Alethea & Athena (double_dear) wrote,
Alethea & Athena

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It's here!!!

Last night, we went to Skywalk with our ward. It's a placed where they got a bunch of trampolines all lined up together so you can bounce from one to the other, all around the big room. It's pretty awesome, except for the fact that it makes us feel very old. We each had enough stamina to bounce around for about thirty seconds (a minute, tops) before we had to take a break for about six or seven minutes. The place offers trampoline exercise classes, and it's really tempting to sign up, but we'd need someone to sign up with us. Then we can get skyfit! Woohoo!

Also, if a place makes you sign a waiver of liability, they're not joking around. The first thing I did when we got there was land really hard on my ankle on one of the trampoline borders, so my ankle was bothering me the whole night. It wasn't serious, though, and now it's feeling much better.

But more importantly!!! Kingdom Hearts 3D got here this morning and it's super awesome! It's also kind of...eerie...? I don't know if that's the right word, but the subtitle "Dream Drop Distance" is scarily accurate, because it's just like how when you dream about something you like a lot and you know really well, only in your dream, it's different, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but then when you think about it in the morning, it feels kind of creepy.

For example, the first place you go is Traverse Town. Aaah, Traverse Town, how we've missed you since Chain of Memories... Only it's not quite the Traverse Town we're familiar with. First of all, since you're not fighting Heartless, the enemies there are way different...okay, not way different, but significantly different, mostly in the fact that they're all pastel-colored. This adds to the eerie dreamlike effect. But the world itself is exactly the same, except for some boxes placed here and there to keep you from going inside places you used to go into before (the item shop, Gepetto's house, the Dalmatian house, etc.)...until! suddenly it's completely different!

Sora goes into the underground post office, and Riku goes through this weird fountain system. It's so bizarre! Awesome, but bizarre.

Speaking of Sora and Riku! First of all, I really like their new outfits. I think it's interesting that Sora's got the X across his chest that Ventus, Terra, and Aqua all wear (only his is just painted on his shirt, and theirs were actual straps of some kind), while Riku's got the symbol of the Spirit Dream Eaters on his back.

I'm a little sad about Riku's hair. I mean, he never had the best hair, but we were playing the first Kingdom Hearts, and I was like, "Oh, Riku. I'm so glad you grew your hair out." It looked kinda weird in KH2, but they've improved their graphics technology since then, I'm sure, and it just looks odd the way it sticks out like that. But now it's even shorter than it was in KH1! Why!?

Storywise, it kind of makes sense, because Riku would be like, "Well, as long as I'm letting myself see stuff again, I might as well get a haircut and get all this hair out of my eyes." But I can't help but wonder if they keep giving Riku bad haircuts as a meager attempt to remind people that Sora's supposed to be the awesome one. Can't they both be awesome?

The other odd thing about this game is they keep making it seem like we're missing something. It's how they do the explanations, really, because they just throw you into the story this time. Every other Kingdom Hearts has a tutorial, and then somebody tells the main character what all's going on, and then you go into the story. Not this time! And not only that, but they add to the weird dreamy disconnect by having Sora and Riku in their original outfits at Destiny Islands getting attacked by Ursula. The heck?

So after you learn how to fight by going through a real battle (or probably a dream battle, or something), then they give you the option of watching a flashback where Yen Sid explains to Sora and Riku part of what all's going on.

The opening movie didn't help with the disconnect, either! Oh! The opening movie! Oooooooohhh♥ I love it! It starts with Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey (my favorite!) walking onto the screen and conjuring stuff (just like in Fantasmic!), and then it goes into a big fancy, fully-rendered recap of the whole series. (During the fancy stuff, Mickey stays on the bottom screen of the DS, dancing and reacting to whatever's happening.) Apparently the Square-Enix people had the same idea about hand-drawn animation 3D that we do, because it starts with a pop-up book version of Destiny Islands. And at the end, Sora, Riku, Aqua, Terra, Ventus (or is it Roxas?), and maybe some other people are all fighting Xehanort, so it was like, "What!? I don't remember that part!"

Anyway, then! Sora goes to Traverse Town and runs into the kid from This World Ends With You, and we were like, "No fair!! We've been wanting to play that game forever but we haven't yet!" We even almost got Mom to give us the money for it for Christmas (back in 2010). But we never did, and now we're meeting all the characters in Kingdom Hearts first. Sigh. Oh well. They seem like fun characters.

It was neat to see the different ways Sora and Riku react to situations. Sora runs into Neku and says, "You look like you need my help, so you're gonna get it whether you like it or not!" And Riku runs into Joshua who says, "Hey, I could use your help," and Riku's like, "Don't trust you. Bye."

And all the while, there are about a million tutorials that make it take forever to progress through the game. Oh! And! and! You play as Sora and Riku at the same time, but they're not doing the same stuff! It's like how we always wanted to play Chain of Memories! Only I'm getting a "be careful what you wish for" vibe, because the switching back and forth also adds to the dreamy disconnect. When we played Chain of Memories, we were going to stop at reasonable places, but in Dream Drop Distance, they'll automatically switch you to the other character RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A BOSS BATTLE! (That didn't happen, but it could have. And then they would have dropped us right back into the middle of that battle when time ran out as Sora!) Of course, you can choose to switch before time runs out, but then you don't get as many points. Oh, Square-Enix. They sure know how to manipulate their players.

We finally got Riku out of weird dream Traverse Town (Sora's still doin' stuff there), and we saw the next batch of worlds, and somehow I doubt they're going to help with the weird dreamy effect. Especially the Grid, and Prankster's Paradise. We're not sure where that is exactly, but we think it's Pleasure Island. We'll find out soon enough. But! we're kind of excited to see that we can go to Hunchback of Notre Dame World! ...We really need to watch that again, as we've been sort of halfway meaning to for a couple years now.

And that concludes this session of Kingdom Hearts squeeing. We need to get back to playing!

Today I'm thankful for getting our copy of Kingdom Hearts 3D, the FedEx guy coming to our door again (when he came yesterday, he made sure to tell me where to look if we're expecting a package and don't see it, so I was a little worried), having plenty of time to play today (though we wish we had more), Page making things a little more interesting, and having Kingdom Hearts AR Cards (maybe someday we'll figure out how those things work).
Tags: kingdom hearts 3d, skywalk

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