2007 was a new era for Kingdom Hearts: a three
game arc had concluded, and all of us were eagerly awaiting the next Kingdom Hearts outing. You’d
see fan box art of Kingdom Hearts 3, you’d see fanart of Kingdom Hearts 3, you’d see fanfictions
of Kingdom Hearts 3, you’d see it all! Nomura had other plans, of course: he wanted to make handheld
spinoffs, and what this lead to is around 13 years of quote unquote spinoffs, until Kingdom Hearts
3 became the conclusion to a narrative arc rather than the beginning of a new one. In reality, three
new games would begin this second chapter: Kingdom Hearts Three-Five-Eight Days Over 2 (yes that is
how you pronounce it), Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, and Kingdom Hearts coded. These three games
would later be connected by Dream Drop Distance, with Kingdom Hearts 3 to serve as the follow
up. Legends spoke of a secret movie at the end of both Kingdom Hearts 1 and Kingdom Hearts
2: both of which would tee up the next entries. This ending scene, referred to as Another Side,
Another Story, served a dual purpose. It hyped people up for Kingdom Hearts 2, but the scene
itself would be represented in Days. Minus the part where Mickey shows up, it’s actually kinda
funny to think about that in retrospect.
Before we begin: it’s pronounced 358 Days Over
2, because this story follows 358 days over 2 people’s lives (Roxas and Xion). It’s dumb, but
I don’t make the rules, and to be honest: I kinda admire the effort this man puts into his titles.
Now that the HD collections have been released, I feel as though Days as an actual video game
has been largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated fans of Kingdom Hearts, and people who
got it instead of Mario Kart DS on Christmas. New fans will only get the abridged version of the
story we all experienced back on the DS. This cutscene collection is serviceable if all you’re
looking for is to be caught up with the plot and nothing else. It hits on all the important beats
and ensures that you won’t be lost come future games, and it only takes three hours compared
to the game’s 17 to 20 hour runtime. However, what we have to understand here is that
the cutscene collection, though a beautiful remastering of specific scenes that weren’t voiced
in the original, is still just a collection of cutscenes ripped out of a video game. Without
that sense of context, something is gonna get lost in the transition, and unfortunately
I feel like the story of Roxas, Axel, and Xion has been poorly represented. I wouldn’t
be surprised if new fans weren’t as attached to these characters simply because they lack the
context and runtime necessary to properly bond with them the same way most KH fans were forced
to back when these collections didn’t exist.
The more time has passed, the more I’ve been
allowed to ruminate on the game, its goals, its narrative: I’ve come to admire it in a
strange way. Though, I completely understand that it would be very costly to remake
the entire game for the HD collections, and for a game that many people played just
to get more story: trust me, I understand why it was just cutscene collections, but there’s
always gonna be a part of me that yearns for everyone else to experience the game as it was
intended. Even though it isn’t always perfect, it weaves narrative with gameplay in a
deceptively simple way. I want to talk about how it does this, and what makes it
one of the most effectively told stories in the realm of games. This is a Kingdom
Hearts 358 Days Over 2 Retrospective.
As promised, I’m gonna run through the important
points of Kingdom Hearts 2 real quick: Roxas is introduced, and so are the concept of
Nobodies, beings that lack hearts. His fake life is unraveled, and he merges back with
Sora, who then goes to various Disney worlds unintentionally fueling the Organization’s plan to
complete Kingdom Hearts. We also learn that Ansem, the final boss of Kingdom Hearts 1, was merely a
heartless of Ansem the Wise’s apprentice Xehanort, and that Xehanort’s nobody, Xemnas, is the
head of an Organization of Nobodies who are causing a bunch of trouble throughout all the
worlds. Diz is revealed to be Ansem the Wise, who sacrifices himself to delay Xemnas’ plans;
Sora, Riku, and Kairi all reunite at the World that Never Was, Roxas and Namine both acknowledge
their other halves, and all is well with the world after Sora and Riku beat up a dragon. Most
of the key points to remember about Kingdom Hearts 2 are the concepts introduced, like the
Organization’s plans, the idea of Nobodies, and the struggles that accompany them.
This leads beautifully into the story of Days, which takes place in between 1 and 2, concurrently
with Chain of Memories. It was created to recount Roxas’ life before the beginning of 2, and
what lead him to Diz’s data Twilight Town. Presumably at or around the same time Sora became
a heartless to save Kairi in Kingdom Hearts 1, Roxas came into being, was given a name by Xemnas
and drafted into the Organization as their 13th member. He is… certainly a distinct Nobody
because he can’t remember ever having a past, and as such he lacks any memory of the ideas that
make up a human: he doesn’t know why he’s in the Organization or what their goal is ultimately
supposed to achieve. According to Axel he doesn’t have emotions, and he doesn’t even have a
basic grasp of what friendship is supposed to be. For all intents and purposes, he’s a newborn
baby thrust into the life of an adult working for a cult that decides who and what he is.
His goal as the keyblade wielder is to defeat the heartless, thus releasing their hearts and sending
them to the World that Never Was, where they form Kingdom Hearts: a version of Kingdom Hearts
*sigh*. The goal of the Organization is to obtain hearts of their own, at least that’s what Xemnas
is telling everyone. Saix and Axel have a feeling there’s a lot more to it, and Xigbar obviously
knows what’s up but that’s for a future game, I’m getting way too ahead of myself. The point
is that Roxas will carry out missions everyday: they range from recon missions, where you’ll
examine a new world and learn new things about it; heartless hunts, which simply involves finding
and destroying artificially created heartless; boss hunts, which are almost exactly like
they sound; and there’s emblem hunting, which is also pretty much exactly what it
sounds like. You’ll start the workday with either a cutscene, or by spawning directly at the
lounge to configure your character and do some shopping before selecting a mission. This pattern
repeats itself scarily often: configure Roxas, select a mission, complete a mission, Return to
Castle, watch a cutscene at the Twilight Town clock tower, and cash in the day’s experience.
The mission-based structure makes for quick and easy, get in and get out game design that both
meshes well with a handheld and makes for good multiplayer mission design, but that’s all they
really are. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say the missions are the worst part of the game,
especially when you start fighting bosses who each have obscure strengths and weaknesses. Leech
Grave, for instance, is immune to magic (for some reason). Nothing about the mission description
clues you in on this like other missions do, it’s just immune to magic, so if you came in
packing a magic build, you’ll have to quit the mission, configure a more physical build, and
redo the lead-up to that boss. When bosses aren’t suddenly immune, you have to be careful not to use
too much magic in that lead up phase since it is now a finite resource that can only be restocked
mid-mission using ethers. Experimenting with the magic system feels way too risky as a result,
meaning that unless I knew magic would be helpful, I often stuck to strength builds. Magic in general
is fairly hit or miss, with the generic fire spell being more useful than the direct upgrade Fira
because it homes in on enemies. What you end up casting so often feels slow, clunky, and pointless
unless it just so happens to do a lot of damage to a specific enemy or boss. It all felt like
a huge waste of time, and whenever you aren’t fighting bosses or generic heartless, you’re just
collecting emblems or doing recon. When you focus on this stuff for more than a minute, it tends to
fold in on itself; however, when you consider that it’s for short play sessions, it makes a little
more sense. Even considering that it was made for a handheld, sometimes short play sessions
don’t even solve the issue: the problem is that there’s next to no mission variety. Since you’ll
be revisiting the same worlds over and over, many times without even advancing the story of that
world, all you’re gonna find yourself doing is a bunch of meaningless heartless or emblem hunts.
None of the worlds offer anything surprising, you’ve been to these worlds before: Beast’s
Castle, Agrabah, Wonderland, Olympus Coliseum; I guess Neverland has some new environments,
but really it just adds a few spacious areas on the rocks next to the ship. We don’t get much
more from Neverland itself until Birth By Sleep, unfortunately. Very rarely was the gameplay itself
the driving motivation, it was mostly everything surrounding that: when I got to meet back up
with Tinkerbell, or reluctantly train with Phil after Xigbar abandons Roxas, or to see incredibly
unusual pairings like Genie, Roxas, and Xion.
See, the problem here is that this game plays
like Kingdom Hearts 2, but shoved onto a handheld: and with all the concessions you’d imagine it
would have to make. Your keyblade hits don’t pack the same punch since the enemies don’t always
stagger like they used to. You can’t so much modify your combos as much as you can switch a
keyblade and use that keyblade’s combo. If you pick a magic keyblade, the physical combo will
be slow, imprecise, and near useless: but the magic you throw out will be far more powerful as a
result. There’s a keyblade for longer air combos, one for higher strength, there’s even a mix of
strength and magic. This provides a momentary sense of variety, but it’s not a deep enough
system to compare it to the combo modifiers of Kingdom Hearts 2. All it really does is add a
visual flourish to your A button presses, and I’d even say it feels less customizable because
it locks you to one keyblade combo at a time, with all the positive and negative stat changes
that accompany it. You end up picking your poison rather than your playstyle a lot of the time. The
lack of heartless variety accompanies the slower, less in-depth combat to help ensure that you’ll
be bored a majority of the way through. There are only so many times I can fight a shadow,
or a bomb, or a fucking ice cube before it just gets old. Structurally it’s very different from
previous games: instead of knocking out worlds one by one, you instead do a series of missions for
each world that can be considered an arc of sorts; except, you complete the arcs mission by mission,
alongside the other missions for other world arcs. By the time you’ve gotten halfway through
Twilight Town: boom, Agrabah shows up.
This really screws with the moment-to-moment
pacing: you’ll go from a heartfelt conversation with Phil where he tells Roxas “not to be a
stranger,” one of the more touching moments of the game; deep into weird Neverland shenanigans
you started several hours ago. While it is cool that you go at them from the perspective of a
“villain”, the Disney worlds end up feeling tacked on. Why does the Organization need to travel to so
many worlds when enough heartless seem to spawn in Twilight Town anyway. The only two new mechanical
elements to this game are mechanics that are woefully underutilized. This grid-based, tetris
style progression system is genius on paper. It allows players to pick and choose whether
they want higher levels, more healing items, more powerful movement abilities or weapons. The
most powerful upgrades are in weird patterns on purpose so you have to think about where you
place them, and so that it constantly ensures you have to keep asking yourself questions
about your loadout. It’s a shame the game itself doesn’t seem to even acknowledge it
though: for the most part, basic keyblade combos and the occasional magic spell will see
you coasting through enemies and boss fights.
Some of these bosses take light years to defeat
because the damage scaling is totally out of whack. Sometimes you’ll shred through bosses and
enemies like swiss cheese, other times you’ll be doing chip damage, and for seemingly no reason.
Some hitboxes are so tiny that doing any damage at all is a chore, especially this Neverland
boss fight where you have to hit the tail of a heartless that will never stop moving. Enemies
sometimes give you very little time to react to their attacks, and counter you at seemingly
random intervals. As a result, the most effective tactic becomes a hit-and-run: you’ll have to
forgive me if I didn’t need to think about what panels I was placing where. Doing extra
missions gets you more panels, more experience, and thus gives you more options: but I never felt
like I needed more options to get by. The fights were so simple and boring that I glided through
them with basic keyblade combos a majority of the time. Unfortunately it just meant that the system
was overly convoluted. The second new system is the limit break system: at low health, you can
sacrifice a small bit of your HP bar to enter a limit break, where Roxas flies around the screen
dealing massive damage. Again: really cool idea, but it’s harmed by a few nasty overlooked details.
First of all, the moment you initiate this limit break, it is very hard to cancel out of it. This
wouldn’t be a problem, except you can still take damage when performing a limit break: and since
you need to be at low health, you can kinda see where this neat new system often threw me. I
almost never used limit breaks because they were so unsafe: in almost every circumstance, it
would be unequivocally safer to heal up and deal slower combos so you don’t get one shot in the
middle of your flashy limit break. There are a few braindead damage sponges that are helped along
by the system: this side objective in one of the earliest missions, it is a sloggggg, who thought
this would be fun so early on? You don’t have any of your later abilities, so it’s most effective
to go to lower health, spam your limit break, and call it a day five minutes later, but does that
really make the limit breaks good on their own? Are they anything more than a bandage? Why do so
many bosses have invulnerability phases that they pull out every five seconds? It feels like you can
only get an attack in every few minutes. I do like the movement abilities you gain access to, and
the spacious level design was intriguing at first, until you realize that there’s not a whole lot
to do in them except fight mook heartless, click “examine” on some rubble, or god forbid you push a
block across a giant chasm. It’s like it has every component that makes the Kingdom Hearts 2 gameplay
great, plus some promising new additions, but none of those components are in the right places. Which
means… we’re done, right? A boring, meaningless waste of time that’s only really fun if you’re
an 11 year old stuck in a car ride. Well… what if I told you that the mundane gameplay is
unintentionally one of its greatest strengths.
On the surface, the mission-based structure is
a complete chore; however, it’s also a fantastic way to get the player into the same headspace as
Roxas. He works as the Organization’s puppet for almost an entire year, completing missions day
by day, and the repetition of that structure is key to the attachment players will have with
Roxas’ future disillusionment and his current distractions in the form of his relationship with
Axel and Xion. You spend a lot of time on missions with other Organization members, which is a great
way to learn more about their characters, and to better explain how they knew so much about the
worlds in Kingdom Hearts 2. I especially like the interactions Roxas has with the Castle Oblivion
members, and wish there could have been even more time spent with them. Unfortunately, they get
sent off to Castle Oblivion almost as soon as the game starts, and we all know what happens
to them there. You can’t really place this game in the timeline where it is and also expect more
time with those members, so I understand why we couldn’t: it’s just a shame because they do a good
job fleshing out the members that we already had more exposure with in Kingdom Hearts 2. Anyway,
my point is that though you spend a lot of time with them, it’s clear that they aren’t trying to
form any substantial connection with Roxas. So, the time he spends with Axel and Xion are even
more special since they’re some of the only characters who don’t yell at him or smack him
in the face. But, since he still doesn’t have much else to latch onto, he just keeps carrying
out missions as he’s told, hanging onto the brief hope that he can go have ice cream with his
friends after work. Key word there: work. I doubt this was an intentional move, but playing
Days made me associate the missions with work; it was something I had to do to make ends meet,
but it was never something I wanted to do. I almost feel like making a handheld game that’s as
fun as Kingdom Hearts 2 is impossible, especially on a DS; so instead of trying to make it super
fun, they made it tolerable. There’s a baseline level of satisfaction you get out of these
missions in the same way there’s a baseline level of satisfaction you get out of doing work, even if
you ultimately don’t want to do it. The animations and sound effects for defeating heartless feel
instinctively good in the same way they did in the previous games, even if the system lacks the
depth that made it exceptional. It brought me closer to Roxas; when he was weakened by Xion and
his level was cut in half, or when he gave up his keyblade to help Xion remember how to use hers:
it wasn’t fun, but it was necessary. Work is very rarely fun, but often it’s the friends you make at
work that make the experience tolerable. When you take out the friends, the sense of connection, all
you’re left with is a meaningless time waster.
It’s fitting that the parts of the game where I
felt most distressed is when Axel or Xion were missing, or when there was tension between the
trio. Roxas wants desperately for those moments eating ice cream on the clock tower to last
forever, but the player knows it won’t happen, the player has the benefit of hindsight. More
time without Axel and Xion means more time alone, doing missions, going through the motions: and
less time overall with friends that won’t last forever. Because another subject this game tackles
well is identity, even more than Kingdom Hearts 2 could ever hope to realize. Roxas and Xion have
no concept of how the world works or what emotions are even supposed to be, meaning that Axel has
to be the one to teach them these concepts, often failing to hit at the heart of what they
mean or why they’re so powerful, likely because he doesn’t understand the full extent of them either.
It leads to Roxas’ definition of friendship being sea salt ice cream, because Axel doesn’t know how
else to describe it to him. All he knows for sure is that they all don’t have hearts, or at least
he thinks he knows because of what he’s been fed by Xemnas, despite being part of numerous scenes
where emotions are arguably present. He denies it by positing that maybe they remember what it
felt like to have emotions, even though it’s all just a thinly veiled justification to keep
doing work for the Organization, to give some of their arguably wasted time more meaning.
Roxas and Xion both struggle to seem like they’re authentic, to seem like they’re real people who
can fit in. When, in reality, everyone in the Organization is just a tool to serve Xemnas,
literally in the case of Xion who was a puppet created to transfer the useful parts of Roxas
into something the Organization could wield full control over. When they start to learn more about
their origins and their purpose, especially Xion, that simple worklife is utterly destroyed. Xion
learns that she was never supposed to exist, that her only purpose was to steal memories
from someone and further the goals of their twisted leader. She tries desperately to cling to
her simple life with her friends, the time she’d come to love: but it can’t change the fact that
this trio is headed down an unavoidable path of tragedy. Axel tries his hardest to keep the unit
together despite knowing that none of his options are ideal. He could have told Roxas everything
that he found out from the start, but that would only cause a rift between the group sooner; the
reason he kept it to himself is because he wanted to be with them as much as he could before reality
caught up with them. He’s caught between his age old friendship with Saix, his allegiance to the
Organization, and his blossoming friendships with Roxas and Xion. The tragic truth is that although
Roxas and Xion desperately want to be people, they work like everyone else, they laugh like everyone
else, they have friendships like everyone else: they aren’t allowed to be people. They were
created to fulfill a purpose, and when its clear they can no longer fulfill that purpose, they fade
away. It becomes increasingly obvious that you’re driving these characters toward their demise,
while also fueling the desires of an evil man, but you just have to keep going. You have to keep
playing the missions, upgrading your character, trying different builds to maintain a sense of
brief variety and momentary fun, so that you can maybe get more scenes where the trio get together
and be friends for a few minutes. You, like Axel, know it can’t last forever; but you also, like
Roxas, want it to last forever, to evade the inevitable tragedy as long as humanly possible.
You can almost prove how effective the gameplay’s relative mediocrity is at getting the player to
connect with the overall struggle, by pointing to the cutscene collection. You rip out a portion
of the whole and expect it to deliver the same way? I watched the cutscene collection before
I went back and played Days again for review, and what I found is that the cutscene collection
didn’t affect me in nearly the same way playing the game did. Sure, it was sad: a lot of sad
things were happening on the screen, but I didn’t cry like I did at the end of the actual
game. I wasn’t shaken when Axel screamed “what’s your problem” because I hadn’t just spent 17 hours
trying to keep this broken trio together, trying to stop the train from veering off the tracks,
trying to hold onto the good. This story doesn't work as well when it's just a movie. They cut so
much out of the collection, so many minor moments of character building. Remember when Roxas picked
up a stick to fight with, and Xion says, “Roxas, that’s a stick.” That’s funny! Maybe having it
in the collection wouldn’t have been important, but it was a nice moment that is relegated to a
text blurb synopsis in the collection. Sometimes when visiting Disney worlds, Roxas will experience
a sense of deja vu: but instead of telling you what Roxas is feeling, they show scenes of Sora
doing the exact same thing. Without a word, and without disrupting the flow of a normal scene, it
shows what Roxas is feeling in that moment. It’s harder to understand Roxas when you aren’t doing
the same things he’s doing: you aren’t working everyday of your life, you aren’t experiencing
these moments at the clock tower as a reward or a moment of release, you aren't experiencing
weird deja vu: you’re experiencing disjointed scenes back-to-back, you’re experiencing them
in a way that was absolutely never intended.
Thus is the art of playing a tragedy: Days
shouldn’t be fun, should it? If Days was fun, working for the Organization would be fun, the
struggles of Roxas, Axel, and Xion wouldn’t be as hard-hitting, and that thematic core of finding
yourself in spite of difficult circumstances, and the unsatisfying, life altering consequences
of those revelations, would be pointless. As the cutscene collection shows, without that context,
it’s just a brief glimpse into various moments in Roxas’ life to fill in his backstory. Days is so
much more than just a piece to fit into a larger puzzle, it deserves to be so much more than that.
Yet, because it isn’t the height of fun gameplay, I have a hard time recommending anyone play
it over just watching the collection. For me, games have the ability to be more than just
fun, but I know there are a substantial amount of people that only view games by how fun their
gameplay is. I get where they’re coming from, but looking at every single game from the same lens
can sometimes lead to tunnel vision. If I were the me of several years ago, I would have hated Days
for being so boring, but that’s obviously changed, and I've found a new experience I simply
can’t get anywhere else. An experience that can only exist in spite of the issues it has.
I think I can get my point across the best by looking at the infamous ice cream line. This has
been memed to hell and back, and out of context: yeah it's hilariously weird. With context,
however, it makes so much more sense. Through the hours and hours you've spent working for the
Organization, through all the good times and bad times, sea salt ice cream, those moments sitting
on the clock tower, bullshitting away about whatever came to mind: those moments were the
highlights, and to Roxas, those moments defined his friendships. Eating ice cream with someone was
an action he only considered doing with his two best friends, the only thing he ever truly wanted
in life. To be denied that by the very people he’d been working for all along, after realizing
that he'd taken them at their word for so long, put so much stock in faith. After doing everything
he was ever asked, with his only desire to hang out after work and eat ice cream: they threw him
and Xion away, the useless tools they were.
When I hear this line, “who will I eat ice
cream with,” it hits me hard. Everything about this climax devastates me. You're forced to
fight Xion through all of the areas you've been doing missions in, putting into perspective how
useless it all was, ending with a fight at the clock tower, Vector to the Heavens blaring
in the background. The tragedy has begun, and you can't stop it anymore. Xion is
one of the best boss fights in the game, making use of all the abilities you likely
have stocked, incorporating some of the best actual bosses of the game, and removing most of
their annoying invulnerability phases, with the exception of maybe a few moves. Going from place
to place, hearing the different boss themes, fighting a different version of her: until it
all ends with her giant variant and, again, vector to the fucking heavennssssss playing in the
background, pillars of light shooting everywhere, whirlwinds, everything is falling apart at the
seams. Ironically the most fun fight in Days is the fight you don’t want to do, the fight you
never wanted to do. The one where you kill Xion. It really gets to me that none of these characters
can do anything to avert the coming sadness. Xion ends up deciding that submitting to her cruel fate
is the best option for everyone, and that gets her killed; Roxas decides that defying fate is for
the best, and that gets him captured; Axel has no idea what to do about fate other than to delay
it as long as he possibly can, and he ends up losing his two best friends, as we later learn in
Kingdom Hearts 2: his only reason for existing.
You know, people complain that nobody dies in
Kingdom Hearts, and that’s a fair complaint; however, they instead go through an insane
degree of emotional trauma to make up for that, and I think that’s a fair substitution. It
traumatizes me, that’s for sure. After Riku succumbs to the darkness and captures Roxas, the
ending theme of Sanctuary plays at the credits. A theme that had once been used to bookend a
touching, happy conclusion in Kingdom Hearts 2, a song you associate with joy, is being
used in a completely separate context to elicit sorrow. To bookend a tragic tale that
no one but the player will ever truly know.
I resonated with Days in a way I never expected
coming back to it. It took so long to make this video because I dreaded the idea of going back
and wrestling with the camera to do a bunch of inconsequential missions. There are a lot of
ideas in Days that would work so much better in a game that took better advantage of those
ideas. The panel upgrade system is genius, because it both allows for a wider degree of
player freedom, while not letting up on the limitations necessary to balance the difficulty. I
wouldn't mind seeing it resurface in a future game that is better designed with that in mind. The
mission mode is quite fun, I remember having loads of fun with my friends back in the day. Just being
able to play as so many different characters, despite how simple their combos are, has a
novelty that I want to see explored again in the future. That isn't really the point
though, I enjoyed it in spite of its issues, in spite of anything the devs wanted it to be, or
what it was supposed to elicit: I liked it for my own reasons, and it will always stick with me for
my own reasons. At the end of the day, for a game to leave an impact on me, to stand out among a
sea of games that are more fun, but nothing else *cough cough COUGH*? I'll take 358 mundane Days
with some of my favorite characters, anyday. (Ugh that pun was bad I'm sorry)
