Investigating an Old Kingdom Hearts 1 Myth

[Music] mew under the truck l isreal2401 sonic games are fun they just don't make video game myths like they used to i'm kidding i just needed something to say for the third one if you're a little younger than me you still may have grown up with a bit more modern video game mythology like herobrine and minecraft or i'm assuming some sort of ritualistic satanic dance in fortnite but i feel like the potential for a general air of unsubstantiated mystery in games definitely peaked in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s i'm sure there was some sick folklore in games before my time too like the fabled secret stage in pong but i think the height of playground rumors and hearsay aligns with video games getting a bit more complex but before the internet was able to catch up in accessibility and complexity itself unfortunately there weren't too many kids in my grade who were into kingdom hearts like i was i mean sure some of them played it but they didn't treat it like one of the five basic food groups which i found to be bizarre so while i didn't hear any rumblings of cage related secrets beneath the monkey bars or near the cubbies i did have the luxury and or a curse of growing up alongside a juvenile internet see my parents were cool and i got to experience the internet unsupervised as young as age seven or eight i know for the older members of my audience 2004 or so might not seem like the true wild west era of the internet that you have fond memories of but hey it was still pre-youtube that's gotta count for something now while i've long documented how my first exposure to kingdom hearts one was through a shared and prolonged playthrough with my cousins throughout 2002 and three i still definitely returned to the game on my own in the years that followed even beyond the release of kh2 i sort of still do that like a lot but instead of being accompanied by family members and the strategy guide the subsequent playthroughs of kh-1 were supplemented with ravenous binges of internet content when i realized there were millions of people out there who also loved this game sharing a vast ocean of information with each other a notion that in retrospect looks like a puddle when compared to 2022 i wanted to read any and everything i could about it i devoured game facts message board topics like they were novels and somehow i managed to walk away with an unfried brain or maybe a totally fried brain given what i do for a living at this moment in time the jury is still out on that now not to suggest that honesty and clarity on the internet has increased as it's aged if anything that line on a bar graph probably dips and rises quite a few times over the past 20 years and we're definitely not at the highest point on that graph right now but if you could believe it it at least seemed even easier back then to just say whatever you wanted wherever you wanted without any verifiable citations or research to back it up so naturally i was bound to come across some such claims when perusing the kh-1 message boards on my family's chunky computer on friday nights the subject of this video is something i remember reading and now long defunct or deleted message board posts but the memory of it had gone completely dormant until i just so happened to come across it again a few months ago this time on tv tropes and for the uninitiated if you haven't checked out tv tropes i recommend going into a cave and looking up every piece of media you've ever consumed and not leaving said cave until you've read everything there is on the topic i have lost months to this website i realized that kingdom hearts had a couple of supplementary pages alongside its main ones so i was browsing those and at the very top of the page entitled wake up call bosses i unearthed this piece of folklore that i had long forgotten riku on destiny islands is very fast and strong for that part of the game has a brutal counter-attack and can serve as a challenge even for those who already beat the game losing to him in the duel has no effect on the story and losing to him in the race will cause the default gummy ship to be named the high wind instead of what you chose to name the raft everything there checks out so far defeating him in the duel provides you with a potion but it's not recommended to defeat him because defeating him on destiny islands and this next part is spoiler tagged changes his coding when you fight him for the first time in hollow bastion making him much more difficult than usual so upon reading this i had a total brain blast back to when i originally saw this in the mid-aughts in handfuls of fresh playthroughs that more often than not didn't even make it to hollow bastion i purposely avoided dueling with riku and definitely didn't try to beat him unless i risk a tougher boss fight after the my friends are my power moment because why wouldn't you believe that when you're like seven or eight it changes his coding for god's sake and i mean i believed anything at that age i have a traumatic memory of my cousin telling me that i would die by age 20 if i continue to eat kid cuisines at the rate that i did now i'm 25 and i eat 17 kid cuisines a day and i'm like what gives what the going on i was impressionable and not only was i not good enough at the game or savvy enough to look into confirming or busting this myth i straight up didn't even conceive that it might be mythological at all it just made sense you beat riku once and it pisses off his ones in zero so bad that he's harder to beat later luckily i'm a bit better at the game now than i was back then and a lot more skeptical which brings us to our little experiment today and the experiment is relatively simple if somewhat arduous but basically we're taking two save files one where i beat riku and destiny islands and one where i lose to him and then comparing the battles i have with him in the entrance hall several hours later while definitely less of an undertaking for my current self than my kid self it's still as annoying of a process as it sounds it essentially means playing through the game twice only really being able to skip the first few dive to the heart platforms on the second run but this seemed like the most obvious and straightforward way to test it for these files i went for the most basic vanilla experience i could i started both runs on standard and picked the sword and dropped the shield for both on file one i beat riku in the duel on the first day just to be safe i also made sure to beat him in the race on the second day making for a final score of 2-0 in favor of sora heading into the apocalypse from there i play through the game normally although avoiding as many optional encounters as possible to keep the experience gained between the files relatively the same with that in mind i skipped olympus coliseum in atlantica and arrived in holobastion at level 33 freshly becoming level 34 before the first fight with dark pajama riku but before engaging i loaded up an early copy of this file that i made at the awakening save point and did it all over again this time with one early but important distinction i made sure to lose the duel with riku in fact i even left the log collectible laying there to make it more likely that sword would trip over it and sprain his ankle and then i made it a point to lose to riku in the race giving us a score of zero to two for riku and hypothetically handing us an easier route to pay back when we arrive in holobastion queue playing through almost the entire game again and arriving at rising falls level 33 reaching level 34 right before proceeding through the castle gates and so here's our moment of truth i unequipped every accessory i had going into both fights with the same stats having not used any boost items in either run as well as the pumpkin head keychain for both i decided to start with the lost to riku file i fought riku taking note of the experience and then soft reset upon beating him because i don't need this file anymore then i loaded up the file where i beat riku and did the same now i started this project knowing that one of the possible results is a lot sexier than the other i would have loved to tell you that i finally obtained proof and can validate this age-old oft-repeated claim but i am instead here to report what's behind the plainly unsexy door number two this has been a crock of ever since the first time someone typed it up so while our end result here isn't relevatory it's at least declarative nothing about the way riku is fought seems to be any different between the two files in fact if anything my first battle with him felt more aggressive despite it being on the file where i lost to him which is the inverse of the myth in actuality i probably just felt that because it was the first of the two tests and i was still getting warmed up but riku's attacks are the same and the rate at which he performs them is unchanged he still annoyingly retaliates on the third hit making it difficult to reliably combo him and cementing this fight as pretty unfun regardless of what happened on destiny islands i compared both the damage i dealt to riku and the damage he dealt to me and with both soros stats being exactly the same with the only variable being whether or not our island's score was higher or lower i was not able to determine any difference to make absolutely sure my friend samuel camel checked riku stats in both scenarios and also found no difference these numbers are also exactly the same unchanged by what happens on destiny islands and just for the sake of thoroughness he also checked riku and some stats and those are also the same regardless of what happens in the duels and fun fact riku 1 and riku tui's attack and defense are also exactly the same to each other in both scenarios riku 2 just has more hp and a slightly higher rate of mp recovery when you hit him so there you have it i'm not sure how many of you even heard of this myth prior to this video but regardless i'm happy to have finally put it to bed and sure reading the premise may have had you scoffing in the first place but if any game was gonna try and pull something like this off it would be the first kingdom hearts if anything this should serve as an example of why you can't just trust anything you read on the internet and i mean that in general but you know most importantly when it comes to kingdom hearts the series is no stranger to straight up falsehoods being peddled as fact like sora being able to wield the keyblade because juventus nobody's being immune to aging or that nimura wrote recoated while he was drunk all of which is a load of bunk at the very least i hope you enjoyed the little walk down the memory lanes between as i investigated this very specific and ultimately inconsequential aspect of a game that i've been hyper fixated on for the past two decades uh happy ending i guess [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Regular Pat

Views: 93,884

Keywords: regular pat, regular pay, kh, kh1, kh2, kh3, bbs, ddd, dream drop distance, birth by sleep, recom, chain of memories, kingdom hearts, square enix

Id: D6e56LqKnYI

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022