Kingdom Hearts Re:coded Log III

Welcome back; time for another exciting episode of logging Kingdom Hearts Re:coded. This one is late because I spent the last week submersing myself in Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy. That game is amazing, by the way, I highly recommend it.

Okay, Wonderland. This time around, Sora's looking for completely unexplained items called "Inklings", which no character bothers to fully unveil or clear up for us. However, Sora looks just behind him to see something sparkly and shiny and possibly star-transcending. Once Sora found it to be an Inkling, he discovered it had two of these qualities. Then Sora reminds a girl who looks to be at least in early teens what her name is... only you, Kingdom Hearts, only you. Anyway, off to collect more delicious Inklings.


Our next stop is a maze garden, with Inklings strewn everywhere! Oh, and there are also red card soldiers threatening to decapitate our fourteen-year-old protagonist, but let's not mind them. That's totally normal for Wonderland after the last three games. At the end of our maze is a... tea garden. Only you, Wonderland, only you. We find two more Inklings here, bash some Heartless heads in, and then make our way out. But oh, what's this? Suddenly, the antagonizing red soldiers are moving at speeds rivaling that of Speed Forme Deoxys, and they cannot possibly be avoided. After venturing across what can only be desribed as Kingdom Pac-Man Hyper Mode FINAL MIX, Sora finally finds the Backdoor to fix this, cleans up the Heartless in there, and all is well. However, because the universal forces require nothing under perfection from Sora, the lad had to redo the system sector to get all the rewards.

Sora spends the entirety of his time in Wonderland finding in Inklings, occassionally stopping to beat some Heartless heads in. Wonderland's maps, large and confusing on a multitude of levels, got Sora lost and dazed on several occassions. However, a force beyond Sora's mortal artificial intelligence forced to him to go, to strive to be the very best, like no one ever was. At last, Sora found all fifteen Inklings. "But wait," said Alice upon noticing Sora's amount of Inklings, "there are sixteen Inklings, Sora!" Sora dug through his pockets, pulling up nothing but digitized sea salt ice cream sticks and empty bottles of Uncle Cid's Keyblade Polish. He happened to purchase a few from Aerith; who by the way isn't even in this game, yay after all, they were only a gil munny.

Since Sora couldn't find another Inkling on him, he backtracked to the Tea Party Garden on the edge of Wonderland. What wonders wondrously lie beyond the wondrous edges of Wonderland are beyond me and my wondrousness. Anyway, Sora made several attacks to attack the table in the room, resulting in his Keyblade coming mere inches from impaling a poor white rabbit. Though "poor" is perhaps not the best term; this rabbit was wearing a fine red coat and was carrying a rather enormous pocket-watch. Anyway, Sora was able to remind the rabbit what a watch was, since I guess rabbits aren't very intelligent species (See also: Data Sora). The rabbit also just happened to be carrying the final Inkling. Sora snags and returns to his fairest of fair Disney princesses who isn't actually a princess at all.

Back with Alice, Sora finally reminds Alice about all of the things that her premature Alzheimer's disease kept her from recalling. Alice remembers where she found the most peculiarly shaped object, a Keyhole. Sora finds it, inside a birdcage. Now, before Sora went to claim his prize, the universal force's command had to pause reality and scoff at this. A birdcage, in Wonderland? There aren't even any birds! The closest thing to a flying organism up in this world is a Yellow Opera! Anyway, Sora ever-so-politely and yet brutally assaults several Card Soldiers, and gets to the Keyhole.

And then, oh nooooooooooooooooo! Things have transformed! Sora is no longer able to simple slash his dark foes away with a gigantic key. Now, he has to fire balls of light at his dark foes... with a gigantic key. It really doesn't get any better than this, folks, really. The universal planes shift and contort, forming something akin to a mobile shooter game, in which the course moves in front of Sora as enemies and obstacles approach from the distance. Sora clears out a round of this rather enjoyable battalion, and then he is met with his old foe: Trickmaster!

Pause.

Okay, seriously. This is really dumb, fo'reel. How many times have we defeated Trickmaster now? Let's see...

1. Kingdom Hearts
2. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
3. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories again with Riku
4. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

So apparently, even though Trickmasters are this theoretically exclusive, individual Heartless, more of them keep coming up, and for different people. Yeah, welcome to the Kingdom Hearts series. The only difference is this time, Sora gets to use projectile balls of light to end the Trickmaster's (fifth) life. So our first bought with the Trickmaster actually isn't too bad; he falls fairly quickly. However, the Trickmaster has a new trick... yes I just used that line. Now the Trickmaster can shrink after defeat, and disappears to another area down the road.

So, Sora, being extremely confident now that he has defeated the Trickmaster without even using the Keyblade brutally, continued along his path to... "wait, where does this even lead?" thought Sora. The universal lord commanded the protagonist to hush his thoughts, and instead filled his mind with thoughts of rocket-powered fists and penguins. Having been distracted by this, Sora didn't expect to get to see the Trickmaster yet again so soon! Sora thought this would be easy, when he saw something glowing out of the Trickmaster... he then learned something of his foe:

TRICKMASTER CAN THROW FREAKING METEORS.

And they're very annoying too. Sora, in reality, dodged the meteors as best as he could while nailing the Trickmaster with more orbs of light. However, in his mind, Sora was scaling the meteors themselves while dealing mighty cannon blasts to the head of the Trickmaster. Yeah, a couple of meteor blows to the head don't really keep a youngster like Sora in check.  By the data skin of his data teeth, Sora defeated the Trickmaster once again, and continued along his path.

Several miles of blox, Heartless, and holes in the walls from an overuse of light bullets from the Keyblade, Sora found the end of the path... guarded by Trickmaster. "No problem," thought Sora, "I'll just climb up more Meteors and punch blast the Trickmaster in the face!" However, it was not that easy. Because Sora also thought that it was going to be the best idea ever to blast the Trickmaster in the face with Fireball. Now, days after this battle occurred, the universal lord made sure to take Sora aside and lock him in the Void for a few days with nothing but Midgar Zolom and the Mysterious Figure for doing this. Trickmaster was now ON FIRE, as well as throwing Meteors. In addition, the Trickmaster revealed its newest trick--yepp, said it again--distorting the very fabric of space. Several times, the Trickmaster forced Sora to battle his space-distorting, meteor-empowered, flaming darkness in such angles as upside down, diagonal shift, and right angle twist. Needless to say, it took Sora several attempts to best the Trickmaster, but at last he did.

With this, Sora debugged Wonderland, though you could hardly tell it was any more of a freaky place than it usually is. Outside the Datascape, three notable events/revelations are made:

1. Donald is an idiot.
2. Goofy is also an idiot.
3. The plot thickens.

Seeing Sora meet with the black-cloaked figure once again, the group wonders just who it could be. Now, by this point, Mickey has pretty much come to some kind of conclusion that the entity is linked to the journal and therefore came from it. At this, Donald exclaims,

"But what if it's Organization XIII!?"

Donald has just lost all respect from me. You defeated Organization XIII in the last game, you haven't seen a Nobody since, and it's not like Organization XIII is the only group of people that can wear black cloaks. Now, after this, we learn that the figure is actually Riku! Or rather, it's... the journal. The journal created the black cloaked figure to defend itself against the bug blox virus, taking on Riku's form. However, if this is the journal from Kingdom Hearts, just when was anyone, or even just Riku in a black cloak!? asdfjkl;tetsuyanomuraasdfjkl;

The Riku-journal-entity-creature--data-thing then reveals that it pulled Mickey, Donald, and Goofy into the Datascape to help fix the virus. Then, the two squirrels that remain in the real world do indeed confirms this. Mickey even puts it all together to affirm it. HOWEVER, Goofy during this scene cannot seem to deduce what the heck is going on. THREE people just explained this, Goofy. You are being really dumb, fo'reel. Maybe next time we'll get better supporting party members, like Kain Highwind and SUPER GIGA MECHA NESBITT and Shantohtothehotto.

 That's all for now. Tune in next time for a glorious rehash of Final Fantasy IV's battle system. But with less Kain Highwind and more "ATB is the heart's true essence!"