heArt II hEart Sequence 2√IX — Re:Fwd:Re:Fwd:Fwd:Re:“Kingdom Hearts Re:coded”
This is the 6th in a series of articles I’m writing about playing through the Kingdom Hearts series for the first time. You can find links to all the pieces here. This article contains spoilers for every Kingdom Hearts game up through Kingdom Hearts Re:coded.
I feel like right around here is where a whole lot of people just sorta collectively threw up their hands at Kingdom Hearts.
To an outside perspective, the series had been gradually vanishing up its own butt for a while already. Kingdom Hearts II is a surprisingly dense game, with lots of complicated ideas, half a dozen characters who all dress identically and a lot of convoluted, non-linear plotting. Then it was followed up by a game with a dang math problem in its title that adds even more complication to things, and that’s followed up by a prequel that adds an entire additional layer of information, including a whole new cast of characters to care about. It starts to give the impression that Kingdom Hearts didn’t want anyone to understand it, especially because doing so at that point meant you needed to own three separate devices.
And then, people started learning about the episodic Japan-exclusive cellphone game that served an essential purpose in the canon, and a lot of people (me included) started laughing. It was hard not to feel like Kingdom Hearts was playing a joke on everybody at that point, and if it wasn’t, then it kinda felt like it was the joke.
I honestly don’t remember any buzz at all when that game got remade into Kingdom Hearts Re:coded and released in America. I think I saw it in a bargain bin at a Wal-Mart at some point? I remember lots of excitement about Birth By Sleep and at least a bit for Dream Drop Distance, but if you’d told me this game never came out in America I probably would’ve believed you.
I only really started to hear any opinions at all about Kingdom Hearts Re:coded once I started playing through the series. A lot of people said it was boring and bad and pointless and that I really just needed to watch the ending cutscene to get the important part; like, no, seriously, they understand that I’m being a stubborn jackass and trying to see as much of this series firsthand as possible but this one is really really skippable. Some people had a slightly more charitable take on Re:coded, which was that the game is actually a really fun twist on the Kingdom Hearts formula, and that it’s honestly worth playing… but that the story is in fact boring and bad and pointless.
Which does me a fat lot of good, considering that I couldn’t actually play Re:coded. Like 358/2 Days, Square-Enix didn’t port over a proper version of this game when making HD II.5 ReMIX. They just included a cutscene compilation. Which means I don’t have access to the one part of this game that anybody actually likes.
Woooooo.
At least this time, I was going into this with the right expecations. Even so, I was kind of dreading having to sit and watch through this thing. I knew that it was going to be a long, boring slog through a story that nobody liked, presented in the least engaging way imaginable. They made me dislike 358/2, a story that people love, so I was real concerned about what they’d do to a game that everybody is, at best, indifferent about. I was ready for this to be a pretty awful experience.
This… Wasn’t an Awful Experience?
Huh.
Watching through Kingdom Hearts Re:coded wasn’t nearly as boring as watching through 358/2 Days.
From what I can gather, the 358 cutscenes in the HD collection look pretty much exactly like the ones from the original DS game, just gussied up a bit. That’s not the case for Re:coded. That game doesn’t really have proper cutscenes. Instead, it just has dialogue scenes with text boxes and very lightly animated character portraits. That makes sense, since it’s an adaptation of a phone game that launched in 2008, but what that means is that everything in the HD version of Re:coded had to be made from the ground up for the Playstation 3. And since they were making this whole thing specifically for the HD collection, they could animate the scenes with that goal in mind, producing a much smoother, more enjoyable experience. They still occasionally resort to text screens filled with expository paragraphs, but they’re much more rare than they were in 358, and the text is read aloud by Mickey Mouse, giving them at least a little bit of energy.
I don’t wanna overstate what this is. It’s still long and and a bit awkwardly paced, and there’s plenty of points where you can feel that the game was supposed to cut to gameplay. The middle of it dragged a bit as it got deeper into the nitty-gritty of the Disney worlds, which are more or less just as perfunctory as always. But it still felt like a complete package in a way that 358 just didn’t. This wasn’t as good as playing Re:coded for myself, but it actually felt like an acceptable substitute, which is all I was asking for.
While it does feel like they put more work into Re:coded than they did 358 (which is kind of hilarious given the relative reputations of the two games), I also think that Re:coded is just better suited to this kind of treatment. The story is always moving forward, putting the characters in new locations and situations and always giving you something new to look at. 358 has, by design, a very repetitive structure. At least 70% of its cutscenes took place on the same clocktower roof, with the same three characters having versions of the same conversation over and over again. That repetition gets way less tolerable when it’s all there is to the experience.
Man 358 was boring to watch. Anyway, sorry, I’ve shit on that game enough. My point is just that, I actually kind of enjoyed my time watching through Re:coded, and I don’t feel like I need to qualify all my statements by saying that I played it in a compromised form. I think I’m actually fully qualified to talk about the story this time around!
…So, uh, I guess let’s do that!
THE STORY
This game throws a lot of new concepts at you that require some explanation. Maybe even more than KHII? I’ll do my best to keep it brief but that might be tricky.
While investigating his mysteriously blank journal from Kingdom Hearts, Jiminy Cricket discovers that somehow, a new message has appeared on the journal’s last page: “Their hurting will be mended when you return to end it.” He takes the diary to King Mickey, who can’t figure out exactly what the message means, but recognizes it as a cry for help and resolves to assist whoever’s sent it.
Mickey uses a big crazy computer that he probably got from Ansem at some point to build a… simulation of the journal’s contents? Contents which, were erased?… okay, look. It’s a little confusing, but there’s a certain kind of logic to it if you don’t try to overthink it or try to approach it from a super literal perspective. Mickey explains that even though the pages are blank, they once contained a detailed account of Sora’s adventure in Kingdom Hearts. Because of that, it’s inexorably linked to Sora’s heart, and the memories of that adventure are still present in the journal in some vague, metaphysical sense. As a result, he can literally pull up footage from the first game and watch it play out on his monitor.
Listen, Ansem tried to put the soul of all worlds inside a Ghostbusters trap to steal it from the reanimated corpse of a Jedi who was possessed by an evil sorceror who’s hell-bent on pulling a sword out of a comatose teenager who’s hidden in a castle that transforms your memories into trading cards. We are well beyond the point where it’s worth it to question this shit.
It immediately becomes apparent that something is amiss with the journal. Every scene is filled with “bugs,” creepy black cubes that look sort of like Heartless. And this is where things start getting weird — okay, they got weird two paragraphs ago, but they’re about to get weirder.
Mickey uses his computer to make contact with the “data” Sora from the very beginning of the journal, and hacks the simulation to give him a keyblade earlier in the story than he’s supposed to get it. He explains this… very confusing situation as best as he can. Data Sora doesn’t understand it at all, and honestly, who could blame him, but he does understand that people need his help and he’s happy to do what he can.
Just as a side note, I’m gonna call him Data Sora from here on out for the sake of clarity. As far as I know that’s sorta the accepted fan name for this character? I’m goin’ with it.
Data Sora gets to work clearing the journal of bugs, but there’s more amiss here than just a few computer spiders. Whoever hacked the journal to put in the cry for help is still altering things. They’ve taken Riku from Kingdom Hearts and transformed him into… sort of an avatar of the journal? But also he’s still Riku. I swear this makes more sense when you actually watch the thing.
Data Riku sucks Mickey, Donald and Goofy into the journal, and explains that all of Naminé’s memory fuckery in Chain of Memories damaged the journal somehow, and that’s being represented in Mickey’s simulation as file corruption in the form of the bugs. The bugs are preventing Sora’s memories from repopulating the journal, so for now, they’re being stored inside of Riku to keep them safe. Riku is also confused about the message that’s appeared in the journal, and wants everyone’s help to get to the bottom of it.
Unfortunately, Pete and Maleficent show up, because they have basically become the Team Rocket of Kingdom Hearts. They use Pete’s SWEET HACKING SKILLS to lock everyone in the journal, and then get to work doing bad shit to… no real discernible end really, they’re just dicks. They kidnap Data Riku, destroy Data Sora’s Data Keyblade, and head for Data Hollow Bation.
Data data data data data data.
Just like the real Sora, Data Sora storms Hollow Bastion unarmed. Even though he’s “just ones and zeroes,” this adventure has led him to have experiences distinct from the “real” Sora. He’s become his own person, and as a result, he has his own heart, and that enables him to summon his own keyblade. He saves Data Riku, but he’s been infested with bugs, and since he contains the entire contents of the journal, that means that the whole “Datascape” is falling apart. Sora Inceptions his way into a deeper layer of the Datascape inside of Riku, and helps him to purge all of the bugs from the original data. After a climactic fight with his own Data Heartless, Sora finally saves the Dataverse, and all the non-Data people are able to leave. Maleficent and Pete fuck off to who knows where, because Maleficent suddenly remembers another book that contains entire worlds in it, a powerful magical item called the Book of Prophecies, and sets off to go find it. I guess that’ll matter in Dream Drop Distance???
Restoring the journal means that Data Sora’s unique personhood will be erased, because he’s just supposed to be a representation of what Sora did in Kingdom Hearts. He’s fine with that though, because all Soras are overconfident doofuses who are completely self-assured that the power of love will preserve them through whatever magical bullshit threatens to destroy their souls next. In fairness, they’re pretty much always right.
Just when Mickey thinks everything has been taken care of, he discovers that new information has appeared in the journal: a Datascape version of Castle Oblivion. He re-recruits Data Sora to explore it, who’s happy to help even though he once again has no idea what’s going on. He’s led through the castle by Data Roxas, which… sure? I guess if the journal isn’t just literally a book but has been somehow elevated to be a perfect reflection of Sora’s heart then Roxas should also be here? Fine. Okay.
Data Sora’s memories of his friends are gradually stripped away, which is weird, because this is the Sora from the beginning of the game before he really made all that many friends, but, he is Data Sora so I guess really everything that happened to him in Kingdom Hearts is still in there somewhere? Data Roxas taunts him for giving all of his memories away in exchange for answers to questions he never asked. He keeps pushing Sora to confront all the pain he feels from losing everything, and to give in to the darkness as a result.
But Data Sora stays strong. He acknowledges that he’s in a lot of pain, but also that his pain is, for now anyway, evidence enough that his connections were real and important, and that he needs to hold on to that pain in order to have any hope of recovering what he’s lost. He also recognizes that Data Roxas is hurting as well, and realizes that the pain he feels allows him to form a connection through their shared loss.
Data Roxas drops his act and admits that the point of all of this was to see if Sora was strong enough to withstand emotional trauma. He recombines with Data Sora, giving him all of Roxas’ memories, and leaves the way open to the end of Castle Oblivion. Mickey meets up with Data Sora, and the two head through the final door.
It turns out that Data Naminé was the one behind everything. While restoring Sora’s memories in Chain of Memories, Naminé found a whole bunch of memories that didn’t belong to him. Obviously, Xion and Roxas were in there, but even deeper down were Ventus’ memories, and the truth about what happened in Birth By Sleep. Data Naminé needed to tell Sora that there were people who were hurting and in need of his help, and set this entire game in motion as both a message and a test. Ventus, Roxas and Xion all carry horrible, traumatic memories, and she needed to be sure that awakening to them wouldn’t destroy Sora’s heart. Data Sora making it this far is proof that the real Sora will be able to take it. Mickey promises to let the real Sora know all about this, and writes the letter that Sora received at the end of KHII.
…
So uh.
Hm.
I am trying to figure out the right way to say this.
I fucking love this story.
No, really, I’m serious. This is not a joke, or a bit, or some weird ironic bullshit like when I got way too excited about Atlantica in KHII. I legitimately think that this was the best Kingdom Hearts story I’ve seen so far. Like to the point where I’m baffled and a little indignant that so many people dismiss this game out of hand! Why did so many of you tell me not to bother with this one?! This game fuckin’ rules!
Okay, okay. Apparently, this is a very out-there opinion. I am going to do the best that I can to state my case for why this story is great.
This Is the Best Way To Tie In the Birth By Sleep Stuff
So, when I wrote about Birth By Sleep, I talked about how prequels sort of inherently recontextualize the stories that were written before them. That’s, you know, what they’re designed to do. However, one frustrating side effect is that they very commonly make it seem like the present-day timeline of the narrative is some weighty fulfillment of a predetermined destiny. The original story isn’t just about characters in dramatic circumstances making choices, it’s not just people interacting and creating compelling narratives. Prequels have a bad habit of turning the original characters into dominoes that just so happen to be falling in sequence along a preordained path.
You can see this really clearly in the Star Wars prequel trilogy: Darth Vader is no longer just Some Evil Guy, he’s the fallen hope of an entire civilization. And when he kills the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi, that’s not a singular act of redemption, but the delayed fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. Dramatic irony is one of the most fun tools in a prequel story’s toolbox, but if it’s overused then the writers run the risk of making their entire fictional universe one big Rube Goldberg machine that exists solely to generate the circumstances of the original story’s plot. It can make the whole world feel small and restrictive.
Like I said before, Birth By Sleep is a pretty solid prequel all told. I was a little worried coming out of it though. Sora wasn’t just some kid who’d been thrown into a big crazy adventure anymore. Now he was like. The keeper of Ventus’ soul, and probably the only remaining link to the χ-Blade. He went from being a kid who made heroic choices into a being kid who was destined to be a hero. That shift didn’t like, ruin Kingdom Hearts for me or anything like that, and I was willing to excuse it because I liked the themes that BBS was introducing to the series, but it did leave me with concerns.
And Kingdom Hearts Re:coded completely puts those concerns at ease.
The ending of Re:coded is sort of a companion to the secret ending of BBS. Sora (or, at least, a version of him) is confronted with all of the various people who are hurting and are in need of his help. These are people that live on inside his heart, but in most cases, he either never met or doesn’t really remember them. He’s completely ignorant of the pain and suffering that other people have had to go through just so he can exist.
This is a really, really smart move. With this ending, Re:coded takes the time to make it clear that Sora isn’t a predestined hero. He really is just some kid. And he’s a pretty fuckin’ privileged kid at that. The happy ending he got in Kingdom Hearts II came at the expense of a lot of other people. He wasn’t aware of the sacrifices that were made for him and he isn’t exactly morally culpable for them, but those sacrifices were made all the same. Re:coded forces him to reckon with that fact, and rather than pushing him into the role of like, “the chosen hero who will defeat Xehanort,” it just lets him know that there are people who need help, that they need help because of him, and that he’s the only one in a position to provide that help. Sora is confronted with a choice, allowing his decisions to still be the driving force of the narrative. He’s not a cosmic pawn, he’s just a kid who’s confronted with people in need.
And, of course, he chooses to help them, because Sora is The Goodest Boy In the World.
This ending even makes me retroactively like 358/2 Days more, because it treats the circumstances of Xion’s death appropriately. One of my biggest gripes with 358 was how it treated her dying as something noble, as “the right thing to do,” even if it was sad. Re:coded doesn’t linger on Xion for too long, because the scene isn’t about her specifically. But it does take a moment to have Data Sora realize the full weight of the tragedy she went through, and recognize it as a tragedy, in a way that, in my opinion, 358 really didn’t.
Instead of succumbing to a really common pitfall, Re:coded uses the context provided by Birth By Sleep to both allow for a really nice moment of character growth and come at the main narrative from a whole new thematic angle. Everyone is connected, and sometimes we can indirectly benefit from the suffering of others. When we find out that that’s the case, then even though we didn’t cause the problem, we should do everything in our power to help.
Anyway. That’s all well and good, but so far I’ve only actually talked about the ending. And maybe I’m right that the ending is really strong, but there was a good two and a half hours of stuff prior to that. I haven’t really done much to refute the idea that you should just watch the last cutscene of this game and skip the rest of it.
I guess I need to explain why everything else is good too.
“Data”
So, to some extent, I understand why everyone rags on this game. The metaphysics of Re:coded are confusing as fuck, even by Kingdom Hearts standards. I like it and I still only have a loose grasp on it. I get how you might listen to everyone drone on about the Dataverse for ten minutes straight and feel your attention start to wander.
But, that’s not the complaint I usually see levied against this game. What I’ve seen and heard over and over again is that this game “doesn’t matter.” That it’s yet another rehash of the events of Kingdom Hearts, starring a version of Sora who isn’t even real and who forgets everything at the end anyway, and only the last 5–10 minutes really do anything to actually advance the overall narrative of the series.
Those points are… true, technically. But I don’t think they add up to the conclusion that this game “doesn’t matter.” In fact, I think Re:coded is in large part a refutation of the argument that it doesn’t matter. It argues for its own importance, because it argues for the importance of stories.
Jiminy’s journal is meant to be a comprehensive, factual account of what happens in the first game. But it’s still a story, a narrative about Sora’s adventure. Sora is a real person, but Data Sora is a fictional character. It would be pretty reasonable to call him a “fake” Sora.
But… we’ve already been down this road. A few times, even. There are no “fake” people. Data Sora is a memory, a shared imagining of what the real Sora was like. He doesn’t have a body, or a physical presence in the world. Even the words that defined him have been erased.
But he’s still real.
In a lot of ways, the point of Re:coded is very similar to the original point of these articles I’m writing. It wants to explore the concept of Kingdom Hearts and figure out why this story matters, if it matters at all. Why is any of this worth caring about?
(As an aside, I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve entirely abandoned that goal at this point. Now I just earnestly like this series and want an excuse to talk way too much about it.)
To the people in Disney Castle, Jiminy’s journal is important because it’s a story about their friend. It’s a narrative about Sora coming of age, making friends with all of them, and defeating a terrible evil. It’s a powerful story for them because of the deep love they all have for their friend.
And because this is Kingdom Hearts, it’s literally a powerful story. Data Sora manages to manifest a keyblade of his own, distinct from the real Sora’s, and even though he’s fictional, he’s able to stand up against real challenges. The story of Sora, the Boy That Saved All Worlds, has the power to influence reality.
But also? It’s kind of a shitty story. It omits a lot of important details and skims over all the sacrifices people made that enabled it to happen. It’s a corrupted retelling of events, just like the worlds in Re:coded are corrupted with bugs.
At the start of Kingdom Hearts, Sora dreams about a world full of gigantic stained glass mosaics that depict various Disney princesses. He’s about to enter a world defined by these stories, these gigantic pillars of popular culture that Kingdom Hearts presents as almost mythological in importance. Sora’s story is about traversing that mythology, inserting himself into it, and protecting it against invasive forces.
The beginning of Kingdom Hearts II calls back to that scene, but the mosaic has been replaced. Instead of a stained glass Disney princess, Roxas’ tutorial takes place on a gigantic depiction of Sora. Roxas is defined by Sora’s story. He only exists because of it, and the people in power have decided that his only purpose is to die in service of it. That narrative, about Sora maturing into a hero and saving the world from evil? It’s a noose around Roxas’ neck. It completely destroys him.
It destroyed Xion, too. And it wasn’t exactly kind to Axel or Naminé. And no one even remembers Ventus and his friends. The narrative that Jiminy is clinging to so hard is a violent, broken one that tears down everything else in service of building Sora up.
No wonder the Data version of Sora’s Heartless is so powerful.
Sora is not a lone hero who acts in a vacuum. He’s not even part of a duo with Riku. He’s just one link in a complex chain, one that stretches back over a decade, and maybe even more than that. Any narrative that spotlights him as a singular hero is a dishonest accounting of the story of Kingdom Hearts. Re:coded demands that The Story of Sora be reconciled with all the people who’ve been forgotten and hurt.
And despite the fact that the established narrative of Sora’s adventures is so toxic, at his core Sora really is a hero worth celebrating, so he of course accepts that task. Sora’s heroism doesn’t lie in the epic anime battles he has with various incarnations of Xehanort. It’s in moments like the end of Re:coded, where he unconditionally agrees to help people who need him, for no reason other than they need him.
So, to go back to the original question: why is the story of Kingdom Hearts worth caring about? Well, it’s not. Not on its own. It’s an ostensibly positive narrative that masks a lot of pain and suffering, and glorifies one lone “hero” to the detriment of a lot of other people. But that’s not what it has to be, and it’s not what it has to do. This story can be about more than swinging giant keys around to kill shadow monsters and monologuing endlessly about light and darkness. It can be about showing kindness and compassion to the people who need those things most. And that would be a story worth caring about.
In the secret ending of Re:coded, Mickey tells Yen Sid about everything he’s learned, and how there might be a chance to rescue Ventus and his friends. Somewhat tellingly, Yen Sid shrugs that off entirely, and abruptly changes the subject, explaining thatt Xehanort might be returning soon. This is interesting, because it’s leaning all the way back into the narrative of Sora as a chosen savior. I don’t know anything at all about the plot of Dream Drop Distance, but it would be interesting if this was laying the groundwork for a conflict between Sora and Yen Sid. What’s more important: helping the needy, or becoming a legendary hero? I know which choice Sora would make, and I love him for it.
Random Stray Thoughts
- Everything else aside, god bless the Kingdom Hearts team for making an entire story about the fuckin’ minigame score tracker from the first game. That is ridiculous in exactly the right way.
- I know everyone dumps on this game for being yet another rehash of the Disney worlds from Kingdom Hearts, but… honestly, I have a hard time caring too much about that. The Disney worlds in every single game have been like 70–90% boring filler. Neither this game nor Chain of Memories really felt all that much more annoying in that regard.
- This game has a compulsive fixation on the word “hurt” in the same way other games in the series have had on the word “darkness.” I wonder if constantly repeating the same nouns like that just doesn’t sound awkward in Japanese? My gut reaction is to make a pithy joke about how someone needs to buy the localization team a thesaurus but there’s probably a reason for why they refrain from using adjectives, like matching mouth-flaps or the Japanese team objecting to fiddling too much with word choices.
- You can definitely tell that the VO for this game was recorded quite a while after Kingdom Hearts II. Haley Joel Osment keeps getting older and his voice keeps getting deeper. It’s honestly kinda funny how Sora’s voice is noticeably deeper every time they go back to Sora circa KH1.
- On the topic of the voice acting in general, man, that must be a hard fuckin’ job in these games. Like, it’s easy to find lots of moments of awkward delivery in this type of thing, but then you stop and remember all the hurdles there are to putting in a good performance and it becomes miraculous that any of it works at all. The actors work on a localized script that had to split the difference between being a good translation and fitting the mouth flaps of the Japanese voice work, they almost certainly haven’t seen the entire script and don’t know where their lines fit into the overall story, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’re recording their lines by themselves without any other actors to play off of. It’s a fucking impossible job, and it’s surprising that only absolute legendary actors like Chrisopher Lee manage to make it through their roles without ever sounding awkward or off-beat.
- The Book of Prophecies sounds… suspiciously similar to the Winnie the Pooh book. If DDD is about to reveal that fuckin’ Pooh-Bear is the guardian of a source of unspeakable power then sign me the fuck up.
- One of the few bits about this game that I don’t love is how Data Sora’s story just sorta… stops. I think I would’ve preferred it if some Kingdom Hearts-style fuckery happened and the real Sora had like, a dream or something and Data Sora merged with him and he got all of the memories of this game, instead of being told about it by Mickey. But, y’know, minor nitpick all told.
- Lotsa quality Sora x Riku stuff in this one. What’s that ship even called? Siku? Rora? Hm. Neither of those sound too good.
Conclusion
So… yeah! This game was fantastic. I’ve had to really fight the temptation to rant about how grumpy I am that people don’t like it, because, y’know, tryin’ to maintain a mostly positive vibe in these pieces. Suffice it to say, I’m really glad I ignored everybody who told me to skip this game, because it’s terrific, and I think they should maybe revisit it when they get the chance.
This game also marks the completion of Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 + II.5 ReMIX! The end of this road is finally starting to appear on the horizon. I’ll see you next time, when I pop open Kingdom Hearts II.8 Final Chapter Prologue and definitely, definitely play Dream Drop Distance next!
I definitely did the thing I said I would do! I played the only game that I possibly could have logically played after Re:coded, and you can read my thoughts about it here.
