Welcome back to Lore Reasons: Kingdom Hearts, our dizzying exploration of Disney and Square-Enix's massive RPG crossover. When we first began to explore Sora's journey through the many worlds of Kingdom Hearts, our memories were fresh from watching cutscene compilations and explainer videos and our bodies were powered by the strength of overpriced beer. But now, weeks later, we have no memories, no beer, and, uh, nobodies. Fuck.
After they’ve concluded Kingdom Hearts I want them to dig into souls lore. Demon’s Souls or Bloodborne preferably due to Dark Souls going muddling the water with sequels and it’s not that interesting beyond individual character motives and location history (although I’d love to hear why Austin likes the DkS II lore because that remains a mystery to me), but also because I think Bloodborne specifically has really interesting lore and I’m sure Natalie would appreciate digging into it.
(Edit: Got to lore suggestions in the pod and I would also love Nier!)
(Edit 2: And Metal Gear holy shit!)
Halfway through this episode, and I’m imagining the opening scene from Princess Bride with the old man reading the child a story the kid thinks is complete BS, but slowly comes to love…
BUT
Natalie is the kid, reading the BS to Austin, the old man, who is quickly coming to love this BS
Destiny is probably a bed bet, bungie’s writing style is basically keep things intentionally vague so we can retcon later without changing much. A whole bunch of d1 lore got thrown out because d1 was a cobbled together mess as a real world product, and I’m pretty sure they’ve had to retcon something about rasputin every content release up through warmind.
It does, and plenty of people have spent a lot of time in front of microphones dissecting it. I just think that for a waypoint podcast like this it’d be a real putdown to run into “why is this like this” and the answer be “It was changed and doesn’t make sense any more if it ever did to begin with” i.e. They re-arranged the mission order of the entire destiny 1 campaign at some point because it didn’t make any sense. It’s also kind of not even attached to the game play like KH or metal gear are. If you play vanilla d2 it’s just a super straightforward shooter campaign.
Dishonored would be cool. It’s got a lot of reading, but there’s only the 3 games so it could theoretically be short. Should probably start a new topic for this so the kingdom hearts discussion doesn’t get lost in a bunch of suggestions.
Man I can’t get enough of these. They get so much wrong but they’re having fun with it and so am I. But since you asked for some corrections, I’ll write this as I listen with some corrections and clarifications:
-The Command board doesn’t even level up your character, its an option to level up and get new attacks
-Like Terra; Ven and Aqua also have keyblade armor that looks sick
-I may be wrong but I think minds and bodies are the same thing. Or maybe souls and bodies.
-We don’t learn this till Dream Drop but Nobodies do actually have hearts. They grow their own because bodies don’t like being without hearts. Xemnas lies to them about not having hearts to keep the organization working toward building “The Heart of All Men”, a version of Kingdom Hearts, even though his actual goal is somthing else, to be learned later.
-358/2 came out after KH2 so we already knew that Roxas was Sora’s Nobody, also it was clear throughout the game anyway.
-No one really cares but the official pronunciation is “Three Five Eight Days Over Two”.
-Roxas wasn’t destroying worlds. He was just going around killing heartless and helping the worlds, pretty much doing the same thing as Sora.
-Xion was created not only to stop Sora from waking, but also so that Organization XIII will have someone to collect hearts if Roxas goes rogue.
-Also from the last episode: True Kingdom Hearts, The Heart of all Worlds (from KH1), and The Heart of all Men (from KH2 and 358) are different things.
-The reason that Sora and Roxas can wield two Keyblades is because Sora has Ventus’ heart. This is also the reason that Roxas looks like Ven, because Ven’s heart goes with Roxas.
-Sora only killed a couple people in CoM, most of Org XIII never fought Sora in Castle Oblivion. Off the top of my head Xemnas, Demyx, Xigbar, Xaldin, Axel, Saix, Luxord, all survived. Sora killed Marluxia, Larxene, Lexaus, Vexen, and Zexion in Castle Oblivion and the rest in KH2.
-Sora, Donald and Goofy come out of Tron in the middle of the world to look around the Hollow Bastion Castle, this is when mickey shows up.
-Riku wears the blindfold because it keeps the darkness from taking him over. We see at the end of 358 he takes off the blindfold to harness the full power of Ansem within him so take out Roxas, because Roxas fucked him up without it. This is when his body turns into Ansem.
-Riku gives a picture and a bar of Sea Salt Ice Cream, not a key.
-Between the battle of 1000 heartless and going back to Twilight Town, they go through ALL the other disney worlds again, doing a second story. The second one usually includes a member of Org XIII.
Also suggesting it because then we might get Danielle on a podcast for longer than 10 minutes.
I feel bad for Cado with how the release of Kingdom Hearts on PSP after FIVE YEARS. Like ugh. Nothing against the PSP but…
Xion doesn’t always look like Kairi. She is a replica of Sora (I think?) that siphons memories of Sora, so 1) her appearance is different depending on who is looking at her, 2) she looks like different people connected to Sora, and 3) only people connected to Sora see her appearance as anything other than a sort of faceless doll. A notable example is that when Xigbar sees Xion, he sees her as Ventus.
Coded is not a very good game but there’s this one very good part where Mickey Donald & Goofy are all watching Data Sora having his adventure on the computer in Disney Castle and then the door opens and fucking Data Sora walks in and the screen is now showing them all in their Disney Castle computer room. After that it’s revealed the three of them got pulled into the datascape as well, but just the way they reveal it is some absolutely wild Shyamalan shit.
Also Austin’s talking about Coded putting too much important stuff in a mobile game like KHUX doesn’t exist. Speaking of which, they really need to go back and cover more than Back Cover and a quick mention that Ventus was also there.
Bummed they didn’t watch the final mix secret ending. The regular one is just like a taste compared to FM’s feast. I mean I get that would have been a full five minutes of them reacting to something we can’t see but still.
There’s one rather major thing skimmed over during the summary of KH2- right after the scene where Xemnas is revealed to be the nobody of Evil Ansem, another man of the organization named Saïx reveals another big plot point- Everytime Sora kills a heartless, and you see the heart it was holding float up, said heart gets added to Kingdom Hearts. Specifically, the Org 13 version they’ve been making. Most of the organization were led to believe that, once this KH is completed, they’ll be given their hearts back and will be able to feel again. This is the entire plot of 358/2- Roxas wasn’t going around killing people or destroying worlds, they were defeating heartless in order to add to the Organization’s Kingdom Hearts. (Sidenote: 358 days over 2, because it was the tale of Roxas and Xion over the course of the year Sora was asleep)
Back to KH2, what makes this scene extra special to me is that Sora suddenly becomes reluctant to kill even the simplest heartless- if he does, he helps the bad guys, if he doesn’t, they’ll kill him. It only lasts that scene before Maleficent teleports them out (long story), but it’s an interesting twist on the plot that I appreciated.
Anyway, can’t wait for the last episode of this and the subsequent KH3 breakdown, because there’s one very specific plotpoint regarding KHUX that is legitimately relevant to the main story that I need to explain, about how Maleficent knew about the Book of Prophecies. Yes, it’s from the mobile game, and yes it’s very stupid. But I love it. (I’d summarize the entirety of KHUX real easy but as Austin said, it’s not really fully relevant to what KH3 has, apart from the idea that certain people from the present may or may not be from a distant past, and even then it’ll probably just be a KH4 plot point. In short, goddamn I love Kingdom Hearts)
I’m enjoying these pods so much! natalie is killing it, and I’m glad everyone is finding their moments of joy wading through this mess (austin getting hype for lingering will was great, I hope he saw what it does with its keyblade).
but also I’m just. so sorry y’all had to engage with coded at all.
Yo I borrowed a friends Ds and another friends Psp To Play 258/2 and Birth by sleep. I Loved Birth by Sleep thought 358 was hot garbage later would borrow another friends 3Ds for Dream Drop Distance. I beat that game I don’t remember any of it beside the World ends with you characters and the Dream eaters.
Austin mentioning Morrowind’s lore reminded me of this concept art I saw recently when I fell down that particular wiki hole, which seems extremely appropriate for this podcast, specifically the “head burst from enlightenment” bit:
P.S. You should totally do Morrowind (or Daggerfall) because I don’t think enough people truly understand exactly how important giant mechs are to the Elder Scrolls lore, and who better to teach them than Waypoint?
