Still more thoughts on Birth By Sleep
Now that Wai-con's behind us and we've got free time again we're getting down to the serious business of playing through the copy of Birth by Sleep: Final Mix that came in just before the con. Not much to say about it yet since we're still a long way short of reaching any of the new material, but it has reminded me that I never did get around to typing up all my thoughts on the last version of the game we tried out, being the English version, or how it compared to the Japanese. Short answer: surprisingly well.
In case anyone is confused already, yes, we now own three different copies of the same game. Actually, we own at least two copies of most of the KH franchise; over the last couple of instalments our pattern has been to order the Japanese version as soon as it comes out, because there's less waiting and we prefer the Japanese voice acting, then pick up the Final Mix version later for the extra content. The irony hidden in this pattern is that half the reason the FM versions exist at all is to give the Japanese fans a chance to buy the version with the English voice acting, apparently because what with all the Disney content in the KH series English is seen as the 'correct' language by much of the fanbase. Possibly there's some deep and meaningful insight into the culture of subs vs dubs in both countries to be found in that, I will leave it for others to discuss.
I can't remember exactly why my sister decided to order in the English version of BBS as well - possibly some misunderstanding about new content was involved. In actuality there was no new content to speak of beyond an optional boss or two and a sticker minigame which, give our take the whole minutes of amusement we got out of sticking traffic cones on Terra's head, can't be said to have contributed all that greatly to the narrative. English dubs in the KH series are generally a bit of a mixed bag - for example, while Axel's English voice in KH2 genuinely impressed me, the less said about KH2 Aeris the better. Most of the dub of the very first KH title was actually better than the Japanese version, though this probably says more about the well below average quality of the Japanese voice acting in KH1 than it does about the dub. It's somewhere between KH1 and 2 that the games went through a fairly major stylistic shift and the quality of the Japanese voice acting leapt up a considerable notch. English language voice acting in the series since has pretty much followed the usual anime/game pattern that has kept us dedicated subbies for so long: no matter how good the English voice actors are - and even we feel like some of the English voices suit the characters better than the Japanese, which does happen now and then - there's always at least one key emotional gut-punch in the plot somewhere that the Japanese voice actors absolutely nail, whereas the English ones just can't make the same grade. If the English language version came out before the Japanese we probably wouldn't wait for the latter, but since it doesn't, we really don't mind having an excuse to get the Japanese instead.
What I do remember in the lead up to the English release is a few bits of news had us unusually curious about how the BBS dub would shape up, not least that it was going to feature Mark Hamill in the role of the Jedi Keyblade Master and Leonard Nimoy in the role of Xehanort, and that alone may have just about justified the purchase.
So here, in order of appearance, are a few of our favourite things from the English version of BBS.
Master Skywalker Eraqus
I don't think I can really overstate how well cast Mark Hamill was in this role. The Keyblade Masters couldn't really become any more Jedi without acquiring a their own beeping droids or amputating some hands. Something not everyone may know about Mark Hamill's post-Star Wars career is that even if he's not exactly rivalling Harrison Ford in visibility, he has made quite a name for himself as a voice actor - many fans consider his Joker in assorted DC cartoon series to be the definitive take on the character, for example. All that experience definitely shows; his first appearance in the game was this great moment of 'whoa, who turned up the voice acting?' Few other cast members could come close to his performance.
All that said, when it came to the crunch - the crunch being the climatic confrontation between Terra and his Master towards the end of the game - we were disappointed to find that even Mark Hamill couldn't quite live up to the performance of his Japanese counterpart. The English version gets the gist across sufficiently well, but there's a depth of emotion in Eraqus' Japanese voice that takes the scene from merely sad to gut-wrenchingly tragic, and that depth was absent from the English dub. I still feel that Mark Hamill was brilliantly cast and did a great job with the rest of his scenes, but if I had to point to one example that underlined the difference in production values between the Japanese and American voice acting businesses, this would be it.
Evil Spock Xehanort
Y'know, Leonard Nimoy does a perfectly decent job in this role. I don't have any acting-related complaints about it. The only problem is that every time Xehanort talks, he sounds exactly like Leonard Nimoy. A very evil Leonard Nimoy, but still very much Leonard Nimoy. Right up to the closing chapters of the game we were still going 'heheheheee, Evil Spock' every time he talked. This was probably not the intended effect.
Jaq
I really don't know that there's anything I can say about Jaq that will do him justice. This may have stood out more to us than your average player since in Japanese, he'd been perfectly coherent, but in English... look, I'm just going to embed a youtube clip here so you can see for yourself.
I think my favourite bit is at 4:25. Jaq: Say, gotanidee! Venven helpajaq? Subtitles: Say, I got an idea! Ven, will you help me? It's something of a miracle Ven understands Jaq's explanation of why he needs to look out for 'Rusafee' at all.
Jaq is officially the first and only character in the KH series who actually needs his subtitles to explain what the hell he is saying. I cannot for the life of me remember if he was this incoherent in the original Cinderella movie. I can only assume he can't have been since Cinderella didn't have the benefit of subs to translate.
To review, our updated list of Things In BBS That Never Stopped Being Funny: Traffic cone stickers, Evil Spock, watching Jaq speak.
Widdle!Sora and Riku
Biggest. Voice acting. Surprise. Of the game. They're minor roles, they're kids, they're being voice acted by kids, so exactly how did they manage to be two of the best voice actors in the whole damn thing? The dawwwww quota to these scenes was off the chart. It's almost embarrassing to see so much of the main cast getting outshone by these two little kids.
Aqua
One of the great disappointments of BBS for me was the discovery that all those lines of Aqua's that had made me love her instantly in the trailer had been rerecorded for the finished product, and in a tone that considerably watered down the the well-spoken confidence that was what I'd originally liked so much about them. A few little changes in emphasis can make a lot of difference to how a character comes across. I still did like Aqua, but she wasn't what I'd hoped she would be.
Aqua's voice is very different again in the English version; this wasn't unexpected, they always are. The big surprise - one I have saved for last because it was the best surprise of the game - was that I found myself liking her more in English than in Japanese.
We weren't sold on her instantly. The voice acting still isn't always on par with some of the Japanese - whether a voice fits a character and whether the voice acting is any good are not necessarily the same thing. The delivery in some of her early lines didn't give us an early good impression, but either her voice actor improved with practice or simply grew on us. The change to Aqua between versions isn't huge, it can't really be with the same script and visuals; Aqua in either version is very pretty, very elegant girl who makes sparkly friendship charms for her friends, and who takes orders like a professional and will fuck your shit up if said friends are threatened. Once again though, a few key changes to delivery can make all the difference. I have occasionally summed up the key difference between the Japanese and English takes on the characters of Kingdom Hearts as 'In English, everyone's that little bit manlier'. Voices are typically a little deeper, characters a little brasher, etc, and Aqua's no exception - and the thing is, it works. That confident edge to her character that I'd been missed from the early trailers is back in the English version. It's lovely.
Stuff that was not awesome: Terra's bad poetry
I was going to skip griping for a change, but then I remembered the two times in the game when, for some reason, the writer decided to make Terra speak in brain-breakingly bad verse and I felt the need to clear one little thing up: there is no poetry in the Japanese at those points, so the translator didn't even have the excuse of dealing with the awkward job of translating poetry from one language to another. No, someone just decided to shove in some random poetry at a couple of vaguely significant moments. My best guess is that they were worried they were running short of their cheese quota for the game.
While I'm on the subject of BBS (because clearly a 4000 word review plus another thousand on the dub is not nearly enough), during the lead-up to Wai-con a comment showed up on my original review asking (perhaps unwisely) what I'd thought of Vanitas, a character the commenter was particularly fond of and whom I'd barely mentioned in my own spiel. The comment was anonymous so the odds they'd notice a reply now that I actually have time to write one are probably not that great, but it did manage to get me going on that old subject of Stuff BBS Could Have Done Better, so for the sake of the argument, here's my thoughts on the subject.
Getting this out there right away, I can't really agree with the Vanitas fans on this one. The reason why Vanitas didn't get much of a mention in my original review is because he didn't make much of an impression on me. I'd even go so far as to say that I found him to be a pretty good candidate for the most boring villain in the KH series to date. My basic problem with him goes thus: Vanitas is supposed to be a creature born of perfect darkness, and yet in the whole narrative of the game he has no objectives and no motivations but to obey his creator's will. That's not a creature of pure darkness, it's a puppet of pure obedience. Sure, he does manage to be quite effectively creepy at some points, and you can probably argue some kind of logic whereby helping Xehanort create the X-blade is the most evil act possible, you can nitpick minor details of Xehanort's instructions that Vanitas may not have quite followed to the letter, but that still feels like a cop-out. Thinking back on his role I am struck by nothing so much as how much more could have done with him.
I am probably biased from the outset on the subject of Vanitas for a couple of reasons, not least that he's intimately linked with the X-blade/Unversed/Sora-Ven-link subplots of the game which were at the heart of everything I found underdeveoped and unsatisfying about the resolution. By the time we got to play BBS, 348/2 Days had already effectively killed any remaining tolerance I may have had for seeing the Sora and Clones clusterfuck grow even more convoluted and the fact that the whole Sora/Ven connection essentially had no impact on the plot other than to inexplicably give Vanitas the face of a guy who hadn't even had any connection to him or Ventus at the time of his creation did not endear me to his basic concept. Presumably some of this is going to be elaborated on in later instalments to the KH series, but there were an awful lot of hours of gameplay in BBS with disappointingly little payoff in the plot department, and that will always remain my biggest complaint about the game.
But my basic problem with Vanitas remains that he is, quite simply, a bit dull. It's a bit hard to get very interested in the mystery behind a character when you as the audience have been privileged with the knowledge that he's working for the big bad from the opening scenes. If he really is supposed to be a being of pure darkness, is it so much to ask that he at least show the initiative to backstab his creator once in a while? Some interest in his own survival, even? Let's remember, Vanitas was created only because Xehanort's ultimate Keyblade recipe required a heart of pure darkness as in ingredient (okay, yes, when the X-Blade is finally created Vanitas seems to live through it somehow, which is pretty much just one more plothole which gets handwaved away without elaboration). It's true that the KH series does have some history of associating evil with a loss of free will; greater evil characters have often been able to control the lesser by manipulating the darkness in their hearts. The trouble is, if that's why Vanitas obeys Xehanort, it puts him down on the level of characters like Terra, Riku or Cloud (who are manipulated against their will), Pete (who follows the greater evil because he's not up to much on his own) or mindless slaves like the Heartless - the diet coke of evil. Not much of a credible threat.
If it's possible to define evil in any reasonably brief manner, then I'd say part of that definition would have to involve what a fundamentally selfish force it is. Evil does not play well with others, not even with other evil. Much of what made the villains of KH2 so interesting was that they came in so many factions working at cross purposes - you had the internal politics of the Organisation, Axel switching sides at the eleventh hour, Riku running around disguised as a bad guy, Malificent's great moment of glory when she decides to turn on the big bad, not to mention at least passing lipservice paid to the question of whether the Organisation's goal of getting their hearts back really was all that bad. It's all that complex ambiguity that I felt was part of what was missing from BBS, which spoiled who the big bad was from the promotional material, then spoiled his link to the secondary bad before you were through the opening scenes.
The point I'm building towards here is that I feel Vanitas would have been an infinitely more interesting character had he rebelled against Xehanort shortly after creation, then spent the majority of his appearances in BBS trying not to end up crushed into a component part of the X-blade. This wouldn't necessarily change the plot as fundamentally as you might think - Vanitas would still have reason to confront Ventus, but now he'd be doing it in attempt to pull off a kind of 'controlled detonation' that would destroy Ventus before he could become strong enough for a clash between them to create the X-blade. I can't see any reason why a little thing like Vanitas' rebellion should force more than a few minor revisions to Xehanort's plans either, since Xehanort is exactly the sort of manipulative bastard who'd enjoy the challenge of having one more pawn to lead around. Tricking Ventus and Vanitas into their ultimate confrontation would pose him no difficulty.
What the game would have gained by setting Vanitas and Xehanort against each other from the outset is a way to give its villains a little ambiguity. Xehanort would still be evil - forget the name, the history and the promotional movie, you only have to look at the guy - but with Vanitas genuinely working against him rather than merely feigning it, you could set Vanitas up as the big bad for the first act of the story and postpone revealing that there was any connection between him and Xehanort at all until well into the narrative. So while that particularly revelation probably wouldn't come as a huge surprise to any player who'd been paying attention, it would give you the opportunity to play around with with one of those big questions: who really is the greater evil, the being created as pure evil, or the one who created him? Vanitas may be just as willing to send the rest of the universe to hell as Xehanort but if his main objective is simply his desire not to be destroyed - and if he's just as much a pawn to Xehanort as the good guys are - then that would give him at least a hint of sympathy. Taken that way, Vanitas could even conceivably wind up siding with the trio against Xehanort for a battle or two somewhere in the story. Or maybe he doesn't care if he lives or dies as long as he can take the rest of the universe with him. Or maybe that's just what Xehanort wants you to think he's capable of. There are all kinds of possibilities to play with and, as I've pointed out before, plenty of dead wood that could be cleaned out of the BBS narrative to make room to develop them. You could give Aqua something to do for the first dozen hours of her storyline for a start.
tl;dr, there was still plenty we liked about BBS - in either language - but it's always going to be disappointing it missed so many chances to do better.
In case anyone is confused already, yes, we now own three different copies of the same game. Actually, we own at least two copies of most of the KH franchise; over the last couple of instalments our pattern has been to order the Japanese version as soon as it comes out, because there's less waiting and we prefer the Japanese voice acting, then pick up the Final Mix version later for the extra content. The irony hidden in this pattern is that half the reason the FM versions exist at all is to give the Japanese fans a chance to buy the version with the English voice acting, apparently because what with all the Disney content in the KH series English is seen as the 'correct' language by much of the fanbase. Possibly there's some deep and meaningful insight into the culture of subs vs dubs in both countries to be found in that, I will leave it for others to discuss.
I can't remember exactly why my sister decided to order in the English version of BBS as well - possibly some misunderstanding about new content was involved. In actuality there was no new content to speak of beyond an optional boss or two and a sticker minigame which, give our take the whole minutes of amusement we got out of sticking traffic cones on Terra's head, can't be said to have contributed all that greatly to the narrative. English dubs in the KH series are generally a bit of a mixed bag - for example, while Axel's English voice in KH2 genuinely impressed me, the less said about KH2 Aeris the better. Most of the dub of the very first KH title was actually better than the Japanese version, though this probably says more about the well below average quality of the Japanese voice acting in KH1 than it does about the dub. It's somewhere between KH1 and 2 that the games went through a fairly major stylistic shift and the quality of the Japanese voice acting leapt up a considerable notch. English language voice acting in the series since has pretty much followed the usual anime/game pattern that has kept us dedicated subbies for so long: no matter how good the English voice actors are - and even we feel like some of the English voices suit the characters better than the Japanese, which does happen now and then - there's always at least one key emotional gut-punch in the plot somewhere that the Japanese voice actors absolutely nail, whereas the English ones just can't make the same grade. If the English language version came out before the Japanese we probably wouldn't wait for the latter, but since it doesn't, we really don't mind having an excuse to get the Japanese instead.
What I do remember in the lead up to the English release is a few bits of news had us unusually curious about how the BBS dub would shape up, not least that it was going to feature Mark Hamill in the role of the Jedi Keyblade Master and Leonard Nimoy in the role of Xehanort, and that alone may have just about justified the purchase.
So here, in order of appearance, are a few of our favourite things from the English version of BBS.
Master Skywalker Eraqus
I don't think I can really overstate how well cast Mark Hamill was in this role. The Keyblade Masters couldn't really become any more Jedi without acquiring a their own beeping droids or amputating some hands. Something not everyone may know about Mark Hamill's post-Star Wars career is that even if he's not exactly rivalling Harrison Ford in visibility, he has made quite a name for himself as a voice actor - many fans consider his Joker in assorted DC cartoon series to be the definitive take on the character, for example. All that experience definitely shows; his first appearance in the game was this great moment of 'whoa, who turned up the voice acting?' Few other cast members could come close to his performance.
All that said, when it came to the crunch - the crunch being the climatic confrontation between Terra and his Master towards the end of the game - we were disappointed to find that even Mark Hamill couldn't quite live up to the performance of his Japanese counterpart. The English version gets the gist across sufficiently well, but there's a depth of emotion in Eraqus' Japanese voice that takes the scene from merely sad to gut-wrenchingly tragic, and that depth was absent from the English dub. I still feel that Mark Hamill was brilliantly cast and did a great job with the rest of his scenes, but if I had to point to one example that underlined the difference in production values between the Japanese and American voice acting businesses, this would be it.
Evil Spock Xehanort
Y'know, Leonard Nimoy does a perfectly decent job in this role. I don't have any acting-related complaints about it. The only problem is that every time Xehanort talks, he sounds exactly like Leonard Nimoy. A very evil Leonard Nimoy, but still very much Leonard Nimoy. Right up to the closing chapters of the game we were still going 'heheheheee, Evil Spock' every time he talked. This was probably not the intended effect.
Jaq
I really don't know that there's anything I can say about Jaq that will do him justice. This may have stood out more to us than your average player since in Japanese, he'd been perfectly coherent, but in English... look, I'm just going to embed a youtube clip here so you can see for yourself.
Click to viewI think my favourite bit is at 4:25. Jaq: Say, gotanidee! Venven helpajaq? Subtitles: Say, I got an idea! Ven, will you help me? It's something of a miracle Ven understands Jaq's explanation of why he needs to look out for 'Rusafee' at all.
Jaq is officially the first and only character in the KH series who actually needs his subtitles to explain what the hell he is saying. I cannot for the life of me remember if he was this incoherent in the original Cinderella movie. I can only assume he can't have been since Cinderella didn't have the benefit of subs to translate.
To review, our updated list of Things In BBS That Never Stopped Being Funny: Traffic cone stickers, Evil Spock, watching Jaq speak.
Widdle!Sora and Riku
Biggest. Voice acting. Surprise. Of the game. They're minor roles, they're kids, they're being voice acted by kids, so exactly how did they manage to be two of the best voice actors in the whole damn thing? The dawwwww quota to these scenes was off the chart. It's almost embarrassing to see so much of the main cast getting outshone by these two little kids.
Aqua
One of the great disappointments of BBS for me was the discovery that all those lines of Aqua's that had made me love her instantly in the trailer had been rerecorded for the finished product, and in a tone that considerably watered down the the well-spoken confidence that was what I'd originally liked so much about them. A few little changes in emphasis can make a lot of difference to how a character comes across. I still did like Aqua, but she wasn't what I'd hoped she would be.
Aqua's voice is very different again in the English version; this wasn't unexpected, they always are. The big surprise - one I have saved for last because it was the best surprise of the game - was that I found myself liking her more in English than in Japanese.
We weren't sold on her instantly. The voice acting still isn't always on par with some of the Japanese - whether a voice fits a character and whether the voice acting is any good are not necessarily the same thing. The delivery in some of her early lines didn't give us an early good impression, but either her voice actor improved with practice or simply grew on us. The change to Aqua between versions isn't huge, it can't really be with the same script and visuals; Aqua in either version is very pretty, very elegant girl who makes sparkly friendship charms for her friends, and who takes orders like a professional and will fuck your shit up if said friends are threatened. Once again though, a few key changes to delivery can make all the difference. I have occasionally summed up the key difference between the Japanese and English takes on the characters of Kingdom Hearts as 'In English, everyone's that little bit manlier'. Voices are typically a little deeper, characters a little brasher, etc, and Aqua's no exception - and the thing is, it works. That confident edge to her character that I'd been missed from the early trailers is back in the English version. It's lovely.
Stuff that was not awesome: Terra's bad poetry
I was going to skip griping for a change, but then I remembered the two times in the game when, for some reason, the writer decided to make Terra speak in brain-breakingly bad verse and I felt the need to clear one little thing up: there is no poetry in the Japanese at those points, so the translator didn't even have the excuse of dealing with the awkward job of translating poetry from one language to another. No, someone just decided to shove in some random poetry at a couple of vaguely significant moments. My best guess is that they were worried they were running short of their cheese quota for the game.
While I'm on the subject of BBS (because clearly a 4000 word review plus another thousand on the dub is not nearly enough), during the lead-up to Wai-con a comment showed up on my original review asking (perhaps unwisely) what I'd thought of Vanitas, a character the commenter was particularly fond of and whom I'd barely mentioned in my own spiel. The comment was anonymous so the odds they'd notice a reply now that I actually have time to write one are probably not that great, but it did manage to get me going on that old subject of Stuff BBS Could Have Done Better, so for the sake of the argument, here's my thoughts on the subject.
Getting this out there right away, I can't really agree with the Vanitas fans on this one. The reason why Vanitas didn't get much of a mention in my original review is because he didn't make much of an impression on me. I'd even go so far as to say that I found him to be a pretty good candidate for the most boring villain in the KH series to date. My basic problem with him goes thus: Vanitas is supposed to be a creature born of perfect darkness, and yet in the whole narrative of the game he has no objectives and no motivations but to obey his creator's will. That's not a creature of pure darkness, it's a puppet of pure obedience. Sure, he does manage to be quite effectively creepy at some points, and you can probably argue some kind of logic whereby helping Xehanort create the X-blade is the most evil act possible, you can nitpick minor details of Xehanort's instructions that Vanitas may not have quite followed to the letter, but that still feels like a cop-out. Thinking back on his role I am struck by nothing so much as how much more could have done with him.
I am probably biased from the outset on the subject of Vanitas for a couple of reasons, not least that he's intimately linked with the X-blade/Unversed/Sora-Ven-link subplots of the game which were at the heart of everything I found underdeveoped and unsatisfying about the resolution. By the time we got to play BBS, 348/2 Days had already effectively killed any remaining tolerance I may have had for seeing the Sora and Clones clusterfuck grow even more convoluted and the fact that the whole Sora/Ven connection essentially had no impact on the plot other than to inexplicably give Vanitas the face of a guy who hadn't even had any connection to him or Ventus at the time of his creation did not endear me to his basic concept. Presumably some of this is going to be elaborated on in later instalments to the KH series, but there were an awful lot of hours of gameplay in BBS with disappointingly little payoff in the plot department, and that will always remain my biggest complaint about the game.
But my basic problem with Vanitas remains that he is, quite simply, a bit dull. It's a bit hard to get very interested in the mystery behind a character when you as the audience have been privileged with the knowledge that he's working for the big bad from the opening scenes. If he really is supposed to be a being of pure darkness, is it so much to ask that he at least show the initiative to backstab his creator once in a while? Some interest in his own survival, even? Let's remember, Vanitas was created only because Xehanort's ultimate Keyblade recipe required a heart of pure darkness as in ingredient (okay, yes, when the X-Blade is finally created Vanitas seems to live through it somehow, which is pretty much just one more plothole which gets handwaved away without elaboration). It's true that the KH series does have some history of associating evil with a loss of free will; greater evil characters have often been able to control the lesser by manipulating the darkness in their hearts. The trouble is, if that's why Vanitas obeys Xehanort, it puts him down on the level of characters like Terra, Riku or Cloud (who are manipulated against their will), Pete (who follows the greater evil because he's not up to much on his own) or mindless slaves like the Heartless - the diet coke of evil. Not much of a credible threat.
If it's possible to define evil in any reasonably brief manner, then I'd say part of that definition would have to involve what a fundamentally selfish force it is. Evil does not play well with others, not even with other evil. Much of what made the villains of KH2 so interesting was that they came in so many factions working at cross purposes - you had the internal politics of the Organisation, Axel switching sides at the eleventh hour, Riku running around disguised as a bad guy, Malificent's great moment of glory when she decides to turn on the big bad, not to mention at least passing lipservice paid to the question of whether the Organisation's goal of getting their hearts back really was all that bad. It's all that complex ambiguity that I felt was part of what was missing from BBS, which spoiled who the big bad was from the promotional material, then spoiled his link to the secondary bad before you were through the opening scenes.
The point I'm building towards here is that I feel Vanitas would have been an infinitely more interesting character had he rebelled against Xehanort shortly after creation, then spent the majority of his appearances in BBS trying not to end up crushed into a component part of the X-blade. This wouldn't necessarily change the plot as fundamentally as you might think - Vanitas would still have reason to confront Ventus, but now he'd be doing it in attempt to pull off a kind of 'controlled detonation' that would destroy Ventus before he could become strong enough for a clash between them to create the X-blade. I can't see any reason why a little thing like Vanitas' rebellion should force more than a few minor revisions to Xehanort's plans either, since Xehanort is exactly the sort of manipulative bastard who'd enjoy the challenge of having one more pawn to lead around. Tricking Ventus and Vanitas into their ultimate confrontation would pose him no difficulty.
What the game would have gained by setting Vanitas and Xehanort against each other from the outset is a way to give its villains a little ambiguity. Xehanort would still be evil - forget the name, the history and the promotional movie, you only have to look at the guy - but with Vanitas genuinely working against him rather than merely feigning it, you could set Vanitas up as the big bad for the first act of the story and postpone revealing that there was any connection between him and Xehanort at all until well into the narrative. So while that particularly revelation probably wouldn't come as a huge surprise to any player who'd been paying attention, it would give you the opportunity to play around with with one of those big questions: who really is the greater evil, the being created as pure evil, or the one who created him? Vanitas may be just as willing to send the rest of the universe to hell as Xehanort but if his main objective is simply his desire not to be destroyed - and if he's just as much a pawn to Xehanort as the good guys are - then that would give him at least a hint of sympathy. Taken that way, Vanitas could even conceivably wind up siding with the trio against Xehanort for a battle or two somewhere in the story. Or maybe he doesn't care if he lives or dies as long as he can take the rest of the universe with him. Or maybe that's just what Xehanort wants you to think he's capable of. There are all kinds of possibilities to play with and, as I've pointed out before, plenty of dead wood that could be cleaned out of the BBS narrative to make room to develop them. You could give Aqua something to do for the first dozen hours of her storyline for a start.
tl;dr, there was still plenty we liked about BBS - in either language - but it's always going to be disappointing it missed so many chances to do better.