“Have I supplied you with any good quotes for Clickbait Boyfriend?”
-Josh, midway through Neverland
He’s becoming self-aware. Welcome back to Clickbait Boyfriend’s playthrough of Kingdom Hearts. It’s like a Let’s Play, but with less gameplay and more non-sequiturs. A Merry Boxing Day to everyone celebrating, and a happy slightly belated 12th birthday to Kingdom Hearts 2 for everyone else (Emma, Josh, and I are celebrating both)! We had a fantastic long weekend playing video games new and old, which I suppose is on brand for the Talk This sisters. Among them, as usual: Kingdom Hearts! After all, is it really the holidays if don’t listen to the people you care about say dumb and embarrassing things?
(New to the series? You can catch up here).
“Bowels?!?!? This whale needs to watch its diet.”
-on Monstro
It is true that the insides of Monstro look a little funky to say the least. That’s not even getting into the weird internal geography. What are all these chambers? How does the mouth connect directly to the bowels? That’s what you get when you eat exclusively gummi ships, I guess.
Should probably get that checked out.
“I feel like that whole ‘zero to eleven thing’ doesn’t bode well.”
-on Riku
Has Josh mentioned this in every blog post so far? It’s at least three out of four. He’s going to need therapy after this game is over.
“Evil Playroom? That sounds like some fifty grades of shay…I mean Fifty Shades of Grey!”
-on Oogie’s Manor and getting tongue-tied
Josh is starting to get an ego about how clever he is coming up with pithy quotes for these posts. Gotta report the facts, people.
Much to my relief, Kingdom Hearts is the first image result when you Google “Evil Playroom.”
“I’m beating the s#!t out of these kids with a giant metal key.”
-on Lock, Shock, and Barrel.
To be fair, Sora is only like fourteen. So it’s definitely bullying, but these evil demon children could probably use a spanking.
“If this game thinks I give a s#!t about Donald and Goofy, they wrong.”
-on Cure
These blog posts are getting a little more crass as the game gets more difficult; just a reminder that they’re rated T for Teen! Josh finds it very irritating that he has to not only select the Cure spell to use, but also has to choose which character to cast it on. Why? Because he only ever wants to cast it on himself. He hasn’t bought into the power of friendship yet, apparently.
“I think that’s the wrong key. It’s a little small.”
-on Halloween Town’s keyhole
You know, it’s a little unclear how the whole keyblade mechanism functions. What is that beam? How does it reflect off the moon and still work? Not to spoil for our main character here, but I don’t think this has ever been addressed.
“Please tell me it’s Captain Hook.
Please tell me it’s Captain Hook.
Please tell me it’s Captain Hook.
Please tell me it’s Captain Hook.
Please tell me it’s Captain Hook.”
-on encountering a pirate ship in his gummi travels
Josh has a deep childhood attachment to Captain Hook. Between him and Jafar showing up as villains, Kingdom Hearts is really hitting his Disney favorites spot-on. It does make me wonder exactly how the designers picked which Disney worlds they wanted to include. Did Disney have characters they required/banned? I would say they planned it around the Princesses, but some of them appear and some of them don’t…I would have loved to be in that writers’ room.
It was Captain Hook, by the way.
“Why was that initial shot of Sora’s upper torso kind of sensual? And why is goofy literally a turtle?”
-on underwater character transformations
Goofy is a turtle because his shell functions kind of like a shield. As for Sora…let’s just add it as another creepy entry in the hotness continuum and move on.
So many questions.
“Interesting questions of personal identity: Is Sora really the same person if he can just adjust his buoyancy like that?”
-on what makes us human
I had never thought of this as abnormal, but theoretically, Sora shouldn’t be able to just float downward. The controls are the same as if he was flying, but you can’t just magically sink in water. Josh took it as a philosophical question, as is his wont. I suppose you could hand-wave it away as part of Donald’s transformative magic. Winking Sora agrees.
“This is probably the best level so far. More effort to get the aesthetic right.”
-on Atlantica
He’s starting to like the game. Slowly but surely.
Atlantica is quite pretty.
“Technically it’s Fira not fire, so maybe that has something to do with it.”
-on undersea flame magic
Atlantica really doesn’t make much sense if you think about it too hard. Josh would argue that’s true of the game as a whole.
“It’s a decorative gorge.”
-on seasonal puns
It’s December, dude. Fall jokes are old news.
“Octopus Donald is straddling it and it does not look happy.”
-on the dolphin
There’s always a delay between when Josh plays the game and when I write these posIs, and it took me a long time to remember what this was in reference to.
Pictured: one unhappy dolphin
“If my keyblade gets turned into a trident after this, I’m gonna be hype.”
-on high expectations
Granted, a trident looks nothing like a key, and you do get Crabclaw as a keychain, but still, missed opportunity here.
“…so that Sora can look dope as hell slaying Heartless.”
“That was grueling, I don’t even have anything funny to say.”
-on Ursula, part one
Another case of strategy guide cushioning. The battle with normal-sized Ursula isn’t very hard if you know what you’re doing. The problem is that it isn’t very intuitive. Casting magic on her cauldron certainly isn’t the first thing that comes to mind as the path to victory. The folks at BradyGames must have made a fortune before the internet superseded them as the world’s free strategy guide, because it was essential back in the day.
Not the right battle, but an accurate depiction of Josh’s frustration.
“Ariel’s pretty hot. Given that she’s at least vaguely humanoid, I might have a slight bias toward her.”
-on the KHHC (Kingdom Hearts Hotness Continuum)
Well, at least he has some standards. Tune in next time for some junior heroics, philosophical musings, and a redemption arc for that 11-0 shutout.