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  • I'm aiming to make a story that's spiritually akin to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in that it takes the cast of characters we know and love and takes them out of their comfort zone. For example, Riku has moved to Radiant Garden and has succeeded Ansem the Wise as the world's new leader, whilst also acting as one of the head Keyblade Masters. Sora still lives on Destiny Islands, and has been an Innkeeper since he graduated school, buying and remodeling the old house where Master Xehanort had grown up in many, many years prior. But yeah, I don't blame you for listening to upbeat stuff! :) I listen to plenty of that too, just when I think the story calls for it.
    I listen to a lot of different genres, but most of it is hard rock and heavy metal. A band I've been listening to a lot lately that's been influencing me is Queensryche. The new self-titled album is pretty cinematic for me. :) This song is sort of a theme song for a KH fanfic I've been working on lately. If you'd like, I can PM you some of the details on it! :D

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsfdeIdUZ6w
    Interesting! :D For me, I've always envisioned scenes and stories while listening to different songs and the trick for me often is to figure out how to properly describe what I'm seeing in my head with words. xD Sometimes the scenes are based from the lyrics of a song, sometimes it's just the music itself that paints a picture in my head. :)
    That too~ :D

    What influences you the most when you come up with an idea for a story? For me, it's music. :)
    It doesn't necessarily take advantage of a smaller environment, but it is possible to utilize the Monomyth in a smaller, more condensed environment. Really, the Monomyth applies to a lot of stories. Look at The World Ends With You, for example. It follows the Monomyth and its set within a single district in a city. Yet, the culture and activity within that single area is so vital to the story. So I think it's possible to do a Hero's Journey in a small rural town in North Carolina. As for a specific genre, I'd say it's drama and adventure.

    However, it's just a concept I'll be suggesting to the rest of the group. It could very well end up being another idea from someone else in the group that gets picked.
    Nice! :D

    The concept I'm working on is my own take on the Monomyth. :) The plots and characters of the film projects my group has done to date have been 'eh', and really indecisive as to how they should behave. So I decided that the best way for us to improve was to go back to the basics and look at doing something with classic archetype characters and follow the Hero's Journey. From there, we can add in our own flourishes and nuances once everything has been more established. :)
    lol I'm sure there's some movie out there already named that. But still, epic title! ;D

    Indeed! :) I'm stuck in a small rural town in North Carolina, but I'm working on a concept I want to propose to the rest of the film group that would be an epic plot and journey, but actually utilize the small environment we're stuck in to our advantage. :D
    I can't really complain, personally. It's worked out rather well for me so far. :) But yeah, I hear ya. Whenever I envision making a film, I'm always day-dreaming of being on sets all over the world and filming all sorts of epic stuff. @w@
    lol The craziness that would ensue~ ;D But yeah, I'm sticking around in North Carolina, I think. At least until I graduate college. I'm currently at a community college, majoring in Associate In Arts. IDK what specific category I'll study in when I transfer.
    Exactamundo! :)

    Probably, yeah. Either something film-related or as a writer, most likely. If I can break my soda addiction, get singing lessons and get back into playing musical instruments, I might look into that too. xD
    Yeah, it IS a bit strange. I actually saw some posts I had made just two or three years ago not too long ago and I was surprised at how much my opinion on a lot of those posts had changed since then.

    Nice! :D I've actually been working on some low-budget film projects with a teen film group at the local library for the past year and a half. :) Best of luck to you on that man!
    I just realized that we haven't chatted in almost two years! D: Dude, how are you?
    Um....o_O...why did you give me the Vidya Gamer award? I'm not complaining, but I don't think I deserve it.
    "It was cool because of the message in the bottle." - LOL'd. I won't argue with that. xP

    AGAIN, I apologize for the wall o' text. >< I need to work on concise language.

    I completely agree, and I really think that's something KH1 and CoM did better than any of the other games (well, BBS did a bit of it, too). The Disney worlds were the places where we got to learn what the characters were thinking and handling under the surface: remember in KH1 Neverland when Sora had to confront the fact that not only was Kairi farther from him than ever despite being in the same place as him, but that his best friend appeared to be lost to him as well? Or when he and Donald had that spat in Deep Jungle that ended with the two of them (and Goofy) becoming the deeply connected, inseparable team that we know them to be now? I mean, in basically one world, you fell in love with these guys. It was brilliant writing, because the rest of the game relied on your willingness to believe that they really were best of friends; that was how the moment when they leave him in Hollow Bastion felt so saddening, and how it felt like such a victory when they defended him against Riku in spite of their mission. And then Sora gives that seminal monologue about the nature of power and "my heart's made a home in all the friends I've made" and suddenly I'm just crying and. D': Ahem. Yeah. Brilliant writing.

    Meanwhile in DDD it felt like Sora barely cared about the worlds he visited or the people he met. I know he did, but the game never gave it that inflection; for the players and the characters, the Disney worlds just felt like obligatory run-through levels. In BBS and Days, at least you could argue that the characters had to be a bit stealth and so they couldn't get attached to the Disney characters in their worlds or interact with them too heavily, but DDD really dropped the ball on the Disney writing. Like, Cite de Cloches in DDD was just a mess. Not only was the plot basically tossed in as cliff notes, jumping from event to event and missing all of the requisite emotional beats of the original film, but Sora and Riku were essentially background characters, watching everything happen and then smacking the bad guy with their Keyblade when required to. Like I said, it was all very routine, which is sad since the Disney worlds are one of the things I look forward to (and occasionally dread) every game. :/
    ohmygawd, I'm so sorry for that wall of text. Where did that even come from. I swear I have typing asperger's or something. D:
    Actually, I totally agree with you about the writing in KH. Some of (maybe even most of) my favorite KH moments are wordless, involving little to no dialogue, and simply allowing what's occurring visually to tell the story (in DDD, I love the moment when Ven's Heart comes to protect Sora as he's falling into darkness; I think it's gorgeously depicted and brings the story back to being about Sora's fate and Riku's decision). I think the problem is that Nomura feels compelled to explain things that need no explaining, or that are much more interesting when left open to interpretation. Exposition kills creative reasoning; it forces everything into a box of rules and limitations, and too many of those are littered throughout the KH-verse at this point. Rules about how Nobodies and Heartless are made, rules about how time travel works, rules about the Heart, about the various Keyblades, about the Realms and Xehanorts and Clones and Memories...a lot of it still works as good solid fantasy and magic, which were the building blocks of the first few games, but starting with KH2 (and increasingly with most games since) everything suddenly needed to be written into a framework under which much of it has steadily dulled into volumes of sci-fi-ish gibberish. It's like Nomura's afraid that if he doesn't have one character or another give an excessively wordy lecture to explain every new concept his fans will eat him alive. One of the things I love about the writing for games like KH1, CoM and 358/2 Days is that the games themselves were always about the characters and the stories they had to tell; they didn't spend time establishing every layer of every plot device-- what was revealed was left to the journals and the secret reports so that the players could piece the bits together themselves; and the concepts themselves were generally simplistic enough that he could reasonably do that. When the characters spoke to each other, by and large, it didn't feel like an unnatural attempt to clue the player in to what's happening. It was always about moving the characters forward toward their respective end-point, and making you care about what happened to them-- not just why it was happening, but the fact that it was happening at all.

    As long as it's done through flashbacks (in the way a lot of people were expecting from DDD), I think I'd be OK with that. On the other hand, we pretty much know Xehanort's story: I'm not sure we need to be shown it, in the same way that the Keyblade War suffices as it stands, an aspect of a mythological history that we'll likely never see in-game but understand to have occurred in some form or another. The only reason it would be pertinent to give Young Xehanort a clearer story line would be to resolve what happened with Terra after the split in Terranort's Heart and Body. And even then, they could have used DDD for this, easily. And even then, they don't really have to show us the past: it's already a relevant interest to Sora et al as they search for TAV, so they're going to discover what happened with that at some point in the present. Ugh, unless the only way to save him involves time travel. Just kill me. Anyway, I know it could work as a way of resolving the main antagonist's story for good, but I honestly think it would be more effective to give him some kind of brief dying confessional: make it a character moment where he expresses how desperate for power he was and how he was drawn astray. Maybe he doesn't even have to see the error of his ways, but rather than simply checking it off the list of "things that need to be addressed in KH3," they could give it some emotional depth and let him (preferably Master Xehanort because ungh Leonard Nimoy would make me cry, guarantee it) be the one to tell us what happened to him (kind of like AtW's final monologue in KH2, which I thought was a very effective bit of writing).

    It wasn't only that fans expected it (let's not kid ourselves; a good deal of the time, fans in any fandom have no idea what's best for them), it was that Nomura facilitated the hype with teasing, evasive answers as to his identity when the entire time he could have just saved everyone the disappointment and been like, "It's Xehanort's self from the past." or something to that effect. Instead he kept referring to this figure as a "mystery character" (he wasn't) and trying to cause players to speculate as to how and why he was in the game (turns out it was time travel SURPRISE and he was just there to...be there, and explain time travel). I guess the problem was that DDD lacked a "key reveal" in the way that every other portable game had to make it feel important (Days had the WHO'S THAT HOODED GIRL thing, BBS had the WHAT HAPPENS TO TAV AND HOW DO THEY FIT INTO ALL OF THIS thing, Coded had the...well Coded had fun gameplay) and DDD needed something living up to that expectation that they could market to the magazines and the gaming journals. Haha, that's it, my final thesis on this matter is that Young Xehanort is the consequence of the commercial prostitution of art! x'D
    BACARDI IT IS. >D Rum is yum! Actually I'm slightly curious now.

    I'm not saying the KH series as a whole isn't suited to interpretation. It makes great use of symbolism and metaphor and has a pretty deep philosophical backbone for a Disney product, but not every plot element can be justified on the basis of its potential "deeper" meaning. At least for me, at some point you have to ask if it works as prescribed, or else there's nothing left to critique, and no way to hold the writing accountable when it doesn't flow as it should, and no way to encourage improvement on the part of the writers. Of course, all of these qualifications are subjective themselves, but such is the nature of art analysis. :p

    Yeah, but if he does come back in KH3, they're going to have to write him yet another plot hole to squeeze through. His task was apparently completed with DDD, and he was supposed to return to his own time and allow everything to occur as it would with his future selves. There was no reason to have him in the game at all. :/

    What I meant was that him being Young Xehanort was always the most obvious answer. Back before DDD was released I was convinced that the character couldn't be Young Xehanort because it was too obvious and Nomura would have no reason to conceal his identity in interviews and such. I thought we were being deliberately misled with his outward appearance and that the character would turn out to be someone or something significant and unexpected that would change the game in some meaningful way. I really don't know how oblivious Nomura thinks we are, but I find it unlikely that anyone who had been paying attention was shocked by the "time travel" revelation considering it was a widespread joke within the fandom (there's no way they would really introduce time travel as a concept, that'd be so dumb!-- remember those days?) for months before the game's release. So when the reveal did come, I'm not sure how impressed I was supposed to be.
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