Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories(MAJOR SPOILERS!)

[Epoetker]

Ahem: SPOILER WARNING!














I've just realized that this game makes no sense until you consider the name of the main evil bad guy.

Ansem? What kind of evil bad guy name is that? Doesn't roll off the tongue or anything! He comes out of nowhere with no relation to any others in any series! Or does he?

Ansem backwards: Mesna. Or, if you want to be very Japanese-credits about it, M. Esna. Michael Eisner!

Kingdom Hearts was chartered by Disney but made by Square. And Square rarely names their evil villains without having their names mean something relevant (Sephiroth, Ultimecia, Necron, SIN, fer cryin' out loud.) This is exactly the sort of in-joke that really won't be caught by the execs before release.

I didn't play much of the first Kingdom Hearts, but the second for the Game Boy Advance really only makes sense once you read it as Disney employees recovering the things they forgot and revolting against the rule of Ansem-Eisner.

AE has a lot of lackeys. Axel, Marluxia, Zexion, Lexaeus, Vexen, and Larxene. Notice a pattern in their names? All of them are employees of Ansem's Organization, which is meant to 'discover the secrets of the heart' and of memory. Pretty much what the Disney corporation has to do to make their movies endearing to all audiences My guess is that Axel represents Pixar, given how he's the coolest and most perceptive, survives even after being seemingly destroyed, helps the heroes out when given the chance, and offs members of his own Organization. Chain of Memories was made during the time when Pixar announced their eventual departure from Disney, so you know the makers were privy to the information.

As for the others, Miramax may be Larxene, but I'd need to study up more on the wholly-owned subsidiaries before making positive IDs.

If Ansem is Eisner, then who are Sora and Riku? Stay tuned or offer your own projections...

[Raptor]

Kingdom Hearts was chartered by Disney but made by Square. And Square rarely names their evil villains without having their names mean something relevant (Sephiroth, Ultimecia, Necron, SIN, fer cryin' out loud.) This is exactly the sort of in-joke that really won't be caught by the execs before release.

What does Sephiroth (and the others) names mean? I didn't realize that they stood for someone.

[Piebald]

Sephiroth is a term from Kaballah, it is the tree of life.

Necron means "One pertaining to Death." Classic ad hoc Final Fantasy theme about the horrors of nihilism.

Sin is obvious

Don't know about ultimecia, though, other than the fact that "ulti" means most or full (ultimate)



Very insightful, Epoetker. Michael Eisner certainly has turned Disney productions into things that are rather heartless.

Viva Roy Disney!

[Epoetker]

Actually, VERY near the end, when playing as Riku, you get helped by a completely enigmatic and disguised guy called 'Diz,' who's presumably been watching your progress the whole time. His only clue to his identity is that he knows King Mickey. Gotta be Roy or even the ghost of Walt. 'Diz' is a lot more obvious than Ansem anyway.

[furay]

What an interesting post. You really might be onto something here!

[Epoetker]

It's also encouraging every GBA owner to get and play the game, which is really friggin' hard (in a good way) and much better than the first Kingdom Hearts IMHO. And the story scenes are actually what the game is played for, rather than the stuff you just mash the A button through.

[Epoetker]

Having finally beaten Ansem and seen Riku's ending, I'm going to have to say two things:

1. Hamster, stop reading if you haven't played through the game yet and have any intention at ALL of doing so.

2. All the rest of you, SPOILER WARNING!










The Organization, as near as I can tell, are the people running Disney corp. Few are truly evil, aside from Marluxia and Larxene, they're all generally dutiful clock-punchers who are very serious about their mission to unravel the secrets of the heart. A few telling quotes-like "Sora's partly one of us," give me the impression that Sora's either a representation of Disney, the company proper, or of Disney's fans. Considering that deep fandom is why people might want to work for them in the first place, there's bound to be some crossover.

In Sora's game, our hero is drawn into the Castle of Oblivion, and finds as he advances that he's slowly losing his old memories but gaining new ones. He attributes this to the saying a cryptic figure made before he entered-"Ahead you will find someone dear to you-but to find him, you must lose something dear." Unlike most cryptic sayings, this is all a lie to cover for the fact that the longer Sora stays in the castle, the longer their resident young witch, Namine, can replace Sora's memories with those made to create loyalty to her and her controllers in the Organization. Really dark stuff, actually, but it makes for the best quote in the game by a repentant Organization member-"Are you so bound by your chain of memories that you've forgotten what's in your heart?" The message of the game is that memories and the heart that cherishes them are deceitful above all things, with numerous examples.

It's easiest to believe that Namine, with her ability to change a person's memory of past events, represent's Disney's licenses. She's guarded as a precious treasure and ordered about at the whim of Marluxia, the dark marketeer. And what else do Disney's licenses represent other than the power to alter the collective and personal memories of past fairy tales and historical events by replacing images and qualities with what they decide?

Coming up later, Riku, the man from Japan!

[Piebald]

Thanks for the spoiler warning! That's not sarcasm, I stopped reading the moment I read "Hamster stop reading.."

[Epoetker]

Before I go into more speculation...Hamster, have you bought it yet, at least... I'm pretty sure you've played through the first....

[Piebald]

Actually I read the whole script at GameFAQs.com

[Epoetker]

Likewise for both the first and second as a refresher. Still fun to play nonetheless.

[Piebald]

I have played (and owned) the first.

That reminds me, I haven't attempted to get the sounds out of my copy of Kingdom Hearts yet...

[Epoetker]

I'm just going to review this post after having played the heck out of Kingdom Hearts 2 and seen the release data for two new KH games, 358/2 Days for the DS and KH: Birth by sleep for the PSP. How right was I? How wrong was I?

I'm pretty sure I was right about the backwards naming. KH2's opening theme song actually has several lines sung backward, perhaps the biggest hint of all that hiding secrets in backwards writing was a pastime of the game's creators for a long while.

Instead of evil businessmen, the Organization is made up of evil scientists-though 'evil' is less easily applied to any but the most senior leadership in this case. Axel, Vexen, Zexion, and Demyx are evidence enough of this, all being guys who'll go out of their way NOT to fight to the death for points of pride. But the Nobodies in the game are not hated so much for what they do so much as what they are. If you can speak in the tongues of men and angels, fathom all mysteries and all knowledge but have not a heart, you are Nothing-and deserve to be reminded of it every step of the way. Even Malificent helps out in the battle against these Nobodies, and gets accoladed for it-the difference between having a twisted and evil heart and having none at all is very, very, clearly demarcated. The Nobodies are an Organization in the worst sense of the word-they have no love or feeling for what they do, they simply do it for their own purposes, and see all other beings, worlds, and institutions as mere food in the path to what amounts to mere survival. Their power can rend the heavens and earth, their implacable murderousness makes them far more unsettling enemies than the occasionally-even-cute Heartless, their structures can dominate the landscape, and yet in the end they all fall to the same oblivion, though they try desperately to drag anything around them along.

DiZ, aka Ansem the wise, really DOES look like Roy Disney when the mask comes off. Yay me.

Forget most of the things I said about Namine or Riku, as their backstories are all upcoming.

[Little Shepherd]

I thought that the first Kingdom Hearts was okay, but nothing special. And at times the battle system and not-so-great camera controls made things harder than they had to be. I died a number of times simply because the lock-on didn't always work properly, the camera didn't rotate fast enough, and I simply couldn't see where my opponent was. It wasn't anything that made beating the game impossible(I did beat it), but if something's going to be difficult, I like it to be because it's actually difficult and not for some arbitrary reason like "bad camera angles." Overall, it was a nice game with an interesting story, and the optional quests were sometimes difficult, but not frustratingly so. So good balance there.

I didn't like Chain of Memories' gameplay at all. It brought back memories of Lost Kingdoms(another game in which all your attacks are governed by your deck of cards), which I also didn't care for. Give me smooth normal attacks at will and a magic meter for special effects anyday! I eventually got bored with the gameplay, and ended up finding a walkthrough(complete with pictures) of all the story segments. The story portions were neat, and led right into the next game. I just wish that it had been more action-RPG like the previous game instead of delivering everything I never wanted from a game and hope to never see again.

Kingdom Hearts 2 was awesome. Unsurprisingly, the combat system was very similar to the first game in the series, only they cleaned up the bad camera angles for the most part and added some neat features(special triangle-button moves, for one) that made it play really good. There were some difficult battles, of course, but I never experienced character death due to bad camera angles or anything like that. I think the level-up mechanism for some of your special costumes could have been less time-consuming, though. Square has this annoying habit of making character advancement and equipment way more difficult than it has to be, though KH2 has it easy compared to, say, FFXII. And I can honestly say that story-wise, I'm really interested to see what happens in future games in the series. I have a DS and my brother has a PSP, so I'm all set to play the portable games when they come out.

[Cerebrum123]

I realize that this thread is old ,but I am a HUGE fan of the KH series ,and both Birth By Sleep AND 358/2 days are out (and awesome). The next one to come out is called Dream Drop Distance for the 3DS ,and will support something called the "circle pad pro". It basically makes the system into a PS2 controller ,but with a screen built in.