*smooth jazz and groaning noises*

Vivi attacks first, pouncing with a speed that doesn’t track with anything we know about him, which is admittedly nothing. “When did Vivi get so tough?” Hayner wonders. Lot of hate on Vivi in the peanut gallery, man. Per the announcer, Seifer didn’t expect him to get this far, and Hayner–who got goose-egged in his own match–is surprised he’s remotely competitive. After Vivi has spent a few seconds manically hopping around Seifer with his bat, like Yoda punking Count Dooku at the end of Attack of the Clones, Seifer finally manages to score one hit, causing one sad blue ball to spurt out of Vivi’s hat. “You’re mine!” he says, with way too much gritty enthusiasm, and sprints to retrieve it. But just as Seifer’s hand is reaching out, Vivi leaps into his path, gets his own blue ball back, and pirouettes, slashing Seifer right in his disconcertingly developed chest. The platform is sprayed with a barrage of yellow balls and Seifer lands with a thump on his back.

“I-I’m not sure what just happened…” the announcer stammers. “Um…but…the winner is Vivi! In a positively blistering comeback!” Couple things. First, we have already established that there were preliminary matches leading to these finals, and presumably Vivi, like, fought in those and won. So unless everyone in the prelims was a noodle-armed choad, or the matches were held in a windowless basement with no cameras, this shouldn’t be that surprising. Second, that was not a blistering comeback. Seifer hit Vivi once, and one ball came out, out of fucking 200. Hayner looked like a malfunctioning paintball howitzer every time Roxas smacked him. Maybe the reason the announcer doesn’t know what happened is that he literally was not watching the match. Probably fantasizing about Seifer like everybody else. Vivi waddles off the platform after his victory, not even pausing for a moment of the crowd’s adulation, or to see if Seifer is doing okay. Ice cold.

Roxas and Hayner are taking a moment to savor the image of Seifer lying prone like that when they hear him say, “That’s not Vivi.” He’s already recovered and is standing with Fuu and Rai. Roxas doesn’t know what that means, and Seifer only adds as he walks to the back alley, “Thrash ‘im,” which does not clear anything up. But Roxas does think to look for Vivi, and spots him in the crowd on the opposite side of the ring. Because of the elevated platform and Vivi’s height he can’t be sure, but the way his fucking hat face is pointed, Vivi is once again giving him a staredown. Somebody has a crush!

Ken Kratz toddles over to talk to the boys. “It looks like Seifer’s withdrawn from the struggle for third place,” he says. Hayner is super excited, because that now means he’s in third. They both got their asses beat, but I guess Seifer at least made one ball spooge out, and that put him ahead in the standings until he dropped out? Sure. Fine. It is also unclear if there is any tangible difference between third and fourth in the Struggle. I kind of figured all the finalists got a gift card to Ruby Tuesday or something.

Roxas now has a short break to fuck around before his match with Vivi. The spectators, unsurprisingly, keep their range of chatter limited to a couple topics: 1) Something is Very Wrong™ with Vivi, and 2) maybe Roxas would stand a better chance against him if he goes to “practice” with Seifer first, WINK. Setzer also has some wisdom for Roxas, namely that he sucks and Setzer is great. Insightful. Roxas dukes it out with Seifer one more time in the back alley, cough, hoping to get another level out of it, but no dice. Oh no, Roxas will just have to beat up a two-foot-tall shadow toddler with his current level! Shit.

“Keep it clean, fellas,” Ken Kratz says as he hands Roxas and Vivi their bats. The announcer tries to hype the crowd by calling this “the match you’ve been waiting for,” when a) I’m sure the match everyone wanted was Roxas vs. Seifer, because hot, and b) they’ve been waiting maybe five minutes. The match starts out normally and easily enough, but before I know it Vivi has already gotten a couple solid hits on Roxas, spraying blue balls everywhere to the oohs and ahhs of the crowd. It takes me a moment to realize that Vivi is managing these big hits because his Struggle dickbat is literally engorging as he swings it at Roxas. Seifer has to be watching this and wondering why Vivi’s bat never swelled up for him.

Grower not a shower!

Time runs out with Roxas having lost a fair few of his squirming blue balls, but still with a comfortable margin of victory on Vivi. Ugly, but a win’s a win, right? Now he can get his trophy and fight with Setzer for that tacky-ass belt. But no! Things can never be that simple for poor Roxas. Out of the Struggle screen, Roxas lunges toward Vivi, bat raised for the killshot, when he notices that time has once again stopped. The tiny crowd somehow looks even more pathetic now that they’re frozen mid-jeering. It looks like Vivi is frozen too, except for the fact that his glowing yellow eyes are fucking blinking. Jesus. And then he is surrounded by an orb of fog that transforms him into a Nobody. Who knew Vivi had all those sinewy curves under his dowdy farm boy trousers? If Seifer weren’t frozen in the back alley with Rai’s hand around his dick, he’d be super jealous.

Two more Nobodies join the one that was Vivi, or inside Vivi, or a Vivi doppelganger, or whatever the fuck. “Again?” Roxas asks as the Keyblade appears in his hand, and when he realizes no one is here to answer, he does so for himself. “Again…” I have to admit, I too would be exhausted in his shoes. And I wish he would just tell someone what’s happening so a trusted friend, or lover, could share the psychic distress load. He takes care of the Nobodies without much fuss, though back in the cutscene realm he is panting an awful lot. I guess he did also just battle Vivi, but I figured all his “Struggle practice” with Seifer would have granted him a little extra stamina by now. Roxas looks around at the frozen Twilight Town citizens, confused as to why they’re not unfrozen yet, but he hasn’t yet taken care of all the dangers: a man in a black hoodie coat, clearly a different person than Ziggy based on his narrow waistline and shoulders, appears on the platform, golf clapping.

“Roxas. All right. Fight fight fight,” Matthew McConaughey, apparently, says. Roxas just glares at this dude silently, because what else is he supposed to do? “You really don’t remember?” McConaughey asks. “It’s me. You know, Axel.” I should point out here that Axel only takes his hood off and reveals his face at the same moment he says his name. Maybe if he’d given Roxas more to go on than a too-chill-by-half voice, he would have remembered! As we’ve seen and will see, there are roughly seven dozen motherfuckers wandering around in these exact outfits, so it’s not like the black coat narrows it down.

But Axel’s face is now out in the open, and HOO BOY. As if Seifer’s hotness wasn’t enough of a problem for me, Axel is a fiery redhead–looking like Crono decided to grow his locks out into a mullet–with dazzling sea-green eyes and reverse teardrop tattoos on his cheeks. I don’t know what the opposite is of killing two people in prison, but I guess that’s where he’s at. Roxas obviously does not recognize this sassy stud, or he would have appeared in his nightly dreams instead of that dip Junior. “Talk about blank with a capital ‘B,'” Axel sighs. “Man oh man, even the Dusks aren’t gonna crack this one.” Dusks, the internet tells me, are the stupid sexy Nobodies Roxas has been dealing with for four goddamn days now. So I guess Axel hasn’t been paying much attention, because if those things were going to do jack shit to Roxas, it would have happened already.

More to the, ahem, point, Axel summons two spinning, blazing chakrams, accented in the same red as his hair. God, I am all in. Take me to ginger church, baby. Roxas, SOMEHOW, is less on board, and demands Axel tell him what’s going on. Axel obliges and pulls out a flowchart explaining who every mysterious character in the game is and their known aliases and affiliates, along with a glossary of terms and a guide to getting all the cool Keyblade keychains. Oops, I meant to say he explains precisely nothing, preferring to keep Roxas and me in the dark as long as possible. “This town is his creation, right?” Axel “explains.” “Which means we don’t have time for a Q&A.” Time is quite literally standing still for the two of you, Axel. Not only do you have time for a Q&A, you have time to make out a little bit. That sounds fun and cool, right? Sure it does. He finishes, “You’re coming with me, conscious or not. Then you’ll hear the story.” I am gonna lay cash right now that that is a fucking lie.

Oh, sedation’s not necessary, but do you have some restraints?

Axel is spinning his chakrams and looking all menacing, and sexual, and our poor boy is starting to get for real scared. Roxas backs away until his back hits an invisible barrier and reality starts distorting around him. Axel seems concerned as well, but this funhouse mirror shit is somehow the last straw for Roxas. He grits his teeth, stares down at the Keyblade in his hand, and finally shouts, “What’s going ON!?” flinging the Keyblade to the dirt. It clatters to the ground by Axel’s feet, but a moment later it appears back in Roxas’s hand, blowing his hair back with magical phallus power.

So the Keyblade has a built-in wind machine now? Fancy.

“Number 13. Roxas,” Axel says. “The Keyblade’s chosen one.” I am feeling more informed and less in the weeds by the second! Roxas must feel the same frustration at never getting answers as I do. “Okay, fine!” he yells back. “You asked for it!” I have a feeling Axel is going to take him to the woodshed, and not because he has a romantic picnic back there.

As always when it comes to Kingdom Hearts, my intuition is dead wrong, and Roxas beats Axel easily. To save face I will contend that Axel is holding back because Roxas is his tiny soulmate and he only wants to slap him around a bit to bring him back to himself. He only does his crazy fire chakram attack once, after all. For defeating Axel–someone he doesn’t even know is his enemy or friend at this point–Roxas receives the Scan ability, so I can now at least see how many Easter pastel life bars I have to fail upward through, even if it doesn’t help Roxas figure out who’s on his side.

As soon as these two have finished their little duel, Saruman the Red appears in a flurry of digital Matrix bullshit. “So it was you,” Axel says, tossing his flaming chakrams at Saruman as a fun, flirty greeting. They hit his invisible Matrix barrier and fizzle out. Thus unmoved, Saruman turns to Roxas. “Roxas, this man speaks nonsense!” This is true, since it’s not like Roxas has the slightest context for anything Axel just said–Axel in fact seemed to be pointedly omitting it. But Axel has to have his turn, and shouts, “Roxas, don’t let him deceive you!” He would have to say anything of substance to do that! These two, honestly. The poor boy looks between the two figures as they each just shout “Roxas!” at him over and over until the syllables lose all meaning. This is like the divorced couple each calling out to the dog to see which one it loves more. Except the dog probably has a clearer understanding of the world around it than Roxas does.

At a loss for what to do, and with reality bending around him–creating not only a funhouse mirror effect but distorting Saruman and Axel’s voices until they sound like two sawblades flapping at each other–Roxas shuts his eyes, puts his hands over his ears, and mutters, “Hayner…[Chumlee]…Olette…” Those sure are three people you know! I guess this is supposed to be Roxas trying to hang on to what is real for him–aww, isn’t that nauseating–and shut out the FAKE NEWS that is these two weirdos making his life terrible. He must think it’s helping, because he repeats it in a shout: “Hayner! [Chumlee]! Olette!” The screen goes white, because saying your friends’ names twice tends to make your problems disappear.

And now Roxas is back in the “real” world, with the crowd moving and cheering again. Vivi wobbles and collapses in front of him, and then gets up, shaking his head. “Huh? …How did I get here?” he wonders, in what we can assume is his normal voice. Without waiting for Roxas to explain any of this to him, he toddles off the platform as Hayner, Chumlee, and Olette run past him to storm their victorious friend. The announcer dubs Roxas “our new top Struggler!” which is a weird and hilarious thing to call someone. Like he just got his report card and it said “YOU TRIED” under a shrug emoji sticker.

Roxas barely gets a moment to soak in the crowd’s adoration, because they start screaming for Setzer as he–and I’m serious–blows them kisses from the platform, and Olette informs Roxas that “it’s starting.” I think it doesn’t start until Roxas is good and goddamn ready, but fine. After a quick save and talking to everyone–Vivi doesn’t understand why he’s getting the “cold shoulder” from everyone, because Vivi has returned to being a cute little bummer–Roxas tells Ken Kratz he’s ready for the championship match.

“You two, play fair now,” Ken says, like he’s talking to two little boys, and not one little boy and a grown-ass man with bad hair. “You’re at the top of the bracket.” THEY ARE? WOW. Setzer replies, again, seriously, “There’s only room for one up here.” That is how championships tend to work, man! Nobody needs this clarification. Ken and his unchanging facial expression nonetheless seem perturbed by Setzer being a creep, so he tells them with an uncomfortable chuckle, “Well, may the best man win!” and waddles away. I fully expect Setzer to mutter, “THAT’S ME,” to his retreating backside, but he manages to keep it in. Instead, he’s saving his breath for an indecent proposal to his opponent.

“Hey. Rucksack,” Setzer says. We’re off to a great start here. “How about you throw the match for me?” To be perfectly clear, an adult man just asked a teenage boy to let him win a nerf bat duel. Whoever wrote these scenes really thinks Setzer is a wad, right? Like, Setzer must be their personal Tightass. From the crowd, Hayner suddenly yells, “Roxas! Focus!” Okay, first of all, the fight hasn’t started yet, nerd. Second, how’s he supposed to focus with you yelling at him like that? Of course, this also has the weird effect of making it seem like Roxas needs to focus on Setzer’s offer. And Setzer adds, “Let me win, and I’ll make it worth your while.” WHOA, DUDE. Even in the fucking Wild West that Twilight Town appears to be–what with the unofficial sheriff being a teen boy obsessed with P90X–that has to be incredibly illegal, and gross besides.

It’s like they spliced Setzer’s DNA with Manfred von Karma’s.

Roxas snarls, “Get real,” at Setzer, as he absolutely has enough boy troubles to be getting on with right now. The battle music queues up as he says this, so I guess the Struggle DJ was waiting to see what Roxas’s answer would be before getting the fight started. The announcer declares, “Roxas, our underdog hero, versus Setzer, our defending champion! The winner of this match will be the true champion!” Um…clearly? What are we all doing here, otherwise? ALSO, does Setzer get Roxas’s colored ball trophy if he doesn’t win this, or is Roxas still good on that front? “That’s bragging rights for a whole year, folks!” It doesn’t seem like Setzer needs much of a pretense for bragging. “Whatever you think is right, you’re wrong,” he tells Roxas now. “And that is a big mistake.” Cool. I’m pretty sure offering underage boys blowjobs in exchange for wrestling title belts is wrong, so I guess that makes it right! I see now!

It turns out the reason Setzer has to beg this skinny child to throw the match for him is that he’s not that good at fighting. He parries a bit more than Hayner or Vivi did, and his strikes are fast, but he is incredibly easy to avoid. “Are you scared of me?” he asks, over and over, as Roxas scoops up his red balls and moves out of the way of his strikes. I mean, a little bit! You’re a child predator, man! He also mutters some shit about “checkmate” the one time he manages to score a hit on Roxas’s boy flesh. OMG CHESS, SO COOL AND INTELLECTUAL. Fucking Miles Edgeworth thinks this dude is trying too hard, and he drives a red convertible and keeps one of his own suits in a frame on his wall. As time runs out, Setzer has just 50 orbs left–fewer than Vivi had at the end of the last match. How did this guy ever become champion? Wait, what’s that loud sucking sound?

To Setzer’s credit, he walks off the stage as the crowd is chanting Roxas’s name, and even points to him in respect, though Roxas’s friends blow right past him like he’s not even there. Setzer is totally washed in this town now. He’s going to end up in the Coliseum tournaments, scratching out victories against Heartless so he and Bitch can pay their coke dealer.

Yup, confirmed. Setzer only makes sense if he’s now an evil prosecutor.

With the much better-looking orb trophy just sitting on the ground next to them like a booby prize, Ken Kratz makes a big show of handing the Struggle championship belt to Roxas. He holds it up with his hands in front and covering half of the plate. These people need to watch RAW so they can figure out belt etiquette, because this is embarrassing. The eight people still in attendance go absolutely apeshit for the new champ, though. And bonus, the Champion Belt is an actual equippable accessory that increases resistance to fire, blizzard, and thunder magic. That means Roxas has to wear the thing, in public, but I guess that’s a sacrifice he can make.