#kangdan horfs

[nautilusopus]

I'm a Kingdom Hearts fan and I'm fully aware the series isn't good, and I can't send an ask to fury-brand so I'm telling you instead

there are fans with different opinions in every fanbase. i know crisis core is hot garbage and arguably the worst thing that ever happened to the ff series, but saying “crisis core is beloved by the vii fanbase and generally regarded as the favourite entry” is still a correct statement. 

and also to this day i keep seeing that stupid “lol people thinking kh is confusing when they haven’t played 358/2 days and birth by sleep” post with the jafar laughing gif drifting by my dashboard every now and then which means to this day this is still an ongoing problem

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

i just finished kh3 (i was putting it off because i knew it would be bad) and... it was so bad :( kairi.......... they did her so dirty. there was also no character interaction despite gathering the whole cast™ and also sora accomplished absolutely nothing the whole game. added to the rewatching the “time travel” confrontation which was just... exhausting. i cant really think of how it could’ve been much worse tbh :(( also. fuck “may ur heart be ur guiding key” absolutely shoehorned garbage

join us in the misery club, drinks are on the left

i don’t imagine anything will change in terms of how nomura tells stories, the model he has now has been generally well-received by fans and critics so whatever

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

I'm aware unfortunately. It's really too bad. I love the first game, it's a lot of fun even when it makes no sense because it didn't take itself that seriously, but then something shifted and it got all overly complicated. I was willing to try to keep up with the overarching plot until DDD, but then I gave up. And I wish fury-brand was accepting anon asks bc I don't have a tumblr account and can't communicate any other way

this is why you plan your stories out nomura

tbh i should probably disable anon too, but haven’t yet for the reasons you’ve listed. right now i still receive more actual questions than whining about ultimania quotes, so on it stays

#kangdan horfs #asks #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

With Nomura I think he only very specifically has contempt towards Kairi since he's at least written a few cool female characters across his line of work (and assuming that whatever he had planned for Versus wasn't that whole Luna nightmare)

It's less contempt and more complete and utter disinterest in any of the girls as characters or their narratives in general, to the extent where they’ll be either sabotaged in the name of characters he does care about at best, or sloppily written out at worst. And that definitely leeches into other titles too. He’s not as bad as Tabata, true, but he’s in no way good either. 

Crisis Core in particular is a huuuuuuge offender, with Tifa not even being in the damn thing aside from showing up to get stabbed and Aeris – who you would think would play a pretty big role, having both connections to Zack and Shinra’s atrocities and might be in a position to convince him to question the amount of kool-aid he’s been drinking – just kinda floats by, and is afraid of the sky for some reason (????? this never gets explained or resolved) and not only has every single life decision that made her distinct actually made by Zack (wearing pink? Zack’s idea. Selling flowers? Zack’s idea. Ribbon? Zack got it. He even fucking coasts by and names 7th Heaven), but she then proceeded to write him 87 letters as she continued to pine after him for four years. Not to mention she’s always dead in damn near every spinoff she shows up in so Cloud has something to cry over because god forbid she ever get to do anything else. They conspired to bring Zack back due to mako whatever, but not her. 

(And Tifa gets kinda shafted in the spinoff titles she keeps appearing in where she’s never really allowed to do anything besides Get Saved By Cloud Because Love Interest and I don’t think she’s ever won a fight once??? which is also not great. Advent Children, which he actually got to direct, is especially bad in this respect with both girls.)

Aqua’s got similar issues to Tifa as well, which, like… of all of them she’s supposed to be the most skilled one since she’s the only one that passed the exam and beat him twice or something in BBS, and then she kinda gets shoved offscreen, actually yells at Mickey for throwing her under the bus, gets un-possessed and doesn’t really mean it uwu, then fights someone that she should absolutely be able to beat and loses just so Ventus can go take care of it. 

Or Xion? Man she sure was, uh… there. She cried that one time. And she has a nice shirt I guess. And she’s pretty chill with Axel even though he was a huge bag of dicks to her during 358/2 Days.

TWEWY is more or less unscathed thus far but given his track record I’m side-eyeing future installments of that too. 

Here’s the thing – storytelling is a collaborative process. Back before Square really got as big as it did, there was no reason to give Nomura absolute creative control. Why would they? We’ve already got another writer and Sakaguchi overseeing the whole thing to balance one another out. 

That’s my theory. Something like this definitely can’t be a recent problem, but there would have had to be more than just Sakaguchi leaving the company to set all this off... right?

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

good lord Lunafreya is a fucking masterwork in crafting female characters compared to Kairi at this point

Kairi I’m so sorry you deserved better than this game

#Dumb and Bad #kangdan horfs #spoilers #so much for that #i knew she wasn't going to actually matter but MAN

[nautilusopus]

Serious non-troll: What if you like the cop-outs and the scrambled bullshit plots and the nonsense towers of half-constructed ideas? I agree that for example Nomura is a goddamn crazy person but I find his convulsions fascinating and want to see more of them.

i mean, you’re entirely within your rights to do that. it’s just frustrating that there’s visibly no effort put into any of it, and he’s just writing for the sake of what makes the trailer look good, and that’s been 100% to the detriment of the story ever since he’s started doing it

i’m not even inherently opposed to ridiculous convoluted bullshit. i’m one of those pretentious fuckheads that unironically likes End of Evangelion and thinks it made perfect sense, obviously, duh, with all its absolute nonsense of adam and lilith and rei being a god-analogue from absorbing both the white and black seeds and allowing shinji to dictate the ultimate outcome of third impact in the culmination of a couple of really fucking long and extremely obtuse character arcs. i mean, hell, i’m 38 chapters into a fic that is running off nothing but weird high-concept ideas of how reality and parallel universes work and abstract metaphor andsleep deprivation. in any other circumstances, i’m fine with convoluted batshit nonsense.

i think the best way to explain the heart of the issue is to look at what happened to the matrix trilogy. or actually wait this is tumblr, everyone’s in high school and would’ve been foetuses or something when Revolutions came out. homestuck, then. we’ll look at homestuck. 

okay so homestuck. remember when that was as big as it was? initially, the big stumbling block was the slow pace of act 1 where john just kind of fucks around throwing glass at clown dolls for a while and if you weren’t into that kind of humour that was where the comic immediately lost you, but what ultimately got the ball rolling was [S] WV: Ascend. the general metric back then was if you weren’t hooked by that one, you wouldn’t like homestuck at all, and for many people that was the point of no return. the reason WV: Ascend was as big of a deal as it was is that we’ve been seeing a bunch of disconnected nonsense happening all over the place, and this is the first time we see our first major time loop actually closed, with the promise of a few more being set up. all that supposed joke nonsense we’d been watching the whole time? it actually mattered, surprise! from there, the narrative spends a lot of time introducing a lot of new concepts – we have captchaloguing and paradox slime, and time travel, and doomed timelines, and exiles and future versions of planets from a parallel universe the metanarrative being perpetuated by the author being diagetic and fuck knows what other things i’m forgetting about. and then, to throw you for a loop twelve whole other characters show up on top of that. so then the narrative needs to spend time establishing who these people are and what their relevance to the story is – which it does, by having them be active participants in the first arc as things go on. this ultimately culminates in [S] Cascade, where we see all these different concepts eventually tie into one another because they were deliberately set up to, and it’s at that point that you figure, well shit we’ve hit a point where all the time travel stuff has finally come to a head. and with it, you’d expect it to also bring all the character stuff to a head too, but instead hussie has an entire extra act to go so we can’t have that resolve yet. 

so in the meantime, here are 20-ish whole other characters doing some other things. but we don’t have time to establish what’s effectively the silmarillion by now, so we have to speed past it, meaning we aren’t given a chance to care about these new people. but we can’t have a chance to care about them either, because we still have to tie all this into 5 whole previous acts that are meant to feed into this. at this point, homestuck is visibly collapsing under its own weight. character arcs are forced to fart around in circles because the status quo can’t change because we still need to make it to endgame with these character dynamics more or less intact. but that’s boring to read so we’ll do this entire “what if” thing and then retcon it all out of existence, and then have the fact that you can retcon things suddenly become vital to the resolution of the coming in place of anything we’ve already established previously – not the time travel, not the parallel universe with the trolls, not even the whole thing with the Scratch leading to the alpha kids being here in the first place – when the mechanic was only introduced in the first place to sloppily patch a story together that had long since devolved into infodumps that served to paint hussie further and further into a corner as he was forced to define his lore to get the plot to keep moving forward despite the fact that the narrative wasn’t focusing properly on the people that could make that happen anymore because the story had since switched focus from those people almost entirely. 

and in the meantime the damn thing got eaten up by filler, and suddenly characters from that filler are showing up like they were totally relevant to the main story the whole time even though literally nothing they did in their own subplot had any direct bearing on the story at large, unlike the initial 12 trolls. why yes, Alternate Universe Calliope was a completely necessary addition to the story! didn’t you see our important sidestory thing where they do Stuff, and then her showing up in the climax to resolve some other things that are sorta disconnected from the main plot anyway?

not to mention the shipping. nothing ruins a story faster than throwing in a love triangle or eight, and then immediately invalidating all the character growth that happened on top of that anyway by having it literally never happen. not that it would’ve mattered anyway, because remember, we never actually got to have any of this really developed to begin with. 

by the time we hit end of act 6, there’s been so many new concepts haphazardly stapled onto the story and so many threads brought up and discarded entirely when we already established back with [S] Cascade that the story works best when they actually do this and it is doable, that it stops being merely complicated and off the wall, and starts being spread too thin, incomprehensible, and ultimately no longer part of a whole narrative deliberately comprised of interlocking storylines. shit’s just kinda happening at you, and rather than getting to see parts of a text interacting as a result of them coming from somewhere for the express purpose of then going to somewhere, you’re just being asked to accept that, yup, that’s a thing that’s going on right now. neato. sure is some stuff happening and whatnot. and in the end, for all that posturing, it didn’t even do anything. in pre-cascade homestuck that wouldn’t have even been a full flash. a bunch of nonsense happens, and then They Fightan Good, and then it’s over and there’s not a single time paradox or meta-interaction to be found. none of the stuff they built up to over all these years mattered, and neither did any of the stuff they just threw in, either. 

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at with this. 

(also he treats the women in his stories like shit and quite frankly i’m sick of it and even more sick that people keep giving him a pass for it because it’s practically reached parody levels at this point , so there’s that)

i have no problem with convoluted twisty bullshit in and of itself. but it has to accomplish something aside from just existing, and nomura doesn’t do that. by his own admission, kingdom hearts wasn’t planned, and it shows really badly. characters and entire story mechanics and plot lines are introduced solely for the sake of introducing them. they don’t go anywhere or build to anything, because they can’t, because fuck we have to stall for kh3 shhhh just keep adding more soras and hopefully no one will notice. i think the last time any of this actually mattered was kh2, and even that had a lot of the issues i’ve mentioned here. as a result of all of this, the character arcs suffer a lot, and you’re left with nothing but a big ball of plot twists that goes nowhere, and a bunch of characters that only somewhat have anything to do with any of it. 

i don’t feel like it’s overly nitpicky to find this kinda gross and seriously insulting of the audience’s intelligence. it’s just lazy time-stalling. i get that people sometimes really don’t care about stuff like narrative and character development and are just here to see riku punching mike wazowski in the teeth or whatever, but i think it’s disingenuous to pretend that these aren’t nonetheless important parts of a game’s construction – especially a studio that used to openly pride itself on selling games with a focus on story. 

and the genuinely frustrating part is, no one cares. people are gushing all over everything square puts out because it’s square, so they know they don’t have to put effort into their stories. i’m well aware i’m in the minority for saying that these games are bad. but i also thought we were done with treating, “it’s just a video game, bro! why do you care so much about the story having quality as a narrative? this isn’t an english class!” as a valid rebuttal. 

maybe i should’ve used the matrix trilogy instead. most people hate movies 2 and 3 for the weird “YOU’VE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE/EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS AN END NEO” shit and the bonkers christ-allegory ending. i hate it because neo is about as interesting as the rock that cracked goofy’s skull open.

#asks #kangdan horfs #do i put this in the discourse tag even though its's not vii? #squid alienates kh fans #that's a tag now #hamsteak #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

hey so did they ever actually explain why the fuck riku was wearing a blindfold or

#kangdan horfs

[nautilusopus]

there's the tiniest chance kh3 is arriving tomorrow and i truly believe i'm about to have an Experience™️

ten bucks says they throw in another story mechanic

we already have clones and time travel and body theft so i’m thinking, like... “genetic memory”. why the fuck not

#asks #kangdan horfs #themateriodictable

[nautilusopus]

cuonalpinus replied to your post: hey so did they ever actually explain why the fuck...

wait now im kind of remembering. mickey had some line about how “eyes don’t lie” or something, so do with that what you will i guess. real reason probably: blindfold = dramatic angst

no i know about that. i mean an actual explanation.

it was just trailer fuel like 90% of every single thing that happens in every square game put out post-kh2

#cuonalpinus #kangdan horfs

[nautilusopus]

Do you read Kingdom Hearts fanfiction? If so, do you have any recommendations? I love the games, problems and all (though I admit 1&2 are my favorites by a long shot), but I can't seem to find fic I like. Admittedly I haven't looked recently, but my past experience was a sea of school AUs and badly written Kairi bashing, when the story focused on the DI trio at all. I have found 3 KH fics I really like in all the years I've been reading, and only 1 of those is still active.

It’s been years since I looked at anything KH. The last one I remember unironically enjoying was basically a KHIII prototype where II hadn’t come out yet (or at least must not have been widely known about) because it involved Sora, Riku, Roxas, and Kairi all teaming up to defeat Ansem/Xehanort. If I were to go back and read it now I’d probably find out it was actually terrible, but I already disillusioned myself with The Fifth Act and I don’t know if I want to do that to myself again.

#asks #kangdan horfs #oh man i bet that one death note fic i remember loving was actually terrible too #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

Playing Kingdom Hearts Final Mix again. I really love the white mushrooms and trinity marks from this game. I wish SE had kept them for later games. And I love the simplicity of the story compared to later.

I don’t think the added complexity of the later games needed to be a bad thing, but the great irony of it all is that despite adding clones and time travel and memories and a war and god knows what the fuck else since I’ve stopped keeping track, they’re conceptually even shallower than the first game. Keywords aren’t writing, Nomura. Stop that. 

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

I've loved the Kingdom Hearts series since I stared playing, but until I saw some of your objections to it I never really thought very hard on the things it does wrong. I'll still get KH3 when it comes out but you've raised some valid points for me about problems with the story... I played KH2 first but I think the first one is my favorite. It just had a different feeling to it and wasn't overly complicated.

It’s really sad because I don’t even think it needed to have the issues it did. It’s just that nobody really told Nomura no when they really should have. 

It’s a bit like Jim Carrey -- a genuinely skilled actor in his own right that can provide some breathtaking performances, but he needs a director not willing to put up with his shit and keep him on the rails or it becomes a Jim Carrey Movie (TM). 

Right now, Kingdom Hearts is very much a Nomura Game (TM). 

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

If in KH3 we either A) Don't get to play as Kairi finally even if it's just a tiny bit like Riku in KH2 or B) Get to hang out with cool Aladdin then I'm going to riot, what's your KH3 wishlist like

I mean I probably won’t buy it because I’ve made a decision to not give Square anymore money until they shape their shit up, and I’m sticking to my guns on that one. Not KH3, not the remake, not XV, nothing. 

My KH wishlist is long and complicated and involves more a series of deep-seated problems with Square and how they approach storytelling that’s permeated nearly every game they’ve put out for quite a while since KHII, finally being done away with. We can see shades of this in things like Crisis Core, FFXV, DDD (the whole KH series honestly). I doubt it’ll be anything that I’ll actually get because of that. The fans seem to love it, so they’ll keep doing it, and they won’t shoot themselves in the foot at this stage in the game with a property that’s guaranteed to make millions just to risk actually saying literally anything about anything with their game. 

(And on a very related point, I can guarantee you right now we will not be getting playable Kairi.)

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

for the video game ask! the mother series! aaand kingdom hearts

never played | want to play | terrible | boring | okay | good | great | a favorite

Earthbound in particular is one of my favourites, though I haven’t played the others yet. I’m not saying anything groundbreaking with that, it’s usually on someone’s favourites list in one way or another, but that’s usually for a reason. 

Kingdom Hearts are fun as long as you don’t think too hard about the very, very flawed storytelling. (grumble grumble)

Like, as long as you don’t think too hard about it it’s okay, but I like thinking about the things you can’t think too hard about so while it’s still a solid game in general, it’s getting harder and harder for me to enjoy with every new release. Oh well. 

#asks #kangdan horfs #Anonymous

[nautilusopus]

hey square i can throw keywords around too

DREAMS DARKNESS ANGELS HEART SYNERGY GLOBALISATION  INNOVATIVE HERO ENTERPRISE CONTENT

#i've made myself all grouchy now #kangdan horfs #squid alienates vii fans #these aren't story beats and characters #they're the writing equivalent of pasting glitter onto the baking soda volcano you made and calling it a day #forfdorfsorf

[nautilusopus]

But consider the following: Mike Wazowski can be a party member, are you less powerful than Mike Wazowski

I am less able to be used as a projectile than Mike Wazowski

#kangdan horfs #asks #Anonymous