When Junior reaches the final beam, leading to the Hundred Acre Wood, he discovers it is green, a pointless exception to the purple/blue color coding that damn near gives me a heart attack. Near Pooh’s thinking log he finds a save point, which he uses to get the hell out of here and restock his dwindling item supply at Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s Overpriced Consumables Emporium. He also checks for the telltale lock on the Winnie the Pooh book in Merlin’s study four or five times, until my pulse settles down. This shit is so not worth it.
Okay, it turns out there is one more pillar past the green one, and this one is a fiery orange, again loosening my fragile grip on sanity. Jesus Christ, why make the colors mean anything if you’re not going to stick with it? I can’t take this. Of course, this pillar represents Hollow Bastion, judging from the abundance of lavender tile work and steampunk copper piping inside. After fighting some Visibles right in front of the inflamed butthole through which they entered (I mean, no wonder, it was being reamed by a fire pillar), a door opens off the left side of the hallway. Inside the room, Junior and friends find a chest containing a sweet, sweet Megalixir, as well as a faux-futuristic machine covered top-to-bottom in teal circuit boards. Junior examines it, and like most machinery, it begins spouting purple prose about hearts and darkness. My microwave does that all the time. “Ones born of the heart and darkness, devoid of hearts, ravage all worlds and bring desolation,” it reads, sporting a digital beret and smoking a digital clove cigarette. “Seize all hearts and consummate the great heart. All hearts to be one, one heart to encompass all.” If Billy Zane wants to have an orgy, he could just come out and say it. No need to program Watson to spout this flowery nonsense. The machine goes on, “Realize the destiny: the realm of Kingdom Hearts. The great darkness sealed within the great heart. Progeny of darkness, come back to the eternal darkness. For the heart of light shall unseal the path. Seven hearts, one Keyhole, one key to the door. The door of darkness, tied by two keys.” This sounds way too much like the ballad of the One Ring to me, which I guess makes Junior Frodo, while Riku is Boromir and the keyholes are all Samwise.
There are ointments for that!
Jesus, the computer is still talking. I am dying to know why Billy Zane left his LiveJournal open before leaving this room. “The door of darkness to seal the light,” it continues. “None shall pass but shadows, returning to the darkness. Ones born of the heart and darkness, hunger for every heart until the dark door opens.” The ghost of Maleficent is openly masturbating right now. Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that Junior is the key to finding something called Kingdom Hearts, a grammatically confusing name that would sound totally ridiculous if it weren’t the name of the fucking game and we hadn’t all gotten used to it by now. Or maybe Riku is the key? Or Token? Or King Mickey? Fuck, I don’t know. Junior can’t stop to contemplate these mysteries, both because he’s too stupid to do so, and because the party is attacked by a wave of Visibles.
Back out in the hallway, Junior jumps back through the inflamed butthole to find the fire pillar gone. Like Junior, these pillars like to hit it and quit it. The gang returns to the save point in the Hundred Acre Wood before jumping back through the now-empty engorged opening. But they do not return to Billy Zane’s bedroom; instead, they plummet through a hole in a stormy, nighttime sky, covered head to toe in Tinker Bell’s flight-bestowing body glitter. If the opening strains of “Night on Bald Mountain” were not enough to clue me in that this is Nomura’s last-minute, half-assed attempt at a tribute to Fantasia, then the massive, winged shadow demon crouching on a mountaintop would fill in the blank. (And I know there is a Fantasia world in Dream Drop Distance, but at the time this boss fight was apparently the only space Nomura could free up for maybe the finest Disney film ever. You know, because spending all that time in a whale’s GI tract was way more important.) As Chernabog unfurls his bat wings and hisses menacingly at our heroes, the camera zooms in on Junior as he makes the most gloriously ridiculous Blue Steel face. I mean, he’s been making that face here and there the entire game, but this one is special. Chernabog somehow manages to not die from laughter, so I still have to fight him.
When has he had time for all that eyebrow sculpting?
It’s really too bad that a battle against a Disney villain as iconic as Chernabog–and one I get to do while flying!–is this boring. Thanks to the demon’s size, the battle closely resembles the fight with Ursula. Poor Chernabog is pulling out all the pyrotechnics to make this visually appealing, but Junior ruins the ambience by hovering above his left shoulder and stabbing him in the ear until he dies. The only disruption to this approach is when Chernabog blows the three of them away with a blast of air, probably because he’s sick of Junior using the Keyblade as a Q-tip. But it only takes a few seconds to fly back and jam the Keyblade all the way into his brain, deafening him and taking out the last of his many life bars. After his defeat, the demon explodes into blue and purple fire and fades away, leaving a crater in the top of the mountain for Junior to float into. He also, as thanks for killing him, upgrades Glide to Superglide. That’s right: he leaves them some lube and then invites them into his waiting hole.
Loading ...At the bottom of the crater, the boys find a circle of light on the ground that transports them into a series of spooky purple caverns that feel a little too much like the inside of a womb, or Jabba, though thankfully there are no naked fish princesses in here throwing wedding jewelry at Junior. A few light circle teleports later they emerge in another cave with a floor glowing radioactive green, a fact that is way more alarming than the Behemoth that greets them at the door. Seriously, enough with the goddamn Behemoths. I’m starting to think that every Behemoth in the game was supposed to be a different Disney boss, and every time the game designers were behind schedule, they bailed on an incomplete design and replaced it with a Behemoth, the equivalent of an “Under Construction” sign.
Once the Behemoth is dead, the Mouseketeers notice a Heartless symbol on the other side of the cave. The death of the nth purple underbite monster causes a chunk of the symbol to fall away, revealing a portal beyond. But before Junior can go poke at this with his Keyblade, they are subjected to a gauntlet of more high-level Heartless, mostly Visibles and KKKlanterns, which are also getting the eleventh-hour pimp job from the game designers. As each wave of Heartless is defeated, other pieces of the Heartless symbol fall off, finally leaving a heart-shaped vagina in the wall. The casts of the Anal Attorney and Suikoden series are crying out for Junior to run the other way, but he bravely charges in there, only to find…the door from the Island of Wankers? Edgeworth and Gremio were right: this was a mistake.
Goofy looks like he’s intently searching for the clitoris.
Next to THE DOOR is the game’s final save point–which I use several times out of paranoia–and a chest with a Megalixir. After I kit out Team Junior with all the best healing items I have remaining, Junior examines the door. “Huh?” he says, obviously. A voice, I guess from THE DOOR, addresses him and only him, while @%$#!!! looks at him like he’s finally lost it. “Careful,” intones THE DOOR. “This is the last haven you’ll find here. Beyond, there is no light to protect you.” I’m here to translate door-ese for you: that was indeed the final save point. I know! Crazy. “But don’t be afraid. Your heart is the mightiest weapon of all.” I feel for the poor ER nurse who is going to have to unroll my eyeballs. “Remember,” THE DOOR finishes, “you are the one who will open the door to the light.” God, I hope THE DOOR means itself, and not some other door. Too many doors!
Ignoring @%$#!!! advising him to “take a rest” since he’s hearing voices, Junior opens THE DOOR. Light pours out from the opening and whites out the screen, but after a beat our heroes emerge onto a beach on the Island of Wankers. “Is this… Is this my island?” Junior asks. Siiiiigh. @%$#!!! fails to slap him in the face.
I make Junior run around for two solid minutes, with no clear idea where he’s supposed to go, until he randomly headbutts a cutscene at the end of one of the island’s many wooden catwalks. The camera zooms out drunkenly as Billy Zane’s voice booms out, “This world has been connected.” I expect Billy to let me know about the great 4G coverage provided by AT&T–now connecting more people on more gummi planets–when he goes on, “Tied to the darkness…soon to be completely eclipsed.” Yeah, that sounds about right. As he monologues, bits and pieces of the Island of Wankers disappear and the ocean turns a dark, emo purple. It’s like Maleficent had an orgasm in there. “You understand so little,” he tells Junior. No shit, buddy. And it doesn’t matter if he’s talking to me or Junior, because it’s not like I know what the fuck is going on, either. Over a white screen, Billy says, “One who knows nothing can understand nothing.” So deep! And dark! So deep and dark! If Billy pulls out an acoustic guitar, I’m out of here.
Goofy and @%$#!!! wonder who farted.
The ocean goes back to being boring, conformist blue, but staring out over the water, on a beach fragmented with fault lines of DARKNESS, is Riku, still in his skin-tight bodysuit and bizarre white half-skirt. Junior glides over to his buddy because he just can’t wait for more Billy Zane monologuing. As the camera comes in tight on Riku’s rubber sculpted abs, Billy says with poor Riku’s mouth, “Take a look at this tiny place. To the heart seeking freedom this island is a prison surrounded by water.” Jesus, we got that theme twenty fucking hours ago, BZ. “And so this boy sought to escape from his prison,” he goes on, raising Riku’s arms to the sky. “He sought a way to cross over into other worlds. And he opened his heart to darkness.” Yeah, I’m sure all of that was conscious planning on Riku’s part–he wasn’t just planning on sailing around the world on his raft, only to get in over his head because a door talked to him in a sexy voice. Your story works so much better. At this last bit, as Junior watches again with no emotion whatsoever, Riku’s body glows like a supernova and in a flash he has become Billy Zane in the over-tanned flesh. Only this elicits a reaction from Junior, who reaches out about three seconds too late and cries Riku’s name. Yeah, he’s been talking with Billy Zane’s voice this whole time and is clearly out to lunch, but now that his body is gone it’s time to emote? Come on, Junior. BZ tells him not to bother because Riku doesn’t live here anymore, but with a lot more words, most of them “heart” and “darkness.”