But first, of course, we have to cut to Riku, back in his silly Heart of Darkness outfit, marching with new purpose toward Maleficent, who is staring at the glowing drug trip portal that is Hollow Bastion’s keyhole. Riku says, “So, I see the path has emerged at last,” but it’s not really Riku saying it. It’s Riku’s voice with Billy Zane’s as an overlay, which just makes it sound like he’s talking through a distortion box. Riku is a Death Knight! It all makes sense now. “Yes,” Maleficent replies, probably envying Riku’s sweet emo voice mod, but not his tatty white skirt. “The Keyhole to the darkness.” Of course it is. Riku tells her that unlocking it will cause the Heartless to overrun this world, like that hasn’t basically already happened. “What do I care?” Maleficent asks, rolling her eyes at him. “The darkness holds no power over me.” Right. Maleficent and Darkness are just friends with benefits! She’s not in a relationship! “Rather,” she goes on, “I will use its power to rule all worlds.” She’s using it! She can break up anytime she wants! “Such confidence,” Riku sneers at her. And to Maleficent’s surprise, he holds out his hand and a Big Black Keyblade materializes in it. But Darkness has never given her a present like that! They are going to have such a fight later. She left her toothbrush at Darkness’s apartment, of course she wanted a relationship! Jesus, Darkness needs to take a hint!
They get baked and stare at this thing for hours.
I’ll stop. Maleficent eyes the Big Black Keyblade with open longing, but I guess she and Riku were expecting it to do something to the keyhole, which it pointedly does not. “Impossible!” Maleficent yells at it. “The princesses of heart are all here!” Then she turns around, and for the first time we can see that Token is lying comatose on the floor nearby, like her pillbox hyperbaric chamber just vanished in midair and dumped her there. “It must be her,” Maleficent mutters. The two of them loom over her, and now that Riku is possessed by Billy Zane he doesn’t give a fuck about her anymore, either. I mean, not that he was super in love with her anyway, but he obviously cared more than stupid Junior. “Without her heart,” he says, “she will never be able to release her power.” But where could her heart be?! As if on cue, they hear a thump from the next room, where the Wanker Trio has just entered. “The king’s fools are here,” Maleficent announces. With a swish of her cloak and one last contemptuous glare at Riku, like he’s the one who turned Darkness into a commitment-phobic manchild, she stalks off. She orders Riku as she leaves to guard the Mary Sues, and Riku doesn’t sass her about it, but he does glow blue like Billy Zane did earlier and look at her like she’s got toilet paper stuck on her heels. Come on, game, we get it, that’s not Riku anymore! God.
And with that, we’re back to Junior. They’re in the same room Riku was when he plunged himself into Billy Zane, or vice-versa. I’m still confused. Two steps into the room, they find Maleficent. “I’m afraid you’re too late,” she tells them as her theme of Dark Evil Darkness swells behind her. She picked this room for her confrontation just for the acoustics, I bet. “Any moment now,” she goes on, “the final Keyhole will be unsealed. This world will be plunged into darkness. It is unstoppable.” And then she and Darkness are going to have a serious talk about where they see this going.
Junior is a complete dip, so he just waves his Flaccid White Keyblade at Maleficent and shouts, “We’ll stop it! After coming this far, there’s no way we’re gonna let that happen!” I mean, I know that’s exactly what he’s going to do, but there’s just something so corny about Junior thinking he can do anything as long as he has his white boy grittiness. He’s like every New England Patriots receiver ever. Maleficent’s eyes bulge as she contemplates this irritating, terribly dressed boy. “You poor, simple fools,” she finally shouts. “You think you can defeat me? Me, the mistress of all evil?” Darkness should have put a ring on it.
As she’s shouting and being her usual over-the-top black hat self, the circular section of floor she’s standing on lifts into the air, because it’s so much more diabolical to confront one’s nemeses on top of a magical evil frisbee. I don’t want to label Maleficent a pushover or anything, given what Junior’s about to deal with, but this fight against her is so easy that I don’t even know what she does, other than summon some Heartless that Junior ignores in favor of standing on top of her frisbee and beating the shit out of her. The battle literally takes 20 seconds. But, of course, she’s not dead, just temporarily down for the count, and, clutching her heart (thud goes the anvil!), she disappears into a portal to regroup. Junior gets Ansem’s Report 5 for his trouble, one more cruel reminder from the universe that he never learned to read.
Well, after hitting the save point that just popped up in the room, I guess there’s nothing for it but to follow Maleficent. If I sound less than enthusiastic about hopping through this portal, there is a reason, but we’ll get to that. A black screen gives way to Maleficent, gasping and clutching her chest as she lurches through a large, echoing chamber. Riku enters through a dark portal behind her, and asks in his and Billy Zane’s most dickish tones, “Do you need some help?” No, she’s fine, she’ll just be in the corner, dealing with her cardiac arrest. Junior and his hangers-on enter behind them, and he goes, “Riku!” for what feels like the thousandth time. But a beat later, @%$#!!! asks in wonder, “Is that–” and Riku finishes for him, holding it up for all to admire, “Yes. A Keyblade.” @%$#!!! is probably on the verge of defecting from Team Junior yet again, but Riku goes on, “But unlike yours, this Keyblade holds the power to unlock people’s hearts.” This game is starting to sound like a goddamn country ballad. But before we can get too bogged down in these cheeseball rhetorical devices, Riku creeps, “Allow me to demonstrate,” whips around, and jams his Big Black Keyblade square into Maleficent’s chest. The point of entry between Maleficent’s tits glows with ultraviolet light, and sparks of light and shadow are spurting everywhere. This is totally not suggestive of anything. “Now, open your heart, surrender it to the darkness!” Riku demands, and after one final thrust, he pulls out and orders her, “Become darkness itself!” And then she and Darkness will never be apart, ever! Well, why not, Maleficent may as well be Overly Attached Girlfriend now.
‘I’m enjoying this, but I can’t stop thinking about the dry cleaning bill.’
Riku, having done his work and blown his load, disappears, leaving Team Junior to deal with Maleficent. She, for her part, is loving her new, indelible attachment to Darkness. As she glows with green pot haze like Riku did earlier, she stares at her hands, possibly wondering if her fingers have always been so weird, man. After a moment, she smiles with delight. “This is it!” she cries. “This power!” And then she bursts into an emerald green fireball and screams the words that trigger me curling up into a ball and sobbing: “Darkness… The true darkness!”
Because, when the flames subside, Junior finds a gigantic black dragon staring down at him with beady little eyes and emitting clouds of eeeeevil black smoke from its nostrils. Obviously it would be way too boring to fight Maleficent a second time if she just had a different color outline, so this is what we get instead. And it’s fucking terrible.
The first thing to know about the Big Black Dragon is that it’s difficult and dangerous to attack her from the ground, since her only attackable point his her head, which is both too high to hit without jumping and is usually emitting streams of ass-scorching green fire. It is much more practical to climb up her tail and along her back to attack her head from above, but when I say practical, I actually mean “the only viable option,” because it’s not exactly practical either. BBD moves constantly, between stomping the ground and creating a massive shockwave I’m terrible at avoiding, and snapping her head down toward the ground in an effort to roast @%$#!!! alive and eat him. Also, her back is narrow and spiky, she shoots fireballs at her own back just to murder Junior, and making it to her giraffe-length neck just means maintaining an even more precarious and unstable perch in the hopes of managing to pull off one Ars Arcanum before plummeting to the ground and getting Junior’s hair lit on fire. She also has colors of health bar I haven’t even fucking seen yet. Pink? What the Christ is that? Is she immortal?
I say all this as preamble to the fact that I…beat the Big Black Dragon on my first try.
Wait, did I really? I did! Wow!
I mean, honestly, this fight actually made me quit the game for several weeks, years and years ago, because I was so sick of Maleficent shouting, “The true darkness!” after yet another reset, only for Junior to yet again pitch clumsily off her neck and into the bright green fires of hell. I was prepared for this to take hours. My husband, knowing what I was attempting and being generally insufferable when it comes to these matters, came in to see if I required help, and I got to say, all nonchalant, “I’m fine, that bitch is dead.” Holy shit, this feels awesome.
I can’t imagine those wings were very useful.
Our heroes take a moment to contemplate the dead dragon, or witch, or anvil conjurer, or whatever she was, as the Big Black Dragon melts away, leaving nothing but a black stain on the floor. Riku reappears and pointedly steps all over Maleficent’s remains. “How ironic,” he mutters. “She was just another puppet after all.” No, no, it’s ironic because she was destroyed by the thing she sought to control! And that’s ironic because Riku is walking that same path! Do I have to do everything around here? @%$#!!! just quacks, “What?” like Riku isn’t talking sense, but I like to think it’s because he simply can’t hear Billy Zane’s dulcet tones from all the way across the room. Riku clarifies for them, “The Heartless were using Maleficent from the beginning. She failed to notice the darkness in her heart eating away at her. A fitting end for such a fool.” Yeah, being killed by Junior is a pretty shitty way to go. However, Riku, you have failed to notice that you are wearing a yeti’s toupee as a skirt, so maybe ease up on the criticism.
Riku disappears again, possibly to laugh at Maleficent some more for being such a sucker with such a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. I mean, I know he’s basically Billy Zane at this point and not really Riku in any way, but it’s still funny to hear him say this shit. Junior receives a summoning gem labeled Fireglow as a reward for beating a boss and listening to more darkness rhetoric. Back in the chapel where they fought Maleficent the first time, a new doorway appears next to the save point. So once more Junior is stuck following some darkness-besotted asshole through a portal to God knows where. Horribly, this door leads to another area of the Lift Stop, and I fear the worst, but it’s only a short jaunt to another door and the real destination: the split-level chamber containing the Mary Sues of Heart and the Hollow Bastion Keyhole of DURRRRRR. Beast doesn’t even react to seeing Belle encased in her wall pod, but it’s not like we care about Beast’s agenda anymore, or ever did, really.
Junior and his companions coldly ignore the six women in comas and proceed to the upper level, where Junior spots Token and runs over to her. Oh, he just needed to find the right woman in a coma. @%$#!!! pauses when he notices a barrier shimmer into place behind them that knocks Goofy on his ass. But Junior is all concerned about his, cough, “lady love,” so obviously he doesn’t notice. He picks her up in his arms and begs her to open her eyes, because he still doesn’t get this whole “heartless coma” thing, but I guess that’s just so Riku/Billy Zane, perched atop the keyhole portal, can exposit at him dramatically, “It’s no use. That girl has lost her heart. She cannot wake up.” And what does Junior say to this? “What? You… You’re not Riku.” NO SHIT, JUNIOR. Did he not notice how not-Riku he was when he was spraying Maleficent with darkness jizz and speaking with Billy Zane’s voice? Get up to fucking speed, kid.
Riku ignores this, which is the proper response, and tells Junior instead as he floats down toward the floor, “The Keyhole cannot be completed so long as the last princess of heart still sleeps.” Oh, but Junior is not done fixating on shit he should already know, since he replies in a confused tone, “The princess…? [Token]’s a princess?” Is he for fucking real right now? Is he trolling me? Riku is like, “Uh huh, and did you catch the part where I told you new information?” He adds, “It is time she awakened,” like her voice actor hasn’t been saying that the whole fucking game.