originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/162172...
Shortly after posting the last post, I realised there was something quite important I still needed to do in Neverland: the Keyhole of course! Speaking to Wendy a bit more reveals what you need to do: one of the faces of Big Ben (#confirmed) is showing the wrong time, so you have to hit it until the time is correct. And once you do…
This, in turn, triggers another flashback cutscene with Riku. We learn that Riku saw the Keyhole in Sora’s world (and that Kairi arrived on a meteor shower).
Back in the present, Maleficent is schooling Riku in the ways of the Sith. He gets all green and glowy.
The party gets the ability to fly anywhere I think? Something like that. Edit: OK, you can glide anywhere, but not with total control as in Neverland.
Anyway, time for the third and final tourney at the Coliseum. This time, at the end we fight Hercules. In the middle there’s also a rematch with Cloud. Exciting!
Cloud rematch uses up quite a bit of resources - I forgot the timings, and Cloud has one new attack - but goes more or less OK.
Hercules on the other hand is an absolute pain. He is invincible unless you throw a barrel at him. Throwing a barrel is fiddly: you have to switch menu items and you can’t be targeting Hercules. Once hit by a barrel, he may go into a number of different attacks that require all your attention to avoid and can’t be broken through, and he can also go back to the invincibility state almost immediately after you take him out of it. Worst, his health bar is really long and you can only get a tiny sliver off it each time you break invincibility, so even after you figure out the mechanic, the fight is quite long and tedious. But after a couple of tries (with one death to Cloud inbetween) I managed to grind through that healthbar, and I’m finally done with Coliseum.
My party gains the ability to push heavy objects, and we’re able to move the heavy box that Phil mentioned right at the start. This reveals the keyhole, and we can leave Rubbish Ancient Greece behind.
I make a quick visit to Wonderland to access some previously inaccessible areas and grab some items. Still need the white Trinity move.
Back to Traverse Town to upgrade my navicomputer and get the final worlds…
Sora is despairing. Donald and Goofy try to comfort him, but it’s kind of hard to take the scene seriously when it’s Donald Duck and Goofy doing their voices. In any case, we get a flashback scene of Kairi!
In fact, it’s some kind of legend about the world. It’s a very Christian sort of Original Sin type story: everyone once lived ‘in light’, but they got greedy, so everything got covered in darkness except the hearts of children, who rebuilt the ‘lost world’, but darkness still separates the various worlds. As far as light and dark imagery goes it falls pretty flat. (Nevermind that the various Disney settings were created by adults in order to instil particular values in children, and often quite reactionary ones blah blah shut up bryn…)
We get an endgame scenario: ‘a door to the innermost darkness will open’, so the ‘true light’ will return. so you must always believe in the light to beat the darkness etc. etc. It comes across as sanitised christianity, but I guess that fits Disney values. Not sure about Square values, and I might be missing some specific Japanese context here? idk.
Sora interprets this vision as a message from Kairi.
Anyway, I get a ‘transform gummi’, which will let my ship transform. Into what isn’t clear. In any case, the Potemkin is pretty tricked out now:
Onwards, to what may be the final world?
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