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KH3 early reactions
I guess it's not so early. We've played 12 or so hours, onto the second world in the second zone. I'm having fun with it so far, although as usual it's not always clear what's going on. I am very very thankful to have picked up the Story So Far collection, and especially to have played both Birth By Sleep games. I still feel okay without Dream Drop Distance for now, but only because I watched a couple of recap videos. If you're planning to play KH3 without having played all of the previous games, I definitely recommend doing your homework -- there are in-story recaps, but you still meet an awful lot of people without knowing who they are.
We've been to four new worlds -- Toy Story, Tangled, Monsters Inc., and Frozen. Sora in Toy Story animation style is entirely adorable, and I also liked his Monster form a lot. I also enjoyed the stories in both worlds; they told new stories that fit within established canon without feeling like retreads of a movie in the franchise. In that respect, the Enchanted world did not measure up. They basically retold the plot of the movie with Sora, Donald, and Goofy inserted at a few key points, with only a few awkward readjustments. Most of its cut scenes were exact replicas of the film animation (and in at least one place there is dialogue from the movie that doesn't make sense for how they altered the plot for the game, so I suspect some copy-paste action), but often without enough context that you could understand what was happening if you hadn't seen the film. In short, it was lazy and disappointing, especially considering how much better previous worlds in the series pulled off the trick (Wonderland, Atlantica, and The Lion King come to mind). We're a little bit into the Frozen story now, and I hope it goes better.
The overall story is... complicated, as to be expected. There are various copies of Xehanort running around, and sometimes it can be hard to tell which is which. Also confusing is the return of various Organization XIII members -- it looks like everyone is back, but some are back in their original human forms and others as their Nobodies, and I'm not really certain how that would work? For the most part, it seems to be that the folks who use their original names and wear other outfits are themselves, whereas the Organization members wear black robes and use the anagrammed names -- except that Lea still wears black and is fighting on the side of light but also just asked Kairi to call him Axel? I realize that Axel/Lea pretty much always goes his own way and has his own agenda, but it still makes it hard to trust him.
Another thing that has me confused: how can Sora be carrying around Roxas's and Xian's hearts? Roxas and Xian were Nobodies, and I thought they weren't supposed to have hearts. Also, at the end of re:Coded, I thought that Mickey learned that Sora had Xian's heart, so shouldn't Sora already know about that? (I do understand why no one knows what's going on with Ventus -- only Aqua and maybe Ansem the Wise have the full story there.)
Maybe it will be explained and maybe it won't. After all, Kingdom Hearts means never having to say "I totally understand what's going on." As long as I enjoy the journey, it's okay if I don't get all the answers.
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Yeah, that is definitely not a group of people who behave like they are detached from all emotion. :)
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It’s a bit disappointing to hear that the Tangled and Frozen worlds seem to be movie retreads, but not too surprised since I’ve been seeing clips from those two on Twitter showing how much the game is able to recreate and animate the scenes to almost film-quality. Especially the “Let it Go” showstopper, including the hair clipping through that was so scrutinized way back.
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Interesting. That's not quite how the scene read to me, but I'm curious to see it all play out.
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The Tangled world being a direct retelling of the film really was a shame. I love Tangled dearly, and I was hoping they'd do more with it. (I'm very entertained that you call it 'the Enchanted world' in this entry. A world based on Enchanted would be great.)
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Heh, that is a telling typo, isn't it? It might have been on the brain in part because we just finished playing Birth By Sleep, which had the Enchanted Kingdom (but not connected to the movie). I agree, an Enchanted world would be AMAZING!