So, I finally broke down and watched the Union X finale, because 4 days is too damn long to wait for the SENA team to get their act together (last time I'll bitch about SENA, I promise, but seriously—SCREW them!). And anyway, I've got a LOT of thoughts about what went on, and I'm anxious to hear your guys' thoughts as well.
1) So, first of all, I think it's safe to say, KHUX is officially the DARKEST storyline in the franchise, bar none. It feels so strange that this series was originally just a fun crossover where you play a young boy that goes around Disney worlds with Donald Duck and Goofy, and now we're talking about genocide, dead children, and massive human tragedy. I have to say, even I'm surprised with how dark this finale got and how straight tragic it was. And what we're presented with is dark enough, but when you stop and ponder the implications of it for a while, it starts to get a LOT sadder. For instance:
2) There's something really haunting about the fact that we know Ephemer and the Player character will never get to reunite. That the Player character died inside a cable and lost everything that ever mattered to him. And Ephemer had to go on and live all the rest of his days without ANY of the people that mattered to him, although at least he probably managed to find closure in knowing what happened to them by reading the Book of Prophecies. But this leads me to another point:
3) Xehanort is now considerably a more tragic character than he originally was. It's so depressing to think that Ephemer had to show up at the Keyblade Graveyard in KH3 to basically save Sora from the person that used to be his own best friend. And it's equally depressing to know that the Player character didn't reincarnate into somebody who lived a good life, but into someone who continued to suffer throughout their childhoods and who grew up into a selfish, evil sociopath hell bent on destroying the entire world and using people like pawns to achieve that end. I'm not sure I like this twist to be honest, because not only is it needlessly depressing, but it also doesn't really seem to mean anything aside from being a twist. Xehanort's gone now, and nobody's ever going to figure out that he was the reincarnation of a nameless hero who knew a guy that lived millennia ago. And beyond that,
4) The reincarnation issue opens up a WHOLE new can of worms for this series. I don't like it. We already had like ten different ways a person could metaphorically come back from the dead or cheat death already, but now we have people actually reincarnating from the dead. Which throws into confusion the whole purpose of a place like the Final World. I thought that a person died and their hearts went to Kingdom Hearts and that was it. Or does Kingdom Hearts refashion dead hearts into new ones? Or do you only reincarnate under specific circumstances? I wouldn't question this so heavily except that I KNOW that this is going to be used as a mechanism to bring back dead characters and to draw unnecessary connections like what this series has been doing from day one. Sora already had like fifteen different versions of himself running around, but now that reincarnation is on the table, I'm expecting we'll see MANY more connections. And I don't want that. It's too much.
5) Are we supposed to assume the Keyblade wielders that became Dream Eaters are still alive and can therefore be saved in the future, or are they just trapped as those things forever? Also, this revelation makes it ten times more depressing that those creatures are called Spirits.
6) Why does Scala look so different here? Is it just a different area of the world? All the islands that we saw in Scala before looked pretty uniform, so I don't know where this version of it could have been. Unless it's what Scala looked like in the past, in which case, I supposed we're to assume that Brain ended up at the same point in time around when Xehanort was born, since that's what the world looked like when he was an infant.
7) Btw, I find it hilarious that we actually got to see XEHANORT's mother before ever seeing Sora's.
8) Does this also mean we have confirmation that Eraqus is EPHEMER's descendent, and not Brain's? That threw me for a loop. How does one explain the resemblance, then? Just coincidence? Not gonna lie, that one feels like a bait-and-switch.
9) We know that seven of the thirteen Darknesses are going to be inside the Foretellers and the MoM, and one is inside Ventus. That leaves the other five trapped in the portal cable. Does that mean that the MoM's plan can't be completed if there are still Darknesses trapped in there that can't then be killed? Or will those ones become important in future titles?
10) Who was that old man that brought baby-nort to the Destiny Islands? And more importantly, did Xehanort never notice his dead body just laying there after he croaked?
11) Why does is real Daybreak Town getting destroyed like that? I thought the Union leaders would have emerged to find it already destroyed from the Keyblade war. But it looks like it's getting sucked up into the same kind of darkness that consumed the Destiny Islands. What the hell is going on? And why are there glitching effects? When I saw the scene the first time, I thought they were watching the Data-Daybreak Town disintegrating, but after rewatching it, I realized that scene took place out in the real world, which doesn't make any sense. Why is it still in the process of being destroyed even though the Keyblade War supposedly happened a good amount of time ago? And why is it getting destroyed in that way?
12) So, we never learned how Lauriam, Elrena, Skuld, and Ventus get amnesia. Maleficent didn't get amnesia after all. She still explicitly mentions her conversation with Darkness in Olympus in KH3, so we know she remembers her journey there, if only vaguely. So time travelling shouldn't erase one's memories. For Lauriam and Elrena, you could make the case that they only lost their memories when they got turned into Nobodies and Ventus when Master Xehanort split his heart, but then how does that explain Skuld, if she is indeed Subject X (she could be Strelitzia, though, come to think of it). Also, we never see how Lauriam, Elrena, and Ventus get revived in the future—who revived them (Luxu?), and why in those specific places?
13) After all of this, I just realized that we never actually saw the X-Blade, the namesake of this whole saga of games. I suppose maybe the X-Blade was actually a product of the previous Keyblade War that the MoM has spoken about.
14) I have to say, now that it's over, even though the ending FELT really powerful, I don't think I can say this was a particularly strong entry in the KH canon. Not by story standards, and CERTAINLY not by gameplay standards. I feel like this ending would have hit a LOT harder if the main story had spent more time developing these characters' relationships and doing more of importance rather than wasting so much time on the filler Disney worlds, and moreover the Player character should have had considerably more time on screen with the Union leaders. The copious amounts of lore do not qualify this as a good narrative to me. All the exposition and world-building in the world can't make up for the lack of genuine character interaction and emotional moments. And sorry, but making the Player character turn into Xehanort at the end doesn't fix his character, it doesn't change Xehanort's character, and it doesn't really add anything to the story, except introduce yet another plot device that has terrible potential for abuse, which is the LAST thing this series needs right now.
So, those are my opinions, tell me what you guys think.
1) So, first of all, I think it's safe to say, KHUX is officially the DARKEST storyline in the franchise, bar none. It feels so strange that this series was originally just a fun crossover where you play a young boy that goes around Disney worlds with Donald Duck and Goofy, and now we're talking about genocide, dead children, and massive human tragedy. I have to say, even I'm surprised with how dark this finale got and how straight tragic it was. And what we're presented with is dark enough, but when you stop and ponder the implications of it for a while, it starts to get a LOT sadder. For instance:
2) There's something really haunting about the fact that we know Ephemer and the Player character will never get to reunite. That the Player character died inside a cable and lost everything that ever mattered to him. And Ephemer had to go on and live all the rest of his days without ANY of the people that mattered to him, although at least he probably managed to find closure in knowing what happened to them by reading the Book of Prophecies. But this leads me to another point:
3) Xehanort is now considerably a more tragic character than he originally was. It's so depressing to think that Ephemer had to show up at the Keyblade Graveyard in KH3 to basically save Sora from the person that used to be his own best friend. And it's equally depressing to know that the Player character didn't reincarnate into somebody who lived a good life, but into someone who continued to suffer throughout their childhoods and who grew up into a selfish, evil sociopath hell bent on destroying the entire world and using people like pawns to achieve that end. I'm not sure I like this twist to be honest, because not only is it needlessly depressing, but it also doesn't really seem to mean anything aside from being a twist. Xehanort's gone now, and nobody's ever going to figure out that he was the reincarnation of a nameless hero who knew a guy that lived millennia ago. And beyond that,
4) The reincarnation issue opens up a WHOLE new can of worms for this series. I don't like it. We already had like ten different ways a person could metaphorically come back from the dead or cheat death already, but now we have people actually reincarnating from the dead. Which throws into confusion the whole purpose of a place like the Final World. I thought that a person died and their hearts went to Kingdom Hearts and that was it. Or does Kingdom Hearts refashion dead hearts into new ones? Or do you only reincarnate under specific circumstances? I wouldn't question this so heavily except that I KNOW that this is going to be used as a mechanism to bring back dead characters and to draw unnecessary connections like what this series has been doing from day one. Sora already had like fifteen different versions of himself running around, but now that reincarnation is on the table, I'm expecting we'll see MANY more connections. And I don't want that. It's too much.
5) Are we supposed to assume the Keyblade wielders that became Dream Eaters are still alive and can therefore be saved in the future, or are they just trapped as those things forever? Also, this revelation makes it ten times more depressing that those creatures are called Spirits.
6) Why does Scala look so different here? Is it just a different area of the world? All the islands that we saw in Scala before looked pretty uniform, so I don't know where this version of it could have been. Unless it's what Scala looked like in the past, in which case, I supposed we're to assume that Brain ended up at the same point in time around when Xehanort was born, since that's what the world looked like when he was an infant.
7) Btw, I find it hilarious that we actually got to see XEHANORT's mother before ever seeing Sora's.
8) Does this also mean we have confirmation that Eraqus is EPHEMER's descendent, and not Brain's? That threw me for a loop. How does one explain the resemblance, then? Just coincidence? Not gonna lie, that one feels like a bait-and-switch.
9) We know that seven of the thirteen Darknesses are going to be inside the Foretellers and the MoM, and one is inside Ventus. That leaves the other five trapped in the portal cable. Does that mean that the MoM's plan can't be completed if there are still Darknesses trapped in there that can't then be killed? Or will those ones become important in future titles?
10) Who was that old man that brought baby-nort to the Destiny Islands? And more importantly, did Xehanort never notice his dead body just laying there after he croaked?
11) Why does is real Daybreak Town getting destroyed like that? I thought the Union leaders would have emerged to find it already destroyed from the Keyblade war. But it looks like it's getting sucked up into the same kind of darkness that consumed the Destiny Islands. What the hell is going on? And why are there glitching effects? When I saw the scene the first time, I thought they were watching the Data-Daybreak Town disintegrating, but after rewatching it, I realized that scene took place out in the real world, which doesn't make any sense. Why is it still in the process of being destroyed even though the Keyblade War supposedly happened a good amount of time ago? And why is it getting destroyed in that way?
12) So, we never learned how Lauriam, Elrena, Skuld, and Ventus get amnesia. Maleficent didn't get amnesia after all. She still explicitly mentions her conversation with Darkness in Olympus in KH3, so we know she remembers her journey there, if only vaguely. So time travelling shouldn't erase one's memories. For Lauriam and Elrena, you could make the case that they only lost their memories when they got turned into Nobodies and Ventus when Master Xehanort split his heart, but then how does that explain Skuld, if she is indeed Subject X (she could be Strelitzia, though, come to think of it). Also, we never see how Lauriam, Elrena, and Ventus get revived in the future—who revived them (Luxu?), and why in those specific places?
13) After all of this, I just realized that we never actually saw the X-Blade, the namesake of this whole saga of games. I suppose maybe the X-Blade was actually a product of the previous Keyblade War that the MoM has spoken about.
14) I have to say, now that it's over, even though the ending FELT really powerful, I don't think I can say this was a particularly strong entry in the KH canon. Not by story standards, and CERTAINLY not by gameplay standards. I feel like this ending would have hit a LOT harder if the main story had spent more time developing these characters' relationships and doing more of importance rather than wasting so much time on the filler Disney worlds, and moreover the Player character should have had considerably more time on screen with the Union leaders. The copious amounts of lore do not qualify this as a good narrative to me. All the exposition and world-building in the world can't make up for the lack of genuine character interaction and emotional moments. And sorry, but making the Player character turn into Xehanort at the end doesn't fix his character, it doesn't change Xehanort's character, and it doesn't really add anything to the story, except introduce yet another plot device that has terrible potential for abuse, which is the LAST thing this series needs right now.
So, those are my opinions, tell me what you guys think.
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