hearT II heaRt Volume IX modulo 5 — Re:Fwd:Fwd:Re:“Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days”
This is the fourth part of a series I’m writing about playing every Kingdom Hearts game for the first time. You can find a list of all the pieces in this series here. This article contains spoilers for every Kingdom Hearts game up through Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.
This article also contains references to depression, suicide, and transphobia.
It feels like I’ve hit a milestone. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days takes place in parallel with the first three Kingdom Hearts games, but despite that, it feels like the beginning of a new chaper in the series for a number of reasons. By 2009, people who were the perfect age to enjoy Kingdom Hearts at its release were now the perfect age to be embarrassed by the things they used to like when they were 13, and I think a lot of former fans were ready to get off the Kingdom Hearts bus.
Kingdom Hearts was more than happy to accommodate that mindset. This point in the series is a clean stopping point: Kingdom Hearts II has a very tidy ending that resolves all the major plot threads, and 358/2 Days doesn’t advance the overarching story, making it feel more like a spin-off. The fact that it’s a handheld game only reinforced that impression. It also focuses exclusively on the Nobodies, and seems like something that’s going to lean heavily on all the weird lore from KHII that a lot of people just weren’t into.
Plus, it’s called 358/2 Days. It’s a confusing, seemingly nonsense title that isn’t even pronounced the way it’s written (it’s supposed to be “Three Five Eight Days Over Two,” which… no. That’s not how you write that). It’s very easy to see why people would have looked at this game and decided that they’d had enough Kingdom Hearts, or that they were content to wait until Kingdom Hearts III. After all, it wasn’t clear at the time that they’d be waiting for ten whole years. In my memory, this is the point where the Kingdom Hearts fandom started to contract a bit, becoming more hardcore and esoteric.
I’ve heard that Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days is not very fun to play. My understanding is that it’s very long and gets tedious fast, since the game is pretty much entirely built around grinding. I’ve also heard that the controls aren’t very good, because it’s a full 3D game released on the Nintendo DS, a system that didn’t have analog sticks. That sounds to me like a pretty miserable experience.
But, I can’t say for sure. I haven’t played it!
Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 + II.5 ReMIX is a really nice package, containing nearly every Kingdom Hearts game there is. But notably, it’s missing 358/2 Days and Re:coded. Considering that both of those games were released on the Nintendo DS, I have to wonder if that’s got to do with why neither game got a “Final Mix.” It’s easy to imagine that adapting the games to work on a single screen with no touch controls just wouldn’t have been worth the effort, especially since my understanding is that they’re pretty widely disliked, at least in terms of gameplay.
Still, they’re part of the Kingdom Hearts story, so you can’t just leave them out completely. And a lot of people really, really love the story of 358/2 Days. So, the HD collection makes a compromise: you can’t play either of the DS games, but you can watch their cutscenes, so that you can still see all of the story.
I put some serious thought into buying a used copy of 358/2. Watching the cutscene collection felt a bit like a cheat, since the whole point of this project is to get a comprehensive understanding of the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Buuuuut the DS cartridge runs about thirty bucks these days, and considering that I’ve already sunk a hundred dollars into this, I really couldn’t justify the expense.
Plus, I mean… the cutscene-only version of 358 is what Square-Enix decided to include in the HD collection. The original game came out in 2009, and the original release of Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 ReMIX came out in 2013. They’ve had ample time to properly adapt this game if they really wanted to. This is the version that, for whatever reason, they’ve decided to stand by as the definitive 358/2 Days experience. So, surely it can’t be that bad.
I figured this would be a totally fine way to experience this story!
This Is a Terrible Way To Experience This Story
I’ll admit, my expectations were perhaps unreasonably high.
In my head, they had really worked hard to make this version of 358/2 Days into an adequate substitute for the original. Sure, I couldn’t play through it, but I thought they’d put some work into making this the next best thing. Heck, considering the negative consensus on the gameplay, I thought it might even be better! I was imagining that they’d taken all the cutscenes, uprezzed them, and then animated all new footage to fill in the gaps created by the missing gameplay, effectively creating a full-fledged animated movie. I wasn’t expecting, y’know, Pixar or anything. But I thought that what I was getting was more or less a 3D animated adaptation of the game.
That is… not what I got.
They did take all the cutscenes and uprez them, I was right about that part. And they did create a single new scene, for what I think is the final boss fight? But for the rest of the game they took an, mm, less labor-intensive approach to stringing the cutscenes together. Any time the game would normally shift into a playable segment, it instead loads a single still shot with a a block of text laid over it, summarizing what happens next in the story. Then it loads the next scene.
There is no sense of flow to this… thing. They haven’t made even the slightest attempt to elevate it past being a collection of video game cutscenes, they’ve just done the bare minimum to ensure you can follow the plot. The end result is incredibly dull, between the stuttering pace, the constant stream of dry exposition, and the fact that the vast majority of the action in the original took place in the gameplay.
So, yeah. The pacing absolutely sucks. That would almost be enough to ruin it on its own, but the problems don’t end there! In the original game, a significant amount of dialogue took place in the playable sections. Any dialogue you got from talking to people, or that intercut the gameplay, or that just wasn’t quite important enough to get a full-on cutscene, has been omitted entirely, replaced by dull summaries. Was any of this dialogue all that important? Well, it’s impossible for me to say! At minimum, it was certainly more flavorful than writing like, “Larxene was mean to Roxas and told him not to use his Keyblade for the day’s mission.”
What I don’t get is, if you’re already accepting the compromise that these parts of the game are going to be conveyed by text, then why not just… copy and paste the dialogue in? Give me like a text log, the way visual novels and some JRPGs do. Organize it chronologically, and use a line or two of exposition when necessary to connect two snippets of script. Maybe even juice it up with high-res versions of the character portraits the game used. That’d still be far from ideal, but at least you wouldn’t be cutting dialogue out of the game.
I’ve mentioned a few times now that, to my knowledge, the general consensus is that 358/2 Days isn’t a great game to play. But, it absolutely has its defenders. I’ve had it explained to me that, sure, the game is a bit long and monotonous, but that that’s sort of the point. It’s supposed to be a game about working a boring job, and forming relationships that make you enjoy the work even though the work itself sucks. That’s a really interesting idea! I’m not entirely sold on it based on its description, but I can at least see why someone would be into that. It sounds like a much stronger attempt to marry the gameplay and the story than anything I’ve seen in the series so far. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Square-Enix hasn’t ever bothered to give this game the treatment it’s given most of the series.
I’ve really gone back and forth a lot about what to do with this game. I don’t feel like I’ve given it a fair shake. Even if I’m not willing to buy a copy, I could’ve emulated it, or watched a let’s play. But, I’m gonna be honest. I’ve committed myself to playing a lot of Kingdom Hearts. Getting two of the ten games in a condensed “movie” format was part of the bargain I signed up for. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to put two more games on my docket, especially when most people seem to agree that they aren’t great. Even watching full let’s plays of 358 and Re:coded represents a time investment that I don’t think I can commit to.
And… I’ll be honest. Giving 358/2 Days the full benefit of the doubt, assuming that I missed out on lots of fun character interactions and accepting that I can’t count the terrible pacing against it… I didn’t like any of what I watched enough to seek out a more complete version of the game.
Let’s talk about this story.
THE STORY
Almost exactly one year passed from the moment that Roxas was born in Kingdom Hearts to the moment that he rejoins with Sora in Kingdom Hearts II. The prologue of KHII shows the last week of that year, and 358/2 Days covers the remaining 358 days… Over 2.
Roxas is very quickly scooped up by Xemnas and inducted as the 13th member of Organization XIII. He can use Sora’s Keyblade, which means that the Organization finally has a member who’s capable of harvesting hearts from the Heartless to help them build Kingdom Hearts. Roxas is so crucial to the Organization’s plans that I’m frankly confused about how they were even spending their time before he showed up.
Roxas has no memories of his previous life, which is unique for a Nobody. As a result, he seems to exist in a permanent daze, mindlessly doing what he’s told. The Organization puts Axel in charge of supervising him and teaching him what he needs to know to do his job, and Axel ends up being kind to him, taking him out for ice cream after he’s completed his daily missions. They form a bond, and Roxas slowly starts to mentally “wake up” as a result.
Shortly after Roxas joins, the Organization gets a 14th member, named Xion. Roxas eventually learns that she also has a Keyblade, and she ends up teaming up with Roxas to collect hearts. She starts off as blank and mindless as Roxas did, but just like him she also starts to slowly open up.
Axel, Roxas, and Xion all slowly become better friends as the days pass. At one point, Axel and about half of the Organization get reassigned to Castle Oblivion, so that Chain of Memories can take place. It turns out that all of Axel’s double-crossing in that game was for the benefit of Saïx, who sent Axel there to find the traitors on the team. Axel also takes it upon himself to kill off Zexion and Vexen to help Saïx gain power in the Organization. It’s not clear exactly what the relationship is between Axel and Saïx, but there’s obviously something more there than was previously established.
Things start getting weird with Roxas and Xion. It seems like if one of them gets more powerful, the other gets weaker, sometimes losing their ability to use the Keyblade at all. They cover for each other, making sure that between the two of them they’re always hitting their heart quotas, to avoid either from being turned into a Dusk.
Axel and Xion slowly start to independantly uncover the truth: Xion is a replica, like the one of Riku in Chain of Memories. She’s based on Sora’s memories of Kairi that he lost in Castle Oblivion. Xemnas’ original plan was to create an artificial Keyblade wielder that could harvest hearts for him, but then he lucked out and discovered Sora’s Nobody. Because Roxas is Sora, he’s draining some kind of essence from him by being alive, and it’s venting into Xion, making her more mentally and emotionally complete. Because they’re different iterations of the same person, Roxas and Xion are having an adverse affect on one another, and that’s why one of them gets weaker when the other one gets stronger.
Xemnas realizes that in the long-term, Roxas and Xion can’t both survive, but he doesn’t really care, as long as whichever one lives remains loyal. He tries to pit them against each other, and Axel’s relationships become strained as he tries to protect them while still remaining loyal to the Organization.
Roxas starts to feel alone and depressed as his friends drift apart. He has a falling out with Axel once he realizes how much he’s been keeping from him, and decides to leave Organization XIII. Meanwhile, Xion learns from Riku that Sora can’t wake up from his weird memory sleep until she and Roxas rejoin with him. She spends some time trying to figure out what to do, before finally deciding to give up her life so that Sora can come back. She tries to convince Roxas to join her, and even ends up fighting him when he won’t listen. Roxas defeats her, which causes her to fade away, and everyone slowly starts to forget that she ever existed in the first place.
Roxas can still just barely remember her, and sets off to fulfill her dying wish of sabotaging Xemnas’ Kingdom Hearts. On the way, he runs into Riku, and they have their fight from KHII. Roxas is beaten, and gets placed in DiZ’s computer simulation to live out the last week of his life.
So… Hm.
I was really looking forward to this game’s story. I loved the Roxas prologue in Kingdom Hearts II, and I was excited to see more of his life. More than that, Sora’s year-long coma represents a huge blank space in Kingdom Hearts, one that you could potentially tell a lot of really cool stories in. What happens next in the main narrative is set in stone, and the main character’s time is spoken for, which means that you’re free to tell a whole new story, focusing on new ideas and parts of the setting. You can explore and expand what Kingdom Hearts even is.
I wanna emphasize again that I experienced this story in a compromised format. I am certain that the original game was more engaging, and that the story felt a lot better when it was in its proper, complete context.
But, as presented, it just didn’t do it for me at all.
Last time, I wrote about how I really appreciated the way they went about telling Roxas’ story in Kingdom Hearts II. They gave you a small number of key details, and positioned them such that you could see the entire picture of Roxas’ life. He felt like a whole, complete character, even though most of his screen time was used on a brainwashed version of him trapped in the Matrix.
I think it’s totally fine to go back and fill in more information about Roxas. But if you’re going to do that, then you should take it as an opportunity to expand the character and show off facets of him that weren’t apparent in Kingdom Hearts II. You should show him doing things he hasn’t done before and teach us things about him that we didn’t know. It should all fit neatly with what was already established about his character, but it should also deepen and broaden that character.
I didn’t… really learn anything new about Roxas from playing 358/2. They did technically give me some new details, like how he was a weird zombie when he was first created, or the exact specifics of why he left the Organization. But none of it is all that surprising, or really does anything to recontextualize the character. We see every little detail of how he becomes friends with Axel, when we… pretty much already knew the entire story. I can’t honestly say that I came away from 358 understanding Roxas as a person any better than I already did, and that’s a real problem, considering that he’s the protagonist and point of view character.
But, the game ain’t called 358/1 Days. There’s a second major character in the story. What about her?
Xion is a person with no identity to call her own. At first, she’s barely a person at all, but she slowly becomes more and more of one as time progresses. Unfortunately, she learns that she isn’t a unique individual, but an artificially created doppelgänger of Sora, and that he’s trapped in a coma for as long as she lives. Ultimately, she dies so that Sora can wake up.
She’s… pretty much just Roxas again, with a dash of Riku’s Replica from Chain of Memories stirred in.
Roxas and Riku’s Replica are two of my favorite characters in the series so far. They’re both complex people that have to directly bear the brunt of all the weird metaphysical bullshit that’s happening in this story in a way that makes for really wonderful character arcs. So, on paper, I should love Xion too. But I don’t. She feels to me like… like I really loved what I had for dinner the past two nights, but now tonight I’m feeling lazy so I’m just tossing all my leftovers into a bowl and microwaving them. It’s… fine, but I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did the first time.
And I know that opinion puts me in a pretty small minority. I consistently see people talk about 358/2 Days as one of the best stories in the series, and call out Xion in particular as a high point, a beloved character that has a tragic ending. Looking up information about this game exposed me to mountains of fan art of her. It’s clear that people deeply connected with this character and really love her.
I want to do my best to understand that perspective. After all, the whole point of this project is understanding why people love Kingdom Hearts.
If I try and think it through, while taking into account all the words I’ve listened to and read, I think I can almost get it. Maybe the point is that she is a lot like Roxas. They’re two detached, depressed people who found each other, and can relate to each other in a way that no one else can. They’ve been stripped of their identities, and they’ve effectively been enslaved by a fascistic cult. They’ve been promised that their efforts will one day be rewarded, but the reward is something they don’t understand and don’t particularly want, and really the only thing that’s keeping them working is the threat of violence. They’ve been completely dehumanized, and the only source of emotional support they have is each other.
Explaining it that way, I can totally see why people would feel so strongly about Xion. I just… don’t see it when I watch the game. Those ideas and emotions don’t come through for me, and I can only extract them from 358/2 Days by working really hard to imagine what its story could mean to me if it was more effective. Nothing about the story as presented drew me into their relationship or made me feel invested in it. Not a single scene on the clocktower roof had the same emotional punch to it as, say, Sora and Riku on the dark beach at the end of KHII.
Part of the reason I have such a hard time with Xion’s character arc is the way it ends. One of the major differences between her and Roxas is that once she learns about Sora, she voluntarily decides to rejoin with him, sacrificing not just her life but everyone’s memories of her ever existing.
I really disliked this. It felt incredibly shitty to me that Xion’s arc concluded with her giving up everything she had for Sora’s sake.
I talked about that feeling with a friend on Twitter, and she pointed out that I seemed to be applying a bit of a double-standard. After all, Sora voluntarily sacrifices his life for Kairi back in Kingdom Hearts. He ends up coming back, but he had no reason to believe that he would. Why didn’t that bother me? Why isn’t Xion allowed to make a similar heroic sacrifice?
That was a really good point, and I had to give it a lot of thought before coming to an answer. Xion doesn’t feel to me like she’s making a heroic sacrifice. Once she learns about who she is, she immediately starts repeating the same anti-Nobody rhetoric that people use all throughout Kingdom Hearts II. She doesn’t selflessly give up her life to protect someone she loves, she just comes to accept the premise that Sora is a fundamentally more important person than her, and that it is correct and proper for her to give up her life for his sake. She repeatedly says that she does not deserve to exist, that it’s wrong for her to be alive.
None of this reads to me as heroic sacrifice. It reads to me like a depressed kid committing suicide. And if that’s how Xion’s story ends, that’s fine, stories are allowed to be tragic. But the game doesn’t treat it like a tragedy. It feels to me like the game agrees that Xion committing suicide was… sad, sure, but that it was the right thing to do.
That kinda creeps me out.
Another perspective on Xion that I’ve heard from a few different sources is that it’s very easy to read her as a trans character. She’s made as a copy of a boy, but when her personality emerges, she’s clearly a girl. Despite that, many people still see her as male, and some people don’t see her as a real person at all, referring to her as “it.” She refuses to be controlled by these people, and her sacrifice at the end is in part a gesture of defiance towards Organization XIII.
Part of the reason I loved Roxas so much in KHII is that I deeply relate to him. Not to bring the room down, but I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety most of my life. There’s been times when I’ve felt disconnected and detached from the world around me. Or when I’ve felt an inescapable, gnawing sensation that something undefinable but vitally important is wrong with me. I’ve literally had dark moments where I imagined that there was some better version of me that could exist, if not for the fact that I was taking up his space in the universe, and that everyone secretly resented me for that. Roxas’ story in KHII resonated with me because I’ve been Roxas.
I haven’t been Xion. Maybe if I had, I would’ve connected with her more strongly.
I’ve been pretty negative this time around, so I want to be really clear about something here at the end: I am not at all trying to diminish any enjoyment or emotional connection people feel with regard to 358/2 Days. I’m not here to argue that people are wrong to like this. I just… wanted to explain why it didn’t connect with me. I really wish that it had! But it didn’t. Maybe it would have if I’d actually played the game, instead of watching through the dumb bullshit version on the HD collection, but that’s the one I went with so, here we are.
Ah well. Whaddya gonna do.
Random Stray Thoughts
- It took me… way too long to get that the game was doing a Thing with Xion’s face looking different based on who’s POV we were seeing her from. I thought there was just some weird bug where the game wasn’t loading the right model for some shots.
- The real reason I didn’t enjoy this game was that I hate the sensation of biting into a popscicle or ice cream bar, and the characters do it fuckin’ constantly. Every time there was an icy crunch i shivered in my seat. Ughhhh I hate it I hate it I hate it.
- I did really like the bit where Saïx tells Roxas that Xion could never be a true member of the Organization, because there has to be 13 members. Organization XIII only had exactly 13 members for like… a week. It just feeds into the running theme that everything about the Organization is a lie.
- I know that they were going for parallelism with the KHII prologue, but I kinda wish Roxas and his friends had hung out in The World That Never Was more than they do. It would’ve been cool to see that place as something other than a battleground.
- I get that the idea is that ice cream on the clock tower roof is just like, their personal friendship ritual and that the comfort is in the repetition, but it would’ve been nice to see them do a few other things. Doesn’t Twilight Town have, I don’t know, a bowling alley or something? I mean you could at least try a different flavor of ice cream.
- On the topic of the sea salt ice cream, I understand that it’s a reference, but surely Tokyo Disney must sell some other novelty snack that these characters could eat sometimes. They eat so much fuckin’ ice cream!
Conclusion
Soooo I didn’t really like 358/2 Days. The way I experienced it didn’t help, but even beyond that I just don’t think it’s my cup of tea. I don’t know what exactly I wanted from an Organization XIII side story, but it wasn’t this. But, I know that it means a lot to a lot of people, and I’m glad that they can have this, even if I can’t join in with the excitement. Who knows, maybe some day when I’ve recovered from binging on so much god damn Kingdom Hearts, I’ll circle back around and actually play 358, and maybe that’ll get me to finally see what others see in it.
For now though, looks like it’s time to get Born By Sleep!
Oh, I GOT Born By Sleep. Wanna read about it? You can do that here!
