've done that or would it be possible/fun to grind up and play the initial chapters on hard at the same time?Harrow posted:See, I figure the group wasn't necessarily duped into fighting the Whispers, if only because Aerith seems to know what she's doing. If nothing else, maybe Aerith and Sephiroth each have their own reasons for wanting the Whispers gone. Also, why would the Whispers been trying to stop the group from leaving Midgar at that point, anyway? That's when they're supposed to leave Midgar--why form a huge wall? I'm wondering if they're going to do a sort of thing where Aerith is trying to change her fate and make sure things work out somewhat like the original but doesn't want to say that out loud, not in a malicious way, just she's scared the others won't agree or something. Then the big threat reveal at the end of part 2 or 3 is that trying to do that has hosed things up and now they have to try and repair what's gone wrong without Aerith having to die. There seemed to be some hints that she knows what's up over the course of the game but it's been so long since I played the original I wasn't sure if that was an original game plotline thing I was forgetting or new stuff. thebardyspoon fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:34
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And why were they blocking Shinra tower, too? The whispers' behavior in the final stretch doesn't make a ton of sense
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Apr 22, 2020 23:34
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Harrow posted:Out of curiosity, what happened in the KH3 DLC that was so egregious? All I've seen is there's some dude who looks like Noctis. You travel back in time 10 minutes before the end of the game to try and rescue your Kairi, but you are not supposed to use time travel that way so you end up being sent into Shibuya were you end up fighting a videogame character that was actually real along and also Noctis from the Versus XIII trailer
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Apr 22, 2020 23:35
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lezard_valeth posted:You travel back in time 10 minutes before the end of the game to try and rescue your Kairi, but you are not supposed to use time travel that way so you end up being sent into Shibuya were you end up fighting a videogame character that was actually real along and also Noctis from the Versus XIII trailer  ex--excuse me...what?
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Apr 22, 2020 23:36
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I'm convinced the whispers weren't preserving the timeline and that they were actively loving it up by rescuing people who are dead in the original and etc. Sephiroth definitely had some kind of control over them.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:37
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Harrow posted:See, I figure the group wasn't necessarily duped into fighting the Whispers, if only because Aerith seems to know what she's doing. If nothing else, maybe Aerith and Sephiroth each have their own reasons for wanting the Whispers gone. Also, why would the Whispers been trying to stop the group from leaving Midgar at that point, anyway? That's when they're supposed to leave Midgar--why form a huge wall? yeah it's tough to guess at the Whispers' intentions because they're a mute hivemind that views time non-linearly, but given that they really started to go off their collective trolley when sephiroth re-emerged at the shinra tower i think they were reacting to him at the end of midgar, not the party. but as aeris says, the planet's cries don't reach him, because his jenova-poisoned soul exists outside its cycle of life and death, so he's instead able to subvert them for his own ends. he carves them open and baits cloud and co. into crossing over into another possible world, and it's only then that the Whispers really go ballistic on the heroes specifically aeris' own motivations are also unclear because she plays her cards so close to her chest, but i think she starts the game off with fatalistic foreknowledge of what's to come but slowly breaks out of it after her intervention at Sector 7 saves so many people, so that by the time the endgame rolls around she's full on YOLO about defying the planet's will
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Apr 22, 2020 23:37
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Kingdom Hearts should be used as the go-to case study of how not to handle a major long-running franchise. I know it's been beaten to death how far it spiraled up it's own rear end, but it really is THAT bad. I'm also going with the reading that the whispers are just future astral shadows of Cloud, Tifa, and Barret, because the Advent Children Remanants would be the dumbest poo poo.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:37
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The only reference to Advent Children in the 7R series should be Rude's ringtone
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Apr 22, 2020 23:39
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thebardyspoon posted:So the chapter select is basically the NG+ for this right? Finished it today and might want to go through it again at some point, possibly on hard. If I want to use all my poo poo on hard would I want to grind up before and then select hard using chapter select after I've done that or would it be possible/fun to grind up and play the initial chapters on hard at the same time? Grind using the earlier chapters on Hard. The game gives you double EXP/triple AP on Hard, and it seems to be balanced around you being at around the same level as endgame at the start of it.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:39
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Flopsy posted:As long as it doesn't go full linear universe lets get real loving surreal in here folks! I think it'll be okay. Nomura isn't the main writer thank Christ. In fairness to Nomura, he was heavily involved in creating the story for the original FF7 as well. Apparently Nomura was really influential in Aerith's death, both that it happens at all and how it happens in the story. It was Nomura's idea to have the story structure be about the group chasing Sephiroth (he wanted to have a mobile enemy who would lead the characters on a mystery). Kitase originally wanted to have the end of the game kill all but three of your party, too, before the final battle, and Nomura argued against it because it would dilute the impact of Aerith's death. Like... Kingdom Hearts is garbage, but according to their own stories about how the original was developed, the original FF7's story owes a lot to Nomura. Maybe he's not as out-of-touch with FF7 as people assume. cheetah7071 posted:And why were they blocking Shinra tower, too? The whispers' behavior in the final stretch doesn't make a ton of sense That's why I'm inclined to consider Maximilian Dood's theory that Sephiroth has already started influencing the Whispers by this point. Otherwise nothing they do after resurrecting Barret makes much sense.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:40
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Flopsy posted:
nomura has repeatedly made it clear in increasingly non-jokey ways that he is, at best, tired of working on the kingdom hearts franchise and at worst despises it. he's said that he fantasizes about ways to destroy sora personally. he's also incredibly bitter about being booted off the versus XIII project after years of playing grab-rear end/getting shoved into more KH projects instead so the KH3 epilogue is basically him announcing his intent to redo FFXV his own way even if it means turning the entire kingdom hearts franchise into a stealth prequel for it
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Apr 22, 2020 23:40
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Oxxidation posted:aeris' own motivations are also unclear because she plays her cards so close to her chest, but i think she starts the game off with fatalistic foreknowledge of what's to come but slowly breaks out of it after her intervention at Sector 7 saves so many people, so that by the time the endgame rolls around she's full on YOLO about defying the planet's will I like that read on her and yeah, it makes sense. She starts out wanting to follow the planet's will even though she might know it doesn't turn out well for her and eventually gets a taste of "things can go better if I defy it" and goes all-in.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:41
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Harrow posted:That's why I'm inclined to consider Maximilian Dood's theory that Sephiroth has already started influencing the Whispers by this point. Otherwise nothing they do after resurrecting Barret makes much sense. They did stop the mines from blowing up the party in the motorcycle chase, just like you'd expect. It's just messy
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Apr 22, 2020 23:41
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yeah the Whispers are still nominally on the party's side right up until they take sephiroth's bait and exit the timeline, at which point they go "DID SOMEONE ORDER A KAIJU"
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Apr 22, 2020 23:42
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Harrow posted:I like that read on her and yeah, it makes sense. She starts out wanting to follow the planet's will even though she might know it doesn't turn out well for her and eventually gets a taste of "things can go better if I defy it" and goes all-in. Yeah, I really liked the arc you can see develop that builds up from the first meeting up to the events of Chapter 12, in terms of shaping her motivation. It's probably the most major thing that has me hopeful about the direction of the follow-up
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Apr 22, 2020 23:44
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Harrow posted:I want so badly to get the full story of how this happened to Kingdom Hearts This is purposeless, unfortunately. Kingdom Hearts is excess; it is "there is always more, and it is always worse." When discussing game design with my friends or co-workers in a casual sense, we've come back to this subject of the axes of depth and complexity. They are often confused for the same thing, but they are not. Kingdom Hearts has enough complexity to make the mind reel, but has as much depth as a puddle of piss. The characters are worse even than cardboard cutouts, which works if they are guest-starring and only supposed to show up and be a Diet Coke version of themselves from their source material, and really really doesn't work if they're expected to carry the narrative of a game that thinks it is very, very profound. The gameplay is a shallow embarrassment that increasingly does everything it can to ignore player input, violating every show/do-don't-tell axiom that has laid the foundation for successful fiction since the dawn of man. The plot is so ludicrous that it performs the rare double wrap-round - it is so stupid that it becomes good, then keeps going and re-becomes terrible. Kingdom Hearts III is creatively bankrupt and distressingly awful for a game of its budget and caliber of staff. The franchise's overarching narrative reads like terrible C-grade fanfiction of itself - that's the only way I can think to put it. It enables all of the worst tendencies of everyone involved and demonstrates zero restraint, resulting in an absolutely disgusting mess of diarrhea fireworks on screen when you're trying to actually fight the battles (which, thanks to the Triangle button doing everything from team-up attacks to counters to the gently caress-awful Attraction commands, it is increasingly unnecessary for you the player to do; the game is quite content to just shower bullshit at you and confuse you into thinking you're having fun). When the plot is happening, it happens in the absolute worst style of cryptic bullshit dialogue that is the hallmark of the worst Japanese fiction has to offer, with intentionally vague "... is it him?" pronoun games played all over the place to no apparent end, for no apparent reason. The ratio of cool things happening : two or more characters who are copies of other characters or the same characters from the future or a data version of the same characters or characters you'd know but you don't recognize because now they're wearing loving stupid black hoodie-robes is like 1:2813671492. Forget that it's nonsensical, because Katana Zero is basically nonsense that runs on Rule of Cool and that game owns bones; that isn't what's happening here. It is incredibly boring nonsense. KZ never seems to be insisting that it's actually EXTREMELY DEEP and the MYSTERIES, they go REALLY DEEP too, keep playing and you'll be in on the EPIC, SWEEPING STORYLINE that is VERY SERIOUS. KH does this all the time, and commits the incredibly egregious sin of forcing anyone who wants to give the newer entries a shot (I cannot recommend against doing this hard enough) to have no choice but to play eighteen different sub-games and side-games to have any understanding of what is going on, and the reward for understanding what is going on is that it is even worse and more boring. It's "Remember to drink your Ovaltine" from A Christmas Story. I may have come off as harsh about Final Fantasy VIII earlier in the thread, and I still think it's bad, but I don't think the team that made it is bad or that they intentionally made a bad game or anything like that. You can tell, at various points, that they tried, often pretty hard, to make something very good that people would enjoy. KH3, particularly, is bullshit. It is lazy, confounding drivel masquerading as a video game, trading on nostalgia for earlier titles that were better, before everyone lost their loving minds and forced this (UGH) Organization XIII bullshit on everyone, to the point where I have an almost ethical objection to its existence. Charging people $60 or more for Kingdom Hearts III should be a federal offense. I'm not even sure who I blame for that, if anyone specifically. Maybe Nomura hates KH; it certainly makes sense given how loving horrible it is. But his name is the one chiefly associated with the project, and even if you don't like what you're working on per se you should just loving quit or make it into something you do like instead of producing KH3 and then selling it for real money. guts and bolts fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:44
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lezard_valeth posted:You travel back in time 10 minutes before the end of the game to try and rescue your Kairi, but you are not supposed to use time travel that way so you end up being sent into Shibuya were you end up fighting a videogame character that was actually real along and also Noctis from the Versus XIII trailer holy poo poo lol Oxxidation posted:so the KH3 epilogue is basically him announcing his intent to redo FFXV his own way even if it means turning the entire kingdom hearts franchise into a stealth prequel for it Honestly that sounds like a step up for the franchise
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Apr 22, 2020 23:44
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Beefstew posted:Kingdom Hearts should be used as the go-to case study of how not to handle a major long-running franchise. I know it's been beaten to death how far it spiraled up it's own rear end, but it really is THAT bad. It's hard to fully overstate how bad it is. At this point even as someone who followed series fairly closely for 10 years I got not clue what the gently caress is happening. I don't understand anything about it anymore. It's unrecognizable as what it originally was. Harrow posted:In fairness to Nomura, he was heavily involved in creating the story for the original FF7 as well. Apparently Nomura was really influential in Aerith's death, both that it happens at all and how it happens in the story. It was Nomura's idea to have the story structure be about the group chasing Sephiroth (he wanted to have a mobile enemy who would lead the characters on a mystery). Kitase originally wanted to have the end of the game kill all but three of your party, too, before the final battle, and Nomura argued against it because it would dilute the impact of Aerith's death. Hmm...I'll be cautiously optimistic on this one. FF7 may be Nomura's baby and maybe he'll be less willing to get....KH style experimental with it. gently caress man I hope so. Both series are like at opposite ends of the scale in quality at this point.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:44
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As another Final Fantasy character would say: "We may accept this fate or defy it, but we cannot deny it"
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Apr 22, 2020 23:45
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JBP posted:I'm convinced the whispers weren't preserving the timeline and that they were actively loving it up by rescuing people who are dead in the original and etc. Sephiroth definitely had some kind of control over them. Kind of a similar thing as the original game, where the Weapons know something hosed up is happening to the planet but don't know that its Sephiroth. The whispers will probably be called out explicitly as another kind of Weapon when they show up
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Apr 22, 2020 23:47
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i think the Whispers are done. aeris says that their showdown at the portal is their final line of defense, which makes sense because it's also the exit from midgar - it's the threshold dividing the enclosed, safe environment of franchise canon from whatever 'nanners bullshit the devs can cook up if they've been unleashed from it. the opalescent supernova that engulfs sephiroth when the party smacks him down probably signifies the last of his Whisper mojo getting knocked out of him as well, which is dandy for him because he's still got plenty of jenova flesh to throw around
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Apr 22, 2020 23:49
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One thing I will give recent KH games credit for is the Master of Masters (yes, that's his name. yes, it's incredibly stupid) writing a Book of Prophecies that can tell the future, and then proceed to rip his eye off, put it in a sword and instruct his apprentice to pass it down to his own apprentice and so on and so forth so that that way he can see the future and write the Book of Prophecies in the first place That is such a badass concept, almost Nordic mythology like, that I wish would belong to a better game.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:49
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lezard_valeth posted:One thing I will give recent KH games credit for is the Master of Masters (yes, that's his name. yes, it's incredibly stupid) writing a Book of Prophecies that can tell the future, and then proceed to rip his eye off, put it in a sword and instruct his apprentice to pass it down to his own apprentice and so on and so forth so that that way he can see the future and write the Book of Prophecies in the first place That is such a badass concept, almost Nordic mythology like, that I wish would belong to a better game. the master of masters is the best character in the kingdom hearts franchise because he has absolutely no respect for the story he inhabits, which is really just another damning point against the story itself
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Apr 22, 2020 23:50
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Oxxidation posted:i think the Whispers are done. aeris says that their showdown at the portal is their final line of defense, which makes sense because it's also the exit from midgar - it's the threshold dividing the enclosed, safe environment of franchise canon from whatever 'nanners bullshit the devs can cook up if they've been unleashed from it. the opalescent supernova that engulfs sephiroth when the party smacks him down probably signifies the last of his Whisper mojo getting knocked out of him as well, which is dandy for him because he's still got plenty of jenova flesh to throw around
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Apr 22, 2020 23:51
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lezard_valeth posted:One thing I will give recent KH games credit for is the Master of Masters (yes, that's his name. yes, it's incredibly stupid) writing a Book of Prophecies that can tell the future, and then proceed to rip his eye off, put it in a sword and instruct his apprentice to pass it down to his own apprentice and so on and so forth so that that way he can see the future and write the Book of Prophecies in the first place That is such a badass concept, almost Nordic mythology like, that I wish would belong to a better game. Yeah wow that concept whips rear end It reminds me of how I feel about, like, FF8 and FF15's settings. They have so many elements that I think are rad as gently caress and I wish were in games I liked more.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:52
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I always wondered how the voice actors for Goofy and Donald must have felt as those games progressed. Like last week you were in the studio recording Goofy's Gawrshmas Spectacular, now you're giving a ten-minute lecture on the duality of the soul.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:53
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Oxxidation posted:nomura has repeatedly made it clear in increasingly non-jokey ways that he is, at best, tired of working on the kingdom hearts franchise and at worst despises it. he's said that he fantasizes about ways to destroy sora personally. he's also incredibly bitter about being booted off the versus XIII project after years of playing grab-rear end/getting shoved into more KH projects instead This sounds hilarious and awesome e: I just watched this ending on youtube and you weren't kidding he literally ends with the intro to the very first Versus XIII trailer that's ballsy Good Soldier Svejk fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:55
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exquisite tea posted:I always wondered how the voice actors for Goofy and Donald must have felt as those games progressed. Like last week you were in the studio recording Goofy's Gawrshmas Spectacular, now you're giving a ten-minute lecture on the duality of the soul. If nothing else I want to check out a KH3 let's play since I imagine there's at least some entertainment value in listening to some of that
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Apr 22, 2020 23:55
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exquisite tea posted:I always wondered how the voice actors for Goofy and Donald must have felt as those games progressed. Like last week you were in the studio recording Goofy's Gawrshmas Spectacular, now you're giving a ten-minute lecture on the duality of the soul. I always wondered how ALL the voice actors felt being given this pile of drivel to work with. A lot of the lines and takes are so weird and robotic I feel like they had to have struggled to figure out what sort of tone to take with half of that poo poo. How exactly is one supposed to sound discussing the nature of your many other selves? Contemplative? Morose? Amused? I dunno. Oxxidation posted:nomura has repeatedly made it clear in increasingly non-jokey ways that he is, at best, tired of working on the kingdom hearts franchise and at worst despises it. he's said that he fantasizes about ways to destroy sora personally. he's also incredibly bitter about being booted off the versus XIII project after years of playing grab-rear end/getting shoved into more KH projects instead This explains so much. He's actively been trying to kill it but fans just kept eating it up.....my God
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Apr 23, 2020 00:02
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I mean, if he wanted to kill the franchise all he would have to do is grab Chain of Memories combat system and pair it up with Birth By Sleep's bullshit fights. Which almost happened before they decided to remake the combat system for the latter
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Apr 23, 2020 00:07
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