Spoilers!
~ Estimated Reading Time: 7 min ~
His controversial reputation fueled by hard-to-catalog role as Artist, Worldbuilder, and vague 'visionary' figure, Tetsuya Nomura for a while confused me in what he actually does for the franchises he's tied to. 358/2 Days is the first game he ever personally wrote the script for, and he's coming in with the whole steel chair here - rocking the most consistent dialogue in the series. I think I'm ready to hand this guy the crown
So much of what makes the game shine is on a textual front. With the most compelling usage of the actual Disney worlds in a KH yet - painting the life of a Nobody as one walking through dozens of obscene worlds, conceptual outsiders to everything around them. There's no time to learn the line between the mundanity and absurdity in each outlined fable, when the only glance we're afforded is one of a spectator through a windowsill.
Yeah, I'll just say outright that you were all totally right about the ludo-suffering going on in this game! One instant shock was the interplay between tutorial and the narrative itself: the first hour is spent being pulled around by tough guys, told you're not man enough if you haven't already figured out how to map a shortcut. The game is player-hostile in ways that are usually textually supported!! Though, I almost think that its interpretation living up to reputation lead me to underestimate the intentional tricks it could pull. Not to say that this sort of "bad gameplay is good" analysis is insincere, but it can sometimes downplay actually worthwhile design at a game's core. 358 is no exception to h.a.n.d.'s excellent eye for experimentalism. It makes sense people don't praise a lot of the ideas here - many of them don't bring enough to the table to 'fix' this game - but I genuinely like seeing them, I find them inspiring. What I'm trying to say is...this is a JRPG with a Resident Evil 4 limited inventory, where you have to store your spells and levels on equal grounds. Coolest thing ever honestly. And it only plays bad due to a shockingly simple set of problems; the enemies are so passive, the missions feel less like battles, and more like cleaning litter off the floor. But that's why it works, right?
the dual screen cinematography in this game is so sick what the hell. silently leaving two cutscenes to play at once near the end is one of the most artistically confident uses of the console i've seen
Gotta love the whole under corpo dynamic here: Roxas put square in the middle between someone beaten into submission by their overlords, and someone held against the dagger yet most charged to take direct action against it. The way people seem to keep comparing this half-sincerely to experiences working at a DMV or McDonalds or whatever just earnestly shows how well this has aged as a sorta universal 21st century aging-into-late-teens/adulthood piece. Heavy weight on everyone, trying to develop new coping mechanisms without guidance. Xion is opening Roxas to embracing new feelings he hasn't tried before, while his suppressed coworker keeps telling him that his feelings aren't real as they laugh and cry together. Xion trying to balance taking ahold of agency, knowing everything in her life that comforts her would be left behind - it's so expressly comparable to queer youth under bigoted authority power dynamics... Who isn't reading Xion as trans, though?
The last act especially has its trio moving with manic indecision, continuing to try to fit all three of them into a shape that just can't squeeze it all in. I almost find it more heartbreaking before it reaches its conclusion than after - the motions more evocative of what I say every day than the grander aftermath. Although I couldn't say no to "Who will I eat Ice cream with?". Tidus laugh savants have done a good job explaining the line as Roxas' teenage awkwardness, but I also think it's interesting that his first thought was of something so material - when his job affords so little free time, what else would he even have?
my fav stray line in the whole game might be xion in bed muttering to herself "I'm going to wreck everything..." before clocking into work normally
The Diary isn't really for me - often existing as a platform to explain the game's artsy cutscenes to its main demographic of twelve-year olds - but it has its occasional goodies. Love the one where Roxas suddenly gets sick of eating ice cream all day, getting sick of his daily ritual all of a sudden. Mystery Dungeon games for example tend to have narratives driven by a strong sense of daily grind, suddenly interrupted by schedule-disrupting twists. I use this as a comparison for 358 - which is more like the very foundation is shakey. A dissatisfaction with the narrative itself keeps all feeling uncertain. Incidents like Roxas hiding that Xion can't use her keyblade anymore feel less like they are moving the plot towards a tipping point, and more like rumbles that wane out - naturally recurring in no relation. The boat rocks but never flips. It feels like a thousand hours go by without anything happening. And that nothing is such a precious memory, that losing it is the tragedy. Great stuff
As a side note, there's a lot here that reminded me of Crisis Core; 358/2 is in a lot of ways a more coherent depiction of the themes surrounding Zack's workplace disempowerment. And now that this is a plainly recurring Squeenix motif, it made me wonder about what working at Square Enix was actually like. It's always been relevant to Kingdom Hearts; Nomura stuff always has a tangible balance of corporate cleanliness, and sensibilities for underground art and estranged human experience. He's good at balancing on needles. It's easy to see its narrative as reflective of the actual difficulty it is for something like this to even exist. And Crisis Core's contradictory nature of Zack feeling proud of his work for SOLDIER while also hating them reads a lot more sensically when you see it as representative of making the exact type of art his team was leading in the 2000s...
KHstillbetterthough.
A lot of what compels me to keep going through these is that sometimes, (and not to say this is an end-all, but!!) it feels like Nomura's crew are the only people who create actually relatable video games? At least in a scale higher than indie. Like, Final Fantasy VII's depiction of the growing pains that go into the very messy process of developing an identity just sat right with me as a teen. Identity as a process of imitation; the whiplash of when you start to become a person that isn't who you're set on being. It's neat seeing how Kingdom Hearts directly extends those aspects of FFVII - touching less on the direct tragic nature of it, processing it as a neutral that intertwines with melancholies. Roxas' story is one of wearing the faces that He wore, getting closer to the parts of Him that were She, while still forgetting that he's everybody. I don't know how much of this is lived experience, and how much is them thinking they're sneaky for putting Hegelian shit in their kids game - but the end result's childish groundedness resonates with me. This one stands out in, as every previous KH had been more retrospectively relatable - this one's young adult angst managed to catch up to me. Very happy to have had this experience, luv this series ❤️
wrote most of this before getting to the end of the game and then mickey mouse showed up and i remembered i was playing a disney game and felt embarrassed for caring for a second but. fuck it we cringe on