Reinbach
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Patreon Pin Up 1/28/19
🕑 Added 2019-01-29 04:41:28 +0000 UTCKingdom Heart 3 comes out today, so here we have Aqua and Kairi merging their hearts to overcome a throbbing lance of darkness!....I have quite a bit to say on this one. So if you're not up for a video game rant, I'll just say I hope you like the pic of two girls sharing a cock, and offer my thanks for being a $5 supporter.
Kingdom Hearts came out on the Playstation 2 in 2002. And at the time, there had never been anything like it. (Hell, even now there's never been anything like it.) The concept was to take the Disney property, which contains the most iconic characters in American animation history, and cross them over with Final Fantasy, Japan's most prolific role playing series. The only comparison I can think of would be if you were to take Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes gang and toss them into the universe of Dragon Quest. And yet Kingdom Hearts was a real thing that happened.
In the story they plunk you down as a Final Fantasy-styled avatar character, complete with the spiky nonsensical hairstyle that remains a hallmark of the brand to this day, and team him up with Donald Duck and Goofy in an action rpg. Throughout your adventure you explore a variety of classic Disney worlds based on their most popular movies, while also meeting a handful of Final Fantasy characters along the way. This led to some outright bat-shit scenarios as the game went on. The fact that Sephiroth, one of Final Fantasy's most powerful and infamous villains, can conceivably be bested by two cartoon animals and a boy in baggy shorts would make one think that this game is a parody, maybe something with a comedic tone? Nope! The whole thing is played dead serious, even leaning towards full-on melodrama at times. This game was truly a unique beast.
And for my part? I loved it. So much so that I even suffered through the portable spinoff game with obnoxious card-based combat that bridged the gap between the first game and the second. Little did I know at the time that portable spinoffs of varying quality would become the series standard for over a decade.
Yep, Kingdom Hearts is one of those series that, for the longest time, couldn't count to three. I don't personally know what was stopping them from making a proper third installment for so long, but I do know that the games they made in the interim could best be described as "filler." And the problem with making so many filler games is that in each one, you have to throw in at least some relevant canonical story bits to make the game worth buying for fans. And after so many games, after all these years, the Kingdom Hearts timeline is probably the most confusing, convoluted mess in the history of the medium. If you feel like the entire Metal Gear Solid saga was too short and easy to follow for you tastes, then this is the series for you.
But here we are on the launch day of Kingdom Hearts 3. A game that, by all means, is bound to attract new players. I mean, a lot of Frozen fans weren't even born when the first KH game released. But now Elsa is featured in a major new game release and they're bound to be at least curious. So what recourse does a new player have? Sure, they could watch hours and hours of cutscenes from previous games on Youtube, but personally I'm going a different route. My local community college is offering a class called Kingdom Hearts: What the Fuck is Going on and Who All These Hooded Assholes Are. I figure with perseverance and diligent note-taking, I'll be at least 30% less confused when I start Kingdom Hearts 3.
Well I think I've gone on long enough. If you have anything to add on the subject I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Though do me a solid if you would: don't mention any spoilers please (especially anything at all about the latest game released today.) Just in case I have any supporters considering diving into the games for the first time, I'd rather not ruin it for them here if I can help it.
Comments
Olympian Comics
Late to the comments. I agree with other comments above. Only Birth by Sleep, and Dream, Drop Distance are really relevant to story, and worth playing game wise too. 358/2 Days is superfluous fan service, coded is 100% rehash. Chain of Memories is fun enough and just relevant enough to be worth playing if only to explain the confusing beginning of II.
Reinbach
I'm holding off for the same reason. I'm playing the RE2 remake when I can, but I hear it's pretty short, which fits my schedule nicely. :)
Reinbach
Interesting! Despite me giving the series some crap above, I'll definitely be playing KH3 for myself eventually.
Flakcloak
Kingdom Hearts games were spreads over multiples consoles, sure, but not obscures ones. They were all on the biggest handled of the moment (Nintendo DS for exemple, the second best selling console ever). The mobile games are bullshit, thought. I was also angry when we had to buy a japanese KH final mix or watch crappy youtube videos to see the whole story, but now that's fine. But, i agree that BBS at least should have been a PS3 game, and 3D the first half of KH 3. But we can't change the past... I think the spin off are one of the appeal of the series, one of it's best gimmicks. It add a lot of mystery, a sense of complexity because you have so much side character with a story of their own. Maybe it was hard to follow at times but now that the saga (or at least this story) is over, we can play it to start to finish and see what they wanted to tell. Now if you start the Kingom Hearts games in 2019 it's just a fun ride. That's what i wanted to say.
ScuzzBucket
Yeah, I figured as much- they were always a bit squirrelly with Pixar, and this is the era in which it became a VERY big issue that Pixar was different. The fight between the two companies saw the invincible Michael Eisner unseated from power, which is how we ended up with Disney owning Pixar today.
guardian__J
Disney didn't own Pixar at the time of the first games. Disney was the sole producer and distributor of Pixar movies, but they were a separate entity owned by Steve Jobs. When the deal was ending and Pixar was looking to decide to extend or start making movies fully on their own, Disney bought them out right. WALL-E or Up were some of the first movies made after Pixar was a full subsidiary of Disney.
David
I LOVE THIS!! AQUA IS MY FAV CHARACTER FROM THE SERIES. I LOVE HER. Now that i'm done with my fanboysm over Aqua, i have to say that KH is one of my favorite franchises in videogames. I started with the original game, and i loved it. It was truly an amazing story with great chracters, and, as you say, filled with melodrama. From that point on... well, it's hard. I LOVE KH2 and Birth By Sleep, but having a franchise grow on multiple devices is just a crazy as fuck idea. Not only it makes it hard to play some of the titles, like Chain of Memories or that one on browsers, but it also ruins some of the things on the lore and it's charactes, Nomura is a crazy dude that likes to put LORE IN ALL OF THEM. I know that what i'm sayind is kinda "WTF", but trying to make every game as important an relevant to the main story is bananas! Specially when some of them plays like shit. I hated Dream Drop Distance. It had some great moments, but at that point the game was just an excuse to put Sora in trouble and having a new Organization XIII. And the prolouge of KHIII with Aqua in a Fragmentary Passage is fun, but after 3 hours of play it feels like it wasn't worth it. Still, i hope KHIII is great. I'll wait a week or two to buy it, mostly because right now i'm playing (and rushing out) Red Dead Redemption 2, and i don't want to play two long games at the same time.
Angelo
The difference is all the Kingdom Hearts side games were spread over multiple different consoles. They were eventually ported to PS3/PS4 but if they were so important to the story then they should've been made for home consoles from the beginning.
Alex
So, having put about four hours into the game, I can tell you that you don't really need to know the back story. If you want to know it, when you start there's about five four minute cinematics that can fill you in. And then the game keeps feeding you the information as you go. I mean, all final fantasies are cut scene and tutorial he at for the first few hours, but usually it's new information. I feel like this one keeps rehashing things.
Reinbach
Oh certainly not. I guess what makes KH 3 stand out (from my point of view anyway) is that it's the first game in the series in over a decade that's getting a flashy, full budget console release that's bound to attract new players in a way the portable side stories probably didn't. And even with all the options available to get caught up on the story, I can't think of any other time a major game was shipped with such a high barrier to entry for newcomers. It's pretty fascinating really. The game industry rarely takes chances like this anymore.
Reinbach
Might be time to sign up for some KH courses! XD I do plan on picking it up when I get some time. Though right now my scant free time is devoted to Resident Evil 2.
Reinbach
Fandoms can certainly be an unpredictable thing. I guess it just depends on the forums you frequent or who you talk to.
Reinbach
Glad you noticed! I'm doing my best to mix things up lately.
Reinbach
You know, even when the first game came out, I remember being like "Where are all the Pixar characters?" I can only assume there was some legal reason they were omitted back then.
Flakcloak
Well you could play only Birth By Sleep and 3D (obviously after 1 & 2) without being lost afterward. The other games expend the universe and answers plot holes (what was sora doing between 1 & 2? What's the story of Roxas?). The point is to see every game as a part of something bigger : the numbered games are sora story, the rest are the stories of other key characters. Even if we play only the third one, there's a big recap of everything. I mean, nobody is crying over Peace Walker (the real MGS 5) or every Splinter Cell, a series of 7 or 8 games without any number. Why blame Kingdom Hearts? 10 core games in nearly twenty years is not too much, and we can play them all on PS4 now. So nothing to be angry about.
Paul
I love the fact that everyone who knows KH knows that 3 is going to be an incomprehensible clusterfuck of plotlines smashing together with all the grace of a multi-clown car pile-up, and we're all totally okay with that. Though I did get my copy on Saturday - only played through the first world, since I'm not quite finished with 3D, but two hours in, I'd already had three people make cryptic statements about things I couldn't comprehend and I could not have been happier.
Paul
Yeah, None of us get angry about it, we just try and point out that they're as important as any numbered game (though I will say, only the original GBA version of CoM was any good to play and Coded and Days you can easily just get away with watching the cutscenes for, CoM, BBS and 3D are the only ones I'd say you absolutely have to pay attention to).
Kyman201
And Coded is aggressively UNnecessary.
Kyman201
See every Kingdom Hearts fan I've talked to (myself included) don't get ANGRY or anything, they just want to warn someone who says that "Oh dude you're going to be so lost. Look, there's that one singular Kingdom Hearts Story So Far Collection on the PS4, that's all you need in one game." ALSO, few of us would say all the side games are AWESOME, but we DO say that you should at least brush up on them. (I will say that Birth by Sleep is a genuinely good game and if you only play ONE side game, play that one)
ScuzzBucket
Yeah, they're much lighter and have a kind of different "consistency", with the lighter spots.
Angelo
The Kingdom Hearts fanbase would hate this post lol. According to them none of the handheld games are side games. They're all awesome and you have to play each and every one of them or you won't understand the story. That means you have to play Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts coded, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage, Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover, and Kingdom Hearts Union χ before you can play KH 3. Needless to say when I tell them I've only played KH 1 and 2 the responses aren't positive lol.
Jonoffen
I really like what you did with her nipples. I've said in the past that it was a shame you didn't have more areola variety.
ScuzzBucket
Alas, I'd never played the series, as I was getting out of owning my own Next-Generation consoles at the time (I just had a Game Boy Advance)- but as I was beginning to accept that Disney was AWESOME, having left my "Disney SUCKS and is for KIDS!" teen years behind, I found it to be an amazing idea. I got the impression from watching my friends play that it's a lot of button-mashing and mowing through mooks, which wasn't really my idea of greatness, but hey- you can't ask for more well-known characters. Pretty mind-blowing that they're finally adding serious Pixar stuff, and of course, the juggernaut that is Frozen. Many, MANY years later than you'd think to capture the peak of that... except that in most of the world, Frozen is still HUGE. Particularly in Japan (Frozen was bigger than any single anime when I was over there 2-3 years ago). So this sequel is going to make ALL OF THE MONEY. Of course it just seems to be re-telling the movie, but... that's pretty much where Elsa is the strongest, most Moe-like, sad character ever. She goes through SO MANY EMOTIONS in that movie, and I think that's going to affect the sequel, where people might wonder why Elsa is acting so different. Nice pic! I have no concept of who these two girls are, but that guy is living the dream. Good job on the foreshortened wiener, too- that's an interesting pose :) Nice light skin on the one girl- it's interesting how pale skin alters your "typical" nipple coloring.
