Last time, I endured the interminable Hades Cup and the remaining odds and ends necessary to get the “good” ending. Spoiler: it’s not a cutscene of Junior being devoured by piranhas while Good Riku makes out with Evil Riku. Why even bother?
But bother I did, so let’s get this over with. Before departing for the End of the World, where Billy Zane is getting the darkness pregnant behind the bleachers, the Gummi Ship of Recapper Annoyance takes a quick detour to Neverland. On my tour of the optional bosses of the gummiverse in the last recap, a commenter pointed out that I missed one. Well, not exactly “missed,” since the Mouseketeers’ encounter with Kurt Zisa was completely by accident and I never intended to cover them all, but why not waste a little more of my life and see this last guy? Junior touches down on Captain Hook’s ship and finds Tinker Bell near the save point, discharging glitter from her vagina, and not ensconced in a Pokéball like she should be. After swapping out Goofy for Peter Pan, the group approaches her. “What is it, Tink?” Peter asks, like she’s a dog. “You want to go to the clock tower?” Peter generously allows Junior the final call on whether they should go. Yeah, I’m gonna come all the way here and not go see what’s got Tink’s panties in a twist. Together, they fly to London, which is never going to make sense to me.
Via cutscene, we see Junior, alone in the London night sky, gliding serenely toward Big Ben. I panic for a moment that Junior is trying to be a big swinging dick again, until I realize the game designers probably didn’t want to render a cutscene with any possible party I may have chosen. The camera swivels to a side view, the better to show Junior crane his neck to the right and see an animated, tattered ombré overcoat whoosh up from behind him, nod the head it doesn’t have at him in greeting, and fly ahead while Junior fails to react at all. I mean, it’s a boss and it’s not phallic in any way! I for one am gobsmacked.
Junior just found Squally’s Christmas present!
Squally’s Amazing Ombré Dreamcoat (or the Phantom) floats, sleeves outstretched, in between our heroes and the clock tower, the boss music swooping in to add drama to its introduction. But instead of doing what I normally do and rushing blindly at the boss while mashing X, I have Junior breeze by the Phantom and face the clock. First among the Phantom’s shitty and annoying abilities is casting Doom on party members, and the Doom counter for any afflicted character corresponds with Big Ben’s ticking. Casting Stopra on the clock negates this problem. Too bad that it takes me something like 20 seconds to even target the clock properly, and that I promptly forget that I have to keep casting Stopra on the clock or Doom will eventually start working again. This is honestly the least of my problems.
As for the Phantom itself, the only way to damage it is to watch the tiny orb floating beneath its coat and to cast a spell at it that matches its color, or to stab it with the Keyblade when it turns white. I think I have adequately demonstrated by now that swift, precise spellcasting is not my strong suit, particularly when I can’t just cast the same hotkeyed spell over and over. And hotkeying all of them is out of the question, since I would be up a creek without Curaga and Stopra also in immediate reach. This fight was basically designed for me to be bad at it. After the clock begins ticking again and Junior has no MP left to stop it, what with blowing it all on casting the wrong spell every single time, Peter drops dead, @%$#!!! soon follows, and all that’s left is for the Phantom to bonk Junior on the noggin with fireballs until he goes away. Sorry, fictional London, I guess your clock is permanently in the control of a well-dressed ghost. Have fun with that!
With that out of the way, the gummi ship warps back to Hollow Bastion, from which it embarks upon one last unnecessary, overlong trip through gummi space. The journey is still filled with all manner of gummi asteroids–to ensure that I’m paying attention and not just holding forward on the controller while reading a book–but the surrounding area is no longer a cheery grape candy color, but pitch black, except for a pulsating purple blob of light directly ahead. Eventually (and for what it’s worth, it seems like it took less time than the original trip to Hollow Bastion did) they arrive at the purple blob, which up close looks like a glowing purple, ringed planet, but it’s probably supposed to be akin to a collapsed star. Glowing blue shards of, I guess, gummi planet matter are flowing into it in streams, no doubt containing millions of dead anthropomorphic household items and girls with pretty hair and great singing voices. Or they’re just shards of ice, the remains of Arendelle.
Down on what I’m going to call the planet, Junior and his sidekicks emerge from a cave of purple rock and find themselves in the midst of an infinite shallow sea of purple water, as the “End of the World” chyron lets me know I didn’t accidentally land in Halloween Town. Though this place has also been confusingly referred to “the heart of the darkness,” the horizon is glowing with that same purple light that was visible from space. Don’t worry, though, it’s not like there’s going to be any confusion about light and darkness going forward.
“Gawrsh,” Goofy wonders as they stare at the tiny rocks floating in the water, “is that all that’s left of the worlds taken by the Heartless?” If you say so, buddy. Junior reminds them that those worlds will be restored if they defeat Billy Zane, like Billy has been personally swallowing world souls or something. It’s not going to happen just like that, idiot. Junior continues, because we haven’t been over this twice already, “But, if we do beat him and all these worlds become restored and disconnected, what’s gonna happen to this place? And to us?” I know perfectly well that “Rocks fall, everyone dies” is not the correct answer to this question, but how I wish I were wrong. Goofy says that this place is a “Heartless world”–again, if you say so, buddy–and that it might just vanish when they’re done. This is a pretty dark thing to say, and Junior and @%$#!!! stare at him in disbelief, until he goes on, “Even if this place goes poof, our hearts ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’m sure we’ll find our pals again. Yup, I just know that we will.” This is straight whistling past the graveyard and they all seem to know it, but Junior and @%$#!!!, the former staring at Token’s fugly paopu fruit keychain, pretend that Goofy’s words are comforting.
‘Or Hakuna Matata, as a ghost warthog on one of those rocks just told me.’
No Heartless physically appear in this first area, making it appear as if all I have to do is navigate Junior across these fragments of dead worlds and collect their treasure chests. But in most cases, the chests are booby trapped with an exploding ultraviolet orb of darkness that transports our heroes to an enclosed area where they have to fight various powerful Heartless (including Visibles, Ku Klux Klanterns, Bombs, and yet another fucking Behemoth) to earn their sweet loot. And it actually is sweet loot, for once, like power ups, elixirs, and accessories like the Angel Bangle and Three Stars; it only took the game designers until the last fucking dungeon, now that gummis are literally worthless and not just functionally worthless, to stop “rewarding” me with them.
After plundering the makeshift graves of a dozen dead worlds and not even pouring one out for the fallen, Junior and pals inch closer to the light and enter a circle of rough rock pillars, in which they are forced to fight yet another goddamn Behemoth. Why is the game trying to make these guys happen all of a sudden? This one goes down just like the others, and afterward our heroes are teleported via orb of darkness to another area. It appears they’re now beneath the surface of the planet, in a cave covered with suspiciously gummi-like crystal formations. Once they’ve derped to their satisfaction about finding Billy Zane, they are free to explore. I get ready to glide and hop to all the platforms in this cave to get to the many treasure chests, but remember what I just said about the game designers finally realizing gummis are fucking pointless? Well, never mind! Every single chest in this cave contains a fucking gummi. If it sounds like I’m complaining, let me be clear–this just means that I have Junior drop all the way to the bottom of the cave, bypassing all that platforming bullshit, and simply move on to the next area. That was easy!
Billy Zane is inside Amanda Bynes?
So was that cave the origin of all gummi matter? If so, I am more in favor than ever of Goofy being right and this planet vanishing into the ether. Make it so. Anyway! The Mouseketeers next find themselves in a mouth-like cave with gross yellow fangs, staring out into the darkness at a number of identical caves nestled within massive rock pillars. Either this is another underground cave and it’s so vast that I can’t see the walls, or the gang is above ground again, even though the sky is completely different. I have no idea what’s going on.
Laser penis! In a butt!
A point of sparkly light near the edge beckons to them, so they blithely jump right in, and are teleported to another mouth cave, this one with a pillar of purple light in the center. Now, every single mouth cave Junior et al are about to visit is identical to this one: entering the light pillar transports them to a world they’ve visited, or a facsimile of that world. I don’t know which, and I promise it doesn’t matter. Once there, just like in the infinite sea, they have to fight waves of Heartless until a treasure chest appears, which, in most cases, contains a copy of the accessory they obtained from that world’s final boss. This is incredibly boring and does not make for interesting recapping, since all of these worlds have–obviously!–been covered in detail. But it’s worth noting that the pillar of light for each world is only purple if that world’s keyhole has been violated by Junior–otherwise the pillar would be blue. So it does serve a purpose as a checklist of the key tasks I was supposed to complete for the good ending, and even though I checked on this stuff myself, in a wave of paranoia, before coming here, I do spend this entire section of the game panicking that the next pillar I see will be blue and that I tortured myself with the Hades Cup for nothing.
Oh wait, one interesting thing happens: in the Deep Jungle interlude, even seeing them coming from several feet away, Junior still slips on about two dozen consecutive banana peels, spilling most of his candy-coated munny on the dirt for a bunch of imaginary monkeys to pick up. Good thing he doesn’t need munny where he’s going! (Not Hell. Sorry to disappoint.)