D
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Orrr you could use wonderful AU's like this one to create your own headcanon.
It's a literary thing.
What do you think of 358/2 Days?
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That is dumb as hell, and it seemed in the begening like that it would have at least SOME relevance.
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It does. It's just relevance on a symbolic, character and thematic level instead of a plot one.
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To add some sick irony to the situation, I guess? What Absent and Audo said works too, I suppose. And not every object has to be a MacGuffin in the plot to be a thing, you know. Little things. Little things...
Just because you can't see anything doesn't mean there's nothing there. Try this, who gets the stick? Who is the stick given to and when? Why did this person hold on to it for too long?
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Oh, okay. I for some reason thought it would be lol.
I always try and focus on the main plot of kingdom hearts to try and understand it, so i never really payed any attention to small details like that.
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Okay, let's look at SDG. I didn't really sense any drama between them except Donald and Goofy abandoning them, yet they're probably the most developed trio in the series. Why couldn't RAX be the same thing? I mean not trying to put in random melodramatic crap, but it could've been a bit more?
I'm probably saying the same thing over and over but THE WASTED POTENTIAL >.<
I'm probably saying the same thing over and over but THE WASTED POTENTIAL >.<
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That's not it lol. There's only one WINNER stick in the game. Roxas gets it early on and at the end of the game he leaves it for Axel.
There was drama, it just wasn't the crux of the plot. Donald and Sora fight in Deep Jungle. They fight in Traverse Town when Sora wants Riku to come with them. The aforementioned abandoning thing etc.
I don't really know if I would call them the most developed trio either. All of their development is really in KH1 with the other titles just having them be happy go-along-ers more or less. I like SDG but the reason why their trio seems the most complete is because, post-KH1, they don't have to uphold the plot. Donald and Goofy tag along and they all get along well together, but there's also no real focus on them anymore as a result either. Meanwhile you also have the fact that the two other major trios, TAV and RAX, only have one game to them. And it's typically the first game for a trio that has that trio being tested the most, so of course it's dramatic stuff.
Idk. I think SDG is one of the trios that is most fully depicted and realized (and perhaps healthiest) but I don't know if I would say that is the same as them being the most developed. How has their relationship really grown or changed, both as individuals and as a unit since post-KH1?
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I'm curious. Which trio do you think is the most well-developed, between the three characters involved?
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thank you finally someone said it.
The most that happened after KH1 with them was the CoM plot, but you could say it didn't count as much as their KH1 conflict because Sora's head was completely overtaken by Namine's power and fake memories at the time.
Tbh I rather not SDG have some plot heavy drama in KH3 for the sake of "including them" again, since this game is mostly going to be about the other two trios, mostly the BBS trio, coming back to the RoL. Forcing SDG to be front and center again would derail that. Their roles would probably be similar to how it was in KH2, which it should be at this point and is actually fine.
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Well there maybe was drama in SDG, but at least it wasn't melodramatic lol
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I have played 358/2 Days more than I ever actually wanted to, and more than anyone ever should. That is, to 100% (inlcuding collecting 358 Crowns solo). Not to mention watching the I.5 cutscenes two or three times.
So I feel like I have a pretty comprehensive grasp of what Days is, in its entirety.
In a word, it's terrible.
The gameplay is pretty much objectively awful, the antithesis of fun and engaging.
Roxas is incredibly slow, even with maxed out movement abilities. The different movesets for the Keyblades vary from also very slow to "I can't hit a goddamn thing what is happening."
This carries over to every other playable character in Mission Mode as well. Especially Mickey.
But the melee combos kind of don't matter, because unless you land a critical hit, they do only the smallest amount of damage. The only way to do real damage in this game is to use magic.
This is because the enemies have absurdly huge HP bars, or absurdly high defense, or both (e.g. Dustflier).
But magic was changed to work based on uses per mission, rather than MP. This is a horrible decision for multiple reasons:
1. You don't really know what you may want/need for the mission unless you've played it already.
2. It takes away valuable space in your Panels.
With this change comes the change wherein every level of a spell functions differently. Unfortunately, this generally means that the base spell is the most effective. Fire still does good damage, and actually homes in on the target, whereas Firaga isn't that much stronger, and does not home at all. Why would I use Firaga? Generally you will wind up only ever needing one version of any given spell for the entirety of the game.
Back to Panels, it was a good idea done very, very poorly. I say it's a good idea because Re:coded did the same thing only it was actually good. Panels gives you 120 slots maximum to compile your levels, Keyblade, items, spells, ring, backpack upgrades and abilities. Just 120 slots. It simply isn't enough for all of that stuff.
This was done, I suppose, because Panels are the "loadout" for this game, it being mission-based. But editing loadouts for every mission is super boring and nobody wants to bother with that. I did so when completing Challenges, but at that point it's more or less mandatory.
The mission-based structure was a huge misstep, once again having been upstaged by Re:coded's adaptation of the same mechanic (the objectives in System Sectors).
It completely kills the momentum of the game, constantly interrupting you; this is something I wind up hating in every game that tries to do this. I see the rationale behind the idea, but since this game was on DS, there's no reason to cut the game up into chunks like this. The DS has a sleep mode function. Even Chain of Memories didn't pull this and it was entirely without such a function.
Because the game takes place in missions, but not all missions are important, you wind up spending much of the game being forced into fighting small-fry Heartless, which in other Kingdom Hearts titles are completely skippable as you make your way to the next main objective. What this means is that the "filler" in the other games is now the main course in Days. It makes the game feel like a chore.
The mission structure also gives way to Challenges, which...
First of all, nearly all of them are time trials. It would have made more sense to just make them all time trials, because it's seriously like 70% time trial, 30% everything else.
In time trials, you can complete the objective in time but still get a lower ranking on the way back to the Corridor. I hate that.
Many if not all of the Challenges have you going up against beefed up versions of the enemies, or having your own stats capped. So what in the main game was already a painfully tedious chip-damage mashfest becomes even more so.
Unless I'm forgetting something, I think that's all I have to say about the gameplay.
So I'll go over graphics really quick.
Yes, it's a DS game, so expectations are low. However, the game looks like trash.
Now, this isn't a huge problem while playing the game, although I will never get over the Shadow's 2D limbs.
No, this is a problem because the game chose to use the 3D assets for the cutscenes. Once again, Re:coded avoided this mistake by using sprites (which were compressed from high-res renders, no less), as well as doing some actually good character modeling (no more paddle hands).
I keep comparing to Re:coded, which is perhaps unfair since it was h.a.n.d.'s second attempt at a KH game, but I think it's useful in highlighting how Days went wrong.
That's really all there is to say about the graphical presentation.
Finally, the story.
Oh, the story.
For those of you who don't know, Nomura didn't actually write Days. I mean, he did. He was a scenario writer.
But the person in charge of the plot was Tomoco Kanemaki, who writes the novelizations.
Something that struck me and completely changed my view of this game's plot (though not my opinion on it), was when I was reading interviews about Days, and it turns out that Nomura had ideas for the story of Roxas's time in the Organization before Days, but Xion was not part of that vision.
Kanemaki invented Xion, coined her name, and then wrote the entire plot around her.
I hope you'll excuse me when I claim self-insertion.
What myself and I assume many people were excited for when Days was not yet released, was the potential of a game focused solely on the Organization.
Turns out, half of the team gets offed within the first couple of hours of the game, and the rest stop being relevant almost entirely.
The only characters with a focus are Roxas, Axel, and... Xion. Saïx gets a few moments here and there, but his character is largely static and pretty uninteresting.
Speaking of static characters, Roxas and Axel are the same characters they are in KHII. Days fails to bridge the personality gap between Axel in CoM and Axel in KHII.
Roxas, as well, is almost instantly placed into the characterization we found him being driven to during the end of his week in KHII.
So Xion is the only one with a real arc as a character, though I would argue that it's pretty shallow.
And despite Axel having little to no arc in this game, he somehow manages to land the only good lines in the entire game. Everyone else is pretty damn unmemorable, apart from who will I have ice cream with?!, which is not memorable in a good way.
So overall, the dialogue in Days is pretty lackluster. Unfortunately, as scenario writer, I have to blame that one on Nomura. It was his first time though, and it's hardly the worst thing about the game.
As I mentioned before, Xion wasn't apart of Days until the game was already in production. Taking that into consideration, and looking to KHII for context, I feel that Naminé was the girl Nomura had imagined Roxas left the Organization for, and the third piece of the Nobody trio. This would also better contextualize Naminé's actions and feelings during the Roxas segment of the game, as well as the scene with them on the top of The World That Never Was, and during the ending.
As a Naminé fan, I'm pretty upset about that.
The biggest sin of this narrative, though, is the pacing. This is in part impacted by the mission structure of the gameplay, but the fact is that nothing happens up until around Day 300.
Because Xemnas tells us not to interact with people in the worlds, we don't really have any Disney worlds to fill the gap between story events.
So what we're left with is a whole lot of nothing between the first hour and hour 20. It's boring as hell and the faults in the gameplay don't help at all.
In summary, nothing in Days works like it should, nothing feels good, and nothing happens (and by the plot's resolution, almost literally).
I find no reason to enjoy Days on any level. It's not even "so bad it's good;" it's just bad.
So I feel like I have a pretty comprehensive grasp of what Days is, in its entirety.
In a word, it's terrible.
The gameplay is pretty much objectively awful, the antithesis of fun and engaging.
Roxas is incredibly slow, even with maxed out movement abilities. The different movesets for the Keyblades vary from also very slow to "I can't hit a goddamn thing what is happening."
This carries over to every other playable character in Mission Mode as well. Especially Mickey.
But the melee combos kind of don't matter, because unless you land a critical hit, they do only the smallest amount of damage. The only way to do real damage in this game is to use magic.
This is because the enemies have absurdly huge HP bars, or absurdly high defense, or both (e.g. Dustflier).
But magic was changed to work based on uses per mission, rather than MP. This is a horrible decision for multiple reasons:
1. You don't really know what you may want/need for the mission unless you've played it already.
2. It takes away valuable space in your Panels.
With this change comes the change wherein every level of a spell functions differently. Unfortunately, this generally means that the base spell is the most effective. Fire still does good damage, and actually homes in on the target, whereas Firaga isn't that much stronger, and does not home at all. Why would I use Firaga? Generally you will wind up only ever needing one version of any given spell for the entirety of the game.
Back to Panels, it was a good idea done very, very poorly. I say it's a good idea because Re:coded did the same thing only it was actually good. Panels gives you 120 slots maximum to compile your levels, Keyblade, items, spells, ring, backpack upgrades and abilities. Just 120 slots. It simply isn't enough for all of that stuff.
This was done, I suppose, because Panels are the "loadout" for this game, it being mission-based. But editing loadouts for every mission is super boring and nobody wants to bother with that. I did so when completing Challenges, but at that point it's more or less mandatory.
The mission-based structure was a huge misstep, once again having been upstaged by Re:coded's adaptation of the same mechanic (the objectives in System Sectors).
It completely kills the momentum of the game, constantly interrupting you; this is something I wind up hating in every game that tries to do this. I see the rationale behind the idea, but since this game was on DS, there's no reason to cut the game up into chunks like this. The DS has a sleep mode function. Even Chain of Memories didn't pull this and it was entirely without such a function.
Because the game takes place in missions, but not all missions are important, you wind up spending much of the game being forced into fighting small-fry Heartless, which in other Kingdom Hearts titles are completely skippable as you make your way to the next main objective. What this means is that the "filler" in the other games is now the main course in Days. It makes the game feel like a chore.
The mission structure also gives way to Challenges, which...
First of all, nearly all of them are time trials. It would have made more sense to just make them all time trials, because it's seriously like 70% time trial, 30% everything else.
In time trials, you can complete the objective in time but still get a lower ranking on the way back to the Corridor. I hate that.
Many if not all of the Challenges have you going up against beefed up versions of the enemies, or having your own stats capped. So what in the main game was already a painfully tedious chip-damage mashfest becomes even more so.
Unless I'm forgetting something, I think that's all I have to say about the gameplay.
So I'll go over graphics really quick.
Yes, it's a DS game, so expectations are low. However, the game looks like trash.
Now, this isn't a huge problem while playing the game, although I will never get over the Shadow's 2D limbs.
No, this is a problem because the game chose to use the 3D assets for the cutscenes. Once again, Re:coded avoided this mistake by using sprites (which were compressed from high-res renders, no less), as well as doing some actually good character modeling (no more paddle hands).
I keep comparing to Re:coded, which is perhaps unfair since it was h.a.n.d.'s second attempt at a KH game, but I think it's useful in highlighting how Days went wrong.
That's really all there is to say about the graphical presentation.
Finally, the story.
Oh, the story.
For those of you who don't know, Nomura didn't actually write Days. I mean, he did. He was a scenario writer.
But the person in charge of the plot was Tomoco Kanemaki, who writes the novelizations.
Something that struck me and completely changed my view of this game's plot (though not my opinion on it), was when I was reading interviews about Days, and it turns out that Nomura had ideas for the story of Roxas's time in the Organization before Days, but Xion was not part of that vision.
Kanemaki invented Xion, coined her name, and then wrote the entire plot around her.
I hope you'll excuse me when I claim self-insertion.
What myself and I assume many people were excited for when Days was not yet released, was the potential of a game focused solely on the Organization.
Turns out, half of the team gets offed within the first couple of hours of the game, and the rest stop being relevant almost entirely.
The only characters with a focus are Roxas, Axel, and... Xion. Saïx gets a few moments here and there, but his character is largely static and pretty uninteresting.
Speaking of static characters, Roxas and Axel are the same characters they are in KHII. Days fails to bridge the personality gap between Axel in CoM and Axel in KHII.
Roxas, as well, is almost instantly placed into the characterization we found him being driven to during the end of his week in KHII.
So Xion is the only one with a real arc as a character, though I would argue that it's pretty shallow.
And despite Axel having little to no arc in this game, he somehow manages to land the only good lines in the entire game. Everyone else is pretty damn unmemorable, apart from who will I have ice cream with?!, which is not memorable in a good way.
So overall, the dialogue in Days is pretty lackluster. Unfortunately, as scenario writer, I have to blame that one on Nomura. It was his first time though, and it's hardly the worst thing about the game.
As I mentioned before, Xion wasn't apart of Days until the game was already in production. Taking that into consideration, and looking to KHII for context, I feel that Naminé was the girl Nomura had imagined Roxas left the Organization for, and the third piece of the Nobody trio. This would also better contextualize Naminé's actions and feelings during the Roxas segment of the game, as well as the scene with them on the top of The World That Never Was, and during the ending.
As a Naminé fan, I'm pretty upset about that.
The biggest sin of this narrative, though, is the pacing. This is in part impacted by the mission structure of the gameplay, but the fact is that nothing happens up until around Day 300.
Because Xemnas tells us not to interact with people in the worlds, we don't really have any Disney worlds to fill the gap between story events.
So what we're left with is a whole lot of nothing between the first hour and hour 20. It's boring as hell and the faults in the gameplay don't help at all.
In summary, nothing in Days works like it should, nothing feels good, and nothing happens (and by the plot's resolution, almost literally).
I find no reason to enjoy Days on any level. It's not even "so bad it's good;" it's just bad.
^ That's a pretty good analysis. I definitely agree on the Namine part, I always found her ending with Roxas a bit strange. Almost like I had skipped a part of the game or something. They had interacted only a couple of times and very briefly, but were suddenly all close and stuff. I always just thought it was because of the Sora-Kairi parallel, but the later games have made it clear that Roxas and Namine are their own people, not really like their somebodies at all. I like Namine a lot, it definitely would have been a better choice in many ways to use her in Days instead of Xion. It could have worked, and made more sense.
Yeah, the panel system was really obnoxious and unescesary.
I was about to bring up Chain of Memories, and I do think it counts. I mean, they remember it now and everything so yeah.
That being said, I disagree about keeping them sort of sideline storywise while simultaneously being the main playable characters. That's probably one of my least favorite parts about KH2's story, and I imagine I am not the only one. Also, aside from Lea, Aqua, and maybe Ven I don't see anyone else showing up much till the end of the game tbh, but I could be super off base with that. (Does not include Riku, Kairi, and Mickey also).
Though, that is quite a few characters...I think Sora, Donald, and Goofy deserve some more emotional attachment than "Well we gotta do this" and I feel DDD was sort of building that up? I mean, Sora's attachment is maybe more obvious, almost being norted, failing his exam, etc. Though, people focus on Kairi's part in the secret ending, not many bring up the foreshadowing of Donald and Goofy feeling unhelpful in recent adventures. I'm not sure what exactly they will do with that, if much at all, but since the whole ending was set up for KH3 its certainly quite possible it will come up. If anything, these things could serve as sort of cute moments where SDG support each other. They don't necessarily need drama to develop together lol.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]I, too, 100% days so yeah this is a fairly good assessment. Though, I do have a soft spot for certain parts of it. I like actually seeing RAX together as friends unlike SRK and TAV where we are just kind of told they are friends. Also, I acknowledge Xion wasn't a great addition narratively and her role could have been filled by Namine or something else could have happened instead of making it conveniently so she was self contained in the game until they decided they wanted to bring her up again, but I did enjoy her nonetheless. I found her story to be tragic, and it definitely stirred my emotions haha. I mean, some of this might be nostalgia for the game really, but yeah.[/FONT]
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THANK YOU.
Maybe RAX should've taken that turn. I mean, sure there is going to be drama, but every tiiiiime.....
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Easily one of the best Days posts I've seen in years. So much is right, so much is true. Especially the bits on drama. Seems like everything is a forced drama after KH2.
Tbh I feel the only people that feel like actual friends are Sora, Donald, Goofy and Riku. Even his disney friends feel closer to him than this repetitive "trio" dynamic the series can't seem to shake. Hell SDG alone is about the only ones I'd call an actual trio in terms of the definition. It's founded in KH1 and carries over to CoM and KH2. Well more screen time than RAX and more "real" feeling. (especially in KH1 that actually shows their 'trio' develop into it's endgame and KH2 self)
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Did I ever post in here? I don't think so.
Days was beyond terrible. From the insanely watered-down gameplay (rather than try to replicate the console's battle system, they should have tried something new with depth - like CoM's), to the beyond terrible story (proof that Nomura should never, ever ever write).
It's depressing that the game is so integral to the overall mythology... But, why wouldn't it be? Nomura himself wrote it! And no one is in love with their own writing more than him.... When you read his interviews, he actually thinks he's a storytelling genius. He takes it so seriously, like there's a Pulitzer on the line.
I blame the fanboys and fangirls for deluding him into it. :< That, and his drinking. Some pills were probably involved too. And a dire lack of Sakaguchi slapping him back to his senses.
Days was beyond terrible. From the insanely watered-down gameplay (rather than try to replicate the console's battle system, they should have tried something new with depth - like CoM's), to the beyond terrible story (proof that Nomura should never, ever ever write).
It's depressing that the game is so integral to the overall mythology... But, why wouldn't it be? Nomura himself wrote it! And no one is in love with their own writing more than him.... When you read his interviews, he actually thinks he's a storytelling genius. He takes it so seriously, like there's a Pulitzer on the line.
I blame the fanboys and fangirls for deluding him into it. :< That, and his drinking. Some pills were probably involved too. And a dire lack of Sakaguchi slapping him back to his senses.
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