We’re back in the city that is the setting of Another Side: Another Story, though it’s not yet raining and setting the mood for hot boy combat. Roxas, in a black robe, is walking alone and with purpose through the quiet streets. It is about 70 percent of the way to a Vince McMahon rooster walk, but he doesn’t have the chest to close that gap. Someone who does, his GOOD FRIEND Axel, is leaning against a building, arms crossed. It could not be more obvious that he’s there–with his hood down it’s not like he blends in–but Roxas just saunters right on by. Axel takes this in stride (sorry) and asks him, “Your mind’s made up?” Yes, he’s really going to law school to catch up with that mysterious boy he knew in fourth grade, DEAL WITH IT. “Why did the Keyblade choose me?” Roxas asks in lieu of an answer. “I have to know.” How much did Roxas know about himself before he was stuck in the Twilight Town Sims mod? Not that much more, it seems! Agitated, Axel shouts, “You can’t turn on the Organization!” Why not? Well, we can assume they are the dudes from the big white throne room, so maybe this means you can’t run from them since between them all they have chairs facing every direction!

Whatever else Axel had to say about the Organization, we don’t get to hear it yet, as we are back in Naminé’s room, and what’s more, so is Naminé. She’s sitting at her table, passively scoping out Roxas having an aneurysm. Roxas barely even reacts to her being there, but does ask, “Organization XIII…they’re a bad group.” He delivers this line like he just can’t accept this group he literally just heard of for the first time might be evil. And this is when his exposure to them thus far has been 1) dudes in hooded black robes and 2) monsters with tight posteriors. “Bad or good, I don’t know,” Naminé replies. “They’re a group of incomplete people who wish to be whole. To that end, they’re desperately searching for something.” AREN’T WE ALL.

I was going to say ‘the clitoris,’ but…

Roxas, of course, would like to know what that something is, and Naminé surprises me by actually knowing and telling him. “Kingdom Hearts,” she says. Okay, that basically is the clitoris. Roxas just laughs, I figure because he’s remembering Junior saying it’s LIGHT, and who doesn’t laugh when remembering that? But the truth is, Roxas realizes all these questions about the larger DEEP STATE CONSPIRACY around him are just him avoiding asking a question he is afraid to have answered: “What’s gonna happen to me now?” He begs her, “Just tell me that. Nothing else really matters anymore.” This is what happens to someone with self-awareness when they find out they’re Junior. Look at this sweet pitiful child, he’s given up.

Naminé is about to tell him something important, surely, when she vanishes in a flurry of pixels. Was that even really her? I extremely do not know, friends. Saruman comes in the same way she left. “There’s no knowledge that has the power to change your fate,” he tells Roxas. This has gotten pretty heavy! Maybe it’s just Saruman’s voice doing that. Roxas, though, would still like to get the skinny and insists it’s his right to hear it, even if he cannot avoid vanishing into the wallet-chained abyss afterward. “A Nobody doesn’t have a right to know,” Saruman insists. “Nor does it even have the right to be.” Jeez Louise, lighten up, Dracula. Does this mean Roxas secretly has an extremely toned butt and can turn himself into a purse, or a bird? “But what IS a Nobody!?” Roxas asks. “The answer would just frustrate and confuse you,” Saruman does not have the time to tell him, because Ansem appears in another digital flurry. “DiZ, we’re out of time,” he says. “Too many Nobodies!” Hahaha. God, ain’t that the truth. If I have to describe one more person as “some dude in a black hoodie” I’m going to walk into the tides.

At least we have gotten the confirmation, if not revelation, that Saruman is actually DiZ (Nuts). And getting in under the wire before everything goes pear-shaped, Naminé emerges from a big shadowy portal–and given her entrance lacks the plugging-into-the-Matrix flair, I’m assuming this is really her–to answer Roxas’s question anyway. Suck on…bofa…um…take that, DiZ! “Roxas. Nobodies like us are only half a person. You won’t disappear. You’ll be whole!” Roxas, in response, executes the world’s first-ever Reverse Shion: “I’ll…disappear…?” Yeah! That is absolutely what she said!

Though DiZ and Ansem did not react or even look her way when Naminé appeared, they turn on her now, looming like the creepy old dudes they are. “No further outbursts!” DiZ admonishes her. It is important to Naminé, though, that Roxas actually fucking comprehend her. “No, you WON’T disappear!” she repeats, before DiZ straight-up puts a hand over her mouth and drags her back through her portal. This is very uncomfortable. Ansem blocks Roxas’s way so he won’t try to be a hero, but Naminé breaks free of DiZ’s arms around her head to tell him, “Roxas! We will meet again. And then we can talk about everything. I may not know it’s you, and you may not know it’s me. But we will meet again. Someday soon. I promise!” For not wanting her to say anything else, DiZ sure did let her say all of that! I wish she had at least mentioned, before she and the two creepazoids disappear, that they’ll both probably be brunettes when this future meeting happens. That would have been useful information!

Fucking ban men.

As a consolation prize for losing Naminé–I guess–Roxas obtains a key item, Naminé’s Sketches. “Sketches left by Naminé. The drawings appear to have deep meaning.” If you say so, dude! Also, the item is her spiral sketchpad, but I am going to assume Roxas collects all her loose drawings off the walls and floor and stuffs those in there, too. Particularly the ones with Axel. Wink. He also gets a map of the area, like a map of a mansion with maybe five rooms is of critical importance. I hope the map is also from the Naminé collection.

Roxas saves in the white room and then crosses the second-floor landing to the east door. This door, too, leads to a single room. Squally’s house in Traverse Town had more rooms than this place, and that whole building could fit inside any one of these rooms. This appears to be the mansion’s library, though there are exactly zero nooks or comfy sofas, only a single wooden table in the center of the room with a candelabra and no chairs. This is not going on my HOME LIBRARY #BIBLIOPHILE Pinterest board. The only other thing on the table is some kind of yellow glyph that’s been drawn on the wood. At least, that’s the case until we switch to another view as Roxas walks toward it, and then Naminé’s sketchpad is suddenly sitting next to it, already opened to a page with the same glyph drawn on it. Come on, game, at least make me briefly examine this key item you gave me instead of supernaturally teleporting it out of Roxas’s chap pockets and opening it to the right page. This would have been a great time for an insultingly easy puzzle! Can’t this boy have any agency?!

Once he’s standing in front of the glyph, Roxas doesn’t hesitate, as if he already knew before walking into this room what he would have to do: conjuring a yellow crayon from nowhere, he sets to work drawing a few additional embellishments on the glyph until it flashes white, and the table and the entire floor disappear, revealing a staircase to the first floor. This isn’t even a secret room! Its real doorway is just blocked with garbage downstairs! And how the fuck is a crayon drawing that legibly on polished wood?

If there’s a Majora’s Mask world in this game, I’m…actually pretty into that.

My notes on this room could probably take up several hundred more words, but let’s just avoid that bramble patch. The “secret” room–full of electrical boxes and machinery, and built of mostly lavender metal and brick–looks nothing like the rest of the house, and may in fact be outside of the illusion of Twilight Town or whatever this whole construct is. This is not important! Moving on. Roxas goes through a doorway into the basement, and discovers DiZ’s Big Brother Surveillance Console. He’s also perturbed by a bunch of other weird equipment in here, but I don’t know what any of that shit does, so who cares. Though none of the monitors have, say, footage of Roxas’s friends enjoying their newly Roxas-free existences, Roxas still narrows his eyes at this setup like he knows exactly what’s been going down in here. (That is, DiZ jacking off a lot. Roxas calls it like he sees it.) He is possibly on the verge of pulling up DiZ’s browser history when another sharp migraine kicks in and leaves him on his knees and clutching his head.

A spinning, top-down view returns us to the all-white throne room that we can now assume is the HQ of Organization XIII. Every seat has a butt in it at this point, and for speed’s sake, I’ll just transcribe the first-impressions notes I wrote for each of them. Of the 13, there are six characters still hooded, either because we need to save some “suspense” for later or because they are scrubs who don’t matter. The seven remaining, in order of appearance: “beefy hunk with brown hair, definitely not Junior”; Marluxia; “girl with dumb hair (probably only girl, sad!)”; Axel; “blue-gray emo hair”; “blond, tanner Sephiroth”; and last of all, Roxas himself. (I know some of these dorks were in Chain of Memories along with Marluxia and Axel, but let’s just worry about it later.) It’s easy to focus on their hair when it’s the only visual element or point of interest we’re given. And they’re all doing nothing but sitting, most of them looking serious, some with their heads in their hands, some more casual or unconcerned. I will say, à propos of nothing, that I figured the black robes would look, like, really black in this room, but they actually seem a bit washed out. The Organization XIII laundry person should try cold water.

We get no glimpse into how these 13 Nobodies (I assume?) interact with each other or what their deal is in general, as we are done with them after this one whip-’round. Cut to: Roxas running through the streets of New Donk City, Dusks floating through the air after him. This is followed by a repeat of Riku yelling at him, but this time, the scene lingers long enough to show that Roxas did not strike Riku down–Riku parries Roxas’s slash and sends him flying. Riku walks over to this prone boy before he blacks out. Ha, black out. I kill me. …Lord, if I don’t meet someone in an interesting outfit soon, I may go crazy. It can have 20 fucking zippers, I don’t care. I need a fix.

Finally, Roxas goes from Riku doing God-knows-what to him to being slumped on the floor of DiZ’s Spank Basement, in the exact spot Roxas was giving the stinkeye to moments ago. I guess that was his memory trigger. DiZ and Ansem are looming over him, having a conversation they could have had at any time before this, but it would have laid the entire conceit bare, even more so than it already was. “Will it work?” Ansem is asking. “If we can maintain the simulated town until Naminé finishes chaining together [Junior]’s memories,” DiZ replies. O…kay? Will that be hard? I don’t fucking know, man. Ansem asks, probably for his own reasons, “What will happen to Roxas?” DiZ makes it explicit that he’s basically half a Junior–oh, how tragic–and “In the end, he’ll have to give it back.” That half of Junior is going to be so chafed when he gets it back. Just raw, in places he did not know could be.

“Until then,” DiZ adds, and I don’t even know if this is necessary, “he’ll need another personality to throw off his pursuers.” Is he implying that the real Roxas isn’t a mild-mannered horndog who loves ska and skateboarding? I AM SHOOK. Ansem seems to feel sorry for him, but DiZ just shrugs and says, “It’s the fate of a Nobody.” And with a few button taps at his fluid-crusted console, a beam of light shoots down and teleports Roxas into his summer vacation interlude. In which he never got laid, didn’t get to go to the beach, and got creeped on by like every adult in a five-mile radius. This was not the best summer ever.

Back to the Roxas of the present, who remembers everything and is pissed off about it. Hard to blame him. DiZ’s Peepstation seems like as good a target as any for his fury, so he whips out the Keyblade and goes fully Office Space on the thing. This was probably also a good security measure, just in case someone snuck in here to mine the real Seifer’s credit card numbers and fingerprints off of it or something.

Are we sure he and Junior are the same person? It’s hard to imagine Junior going HAM on some dude’s gaming rig when he could just tell it how hard he’s been looking for Kairi.

It is clear from Roxas’s face that he does not feel one bit better after doing this, but the door to his left does open after he’s finished, like someone realized he needed to get this out of his system first. Or he needed to warm up, as the next room is full of Dusks, on which he can work out even more aggression. Either way. Once they’re dealt with, Axel appears to beg him to run away together. Or to fight, in the boring canon version. “Simply amazing, Roxas,” he sneers, stopping short of an actual golf clap. And not even the knowledge that Roxas recognizes him for real this time brings any of Axel’s warm feelings back. Instead, he explodes with literal fiery rage and shouts, “I’m SO FLATTERED! But you’re too late!!!” This dude is such a stereotype. I do not care.

This first-person dating sim has been strange so far, but I can’t quibble with the results!

Roxas, his memories returned, summons the two Keyblades he used against Riku, and Axel summons his chakrams in response. This is, if you’ll pardon me, so hot. “Come here, I’ll make it all stop,” Axel purrs, before shrieking “BURN BABY!” and blasting Roxas with a fireball. What a tease. Despite the definite undertones to the encounter, Axel is not fucking around, and opens with turning the entire floor inside his ring of fire into lava. But this only plays to my one strength as a gamer–jumping a lot–and Roxas soon closes on him and unleashes a flurry of combos using triangle triggers. This knocks half of Axel’s life bar clean off, and after that he can teleport around all he wants, but it’s still only a matter of time. Roxas’s now surely ex-boyfriend can only grunt his name in disbelief as he provides Roxas the final level-up of his short life. And as if that’s not sad enough! We return to the final confrontation these two had before Roxas got kidnapped and thrown in a fish tank. Axel’s protests, it turns out, are more that Roxas will be destroyed if he crosses the Organization, not that he shouldn’t do so because they’re so fucking great. “No one would miss me,” Roxas sighs, and I hope this is the peak of his insufferable emo mountain range, because hoo boy. Roxas continues walking away, so he doesn’t hear Axel say, “That’s not true…I would.” Sniff! Turn around and kiss him, idiot!

I mean, Axel is still here in front of him in the here and now, so he could very much carry out my wishes if he wanted to be cool. But Roxas has apparently decided he would much rather be Junior? Fantastic. He and Axel share a look of understanding–though how Axel could understand that baffling decision beggars belief–and Axel says, “Let’s meet again in the next life.” Or you could run off to fucking Agrabah or whatever now! Come on! Roxas replies, “Yeah. I’ll be waiting.” Axel, again somehow, accepts this, and vanishes through his shadow portal, though not without some last words: “Silly. Just because you have a next life…” It’d be nice to at least give me HOPE of something rad happening in the face of my imminent reunion with Junior. He is to blame for this. Along with so many other things.