Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days - Living down to every expectation
Despite a lot of objections from me about how we're only going to encourage Squeenix if we keep giving them money for this crap, pinneagig ordered in the Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days a little while ago to see how it held up against our first impressions. Neither of us were very surprised when the game proved to be every bit as bad as we'd feared. If anything, it found a number of ways to be worse - the finished product is frankly so bad it doesn't deserve a full review. Xion* is every bit as Sue-ish as we could tell she was going to be, swiftly takes over very nearly the entire plot of the game, and yet never once gives us any useful new insight or development of any character we actually care about. There's very little point going through all the specifics; though pinneagig's own review includes a full Sue-tally summary of all Xion's worst achievements, which really needs to be seen to be believed.
* In my sole attempt to maintain something remotely approaching journalistic neutrality, I am going to be good and try very hard not to call her Xarmy for the rest of this post.
One thing we did have wrong from the trailer was the impression that Xion was someone supposed to be Kairi's 'other' Nobody, but the reality is even less sensical: she's a 'clone' of Sora/Roxas, created by the Organisation by out of something-about-Sora's-lost-memories-mumble-something because they apparently needed an extra keyblade user taking out Heartless. Later, it turns out they didn't need her that much after all, and with Sora on his way back that's about it for her. At the end of the game, she transforms into a seriously creepy Heartless-monster which for some reason wears Sora's clothes, fights Roxas and finally dies tragically in his arms. The end implications that Roxas left not so much to find Sora as because of Xion - and worse, that Riku's confusion on meeting Roxas was because Roxas reminded him of Xion rather than Sora - are nothing short of insulting to anyone who played KHII. Her entire contribution is to give chronically angsty characters yet another thing angst about, and repeat Roxas' story almost verbatim, give or take a sex change. You could remove her from the series altogether and lose nothing of consequence at all.
Even the non-Xion related aspects of the game are painfully lacking in redeeming moments. As I said in my trailer impressions, at first glance I had reasonable hopes for a game like Days - done properly it could be a chance to flesh out Org 13 a bit, let us in on how they spend their downtime and maybe develop the story of how Roxas came to leave them and go hunting for Sora in a bit more detail. Well, it turns out that all the Organisation did in their downtime was kill lots of Heartless, so as to collect all those hearts they're so keen on. Virtually all the gameplay in Days consists of Roxas being sent on missions to one world after another and instructed to kill a bunch of Heartless before he's allowed to come home, after which he, and Axel and/or Xion all have ice cream together on the clocktower in Twilight Town. That's pretty much the whole game. Proper cutscenes with the rest of the Organisation happen sporadically, including the occasional important event like the Chain of Memories plotline (interspersed with lots of Xion-related angst) but do little to interrupt the tedium. Even the ice cream scenes we loved so much in KH2 quickly get old to the point of being physically painful. The battle system is nothing to write home about either. Abilities are equipped in a grid that fits together like a badly-designed tetris puzzle, and can't be re-equipped mid-level if you've done a bad job, adding an extra level of frustration to a lot of endlessly boring combat sections.
The whole game is painfully analogous to Crisis Core - unnecessary, poorly thought out, and overly dependent on Sue/Stu characters or villains to fill a minor plot-hole in a previous game with more backstory than the narrative had the space to accommodate. Only worse, because for all its faults, CC at least had a likeable main character and enjoyable combat. Days can't even boast that much.
(As a quick side-note before anyone launches into Nomura-bashing for giving us such a lemon of a game, I just want to point out that as variable in quality as some of his work is, the man has lately been dividing his attention between about six games at once and the main culprit for the plot is instead apparently the author of the KH novelisations (which I've otherwise heard decent things about - go fig). I'm not saying Nomura's blameless, but, well, for all I know he drew a few pics, signed off and fell asleep on a pile of Versus XIII storyboards. It takes a team effort to deliver a game this bad.)
The game's just not worth analysing any further, but it's gotten me into the mood for overanalysis, so instead I'm going to head off on a bit of a tangent about Sues in the KH-verse, because that way I get to talk about some of the characters I don't hate. You see, one thing that did strike us during the very first rounds of Xion-bitching is that complaining about her Sue-ish tendencies was maybe a bit disingenuous considering that I've been affectionately referring to Sora as the Intergalactic Mary Sue From Hell for ages. I mean, think about it - the guy spends most of his time flying from one barely-reinvented Disney world to the next, making friends and helping save the day. That's pretty much textbook Sue activity, and yet I like Sora. A lot. So what makes the difference?
It's a lot of factors, but the main one (for us at least) is that Sora manages to be endearing despite his Sue-ish tendencies, rather than being defined by them alone. It's not hard to see what Squeenix and Disney were trying to do with the KH series - Sora is very much born from the childhood fantasy we all had at some point of getting to travel to the worlds of all those Disney movies (or whatever else our favourite story might have been as a kid) and make friends with our favourite characters. But for me personally, and an impressively large number of other KH fans who've variously outgrown Disney or otherwise become disillusioned the company over the years, this is not a selling point. In fact, quite a bit of disgust at the idea of playing 'a Disney game' kept us from getting into the series at all for years. Sora does also get to cosy up to a lot of Final Fantasy characters, which is a whole lot more up our fanservice alley, but what played the biggest part in getting us to finally give the game a chance was the realisation that the KH series had some likeable new characters, and a really good story. Not to mention gorgeous graphics and enjoyable gameplay, but characters and plot will always be my one big weakness.
This is not so much true of KH1, which is best described as a bit of brainless fun, but by Chain of Memories the story was genuinely involving me, and KHII blew me away - the leap in storytelling between the two main games is so big it verges on emotional discontinuity. And while I didn't have much opinion on Sora in KH1, by KHII I loved him to bits. He's in many ways the stereotype of the dumb, well-intentioned hero - chosen by destiny for the usually arbitrary 'strength of the heart'-type characteristics. But his stupidity rarely hits the point of being offensive - by KHII, he's being allowed to give good advice and make good calls (see, for example, his efforts to get Hercules out of his emo-phase, or his justified reluctance not to trust the parrot). Sora's been dealt a rough hand - torn from his home, separated from his friends, dumped with the weight of the universe on his shoulders - and just when he thought it was over and he could go home, sent straight back into the fray for another round. And yet he never complains about the unfairness of his lot, and rarely takes more than a few glum moments here or there to angst about it. No matter how many worlds he visits or how many friends he makes, he never loses his sense of wonder, never makes you doubt he genuinely cares about each of them, but never long loses sight of his own goal of finding those two really important friends he grew up with again. Sora, in short, is a good person, but without becoming so perfect he becomes unbelievable. A few Sue-ish traits can't even make a dent in that.
Xion, alas, is not nearly so inoffensive.
Whereas Sora may have been born from childish fantasies of meeting fictional characters and having fun, Xion is the kind of Sue people start writing when the crushing angst of puberty is upon them. She exists not to meet wonderful people, help them out and have fun, but to be told by all the good guys what a wonderful special little snowflake she is, and victimised by everyone else to make the us feel sorry for her. The story is no longer about how wonderful all the worlds she's experiences are, it's about how wonderful she is. This is narcissism of a far less innocent kind. To add insult to injury, unlike Sora, innocently Sue-ing himself into a bunch of old AU Disney movies, Xion is Sue-ing herself into a series I genuinely enjoy - and that usually has far better writing than that.
There are two more characters from the KH series who sometimes get accused of Sue-ism: Roxas and Namine, and the accusations aren't entirely unfounded. Both are, pretty much by definition, pale shadows of established characters (Sora and Kairi respectively), introduced to the series well after most of the main cast with a heavy side order of angst about how neither were 'meant' to exist at all. For which matter, the entire plotline revolving around the Nobodies of CoM and KHII was not so much as foreshadowed in the first game, and when I initially heard about this (surprisingly humanoid and frequently prettyboy) new group of enemies I was initially a little skeptical that, with so much left unresolved from KHI, the producers might be adding one plot element too many. On this point I can only say I was proven happily wrong. Roxas and Namine manage to just squeeze in under the same category.
Out of the two of them, accusations of Sue-ishness probably suit Namine best, who not only has to be rescued princess-style from the badguys and is heavily implied to have at least a bit of a thing for Sora, she quite literally rewrites Sora's history to accommodate herself as a long-forgotten childhood friend. What redeems her is that Namine is that she's really no more than an innocent pawn, being used by the real badguys to manipulate Sora, and the inherrent falseness of everything she's doing to him is pretty much the entire point of it. She's ultimately not so much a real Sue as a cautionary tale to show what's wrong with Sues, and, like Sora, she's endearing enough that I love her anyway. (And I have to say, when you see that page from the otherwise crack-tastic CoM manga of all four of them on the beach together - Sora, Riku, Kairi and Namine - you know it's a lie but it's still so cute that goddamn, you want it to be true.)
When it comes to Roxas, who takes over from Sora as main character in the early part of the game, it's worthwhile keeping in mind that not everyone playing KHII will have played KHI, so there's real practical value to starting the player off with a character who's as unfamiliar with The Story So Far as many of the players will be. Roxas also ties into events from the previous games (Sora's transformation into a Heartless and memory loss) enough to have some point in proceedings. More importantly, he never comes close to taking over the plot - after the introductory sequence, he's seen again only barely long enough to give his story some needed resolution.
The real shame of Days might be that after such a long history of giving us characters with a few Sue-ish traits but enough redeeming features to make them likeable, they've gone and gotten it so very wrong in the latest instalment. There is nothing to Xion the series hasn't done before. She's a Nobody (Roxas, Namine) Organisation member (Roxas, etc), created by a slightly more unusual method than normal (Namine) by some kind of cloning process (the Riku Replica), connected to Sora (Roxas) and Kairi (Namine), connected to Sora's memory loss (Roxas, Kairi, Namine) and ulimately screwed into non-existence by a combination of Organisation disinterest and Sora's return (Roxas). In short, she's a female Roxas, with a couple of other overused character traits thrown in for flavour. Oh yeah, and a whole lot more angst.
'Cause lord knows what Org 13 always needed was more angst amiright?
In better news, now that Days is out we're finally getting some new news on Birth by Sleep, which continues to look much more promising. But they had so better have a better explanation for Ven's connection to Roxas than what they served us with Xion, that's all I'm saying. >(
* In my sole attempt to maintain something remotely approaching journalistic neutrality, I am going to be good and try very hard not to call her Xarmy for the rest of this post.
One thing we did have wrong from the trailer was the impression that Xion was someone supposed to be Kairi's 'other' Nobody, but the reality is even less sensical: she's a 'clone' of Sora/Roxas, created by the Organisation by out of something-about-Sora's-lost-memories-mumble-something because they apparently needed an extra keyblade user taking out Heartless. Later, it turns out they didn't need her that much after all, and with Sora on his way back that's about it for her. At the end of the game, she transforms into a seriously creepy Heartless-monster which for some reason wears Sora's clothes, fights Roxas and finally dies tragically in his arms. The end implications that Roxas left not so much to find Sora as because of Xion - and worse, that Riku's confusion on meeting Roxas was because Roxas reminded him of Xion rather than Sora - are nothing short of insulting to anyone who played KHII. Her entire contribution is to give chronically angsty characters yet another thing angst about, and repeat Roxas' story almost verbatim, give or take a sex change. You could remove her from the series altogether and lose nothing of consequence at all.
Even the non-Xion related aspects of the game are painfully lacking in redeeming moments. As I said in my trailer impressions, at first glance I had reasonable hopes for a game like Days - done properly it could be a chance to flesh out Org 13 a bit, let us in on how they spend their downtime and maybe develop the story of how Roxas came to leave them and go hunting for Sora in a bit more detail. Well, it turns out that all the Organisation did in their downtime was kill lots of Heartless, so as to collect all those hearts they're so keen on. Virtually all the gameplay in Days consists of Roxas being sent on missions to one world after another and instructed to kill a bunch of Heartless before he's allowed to come home, after which he, and Axel and/or Xion all have ice cream together on the clocktower in Twilight Town. That's pretty much the whole game. Proper cutscenes with the rest of the Organisation happen sporadically, including the occasional important event like the Chain of Memories plotline (interspersed with lots of Xion-related angst) but do little to interrupt the tedium. Even the ice cream scenes we loved so much in KH2 quickly get old to the point of being physically painful. The battle system is nothing to write home about either. Abilities are equipped in a grid that fits together like a badly-designed tetris puzzle, and can't be re-equipped mid-level if you've done a bad job, adding an extra level of frustration to a lot of endlessly boring combat sections.
The whole game is painfully analogous to Crisis Core - unnecessary, poorly thought out, and overly dependent on Sue/Stu characters or villains to fill a minor plot-hole in a previous game with more backstory than the narrative had the space to accommodate. Only worse, because for all its faults, CC at least had a likeable main character and enjoyable combat. Days can't even boast that much.
(As a quick side-note before anyone launches into Nomura-bashing for giving us such a lemon of a game, I just want to point out that as variable in quality as some of his work is, the man has lately been dividing his attention between about six games at once and the main culprit for the plot is instead apparently the author of the KH novelisations (which I've otherwise heard decent things about - go fig). I'm not saying Nomura's blameless, but, well, for all I know he drew a few pics, signed off and fell asleep on a pile of Versus XIII storyboards. It takes a team effort to deliver a game this bad.)
The game's just not worth analysing any further, but it's gotten me into the mood for overanalysis, so instead I'm going to head off on a bit of a tangent about Sues in the KH-verse, because that way I get to talk about some of the characters I don't hate. You see, one thing that did strike us during the very first rounds of Xion-bitching is that complaining about her Sue-ish tendencies was maybe a bit disingenuous considering that I've been affectionately referring to Sora as the Intergalactic Mary Sue From Hell for ages. I mean, think about it - the guy spends most of his time flying from one barely-reinvented Disney world to the next, making friends and helping save the day. That's pretty much textbook Sue activity, and yet I like Sora. A lot. So what makes the difference?
It's a lot of factors, but the main one (for us at least) is that Sora manages to be endearing despite his Sue-ish tendencies, rather than being defined by them alone. It's not hard to see what Squeenix and Disney were trying to do with the KH series - Sora is very much born from the childhood fantasy we all had at some point of getting to travel to the worlds of all those Disney movies (or whatever else our favourite story might have been as a kid) and make friends with our favourite characters. But for me personally, and an impressively large number of other KH fans who've variously outgrown Disney or otherwise become disillusioned the company over the years, this is not a selling point. In fact, quite a bit of disgust at the idea of playing 'a Disney game' kept us from getting into the series at all for years. Sora does also get to cosy up to a lot of Final Fantasy characters, which is a whole lot more up our fanservice alley, but what played the biggest part in getting us to finally give the game a chance was the realisation that the KH series had some likeable new characters, and a really good story. Not to mention gorgeous graphics and enjoyable gameplay, but characters and plot will always be my one big weakness.
This is not so much true of KH1, which is best described as a bit of brainless fun, but by Chain of Memories the story was genuinely involving me, and KHII blew me away - the leap in storytelling between the two main games is so big it verges on emotional discontinuity. And while I didn't have much opinion on Sora in KH1, by KHII I loved him to bits. He's in many ways the stereotype of the dumb, well-intentioned hero - chosen by destiny for the usually arbitrary 'strength of the heart'-type characteristics. But his stupidity rarely hits the point of being offensive - by KHII, he's being allowed to give good advice and make good calls (see, for example, his efforts to get Hercules out of his emo-phase, or his justified reluctance not to trust the parrot). Sora's been dealt a rough hand - torn from his home, separated from his friends, dumped with the weight of the universe on his shoulders - and just when he thought it was over and he could go home, sent straight back into the fray for another round. And yet he never complains about the unfairness of his lot, and rarely takes more than a few glum moments here or there to angst about it. No matter how many worlds he visits or how many friends he makes, he never loses his sense of wonder, never makes you doubt he genuinely cares about each of them, but never long loses sight of his own goal of finding those two really important friends he grew up with again. Sora, in short, is a good person, but without becoming so perfect he becomes unbelievable. A few Sue-ish traits can't even make a dent in that.
Xion, alas, is not nearly so inoffensive.
Whereas Sora may have been born from childish fantasies of meeting fictional characters and having fun, Xion is the kind of Sue people start writing when the crushing angst of puberty is upon them. She exists not to meet wonderful people, help them out and have fun, but to be told by all the good guys what a wonderful special little snowflake she is, and victimised by everyone else to make the us feel sorry for her. The story is no longer about how wonderful all the worlds she's experiences are, it's about how wonderful she is. This is narcissism of a far less innocent kind. To add insult to injury, unlike Sora, innocently Sue-ing himself into a bunch of old AU Disney movies, Xion is Sue-ing herself into a series I genuinely enjoy - and that usually has far better writing than that.
There are two more characters from the KH series who sometimes get accused of Sue-ism: Roxas and Namine, and the accusations aren't entirely unfounded. Both are, pretty much by definition, pale shadows of established characters (Sora and Kairi respectively), introduced to the series well after most of the main cast with a heavy side order of angst about how neither were 'meant' to exist at all. For which matter, the entire plotline revolving around the Nobodies of CoM and KHII was not so much as foreshadowed in the first game, and when I initially heard about this (surprisingly humanoid and frequently prettyboy) new group of enemies I was initially a little skeptical that, with so much left unresolved from KHI, the producers might be adding one plot element too many. On this point I can only say I was proven happily wrong. Roxas and Namine manage to just squeeze in under the same category.
Out of the two of them, accusations of Sue-ishness probably suit Namine best, who not only has to be rescued princess-style from the badguys and is heavily implied to have at least a bit of a thing for Sora, she quite literally rewrites Sora's history to accommodate herself as a long-forgotten childhood friend. What redeems her is that Namine is that she's really no more than an innocent pawn, being used by the real badguys to manipulate Sora, and the inherrent falseness of everything she's doing to him is pretty much the entire point of it. She's ultimately not so much a real Sue as a cautionary tale to show what's wrong with Sues, and, like Sora, she's endearing enough that I love her anyway. (And I have to say, when you see that page from the otherwise crack-tastic CoM manga of all four of them on the beach together - Sora, Riku, Kairi and Namine - you know it's a lie but it's still so cute that goddamn, you want it to be true.)
When it comes to Roxas, who takes over from Sora as main character in the early part of the game, it's worthwhile keeping in mind that not everyone playing KHII will have played KHI, so there's real practical value to starting the player off with a character who's as unfamiliar with The Story So Far as many of the players will be. Roxas also ties into events from the previous games (Sora's transformation into a Heartless and memory loss) enough to have some point in proceedings. More importantly, he never comes close to taking over the plot - after the introductory sequence, he's seen again only barely long enough to give his story some needed resolution.
The real shame of Days might be that after such a long history of giving us characters with a few Sue-ish traits but enough redeeming features to make them likeable, they've gone and gotten it so very wrong in the latest instalment. There is nothing to Xion the series hasn't done before. She's a Nobody (Roxas, Namine) Organisation member (Roxas, etc), created by a slightly more unusual method than normal (Namine) by some kind of cloning process (the Riku Replica), connected to Sora (Roxas) and Kairi (Namine), connected to Sora's memory loss (Roxas, Kairi, Namine) and ulimately screwed into non-existence by a combination of Organisation disinterest and Sora's return (Roxas). In short, she's a female Roxas, with a couple of other overused character traits thrown in for flavour. Oh yeah, and a whole lot more angst.
'Cause lord knows what Org 13 always needed was more angst amiright?
In better news, now that Days is out we're finally getting some new news on Birth by Sleep, which continues to look much more promising. But they had so better have a better explanation for Ven's connection to Roxas than what they served us with Xion, that's all I'm saying. >(