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Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep gamethink 1
Done with Terra's story
Going to repeat myself here: the worlds are wonderful and the game mechanics are really fun. Even grinding is fun! Aside from once or twice some frustration with a boss fight we couldn't win, or something similar, it's been pure fantastic.
But now, some arbitrary complaining:
First off, Terra's voice acting is terrible. Terrible terrible terrible. He completely fails at having any kind of intonation at any point. He talks about very serious heart-breaking things in what is nearly a monotone. Ugh. But despite hearing many complaints, I don't hate Aqua's voice... thus far. It's possible she may also fail to emote during emotional scenes in her story, but so far it's hard to trump Terra. I don't know if they told Terra about the "acting" part of the voice acting gig.
Second of all, Terra's story in general is kind of clumsy. We start out by packing him full of flaws that we are mostly told about; how he craves power, and fears losing, etc. All we really see is him once reaching for the darkness during a fight. But there's little exploration of what he's actually thinking or feeling, so it sounds very heavy-handed. Possibly a flaw of the voice acting more than the storytelling, but then we get to the fact that his biggest flaw actually seems to be stupidity.
Every Disney villain in the game plays Terra for a fool. And I don't just mean "He's unable to identify clearly evil people via their obviously evil appearance." I mean he doesn't apply thought to anything. Is there any way Maleficent could have told him "Steal Princess Aurora's heart" that would have sounded remotely like a good idea? And he went "Herp derp okay" until he actually was standing in front of her and went "...waaaaait a minute." Repeat this about six times.
And then we're told things like "You betrayed me! I knew it!" But he still went along with it. If you can see the evil plot, but you walk into it anyway because it pings your clumsy character flaw, you're a moron. Riku did this stuff much better. He knew Maleficent was using him, but he had no choice if he wanted to help Kairi, so he expressed his distrust in a way we could see but worked for her anyway -- and her twisting his heart around was slow, insiduous, and actually supported by material evidence he saw with his own eyes.
Meanwhile, Terra's story feels kind of like it was told backwards. The first thing that happens to him is that he does something questionable, and then the darkness controls him and makes him be evil. ...then he proceeds to continue to behave in borderline ways six more times until finally he goes "Oh no! I'm being evil and that's wrong!" They should have built up to Maleficent seizing control of his body, instead of starting with an example of why the darkness isn't a good idea.
Thirdly, Terra's brief visit to Destiny Islands was literally so bad that it hurt me, as a writer. He arrived there by accident, was completely ignored by Sora and Riku until convenient for the plot because why waste preciously-rationed NPC dialogue, decided that the light wanted him to talk to Riku for no real reason, hallucinated the future like three times, and then had a thirty second conversation with Riku before promising him that someday, Riku could have his keyblade. Really? Really, game? Keyblades are just something you hand out to five-year-olds in a whimsical spur of the moment quasi-ceremony if they seem restless enough? There were so many ways that could've been handled... if, you know, the game weren't on the PSP and thoroughly limited in amount of possible content. Like, say Terra ended up on Destiny Islands after every world to mope about his failures or brood about how weak he is, and Riku was continually there to lift his spirits or goad him on or whatever.
Okay, enough griping. Things that were awesome: many, many things. Sora and Riku were so cute it hurts my soul. The battle violins, oh man, some of the battle music is also soul-hurty. The enemy descriptions were fun to read and I really felt like they must've been fun for someone to write, too. The worlds were a ton of fun, and I didn't mind story-rehashing, especially since we actually worked our characters into the plots in a triad of tangled ways instead of just having them along for the ride. The confrontation with Eraqus actually made a lot of sense: the misunderstanding was completely believable, and his weakness of fearing darkness (underlined by Xehanort's notes and words) seemed to be visibly affecting him. I was also pleased that we avoided easy misunderstandings with Terra and Aqua at the keyblade graveyard -- I was afraid Terra's self-recrimination would result in misleading Aqua and we'd have to fight her because Terra didn't feel like explaining the full context of what happened. And the end with Terra's armor -- the lingering spirit ;; -- was kind of heart-wrenching.
Overall rating: 7.5/10. At least 6 points of that are purely for funtimes, the rest for the meh but intriguing storytelling.
Thirty seconds into Ventus's story
Holy crap, this kid is so in love with Terra.
Three worlds into Ventus's story
I had really honestly been assuming that the tides of people I saw asserting that Ven had a crush on Terra were just using their slash goggles. But this kid is so in love with Terra, I swear.
Going to repeat myself here: the worlds are wonderful and the game mechanics are really fun. Even grinding is fun! Aside from once or twice some frustration with a boss fight we couldn't win, or something similar, it's been pure fantastic.
But now, some arbitrary complaining:
First off, Terra's voice acting is terrible. Terrible terrible terrible. He completely fails at having any kind of intonation at any point. He talks about very serious heart-breaking things in what is nearly a monotone. Ugh. But despite hearing many complaints, I don't hate Aqua's voice... thus far. It's possible she may also fail to emote during emotional scenes in her story, but so far it's hard to trump Terra. I don't know if they told Terra about the "acting" part of the voice acting gig.
Second of all, Terra's story in general is kind of clumsy. We start out by packing him full of flaws that we are mostly told about; how he craves power, and fears losing, etc. All we really see is him once reaching for the darkness during a fight. But there's little exploration of what he's actually thinking or feeling, so it sounds very heavy-handed. Possibly a flaw of the voice acting more than the storytelling, but then we get to the fact that his biggest flaw actually seems to be stupidity.
Every Disney villain in the game plays Terra for a fool. And I don't just mean "He's unable to identify clearly evil people via their obviously evil appearance." I mean he doesn't apply thought to anything. Is there any way Maleficent could have told him "Steal Princess Aurora's heart" that would have sounded remotely like a good idea? And he went "Herp derp okay" until he actually was standing in front of her and went "...waaaaait a minute." Repeat this about six times.
And then we're told things like "You betrayed me! I knew it!" But he still went along with it. If you can see the evil plot, but you walk into it anyway because it pings your clumsy character flaw, you're a moron. Riku did this stuff much better. He knew Maleficent was using him, but he had no choice if he wanted to help Kairi, so he expressed his distrust in a way we could see but worked for her anyway -- and her twisting his heart around was slow, insiduous, and actually supported by material evidence he saw with his own eyes.
Meanwhile, Terra's story feels kind of like it was told backwards. The first thing that happens to him is that he does something questionable, and then the darkness controls him and makes him be evil. ...then he proceeds to continue to behave in borderline ways six more times until finally he goes "Oh no! I'm being evil and that's wrong!" They should have built up to Maleficent seizing control of his body, instead of starting with an example of why the darkness isn't a good idea.
Thirdly, Terra's brief visit to Destiny Islands was literally so bad that it hurt me, as a writer. He arrived there by accident, was completely ignored by Sora and Riku until convenient for the plot because why waste preciously-rationed NPC dialogue, decided that the light wanted him to talk to Riku for no real reason, hallucinated the future like three times, and then had a thirty second conversation with Riku before promising him that someday, Riku could have his keyblade. Really? Really, game? Keyblades are just something you hand out to five-year-olds in a whimsical spur of the moment quasi-ceremony if they seem restless enough? There were so many ways that could've been handled... if, you know, the game weren't on the PSP and thoroughly limited in amount of possible content. Like, say Terra ended up on Destiny Islands after every world to mope about his failures or brood about how weak he is, and Riku was continually there to lift his spirits or goad him on or whatever.
Okay, enough griping. Things that were awesome: many, many things. Sora and Riku were so cute it hurts my soul. The battle violins, oh man, some of the battle music is also soul-hurty. The enemy descriptions were fun to read and I really felt like they must've been fun for someone to write, too. The worlds were a ton of fun, and I didn't mind story-rehashing, especially since we actually worked our characters into the plots in a triad of tangled ways instead of just having them along for the ride. The confrontation with Eraqus actually made a lot of sense: the misunderstanding was completely believable, and his weakness of fearing darkness (underlined by Xehanort's notes and words) seemed to be visibly affecting him. I was also pleased that we avoided easy misunderstandings with Terra and Aqua at the keyblade graveyard -- I was afraid Terra's self-recrimination would result in misleading Aqua and we'd have to fight her because Terra didn't feel like explaining the full context of what happened. And the end with Terra's armor -- the lingering spirit ;; -- was kind of heart-wrenching.
Overall rating: 7.5/10. At least 6 points of that are purely for funtimes, the rest for the meh but intriguing storytelling.
Thirty seconds into Ventus's story
Holy crap, this kid is so in love with Terra.
Three worlds into Ventus's story
I had really honestly been assuming that the tides of people I saw asserting that Ven had a crush on Terra were just using their slash goggles. But this kid is so in love with Terra, I swear.
no subject
(And wow, voice acting/translation fail, I'm sorry~~)
....and I actually see the three of them as utterly platonic not'siblings, so. Huh. Maybe I SHOULD play the English version, just to see...
no subject
I really wanted to see them as platonic, because I really don't ship and don't want to ship any of them with each other. But Ven's crush on Terra is so there that it weirds me out a little. I guess you can read my thought process in the gamethink I just posted, la.
no subject
Yay gamethink! :D:D *trundles over to read*