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Kingdom Hearts III Pre-Release Spoiler Discussion Thread



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Raz

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The_Echo

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Uploads of Face My Fears are slowly trickling in on YouTube
Got to hear all of the Japanese version and then the video got removed immediately
 

furusatoe

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Face My Fears has been uploaded/removed from YouTube for at least a week now. I'm curious to see if Square will release it along with the opening video tomorrow, or if they'll just release the audio.
 

Twilight Lumiair

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I think it's clear that Aqua really isn't herself, man.

I really hope so, don't get me wrong. Honestly, I'm just trying to be objective here. It's not just her in-battle dialouge that pushed me to say that, she talks about being in misery and pain in the trailers too. Looking at all of that diolouge in addition to the "you're too late" kinda spells out a pretty clear picture. I just don't see many other ways to interpret it without assuming they're not even her words at all, and that, to me, would just make the whole subplot of her falling to darkness a waste of time.
 

DraceEmpressa

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I wonder what will that leaker post to divert all the attention from this trailer to his leaks again.
 

notnow123487

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Face My Fears has been uploaded/removed from YouTube for at least a week now. I'm curious to see if Square will release it along with the opening video tomorrow, or if they'll just release the audio.

They already said they’re not releasing the opening before release.
 

alexis.anagram

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Yeah, a poster on another forum referred to it as character assassination, and I think that sums it up pretty well in one word. It's worse than that, though, because it's a wasted opportunity to expand the dialogue surrounding what darkness and light are in this universe: we're constantly told that darkness is not evil, but all we ever see is its destructive capacity and people being victimized by it. With KH3, I feel like we should be well past the point of wringing our hands over who is and isn't going to fall to darkness, and characters like Sora should have a much stronger grasp of how darkness is just another state of existence.

Basically the only arguments to justify Aqua's condition are that she gave up and allowed all her malicious intentions to take root in her heart, and/or the big bad darkness forcibly corrupted her after she lost the capacity to fight it back. Neither are consistent with the story we've been told so far.

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But the saga began with Leon, Yuffie, Aerith, Cid and Cloud all participating in the events of the series. That's five FF characters, six if you count Sephiroth in International/FM, and eight or nine if you count the DI kids. So by your own metric KH3 falls short of the mark.
 

furusatoe

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Twilight Lumiair

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furusatoe

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Sephiroth0812

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Mizunashi

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alexis.anagram

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And it's exactly this sort of sloppy writing and characterization that simply does not suffice in KH3. We can all allow for the fact that some installments were bound to be handled with less care than others (which is not the same as saying they're not due their share of criticism). But KH3 stands as the final testament as to how and why all of these personal stories are meant to converge in a way that fulfills the promise of everything that has come before, and it's nowhere close to doing that.

Let's imagine that we have a pretty clear concept of how Aqua's arc is mapped out in this game and consider what that entails. After we've finished all of the Disney worlds which we now know make up the vast bulk of the game's story, Sora decides it's finally time to go rescue Aqua since I guess that wasn't a real priority or maybe all the protagonists figured what the diddly, she's already lost to darkness how about we leave her alone down there for a few more weeks while we rehash the same Disney world lessons two or three times and then if we've got time after that maybe we'll see what we can do for her. Everybody is now a Mickey, but that's fine. Next up, Sora goes and rescues her, because KH3 is now The Sora Show and if you had any interest in other characters who aren't named Sora, you might as well hang your hopes up right now because Nomura's about to show you exactly the wrong way to go about structuring an ensemble drama so that each plot thread is sure not to be effectively mined and fulfilled. Aqua is rescued, but there's only a couple of hours left in the game, so now what? She gets maybe two cutscenes to reflect on the 10+ RoL years she spent down in the RoD and how that so changed her as a person that she actually became Darkness Incarnate and tried to kill her friends and the people she had placed all of her hopes in for the entirety of her exile, until the last five minutes when some particularly nasty guy conveniently turned up and managed to break her spirit? And then she's going to be right back on the beat with Sora and the gang without hardly even a moment to catch her breath, and that's believable because she is both naturally given to despair and hopelessness and capable of recovering from all that seething hatred she had built up without a second thought. This is at once a very true and realistic depiction of how depressed and suicidal people operate and also a magical fantasy scenario where none of that actually matters in the long run because when duty calls, heroes get to it, with the power of friendship! But hey, if the game/its fans want to argue out of both sides of their mouth, what's wrong with that?

What's wrong with it is that no matter how we approach this plotline, it's value subtracted. We don't get any real insight into Aqua's nature as a person or the RoD's nature as a setting. Whatever we do get is almost certain to be curtailed and contrived, more a means of operating the plot vehicle than developing Aqua and her relationship with the dark/light dichotomy of the KH universe. What makes it worse is that they didn't have to go this route, it was not demanded in any way by the progression of events up to this moment, as 0.2 set up Aqua's arc perfectly: her wavering self-confidence buoyed by the ultimate truth of her resilience and a sense of personal and universal purpose which would carry her through until she found a path out of the darkness. That totally works and there are so many ways they could have integrated her into the larger narrative of KH3 from its earliest chapters in order to affirm the empowering contexts of her journey, and they decided against all of them so that she could remain lost and alone for even longer than she already has.
 

Grono

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... Anti-Aqua is cool? I'm just going to leave it there?

I wonder if the same people that hated Luke Skywalker making bad decisions later in life are also people that hate the anti-aqua arc.
 

The_Echo

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I don't really see the issue with Anti-Aqua
Darkness is an element governing negative behaviors, emotions, and the general concept of chaos and destruction
The Realm of Darkness is an entire Realm where darkness reigns uninhibited--stronger than anywhere else with no light to temper it
Entire worlds can be warped beyond recognition, and the laws that used to bind them no longer apply

She's been there for 10 years, but her experienced time could be shorter or longer (even though she physically hasn't aged, it could still feel, to her, to be a significantly longer period)
She's constantly fighting Heartless, and her own darkness being emboldened by the oppressive darkness that surrounds her at all times simply by being there

She gets a boost every now and then, but there are long stretches between those chance meetings where she's struggling with everything by herself.
It's not like she's got a Darkness Meter that reduces to 0 whenever she finds a friend or something, and then she starts the process all over again
It's a constant drain on her mind and body and it really shouldn't be a big deal that it finally overtook her
Fighting with Ansem bare-handed probably doesn't help either
 
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