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hahahailtotheking) wrote2012-08-08 01:27 am
hahahailtotheking) wrote2012-08-08 01:27 am
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Dream Drop Distance Let's Play Part 3: In Which We Do NOT Meet Daft Punk.
SO YOU KNOW WHAT WAS ALSO A LIE? Me having nothing but time to work on these, because my parents went on vacation and since I am a useless bum who lives with them, that means I got to help them with chores such as fence-painting and heavy-duty gardening. Also gotta study for make-up exams, BUT NONETHELESS I PERSEVERE and bring you this installment.
-Riku’s Tron-dive is NOT an easy one. A ton of distracting lights makes it hard to properly navigate the maze of obstacles.
-And it takes him about five seconds or so after landing to get captured by a bunch of security programs and lead into a transport hovercraft. At no point during this process does he resist arrest, he just… goes along.
-Riku this is not how you assert your worth. How many friendship speeches does a guy need to hear before he starts standing up for himself, I’m just asking…
-Oh look, Garret Hedlund (Sam) is on the hovercraft too! Hi Garret!
-”Hi I’m Sam!”
”Riku!”
-And then the camera apparently felt the need to cut away from the hovercraft because the VERY NEXT SECOND Riku is standing all alone in some arena and not!Jeff Bridges (Clu) is telling him to race or die.
-I don’t know what scene they cut to warrant such a jerky exposition, but I’m going to imagine Garret and Riku got too hot for Disney.
-Riku asks not!Jeff to explain what they’re playing and why. Ha ha ha oh Riku, asking for context and clarification in a KH game. You silly little boy.
-And despite all that he instinctively knows how to summon the light-cycle and then it’s time to D-D-D-D-DUEL… ON MOTORCYCLES!
-OKAY so after dying twice I finally got the hang of it.
-The bike has two modes: trail mode and shooter mode. Trail mode leaves a hard light trail behind the bike that hits enemies behind you HARD- if you’ve seen Tron, you’ve seen this. Shooter mode busts out two cannons for enemies in front of you that also slow enemies down so they’ll end up behind you so trail mode can finish them off. Sticking to one mode is synonymous with death, if not in the race then in the boss fight. Because you’re fighting a sub-boss after all the enemies, and your HP cannot be restored and you get sent back to the start of the race if you die.
-Joyous tidings.
-I beat it after two attempts, and my reward… is having Riku turn around to blast a hole in a nearby wall (a heart-shaped hole at that) and drive into the digital sunset.
-Because doing that from the start would have been a quitters way out.
-For some reason Riku stops using the high-speed cycle and starts walking on foot. He comes across Garret again who offers him a way out of the Grid through the portal to the ’real world’. That is to say, Garret Hedlunds real world, not… Rikus…
-And now I’ve gone cross-eyed.
-”No man I gotta stick around and be a hero here first.”
”Not even if I tell you my back-story, and how I’m gonna find a way to delete not!dad?”
”Well killing stuff IS pretty darn heroic… so what the hell, I’ll tag along.”
-Again, that conversation is just as abrupt in the game as I describe it here.
- A flashback happens. We see Garret and Jeff Bridges (Flynn) talk about going to the portal, but Jeff reveals that not!Jeff has the McGuffin disc that can allow him to escape to the outside world and they need that part first. So basically Sams entire backstory is part of an entirely skippable flashback… and it’s an almost direct rip off a scene from the movie, just without Olivia Wilde (Quorra) who was in fact there in the movie. I am confussled as to this choice.
-And equally confussled at the difficulty of these enemies.
OKAY time to try this again. This time with Sora!
-The Dive-boss (an octopus with lasertentacles) gets me once, but I figure out the trick. He blasts a lot of shots- dodge. He slashes out with laserswordtendrils- dodge. He shoots tracking lasers go in a circle and when he flies up close, hit the brakes and avoid his massive aura of hurt. Then hit him as much as you can and you soon touch down…
-Ha ha Soras reaction to realizing he’s back on the Grid is adorable.
-Although I wonder if he will come to find the artistic homogenization of the new Grid soul-crushingly dull in time, or if he simply appreciates the higher pixel-count.
-Or he doesn’t think about that at all because he sees a ship and he must chase the big shiny thing. Because it is there, and it is shiny.
-So Sora meets up with a bunch of guard programs and has no apprehensions talking to them because if he hasn’t learned by now that people dressed in all black is trouble, he never will. They proceed to drag him away into a prison ship.
-”GEE TALK ABOUT RUDE.”- actual quote
-How can one boy be this precious?
-AND smart to boot since unlike A CERTAIN SOMEONE he actually wrangles out of the guards grips and runs away.
-Que ”Brave Sir Robin” theme because I’m not even gonna bother fighting these guys.
-Run away some more and… there’s Rinzler- I mean, bad!Bruce Boxleitner.
-And in the background is Jeff Bridges, Garret Hedlund and Olivia Wilde! Hi every realistic body!
-So not!Bruce just busts out his disks and then… runs away. Sora has no idea what that was about and neither do I.
-Olivia is for some reason very interested in the Keyblade and Sora, because puppies don’t exist in the computer world and she is overwhelmed by the cuteness. Garret misreads the situation as he’s strangely threatened in his masculinity by the small (seriously he’s like chest-height with EVERYONE) boy with hair sticking out of his helmet.
-Sora’s reaction to finding out that Bruce was turned into bad!Bruce can only be summarized as ":("
-Jeff :” Welp that’s programs for you you can just rewrite them like that and no one is any wiser...”
Xion/Riku replica/Roxas: *Clings together in a big wheepy pile in the corner*
-So Jeff tells Sora that not!Jeff might have Bruce’s source code which can restore him.
-”Man I’d be horrified by the implications of that if I understood a single word you just said beyond ’find CLU and I can save Tron’. SO OFF I GO! ” *runs off in a random direction*
-”Do you have any idea where he is?”
-”NOT A ONE :D !”
-Jeff decides to let Sora run off and try to the incredulous astonishment of Garret (I can’t say I blame him), whereupon Olivia insists on tagging along because I guess someone has to make sure Sora doesn’t play in traffic. But elsewhere not!Jeff shows bad!Bruce a video of Soras keyblade, and not!Jeff is very interested… also man they really haven’t told us anything of WHY not!Jeff and Jeff look alike, newcomers are gonna be SO lost here. Also, I receive the ”counter-attack after you block” move now, which will probably be useful.
-I get on the Solar Glider. This section is NIGHTMARE-HUGE. Imagine if you will train-cars stacked on top of each other, two in width, two in heigth, three in length. Now imagine running around these train cars that look identical in a stage with a color-scheme goes ”BLACK WITH BRIGHT BLUE LINES” that makes it almost impossible to tell where openings in the walls can be found while trying to press forward under the pressure of a time limit.
-Suffice to say I run out of time and I change to Riku, who’s supposed to meet with ”Sam’s contact”.
-Get killed again. Note to self: Kingdom Hearts 3D is HARD without the ”survive a mortal blow with only one HP-tick left” ability, because attacks come from EVERYWHERE in this game and if you get too offense-happy you WILL get suckerpunched in the back without even noticing.
-Can’t quite tell yet if I die because I’m too offense-happy and just need to chill or if it’s something with the game- so far I’ve beat every challenge that killed me as long as I stopped rushing in with commands and used Flowmotion attacks instead. But I have to admit that with so much going on, far more than Birth By Sleep and on a much smaller screen than the PSP, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.
-So we make it into the city at fullsprint while desperately on the run aaand Garret tells us to wait. We get attacked and fight several waves of enemies, using Flowmotion and the odd run-away-and-heal strategy, and suffice to say that the whole thing feels a little bit forced. There seem to be machines that can transport you to different parts of the level here and there, so at least they have the kindness to offer alternatives to walking the long and perilous path from point A to point B. You take over these devices by Reality Shift-hacking them and turning them to your side- nifty use of the ability, I must admit.
-After fighting the wave, Riku… hears something and rushes after Garret. He finds him, comatose!Olivia and Jeff Bridges on their way to a solar sailer in order to catch up with not!Jeff so Riku decides to just tag along. Riku does a LOT of ”just tags along” so far. Like he would totally have been left behind by Garret unless he had run after him… really not making a very strong impression so far, script-writers for Rikus side.
-We also get a flashback showing us Garret freaking out over comatose!Olivias body and Jeff doing his zen thing, thereby coming up with the brilliant plan of chasing after not!Jeff after some waffling and deciding he should first try NOT to chase after not!Jeff. I don’t know if this was in the movie, but I have no idea what Jeff talks about half the time he’s on screen here. Worth noting is that so far the thing they’re chasing, the mcguffin that will let not!Jeff use the portal to enter the real world, has only been discussed in flashbacks so far. Riku has no idea what it is or what that portal even does, and… okay to make a long story short, Rikus segment of this story is SUPREMELY UNENGAGING and I basically feel like I’m just being pulled from A to B here. We need to talk about this Riku. You have to get more proactive man, Sora’s got you beat by a MILES.
-Speaking of Sora, let’s drop back to him.
-Entering the Solar Sailer leads to a new challenge, and the first time I try it I get obliterated in seconds after a barrage from KO Kabutos. The second time I try it I use a link up and use temporary invincibility to immediately destroy my opponents… felt kinda cheap?
Slinking around a maze, tons of paths that are shaped pretty much the same, wandering and wandering and fighting aaand I drop back to Riku.
-After Riku spends some time hacking turrets and enemies, we finally get a plot and character-developing scene with him, Garret and Jeff. They discuss how Olivia is a whole new lifeform sprung from the proverbial primordial internet-soup, and how not!Jeff saw them as dirty evolution-monkeys that had to be exterminated- and so hed did. Riku has a little moment where he ponders how Xehanorts hunger for answers lead to creation of Ansem, and through Jeff Bridges hunger for perfection he created not!Jeff Bridges, and maybe we all have the potential to create an Ansem… and it would be more touching if he weren’t walking away from Jeff and Garret while talking so I’m pretty sure they can’t hear a thing. Or maybe he’s monologuing, he’s so far away from the camera that I can’t make out any lip-flaps.
-They get rerouted and find themselves in some kind of docking cargo (which is coincidentially where Sora is right now when I dropped) and Olivia… runs out and gets herself captured by Rinzler.
-Why?
Jeff:” She’s removing herself from the equation, sacrificing herself so that we have a chance to get out and shut CLU down from the outside”.
Garret:” Screw that sound plan have you even seen her figure in that outfit? I am NOT risking an ass so fine!”
Jeff: ”That’s a terrible idea, what makes you think it’ll work you haven’t accomplished anything so far and if you overstretch yourself you’ll lose all chances.”
Riku :”If this is a father-son thing I won’t butt in (actual quote)… but I’m totally gonna enable Garret to throw caution to the wind and go with me and rescue Olivia, because I didn’t get this far by listening to sound advice and I’ll be damned if I’ll start now!”
Jeff: ”Can’t you just split up so the kid with the magic sword can go challenge the army?”
RikuxGarret: ”FORETHOUGHT IS FOR LOOOSEEERRSSSS”
Jeff: ”You guys are totally throwing off my zen, man.”
-AND OFF THEY GO in hunt for Olivia in a tight outfit and that disk thing that can let CLU escape I guess.
-Reach the same place as Sora, time to drop back.
-As Sora enters the ship we pretty much immediately run into bad!Bruce, and Sora tries his best to communicate with him.
-He actually tells Olivia he’ll have a ”heart-to-heart”.
-I love how Olivia just tells him that programs don’t have one. The Grid can be accurately summarized as a boot, stomping down on a puppy with spiky fur. Again. And again.
-Anyhow bad!Bruce and Olivia shares some fighty-time, but Olivia ends up knocked out and separated from Sora by a thick blast-door. Because right now it’s time for two old familiar faces to turn up… Mister Black Coat, and Xemnas. Long story short they dump some rather intriguing info on the world we’re inside: it is the original program which Ansem copied to create the version we played in KH2, meaning this is a completely different world and a completely different Bruce Boxleitner that logically shouldn’t know Sora at all. Ansem informs Sora of basic programming, namely that data has no heart and can be reprogrammed in an infinite number of ways and so on, and then mister Black… you know, I think I’ll call him Situation XIII from now on. He’s got the fake-looking tan for it. Situation XIII drops the small bomb that data does not sleep and cannot dream, so Sora ISN’T in a sleeping world at all- this is a real world and he’s veered drastically of course!
-That would be superdramatic if I had the slightest damn idea what separated a sleeping world from a waking one because seriously WHEN DID WE GET HERE WHAT ARE THEY HOW ARE THEY ANY DIFFERENT FROM REGULAR WORLDS… AT ALL… answers… in a Nomura game… I am a fool.
-Anyhow they also ask him how he can be sure that his memories are real as well, and Sora comes to the conclusion that it’s because he has a heart to guide him to the truth which I’m sure means something to someone and isn’t just so much metaphysical blown smoke. Also boss-fight with Tron now for some reason. Really, we just fade out from the spaceship and are suddenly inside an Arena. Even Sora doesn’t understand how we got here. Not!Jeff tells Sora he’ll reprogram bad!Bruce back to Bruce if he just hands over the Keyblade, but Sora can’t do that because hey, Keyblade. Kinda important for the survival of the world. Olivia is suddenly standing on the spaceship not!Jeff flies around with and tells us that she survived because bad!Bruce spared her and Sora’s kokoro is so pure that it can make even data go doki-doki with remembrance or something.
-But enough about that, time for boss-fighty time!
bad!Bruce flips around, kung-fu kicks and hacks at us with the disc, and the best way to handle him is to just block his attacks as he comes in for the kill and use our fancy new block-counterattack to get a few good licks in. Tron is super-aggressive and never lets up so it’s easy to bait him into block-traps. Block and counter, use a Dream Link when you can. He can also flip the whole arena upside down whereupon we have to fight while standing on the ceiling. Everything is now upside down and the controls are reversed. Rather than move around and get hacked from behind I just stand still and let bad!Bruce come in. Hold the line with blocks and counter-attacks, and you’ll win before long.
-Oh man this ending :(
Sora:” Hooray I used the Keyblades hitherto unexplained power to hack Rinzler back into Tron!”
not!Jeff: ”Betrayal five!” *throws disk at Soras back*
-BUT BRUCE GETS UP AND BLOCKS IT!
Sora: ”YAY BEST FRIENDS FOREVER! :D”
-But the disk bounces off the roof and then hits the ground Bruce’s standing on and that somehow destroys it and sends Bruce plummeting into the NEVERENDING ABYSS.
Sora: ”NO BEST FRIEND FOREVER D:”
Tron :”SAVE ME RANDOM STRANGER”
-But Sora is too late and JUST misses Bruce’s out-stretched hand. He plummets down… and we all wait for him to respawn elsewhere because I’m sure he had an extra-life or two.
-And then not!Jeff teleports out to pick Bruce back up, with Sora in hot pursuit!
- Or he can just stand there and mope until Olivia shows up and points out how Bruce was still inside bad!Bruce, and Sora can tell her that she gave him hope that was necessary in order to bring his buddy back and they can share awkward laughs as not!Jeff gets his dirty fingers deep into Bruces code again.
-And then Sora locks the keyhole and leaves.
-I am not kidding.
-Sora you are the worst friend right now and I don’t care how tight Olivias pants are, that was just LOW.
-Drop back and time to take it to Riku! He goes through the ship and fights some mooks, and when they arrive at the helm of the ship the disc which allows them to escape to the real world is- get this- CONNECTED TO AN ALARM.
-Everyone acts shocked at this unexpected development.
-bad!Bruce shows up Olivia in an armlock and Garret tries to fight him (just GUESS how that goes) when all of a sudden Riku uses a Flowmotion attack! In a cutscene! And he knocks bad!Bruce on his ass and sends him RIGHT out the spaceship doors to his death on the digital rocks below!
-Cold as ice, man.
-But the display impresses Garret enough to give him an instant and FIERCE bro-crush on Riku because he’s all of a sudden his biggest fanboy.
-With disc in hand they leave the ship, take another ship to the portal which Jeff somehow commandeered and then fight through yet ANOTHER horde of mooks until they reach the portal.
-not!Jeff appears again and has a philosophical pow-wow with Jeff on their conflicting view-points of whether perfection means creating the best system from scratch, or let it grow through iteration. It’s quite a touching scene up until the point where not!Jeff summons a giant praying mantis and Riku FINALLY gets to fight the boss. Because who’s ever heard of solving a conflict through discussion?
-Commantis killed me the first time, because I was dumb and went all out offensive AGAIN.
-I seriously don’t know when I’ll learn.
-The answer: the second time around. The outer edge of the arena has a light-rail you can grind on. Do this and the Flowmotion attack teleports you to the boss and lets you take off big chunks of health.
-Standing on the rail also lets you evade the bosses NUMEROUS projectiles because he sprays those EVERYWHERE.
-After enough damage is done he also hooks up to not!Jeff’s ship and recharges health. You have to go up close and use the hacking Reality Shift to cancel the program and then proceed to wail on him some more.
-After rail-grinding him to a pulp we are victorious! Not!Jeff and Jeff has some more talky and it looks like not!Jeff is going to realize what a tool he’s been, but nope. He kicks Jeff far away and starts retracting a drawbridge that separates Jeff from the rest of the group.
-But the Dude is wily, and fools not!Jeff to jump over to his side by pretending he’s going to give him the escape-disc. But jokes on him because the escape-disc was with Garret all along! Not!Jeff tries jumping back but is too late, as Garret and Olivia teleport out into the real world that is our world… I presume?
-Man this is meta.
-Seeing that not!Jeff is barely hanging on to a retracting drawbridge while Riku bars his path, the following bit of ridiculousness happens.
Riku: ”YOOOU. SHALL NOT. PAAAASS!”
Jeff: ”I could let the kid who took out a huge mantis-program handle things… or I could absorb not!Jeff into myself by some unexplained method and end us both in a big-”
*KABOOM!*
Riku: ”… Why didn’t you do that sooner?”
Jeff: ”Shouldn’t have thrown off… my zen, man…”
And so Riku ponders the danger in chasing ideals, and how travel to other worlds changes people because of the double-edged sword that is knowledge. And since the recap says so, Riku ALLOWED himself be captured because he was gonna find out information that way. Sure Riku, whatever sounds better than ”I am so mopey I let people manhandle me whenever they want to” is fine in my book.
-Oh, but now we get to the INTERESTING part.
-Lea has searched high and low for the missing members, and found nothing. Aeleus informs him that Even and Dilan are conscious, but their condition is still unstable because their voice-actors couldn’t get back. I mean… no I don’t really know why they’re not around. Lea wonders where Isa and Braig are and Ienzo…
-Holy. Holy shit you guys.
-Ienzo… IS A DORK.
-HE’S A TOTAL NERD.
-Oh man he tries to tell Lea on how the Kingdom Hearts universe works and how if someone who is ”recompleted” which I guess is the word we’re going with for people who are made whole again either end up in their world of origin or in Traverse Town and Lea just… shuts him down and Ienzo makes this awkward little noise.
-Lea is the kind of guy who dunks guys like Ienzo in the toilet.
-I don’t really know how to handle this revelation.
-Or on a similar note, Ienzo was in NO WAY anywhere near puberty when he turned into a Nobody, how the hell is he even going to handle a grown mans body and its quirks?
-Aeleus: ”Goodness I have dropped the Ansem Rapport. Let me get that.”
*Bends over and Ienzo suddenly has to run for the bathroom*
-So Lea cuts in on Ienzos lecture to tell him that Radiant Garden exists, so they should be there and if they’re not he’s going to hunt them down personally, even if it means taking on another icky job. Baller.
-Although now I’m wondering why the members who died in Chain of Memories appear at the exact same time and spot as the members who died during Kingdom Hearts 2…
-A stray thought that occurs to me, before I wrap this whole thing up. Seen from a certain perspective the Flowmotion attacks are kind of interesting- could it be that they symbolize how Sora and Riku, having not received the formal training that Aqua, Terra, Ventus and Mickey got lack their versatility of ”command attacks” and style changes, but are instead much better at moving around in a versatile manner, and using mobility to their advantage instead of knowledge of magnificent spells?
-Or is the Flowmotion basically just here because Nomura wanted thigns to go zippy-zippy WEE fast?
-Another interesting note: Sora’s Dream Links are all basically team ups, but Rikus Dream Links actually let him do Command Styles from Birth By Sleep! His Dual Links are the more advanced Command Styles like Ghost Drive and Bladecharge and Rising Wind, while his Dream Links are elemental Styles. Including one that I do not think existed in Birth By Sleep, Watersurfer, which envelops his Keyblade in water formed like a surfboard, and then lets him move around at high speeds while surfing on his waterkeyboard. Nice little touch, I must admit.
-Riku’s Tron-dive is NOT an easy one. A ton of distracting lights makes it hard to properly navigate the maze of obstacles.
-And it takes him about five seconds or so after landing to get captured by a bunch of security programs and lead into a transport hovercraft. At no point during this process does he resist arrest, he just… goes along.
-Riku this is not how you assert your worth. How many friendship speeches does a guy need to hear before he starts standing up for himself, I’m just asking…
-Oh look, Garret Hedlund (Sam) is on the hovercraft too! Hi Garret!
-”Hi I’m Sam!”
”Riku!”
-And then the camera apparently felt the need to cut away from the hovercraft because the VERY NEXT SECOND Riku is standing all alone in some arena and not!Jeff Bridges (Clu) is telling him to race or die.
-I don’t know what scene they cut to warrant such a jerky exposition, but I’m going to imagine Garret and Riku got too hot for Disney.
-Riku asks not!Jeff to explain what they’re playing and why. Ha ha ha oh Riku, asking for context and clarification in a KH game. You silly little boy.
-And despite all that he instinctively knows how to summon the light-cycle and then it’s time to D-D-D-D-DUEL… ON MOTORCYCLES!
-OKAY so after dying twice I finally got the hang of it.
-The bike has two modes: trail mode and shooter mode. Trail mode leaves a hard light trail behind the bike that hits enemies behind you HARD- if you’ve seen Tron, you’ve seen this. Shooter mode busts out two cannons for enemies in front of you that also slow enemies down so they’ll end up behind you so trail mode can finish them off. Sticking to one mode is synonymous with death, if not in the race then in the boss fight. Because you’re fighting a sub-boss after all the enemies, and your HP cannot be restored and you get sent back to the start of the race if you die.
-Joyous tidings.
-I beat it after two attempts, and my reward… is having Riku turn around to blast a hole in a nearby wall (a heart-shaped hole at that) and drive into the digital sunset.
-Because doing that from the start would have been a quitters way out.
-For some reason Riku stops using the high-speed cycle and starts walking on foot. He comes across Garret again who offers him a way out of the Grid through the portal to the ’real world’. That is to say, Garret Hedlunds real world, not… Rikus…
-And now I’ve gone cross-eyed.
-”No man I gotta stick around and be a hero here first.”
”Not even if I tell you my back-story, and how I’m gonna find a way to delete not!dad?”
”Well killing stuff IS pretty darn heroic… so what the hell, I’ll tag along.”
-Again, that conversation is just as abrupt in the game as I describe it here.
- A flashback happens. We see Garret and Jeff Bridges (Flynn) talk about going to the portal, but Jeff reveals that not!Jeff has the McGuffin disc that can allow him to escape to the outside world and they need that part first. So basically Sams entire backstory is part of an entirely skippable flashback… and it’s an almost direct rip off a scene from the movie, just without Olivia Wilde (Quorra) who was in fact there in the movie. I am confussled as to this choice.
-And equally confussled at the difficulty of these enemies.
OKAY time to try this again. This time with Sora!
-The Dive-boss (an octopus with lasertentacles) gets me once, but I figure out the trick. He blasts a lot of shots- dodge. He slashes out with laserswordtendrils- dodge. He shoots tracking lasers go in a circle and when he flies up close, hit the brakes and avoid his massive aura of hurt. Then hit him as much as you can and you soon touch down…
-Ha ha Soras reaction to realizing he’s back on the Grid is adorable.
-Although I wonder if he will come to find the artistic homogenization of the new Grid soul-crushingly dull in time, or if he simply appreciates the higher pixel-count.
-Or he doesn’t think about that at all because he sees a ship and he must chase the big shiny thing. Because it is there, and it is shiny.
-So Sora meets up with a bunch of guard programs and has no apprehensions talking to them because if he hasn’t learned by now that people dressed in all black is trouble, he never will. They proceed to drag him away into a prison ship.
-”GEE TALK ABOUT RUDE.”- actual quote
-How can one boy be this precious?
-AND smart to boot since unlike A CERTAIN SOMEONE he actually wrangles out of the guards grips and runs away.
-Que ”Brave Sir Robin” theme because I’m not even gonna bother fighting these guys.
-Run away some more and… there’s Rinzler- I mean, bad!Bruce Boxleitner.
-And in the background is Jeff Bridges, Garret Hedlund and Olivia Wilde! Hi every realistic body!
-So not!Bruce just busts out his disks and then… runs away. Sora has no idea what that was about and neither do I.
-Olivia is for some reason very interested in the Keyblade and Sora, because puppies don’t exist in the computer world and she is overwhelmed by the cuteness. Garret misreads the situation as he’s strangely threatened in his masculinity by the small (seriously he’s like chest-height with EVERYONE) boy with hair sticking out of his helmet.
-Sora’s reaction to finding out that Bruce was turned into bad!Bruce can only be summarized as ":("
-Jeff :” Welp that’s programs for you you can just rewrite them like that and no one is any wiser...”
Xion/Riku replica/Roxas: *Clings together in a big wheepy pile in the corner*
-So Jeff tells Sora that not!Jeff might have Bruce’s source code which can restore him.
-”Man I’d be horrified by the implications of that if I understood a single word you just said beyond ’find CLU and I can save Tron’. SO OFF I GO! ” *runs off in a random direction*
-”Do you have any idea where he is?”
-”NOT A ONE :D !”
-Jeff decides to let Sora run off and try to the incredulous astonishment of Garret (I can’t say I blame him), whereupon Olivia insists on tagging along because I guess someone has to make sure Sora doesn’t play in traffic. But elsewhere not!Jeff shows bad!Bruce a video of Soras keyblade, and not!Jeff is very interested… also man they really haven’t told us anything of WHY not!Jeff and Jeff look alike, newcomers are gonna be SO lost here. Also, I receive the ”counter-attack after you block” move now, which will probably be useful.
-I get on the Solar Glider. This section is NIGHTMARE-HUGE. Imagine if you will train-cars stacked on top of each other, two in width, two in heigth, three in length. Now imagine running around these train cars that look identical in a stage with a color-scheme goes ”BLACK WITH BRIGHT BLUE LINES” that makes it almost impossible to tell where openings in the walls can be found while trying to press forward under the pressure of a time limit.
-Suffice to say I run out of time and I change to Riku, who’s supposed to meet with ”Sam’s contact”.
-Get killed again. Note to self: Kingdom Hearts 3D is HARD without the ”survive a mortal blow with only one HP-tick left” ability, because attacks come from EVERYWHERE in this game and if you get too offense-happy you WILL get suckerpunched in the back without even noticing.
-Can’t quite tell yet if I die because I’m too offense-happy and just need to chill or if it’s something with the game- so far I’ve beat every challenge that killed me as long as I stopped rushing in with commands and used Flowmotion attacks instead. But I have to admit that with so much going on, far more than Birth By Sleep and on a much smaller screen than the PSP, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.
-So we make it into the city at fullsprint while desperately on the run aaand Garret tells us to wait. We get attacked and fight several waves of enemies, using Flowmotion and the odd run-away-and-heal strategy, and suffice to say that the whole thing feels a little bit forced. There seem to be machines that can transport you to different parts of the level here and there, so at least they have the kindness to offer alternatives to walking the long and perilous path from point A to point B. You take over these devices by Reality Shift-hacking them and turning them to your side- nifty use of the ability, I must admit.
-After fighting the wave, Riku… hears something and rushes after Garret. He finds him, comatose!Olivia and Jeff Bridges on their way to a solar sailer in order to catch up with not!Jeff so Riku decides to just tag along. Riku does a LOT of ”just tags along” so far. Like he would totally have been left behind by Garret unless he had run after him… really not making a very strong impression so far, script-writers for Rikus side.
-We also get a flashback showing us Garret freaking out over comatose!Olivias body and Jeff doing his zen thing, thereby coming up with the brilliant plan of chasing after not!Jeff after some waffling and deciding he should first try NOT to chase after not!Jeff. I don’t know if this was in the movie, but I have no idea what Jeff talks about half the time he’s on screen here. Worth noting is that so far the thing they’re chasing, the mcguffin that will let not!Jeff use the portal to enter the real world, has only been discussed in flashbacks so far. Riku has no idea what it is or what that portal even does, and… okay to make a long story short, Rikus segment of this story is SUPREMELY UNENGAGING and I basically feel like I’m just being pulled from A to B here. We need to talk about this Riku. You have to get more proactive man, Sora’s got you beat by a MILES.
-Speaking of Sora, let’s drop back to him.
-Entering the Solar Sailer leads to a new challenge, and the first time I try it I get obliterated in seconds after a barrage from KO Kabutos. The second time I try it I use a link up and use temporary invincibility to immediately destroy my opponents… felt kinda cheap?
Slinking around a maze, tons of paths that are shaped pretty much the same, wandering and wandering and fighting aaand I drop back to Riku.
-After Riku spends some time hacking turrets and enemies, we finally get a plot and character-developing scene with him, Garret and Jeff. They discuss how Olivia is a whole new lifeform sprung from the proverbial primordial internet-soup, and how not!Jeff saw them as dirty evolution-monkeys that had to be exterminated- and so hed did. Riku has a little moment where he ponders how Xehanorts hunger for answers lead to creation of Ansem, and through Jeff Bridges hunger for perfection he created not!Jeff Bridges, and maybe we all have the potential to create an Ansem… and it would be more touching if he weren’t walking away from Jeff and Garret while talking so I’m pretty sure they can’t hear a thing. Or maybe he’s monologuing, he’s so far away from the camera that I can’t make out any lip-flaps.
-They get rerouted and find themselves in some kind of docking cargo (which is coincidentially where Sora is right now when I dropped) and Olivia… runs out and gets herself captured by Rinzler.
-Why?
Jeff:” She’s removing herself from the equation, sacrificing herself so that we have a chance to get out and shut CLU down from the outside”.
Garret:” Screw that sound plan have you even seen her figure in that outfit? I am NOT risking an ass so fine!”
Jeff: ”That’s a terrible idea, what makes you think it’ll work you haven’t accomplished anything so far and if you overstretch yourself you’ll lose all chances.”
Riku :”If this is a father-son thing I won’t butt in (actual quote)… but I’m totally gonna enable Garret to throw caution to the wind and go with me and rescue Olivia, because I didn’t get this far by listening to sound advice and I’ll be damned if I’ll start now!”
Jeff: ”Can’t you just split up so the kid with the magic sword can go challenge the army?”
RikuxGarret: ”FORETHOUGHT IS FOR LOOOSEEERRSSSS”
Jeff: ”You guys are totally throwing off my zen, man.”
-AND OFF THEY GO in hunt for Olivia in a tight outfit and that disk thing that can let CLU escape I guess.
-Reach the same place as Sora, time to drop back.
-As Sora enters the ship we pretty much immediately run into bad!Bruce, and Sora tries his best to communicate with him.
-He actually tells Olivia he’ll have a ”heart-to-heart”.
-I love how Olivia just tells him that programs don’t have one. The Grid can be accurately summarized as a boot, stomping down on a puppy with spiky fur. Again. And again.
-Anyhow bad!Bruce and Olivia shares some fighty-time, but Olivia ends up knocked out and separated from Sora by a thick blast-door. Because right now it’s time for two old familiar faces to turn up… Mister Black Coat, and Xemnas. Long story short they dump some rather intriguing info on the world we’re inside: it is the original program which Ansem copied to create the version we played in KH2, meaning this is a completely different world and a completely different Bruce Boxleitner that logically shouldn’t know Sora at all. Ansem informs Sora of basic programming, namely that data has no heart and can be reprogrammed in an infinite number of ways and so on, and then mister Black… you know, I think I’ll call him Situation XIII from now on. He’s got the fake-looking tan for it. Situation XIII drops the small bomb that data does not sleep and cannot dream, so Sora ISN’T in a sleeping world at all- this is a real world and he’s veered drastically of course!
-That would be superdramatic if I had the slightest damn idea what separated a sleeping world from a waking one because seriously WHEN DID WE GET HERE WHAT ARE THEY HOW ARE THEY ANY DIFFERENT FROM REGULAR WORLDS… AT ALL… answers… in a Nomura game… I am a fool.
-Anyhow they also ask him how he can be sure that his memories are real as well, and Sora comes to the conclusion that it’s because he has a heart to guide him to the truth which I’m sure means something to someone and isn’t just so much metaphysical blown smoke. Also boss-fight with Tron now for some reason. Really, we just fade out from the spaceship and are suddenly inside an Arena. Even Sora doesn’t understand how we got here. Not!Jeff tells Sora he’ll reprogram bad!Bruce back to Bruce if he just hands over the Keyblade, but Sora can’t do that because hey, Keyblade. Kinda important for the survival of the world. Olivia is suddenly standing on the spaceship not!Jeff flies around with and tells us that she survived because bad!Bruce spared her and Sora’s kokoro is so pure that it can make even data go doki-doki with remembrance or something.
-But enough about that, time for boss-fighty time!
bad!Bruce flips around, kung-fu kicks and hacks at us with the disc, and the best way to handle him is to just block his attacks as he comes in for the kill and use our fancy new block-counterattack to get a few good licks in. Tron is super-aggressive and never lets up so it’s easy to bait him into block-traps. Block and counter, use a Dream Link when you can. He can also flip the whole arena upside down whereupon we have to fight while standing on the ceiling. Everything is now upside down and the controls are reversed. Rather than move around and get hacked from behind I just stand still and let bad!Bruce come in. Hold the line with blocks and counter-attacks, and you’ll win before long.
-Oh man this ending :(
Sora:” Hooray I used the Keyblades hitherto unexplained power to hack Rinzler back into Tron!”
not!Jeff: ”Betrayal five!” *throws disk at Soras back*
-BUT BRUCE GETS UP AND BLOCKS IT!
Sora: ”YAY BEST FRIENDS FOREVER! :D”
-But the disk bounces off the roof and then hits the ground Bruce’s standing on and that somehow destroys it and sends Bruce plummeting into the NEVERENDING ABYSS.
Sora: ”NO BEST FRIEND FOREVER D:”
Tron :”SAVE ME RANDOM STRANGER”
-But Sora is too late and JUST misses Bruce’s out-stretched hand. He plummets down… and we all wait for him to respawn elsewhere because I’m sure he had an extra-life or two.
-And then not!Jeff teleports out to pick Bruce back up, with Sora in hot pursuit!
- Or he can just stand there and mope until Olivia shows up and points out how Bruce was still inside bad!Bruce, and Sora can tell her that she gave him hope that was necessary in order to bring his buddy back and they can share awkward laughs as not!Jeff gets his dirty fingers deep into Bruces code again.
-And then Sora locks the keyhole and leaves.
-I am not kidding.
-Sora you are the worst friend right now and I don’t care how tight Olivias pants are, that was just LOW.
-Drop back and time to take it to Riku! He goes through the ship and fights some mooks, and when they arrive at the helm of the ship the disc which allows them to escape to the real world is- get this- CONNECTED TO AN ALARM.
-Everyone acts shocked at this unexpected development.
-bad!Bruce shows up Olivia in an armlock and Garret tries to fight him (just GUESS how that goes) when all of a sudden Riku uses a Flowmotion attack! In a cutscene! And he knocks bad!Bruce on his ass and sends him RIGHT out the spaceship doors to his death on the digital rocks below!
-Cold as ice, man.
-But the display impresses Garret enough to give him an instant and FIERCE bro-crush on Riku because he’s all of a sudden his biggest fanboy.
-With disc in hand they leave the ship, take another ship to the portal which Jeff somehow commandeered and then fight through yet ANOTHER horde of mooks until they reach the portal.
-not!Jeff appears again and has a philosophical pow-wow with Jeff on their conflicting view-points of whether perfection means creating the best system from scratch, or let it grow through iteration. It’s quite a touching scene up until the point where not!Jeff summons a giant praying mantis and Riku FINALLY gets to fight the boss. Because who’s ever heard of solving a conflict through discussion?
-Commantis killed me the first time, because I was dumb and went all out offensive AGAIN.
-I seriously don’t know when I’ll learn.
-The answer: the second time around. The outer edge of the arena has a light-rail you can grind on. Do this and the Flowmotion attack teleports you to the boss and lets you take off big chunks of health.
-Standing on the rail also lets you evade the bosses NUMEROUS projectiles because he sprays those EVERYWHERE.
-After enough damage is done he also hooks up to not!Jeff’s ship and recharges health. You have to go up close and use the hacking Reality Shift to cancel the program and then proceed to wail on him some more.
-After rail-grinding him to a pulp we are victorious! Not!Jeff and Jeff has some more talky and it looks like not!Jeff is going to realize what a tool he’s been, but nope. He kicks Jeff far away and starts retracting a drawbridge that separates Jeff from the rest of the group.
-But the Dude is wily, and fools not!Jeff to jump over to his side by pretending he’s going to give him the escape-disc. But jokes on him because the escape-disc was with Garret all along! Not!Jeff tries jumping back but is too late, as Garret and Olivia teleport out into the real world that is our world… I presume?
-Man this is meta.
-Seeing that not!Jeff is barely hanging on to a retracting drawbridge while Riku bars his path, the following bit of ridiculousness happens.
Riku: ”YOOOU. SHALL NOT. PAAAASS!”
Jeff: ”I could let the kid who took out a huge mantis-program handle things… or I could absorb not!Jeff into myself by some unexplained method and end us both in a big-”
*KABOOM!*
Riku: ”… Why didn’t you do that sooner?”
Jeff: ”Shouldn’t have thrown off… my zen, man…”
And so Riku ponders the danger in chasing ideals, and how travel to other worlds changes people because of the double-edged sword that is knowledge. And since the recap says so, Riku ALLOWED himself be captured because he was gonna find out information that way. Sure Riku, whatever sounds better than ”I am so mopey I let people manhandle me whenever they want to” is fine in my book.
-Oh, but now we get to the INTERESTING part.
-Lea has searched high and low for the missing members, and found nothing. Aeleus informs him that Even and Dilan are conscious, but their condition is still unstable because their voice-actors couldn’t get back. I mean… no I don’t really know why they’re not around. Lea wonders where Isa and Braig are and Ienzo…
-Holy. Holy shit you guys.
-Ienzo… IS A DORK.
-HE’S A TOTAL NERD.
-Oh man he tries to tell Lea on how the Kingdom Hearts universe works and how if someone who is ”recompleted” which I guess is the word we’re going with for people who are made whole again either end up in their world of origin or in Traverse Town and Lea just… shuts him down and Ienzo makes this awkward little noise.
-Lea is the kind of guy who dunks guys like Ienzo in the toilet.
-I don’t really know how to handle this revelation.
-Or on a similar note, Ienzo was in NO WAY anywhere near puberty when he turned into a Nobody, how the hell is he even going to handle a grown mans body and its quirks?
-Aeleus: ”Goodness I have dropped the Ansem Rapport. Let me get that.”
*Bends over and Ienzo suddenly has to run for the bathroom*
-So Lea cuts in on Ienzos lecture to tell him that Radiant Garden exists, so they should be there and if they’re not he’s going to hunt them down personally, even if it means taking on another icky job. Baller.
-Although now I’m wondering why the members who died in Chain of Memories appear at the exact same time and spot as the members who died during Kingdom Hearts 2…
-A stray thought that occurs to me, before I wrap this whole thing up. Seen from a certain perspective the Flowmotion attacks are kind of interesting- could it be that they symbolize how Sora and Riku, having not received the formal training that Aqua, Terra, Ventus and Mickey got lack their versatility of ”command attacks” and style changes, but are instead much better at moving around in a versatile manner, and using mobility to their advantage instead of knowledge of magnificent spells?
-Or is the Flowmotion basically just here because Nomura wanted thigns to go zippy-zippy WEE fast?
-Another interesting note: Sora’s Dream Links are all basically team ups, but Rikus Dream Links actually let him do Command Styles from Birth By Sleep! His Dual Links are the more advanced Command Styles like Ghost Drive and Bladecharge and Rising Wind, while his Dream Links are elemental Styles. Including one that I do not think existed in Birth By Sleep, Watersurfer, which envelops his Keyblade in water formed like a surfboard, and then lets him move around at high speeds while surfing on his waterkeyboard. Nice little touch, I must admit.