Backlog Dialogues

It's time for the completion episode of Dream Drop Distance! John takes Jared and Matt through a fun(?) game where they try to guess what he named every spirit as he worked towards completion, then goes over all the ways in which completion in Dream Drop Distance sucks, from obnoxious grinding by throwing Spirits in water barrels or balloon minigames, to using forecasts to try to get every single special portal, to a really stupid hidden message in the credits. It's not all bad, though, we've got an optional boss and a bunch of rather good story stuff, so let's have some fun this week!

This time we focus on Sora's side of The World That Never Was. We come to an understanding of both why Sora is the protagonist despite not being the chosen hero of the Keyblade, and what Xehanort's plan has been. Riku takes over once more to finish off Young Xehanort, and Master Xehanort closes out the game with a pitch for the story of Kingdom Hearts 3. Discussion of weird time travel, what it means to be a Xehanort, and more await in this installment!

The trip's going bad as we enter the first part of the finale of Dream Drop Distance with a return to The World that Never Was! We briefly get to see Sora be taunted by Xigbar before we are forced to drop to Riku, who has to deal with shifting dream labyrinths and crazy reveals about his present status as a Dream Eater, culminating in the final showdown with his own Darkness personified by Ansem, Seeker of Darkness. Obnoxious fights await in this installment!

It's time for the final Disney world in Dream Drop Distance, along with its coolest world concept (and perhaps the coolest world concept in all of Kingdom Hearts), Symphony of Sorcery, based on Disney's Fantasia. It's all about the classical music this week as Sora and Riku go through largely plotless worlds based on Fantasia sections and fight classic Fantasia villains Chernobog and Spellican.

Wait, something seems off about that.

It's time to visit a Disney world that can in no way come close to just how bizarre the movie it's based on is, the Country of Musketeers! Based on the 2004 direct to DVD animated movie Mickey, Goofy, and Donald: The Three Musketeers, this world makes us question many things, including the timeline of Mickey as a Keyblade master and how sleeping worlds even work. We continually fight our distractions and weeb sensibilities as we try to make sense of this absurd world we have found ourselves in. Goofy demonstrates his keenly honed mind for slapstick comedy by performing the most impractical yeeting that has ever yeeted.

This week, we head back to Traverse Town because it's glowing for some reason! Sora and Riku have to help the The World Ends With You characters deal with a Spellican problem, which seems to be the kind of NFT that steals all your other NFTs from your wallet. But that's not important, what's really important is what happens at the end of the episode, where Maleficent makes her move to assert her dominance as the true endgame of Kingdom Hearts by performing the most evil move anyone can do: making Coded matter.

Time for Kingdom Hearts to make its saving throw on portraying Pinocchio with Prankster's Paradise! Sora gets to explore a fun theme park and interact with characters he's met that don't remember him, while Riku gets to go through a much better version of Monstro that isn't a chaos maze. The reality shift for this world enables some utterly delightful nonsense against the lobster themed dream eaters we face. Various discussions of gross anatomy are had. Fun!

This week in the world of dreams, Sora and Riku find a world almost but not entirely unlike Space Paranoids! We go in to the legacy of Tron Legacy and then see all the ways Dream Drop Distance kinda just makes a rather mid Kingdom Hearts world out of it. There's still fun to be had, though, as Sora gets great lines, Riku gets great character development, and the evil version of Tron, Rinzler, gets to beat us up for an hour.

The first Disney world in Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance is also the wildest tone misfire in the entire Disney Animated canon! Join Sora and Riku as they grapple with such horrors as anti-Roma racism, Catholics, and awkwardly out of place talking gargoyle statues in La Cité des Cloches, because the French would complain if we just called it Paris. We discuss the movie that spawned the world, then observe just how much of it is pared back in the traditional Kingdom Hearts way.

Time to start the time traveling adventure in the world of dreams, Dream Drop Distance! This week, after we introduce the basics of how DDD works, we begin our journey with a revisit to Traverse Town, which is much bigger than we remember. Also it's been crashed by characters from Tetsuya Nomura's best game, The World Ends With You! Fun and Flowmotion await us on the next leg of our journey!