Our initial visit to Sunset Strip Twilight Town introduced us to Roxas, a confused, horny young man with A MYSTERIOUS LINK to our boy Junior; his besties Hayner, Chumlee, and Olette, who are boring; and Seifer, a sculpted-abs-baring honeypot not only for Roxas, but for sad middle-aged women who need to stop being creepy. Cough.

It is now dawn on the “3rd Day,” of Who Knows How Many Days. This is like a tweetstorm that begins with “1/?” except I can’t just refuse to click on it. This day starts a little differently than the first two, in that Roxas is not alone in his room. Naminé is standing next to his Rockstar energy drink fridge, leering at him, but when Roxas turns to face her, she’s no longer there. “Huh?” he derps. I can’t tell if he’s surprised she’s disappeared, surprised she was there in the first place, or surprised the sun rose again this morning. Once he’s stripped his sheets off the bed and taken a shame shower, Roxas heads down to the Wankhouse.

But he arrives to find the place empty, save a note on Chumlee and Olette’s fuck sofa. “Meet at the station,” it reads. “Today’s the day we hit the beach–and don’t sweat about the munny! –Hayner” Yeah, don’t sweat about the 5000 munny he lost and then covered up his mistake with (as far as his friends know) an absurd lie, and certainly don’t sweat how they’re getting to the beach without it. Hayner’s got this! Do I even want to know what he did to finance this excursion?

Trying not to think about who Hayner’s sugar daddy might be–but, real talk, it’s the candy shop grandma–Roxas runs toward the train station, and runs into Chumlee and Olette along the way. Olette doesn’t get further than a chipper “Morning!” before the air around her and Chumlee shifts and they’re motionless, like someone hit the pause button. Another “Huh?” escapes from Roxas’s pouty lips as he rushes forward, only to slam on the brakes when Naminé appears in front of him. I have to say, when she’s out here in “public,” her tiny white babydoll nightie seems…not indecent, exactly, but like she’s the new employee who has never been told it’s not acceptable to wear pajamas to the office.

She says, “Hello, Roxas,” like they ran into each other at Starbucks and time isn’t stopped around them. “Hi…” Roxas replies. He’s good at this. He goes on, “And you are…?” but Naminé puts a hand up in his face to shush him. Oh, you didn’t think you were getting answers, did you? Silly boy. “I wanted to meet you at least once,” she tells him, revealing the gummiverse’s saddest bucket list. And now that she has crossed off this item, she walks away without another word, pushing the play button again as she disappears down the street. She didn’t even ask him his favorite color, or to play Fuck/Marry/Kill with Hayner, Seifer, and Junior! What, did she have another pressing appointment with some other hormonal teen boy?

“Olette dragged me along to go shopping,” Chumlee is saying now that the scene is moving again. Oh, they are for sure fucking. He’s not carrying any shopping bags, but I assume that’s merely an issue of animator laziness. Olette asks if Roxas would like to join them, which I am taking as an invitation to ALL their joint activities. Which, no thanks. But Roxas, for some reason, is still hung up on meeting Naminé and witnessing her Sailor Pluto powers. His friends, obviously, have no idea what he’s talking about. “He’s stalling…” Chumlee says, exasperated, as Roxas stares at where Naminé appeared a moment ago. Even Chumlee knows their invitation was not appealing. “Very well, then,” Olette says. “We’ll see you later, Roxas, okay?” Aren’t they all going to the beach together? Are they again going to make the mistake of going to the train station right before it closes? Or are these two not invited? Hayner didn’t actually specify all four of them were going. Oooooh, a date!!!

Look, it’s been a hard few months, and I need this. We all need this.

Roxas barely registers that his friends are gradually downgrading him to a sometimes pal, because he thinks Naminé might have been headed for “that Haunted Mansion.” Sure, why not. He indeed sees her in the street on the way to the crack in the wall leading to the forest. By the way, is that the only way to reach this mansion? Through a hole in the city walls? That’s bad planning. When Roxas reaches the forest, a portal opens up in front of him and spills forth three zipper-headed, tight-assed Nobodies. When one of them tries to gently caress his hand, Roxas realizes he’s not emotionally ready for intimacy and runs back toward town. The creatures gambol through the air behind him, like the Patronuses of the world’s most emotionally disturbed witches and wizards.

Roxas’s flight takes him to the sandlot, where Seifer and his gang are standing around, probably admiring Seifer’s abs. “Hey, chicken wuss,” Seifer says as Roxas runs toward them. Oh noooooo. Being compared to Zell isn’t exactly the friend zone, since they were not friends, but it’s not his term for his best boning buddy, either. This is bad. Fuu blurts out, “Who’s that?” as the Nobodies approach, which is awkward, but Seifer announces, “I dunno, but they’ve already crossed the line!” Seifer has so many arbitrary rules for fighting that I am forced to accept he really is 13 years old. He tells his crew to find weapons, and Roxas too grabs for the same Struggle dildo bat he used in their first encounter, with an unnecessary handspring because his man might be watching squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

A “battle” ensues, not unlike Roxas’s first encounter with a Nobody–he can’t make contact with their weird zipper bods with his nerf weapon. Fuu and Rai, squared up with one, and Seifer with another, don’t seem to have any better luck. (Vivi is hiding behind a bench, bless him.) Roxas goes flying and lands flat on his ass, but thankfully Seifer and his posse are too busy being surrounded by the enemies for him to lose face. What also helps is that time stops again, at least for Seifer and his gang. Roxas stares as the Nobodies perform mating dance in a circle around the frozen teens. Even the Nobodies want Seifer’s candy. It is known.

Just as the Nobodies are about to abandon the hottest boy in the room and move in on Roxas again, Naminé shouts from offscreen, “Roxas! Use the Keyblade!” It could only be Naminé doing said shouting, given the time stoppage, but instead of looking around for the damn Keyblade, Roxas spends three agonizingly long seconds looking around for Naminé like seeing her pale pointless face is going to help this situation in any way. He finally spots her on a rooftop. She does nothing else but stare at him, and while he stares back, a Nobody realizes Roxas is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer and presses its advantage. At the last moment, he throws up his forearms in defense, and the screen flashes white. Well, he’s dead now. Good job, Naminé.

Sadly, no. When Roxas opens his eyes, he is no longer in the sandlot, or in Twilight Town at all, but in a setting familiar to us: the land of stained-glass portraits. The depiction he’s standing on now, in fact, is the one from this game’s opening cinematic that depicts Princess Junior, his friends, and the Isle of Wankers.

The Nobodies that, I don’t know, followed him in here, are temporarily hanging out to the side, to give Roxas space to make an important decision he already fucking made. Three items materialize in the air in front of him: the same sword, staff, and shield that Junior chose from so long ago. The choice with the nerf weapons merely gave me a bonus to attack, but this choice affects what abilities I’ll get as I level up. Why am I saying I’m getting these things? What about Roxas? Am I implying that Roxas won’t be around forever?!?!

As before, I have Roxas choose the sword and get on that accelerated path to indiscriminate button-mashing prowess. He receives “the power of the warrior,” the Keyblade reappears in his hand, and the Nobodies choose this moment to attack him again. So polite of them to wait like that! Doesn’t work out too well for them, though. When they’ve been dispatched, Roxas is rewarded with the use of special abilities, an insulting text box lecture about leveling up if enemies get too difficult for him, and a treasure chest containing a potion. Best of all, THE DOOR appears behind him.

“Be careful,” he is told. “Beyond that door lies a completely different world.” Perhaps this is a faulty assumption, but I figure the voice behind the warning is also the being responsible for making the door appear. So maybe instead of telling him it’s dangerous, just…don’t provide the damn door? Let’s work on this. But the voice also tells him not to be afraid. “Don’t stop walking…” Never mind. This door clearly leads to the back of the candy lady’s van. Pieces of taffy are going to start appearing in a trail through the door any second now.

So I fully understand the danger the Disembodied Candy Lady has put Roxas in, a save point appears, along with the message, “From here on, when HP becomes 0, it is game over. Make sure to restore HP when HP gets low.” Funny, I also read this in a fortune cookie yesterday. When Roxas opens up the menu, he is greeted with a tutorial on “auto-reload,” which allows his rigid item holster to re-equip itself with potions and such after he spurts them out in the heat of battle. “Learn to set up Auto-Reload!” a red arrow at the bottom of the screen, um, gushes. Can’t I just…use it? Do I really have to learn to set it up? Is that a skill I need going forward in my life? But all it amounts to is tagging item slots with triangle to make them auto-reload. It takes two incredibly cluttered text screens to “teach” me this setup, and two more to “teach” me how to equip abilities, something I already knew how to do.

With this exhaustive array of new options covered, and now understanding the mortal peril he’s supposedly in, Roxas can now proceed through THE DOOR. On the other side he finds himself in the “Station of Calling,” which the chyron still insists is part of Twilight Town. The sky is completely dark in here, so maybe if you average out Twilight Town’s sky and this one, it’s actually twilight. I get it now. He’s again standing on Junior’s stained glass bony chest, but now there are ramps leading to other princess portraits. They’re actually all portraits of Junior, just with different color palettes. Either Twilight Town is some kind of creepy digital Junior shrine (spoiler: yup) or a designer had a three-martini lunch and decided the same image palette-swapped four times is totally good enough. Roxas fights Nobodies all the way up to the top, where another door sits on Junior’s red-bordered portrait.

And this door leads back to the original blue platform! Fuck me. What did I even do that ramp-climbing for? One potion? At first it appears he’s alone, but for a split second there’s a person in a black robe lurking behind him, until Roxas turns around and the mystery man has been replaced by a series of flailing blue-gray hentai tentacles, outstretched creepy hands, and pointy-slippered toes. All of this is attached to a gargantuan Nobody that is clearly supposed to be Roxas’s fucking upside-down version of the Darkside. (The hentai tentacles are actually the ends of his scarf fluttering in the breeze. Or they’re sentient tentacles. Who are we kidding, here?)

Roxas panics and runs to the edge of the platform before he realizes he has nowhere to go. This leads to Roxas facing the monster, Keyblade in hand, as a text box tells me to “defeat the mysterious enemy!” but a beat later circumstances have…changed. Roxas is suddenly hanging in midair, Keyblade still in hand but shackled at the wrists and ankles by magic lightning handcuffs. No, really. The Nobody, named Twilight Thorn (and I’m trying hard not to take that as the name of the thing he’s about to give to Roxas), zooms up into Roxas’s face with a whoosh, grabs him in one big white fist, and throws him skyward. I’m not sure why it would do this when Roxas was previously helpless, since it gives Roxas an opening to use a triangle command and drive the Keyblade into its skull. Roxas springboards off the Thorn’s head and lands with a flourish back to the platform as it slithers offscreen. This single hit doesn’t do it in, shockingly. As Roxas runs around the platform like a doofus, looking for something to stab with his long rod, the Thorn grabs the platform from underneath–even though it’s a column and not a disc–and flips it over, sending Roxas flying into nothingness. Worse, it flings a ball of energy at him, but after another triangle reaction, our boy smartly (???) tosses the Keyblade into its center, exploding it, and landing him and the Thorn prone back on the platform. (I think they’re now upside-down from where they were? Gravity is a malleable concept in the Princess Junior Stained Glass Zone.) But at least this means the Thorn is unmoving and vulnerable, like Gohma after getting its one eye stabbed, so Roxas can wail away for a few seconds.

Once the Thorn gets back to its feet, Roxas is instructed to dodge its attacks, both in the form of its swiping tentacle arms (look, it’s just all tentacles now) and some vague tendrils of fog or shadow lightning or some goddamn thing. It looks like an animated version of Roxas’s skateboard decals. Somehow dodging this energy with triangle causes Roxas to float upward, like a falling leaf animated backward, until he reaches the Thorn’s upper body and can stab him again. And again somehow, this leads the Thorn to the sensible conclusion that it should wiggle its body around the platform until it’s standing on its head on top of @%$#!!!’s portrait, and is a flattened cardboard box away from a hot breakdancing routine. When Roxas slashes at this tempting target, its neck elongates, pulsing and throbbing and looking so penis-like that it’s making me physically uncomfortable. These pulses, I am guessing, lead to the ejaculation of smaller Nobodies that start out as walking pairs of legs, then morph into floating zippered coin pouches, then into erotically pulsating spears. I am not drunk. This is all happening.

Most annoying of all, the Thorn does not have a visible HP bar, so Roxas and I are flying blind on how long this will take. Apparently he has not done enough damage yet, because once the Thorn is done birthing animorph Nobody sperm from its dickneck, the whole process starts over again, with Roxas shackled in the air and everything. Once more, he is thrown upward so he can thrust downward into the Thorn’s skull (which I realize now is a penis head), and once more, he tosses the Keyblade into the lightning ball to give himself a chance for some interference-free button-mashing. And this thing is still fucking alive! I know I’m not that bad at this game. This time, the Thorn is facing upward as it elongates its neck into penis shape again, but it doesn’t stop there. Now it stretches out its limbs in some kind of orbiting circle above the platform, so it has maximum coverage for its shadow lightning. More reactive dodges carry Roxas into the eye of this magical cum storm, where he can administer the last few thwacks of his Keyblade and finally send the Twilight Thorn back into the acid-tinged boner fantasy from which it was birthed. Unfortunately, its exit route from the land of the living involves collapsing on top of Roxas, whose only response is to fall on his ass and groan impotently.

Being buried under an avalanche of dead Nobody sends Roxas into a miasma of DAAAAAAAAARKNESS, and he again responds with a lot of groaning and arm flailing. He stretches out his hand as the darkness consumes him, seemingly to nothing, but at the last moment another hand reaches out and grabs his. Their hands glow together with white light and pull our boy out of the darkness. Next thing he knows, he’s in an empty white space with Naminé, so he’s also with an empty white space. Naminé is perched above Roxas on a white block, and when he is about to ask some questions about this whole arrangement he’s found himself in, she holds her finger to her lips. Shush, you man. Your whole gender has talked enough.

“My name is Naminé,” she tells him. I had totally forgotten she hadn’t even been named yet. On that note, she asks, “Do you remember your true name?” I eagerly anticipate Naminé announcing that Roxas’s real name is Dingleberry, or perhaps Edmond Dantès, but suddenly the black-cloaked Ziggy swoops down, grabs her by the always vulnerable upper arm, and says, “Say no more, Naminé.” She is concerned that something bad will happen to Roxas if no one provides him this information, though 1) she could have just told him instead of asking him if he remembers if it’s so goddamn important, and 2) her facial expression remains frozen in “Gotta look pleasant for my school photo” mode even as Ziggy is manhandling her out of the room. “It’s best he doesn’t know the truth,” Ziggy insists. Perhaps proving his point for him that Roxas is already dealing with more than he can handle, Roxas shakes his fist at Ziggy. “Hey! You’re that pickpocket!” Good lord. I know you worked all day for that munny, dude, but please prioritize. Ziggy does not dignify this with a response, and instead opens a dark portal behind Roxas and shoves him into it once he’s turned around to squint at it like a dope.

When Roxas comes to, he’s lying on his face in the sandlot, and Rai is shouting, “Seifer, strike a pose, y’know?” Offscreen, Seifer waves his junk in Rai’s face–prove me wrong–and asks, “How’s this?” Rai of course replies, “That’s totally perfect, y’know!” When we finally see this scene from Roxas’s viewpoint, Seifer is standing in front of his prone body as his friends snap photos. It is possible he was teabagging our hormonal hero, but I feel like we would have been able to see his butt in frame in that case. Fuu tells Roxas the photos are a “keepsake,” and Rai adds, “Those freaks in the white jumpsuits are gone, y’know?” Seifer, for his part, doesn’t trouble himself much with what the Nobodies are. “Outsiders, that’s what,” he says. “And if they don’t wise up to the rules around here, I might have to take ‘disciplinary measures.'” Oh. Oh no. I’m sure that would be terrible for them. I hope you’re not also going to videotape it!

Roxas puts away his fantasy journal just in time to look across the courtyard, where Hayner, Chumlee, and Olette are standing, staring at him. They look placid enough for a moment, but as soon as the camera closes in on him, Hayner pouts, grunts, “Hmph,” and runs away. The other two wordlessly follow him, with Roxas on their heels, shouting, “Wait up!” Seifer yells at his retreating chino backside, “Hey! No chickening out of the tournament tomorrow!” Like Roxas is missing a chance to get hot and heavy (in combat) with Seifer again. And just in case the opportunity presents itself, he’s already prepared a pizza box with a hole cut in the bottom.