Preface: When I began working on this recap–by my estimates some 6000 years ago–the U.S. was still in “COVID is real, but not real to us” mode, but quickly entered “Hoard toilet paper and dime out your neighbors for having a barbecue” mode, and as of me posting this is in “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WE CAN’T HAVE FOOTBALL BACK JUST BECAUSE 140,000 PEOPLE ARE DEAD” mode. Shit’s real bad and weird! This will probably not be news to anyone who reads this when it comes out, but I still feel the need to mention it for posterity, or perhaps for aliens who come across our human internet servers in some smoking ruins somewhere. I’m trying not to let all of, y’know, THIS, seep into this nice story about a heroine who saves China from a deadly invading…ah, fuck.
On our last Wild Ride, Mr. Choad was awkward with and often rude to a succession of people in Twilight Town who wanted nothing more than to befriend him, help him, or give him free stuff. Then Junior and his friends got back on the gummi road, visited Squally in Hollow Bastion, and completely failed to help him with any of his problems. But at least they were there long enough for Junior to get back to what he does best: raw-dogging keyholes. It is this last bit that led the Mouseketeers toward their current destination: the Land of Dragons.
There are actually two worlds the gummi ship can reach from Hollow Bastion, each linear path (and here I have to repeat myself much sooner than I would like and say this is not how space works) blocked by a white door. On Hollow Bastion’s opposite side, Twilight Town is now ensconced in a bubble of shadow, and apparently inaccessible. Chip and Dale panic over this, or maybe that’s just their voices and they’re very calm. “It’s gone!” Dale says, inaccurately. You can still see its outline in there. But fuck Twilight Town and everyone in it except Vivi: it is in the past, just like Roxas, and the idea of finding the game’s protagonist charming and likable. Anyway, one of the chipmunks tells Junior how to fly the gummi ship toward the door (the left stick, in a surprising twist, is the key to this mystery) and that he’ll have to “Clear Gummi Routes” to connect worlds together. Isn’t this the job of Scrooge and his goddamn interplanet highway system? Is he too busy making popsicles that look and taste like climate change?
Presented with this embarrassment of non-linear riches, I choose the door that leads to a “planet” that looks like Beijing’s Forbidden Palace floating in space. But selecting this route can’t just open the damn door into the “Asteroid Sweep,” which makes it sound like even more of a shitty minigame than gummi navigation actually is. No, this actually opens the Gummi Menu, a thing I wish was a list of gourmet gummis presented by a gummi sommelier with (gummi) wine pairing suggestions. In reality it is a menu–this is generous–comprised of three options: 1) continuing to the Half-Assed Starfox minigame, 2) opening the Gummi Editor to graft new candy bits (of which I currently have none) onto my majestic shopping cart of a fucking ship, and 3) “World Map,” aka “Go back.” In other words, 1) the thing that should have happened directly in the first place, 2) an option I don’t need now and will never actually want, 3) and exiting the menu. I think the chipmunks are lonely and coming up with reasons that Junior has to talk to them. This is a cry for help.
For one last insult, when I choose to go into the goddamn asteroid field already, the game deploys a whole overwrought launch sequence: an elevator platform ferrying my juddering, limpdick gummi ship up to the ’90s arcade-cum-launch bay for takeoff. The chipmunks, on their own monitors in the saddest mission control in existence, salute Junior as the ship blasts off. Okay, they are definitely in a bleak headspace. Maybe they should eat some gummis. Get a little sugar high to stave off the darkness.
The latest in Windows 95 screensaver technology.
After I’ve been instructed that the left stick is also just the thing for steering this very same gummi ship in the minigame space, the ship jumps into hyperdrive through a big gaping white keyhole as Junior says, “Bring it on!” Child, do not fucking start.
So flying the gummi ship is every bit as shitty and pointless as it was in the original game, with almost no changes worth bringing up. I will try anyway: the music, the one saving grace of the original experience, is inarguably shittier; the interface is a tiny bit better and more responsive (though that may be because this is the PS3 port); and while the gummi ship is still on rails down a linear track, the camera occasionally about-faces or shifts to the side to fire at enemies from a different angle, which brings this from “Death would be an improvement” boring to “Do I need to unload the dishwasher?” boring. Finally, at the beginning of the run, Chip or Dale comes in over the squawkbox: “[Junior], try not to crash into anything!” sounding for all the world like Slippy goddamn Toad. This implies that Goofy is Peppy and @%$#!!! is Falco, which also means Junior and @%$#!!! are fucking. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.
At the end, after a bunch of NEW RECORD!! notifications and pinball-esque meaningless scores, I discover that Jiminy is also tracking in his journal any loot Junior missed out on during gummi ship runs. This turns out to be a single, massively unimportant gummi, creating a paradox of my priorities that rips my soul in two. I’m sure this will be the last time it bothers me, though.
Before disembarking on this new and improbably rectangular planet, I flip open Jiminy’s Journal to take a peek at the Seekrit Ansem Report Junior yanked out of Hollow Bastion’s vagina. This one, number seven, picks up with Ansem talking about Darkness. Weird, I know. After noting that the “corridors of Darkness” are only convenient to the Heartless and are actively harmful to everyone else, he notes that he totally used said corridors to travel to Twilight Town, in search of a place to take a research sabbatical. “It is a quiet village, forgotten in the chasm between light and darkness,” he writes. “LIKE TWILIGHT, GET IT, IT’S LITERARY,” I scribble in his margins. Continuing: “I situated myself in the basement of an abandoned mansion standing beyond the woods.” What is with this dude and having to hang out in basements? This is the second reference to basements in as many reports! I was going to make a joke about the sweet rig he set up in this one to play Borderlands, with a handy side tray for his Combos and Surge, but then I remembered he literally did have that. Also, we know from the previous report that our Ansem is not the Ansem (OR DO WE), so presumably this means this Ansem is DiZ. Which means Ansem and Ansem were hanging out together, perhaps talking about what it’s like to be Ansem. Unless that version of our Ansem is not really him, since he should be dead and all, and this is just one Ansem hanging out with someone who looks like the fake Ansem. Or, maybe DiZ is not Ansem and there’s a third Ansem who just happened to also spend a month lurking in the Haunted Mansion and being mean to Roxas. …I need to go outside for a few minutes. Feel the sun on my face.
Well, it’s cloudy, and going outside becomes more illegal by the hour, so instead I ate some mac and cheese. Moving on. Ansem writes he had “one new discovery after another” in his basement lab: “When a Heartless is born, the body and soul left behind are reborn into this world as a different being. They possess different intentions than their Heartless brethren, and while it is unclear what these sentient ‘things’ are after, it would appear they are responsible for much bedlam in the world.” Uh, this is well after this dude apparently flipped his lid that his protégés were getting too into studying the daaaaaaaarkness, and he’s hanging out in a dim basement, poking bodies with a stick to see what happens after they turn into Heartless. He seems self-aware. Seemingly to place this somewhere concrete in the timeline of the series, Ansem notes that King Mickey and “a hero wielding the Keyblade” are in the middle of battling the Heartless as he writes this, but repeats for the nth time that as threats go, Heartless are now tired and Nobodies are wired. He repeats the What Is a Nobody tutorial in case Junior, in the future, was zoning out during Yen Sid’s version, but also relates some new, if unsurprising, information about the most important Nobodies out there. “‘Organization XIII,’ formed of 13 Nobodies with my betrayers at its core, has divided into two; they are said to be carrying out some sort of research.” I wonder if Ansem’s old interns are dissecting Heartless in a basement! Those evil bastards! Ansem finishes the entry by writing he’s about to travel to “where six of its members have gathered. Towering over the outer limits of the realm between darkness and light: Castle Oblivion.” Does this mean Twilight Town and Castle Oblivion are neighbors in the Light and Dark Demilitarized Zone? Wait, no one cares.
It’s almost comforting to know Jiminy is struggling to chronicle this as much as I am.
We open on a village in the hills of ancient China, in the late stages of burning to the ground. No hot Stars of Destiny making out are to be found, so this is even more tragic. A hawk flies ominously overhead, and the camera swirls back around as the bird completes its scouting mission and returns to land on its master’s shoulder. Its master is a beefy man with a fu manchu, gray-tinted skin, and glowing orange eyes with black sclera. If the fact that he’s standing in a burnt village and grinning with glee didn’t get you all the way there, the eyes are an important clue that this is our villain. For another clue, we cut to a bamboo thicket on a hill overlooking the village, where someone in a top knot and armor is peering through the leaves at the carnage. Offscreen, they’re told by someone who is not quite Eddie Murphy, “See that, Mulan? It’s Shan-Yu, leader of the Hun army!” The flames cast from a fire behind Mulan throw a red-eyed dragon into silhouette, who goes on, “C’mon, girl. This is your big chance!”
WHAAAAT?
MULAN IS A GIRL???
Hilarious. Can you imagine the sort of dumb asshole who would react this way? I ask for no reason? Anyway, Simulacrum of Eddie Murphy is still trying to fire Mulan up about what a hero she’ll be if she takes this guy out, causing Mulan to finally turn around and say, “Mushu, I’m not sure… I haven’t even joined the army yet.” I just watched the movie for the first time–something something free time, yadda yadda all the bars are closed–and this seems badly out of whack from the plot of the movie, but the plot of the movie is “Girl goes to war because she has no brothers and her dad is old and busted, somehow fools everyone until a doctor discovers her tits,” so I shouldn’t complain. Mulan explains all of this except her future surprise boobs to Mushu, who already knows it all, and while I’m here, was also voiced by Discount White Eddie Murphy in the first game too, which I would have noticed if I ever once thought to use a summon. Mushu, still only visible as a shadow that makes him look way more frightening than he is, accuses Mulan of being scared. She retorts, “Aren’t you?” The shadow facepalms. So trying, being saddled with a woman, the only gender who would find war terrifying!
Mickey Mouse’s Brain Trust happens to touch down in this exact bamboo grove. While Junior grunts “Hmm” to himself in a sad imitation of a sentient human having thoughts, Goofy spots Mulan out of the corner of his eye. Then he spots Mushu’s shadow, and the team huddles up. “A Heartless?” @%$#!!! whispers. “Let’s get the jump on ‘im!” Junior agrees. Only Goofy counsels not being fucking stupid about this, though only because he’s timid and not because he recalls what Mushu looks and sounds like. Junior and @%$#!!! charge, Goofy half-heartedly bringing up the rear. Mulan sees this wild-haired nutcase in weird clothes bearing down on her and gasps, Mushu jumping into her arms like a scared puppy from where he was hidden up to this point. This brings Junior and @%$#!!! up short, not that they apologize for scaring the daylights out of this woman they don’t know. Instead, Goofy goes, “Is that Mushu?” No, it’s some other tiny dragon, better kill him.
Mushu pops up over Mulan’s cowering shoulder to talk some shit, and gets far enough into telling them to fuck off that I hope, for his sake, that he has yet to remember these three, but then he too is finally brought up short when Junior’s all, “Hey, Mushu! We missed you!” Come on, guy. I know his brain is realistically the size of a cashew but he doesn’t seem that stupid. “Well you better HOPE I miss YOU, or else you’re–you’re…[Junior]! [@%$#!!!]! Goofy!” he says, with depressing enthusiasm. Mulan asks, with not a small amount of disgust in her voice, if Mushu knows these creeps. “Man, we used to kick all kinds of bad guy butt together!” Mulan blinks several times in reply, obviously because of how plausible this is.
‘And MY calves are as thick as a dragon’s torso!’
Once Mushu is done stroking himself, Junior asks who Mulan is, and she starts to introduce herself, before she unconvincingly drops her voice an octave and Mushu corrects, “Ping!” @%$#!!! cocks a feathery eyebrow and asks, “Mulan Ping?” I’m sure she thinks Donald Duck is a fucking strange name too, asshole. “Just…Ping,” Mulan replies. “I am Ping, son of Fa Zhou.” Wouldn’t that make her Fa Ping? And that wouldn’t have even been an immature joke in 1998, and barely in 2005! She goes on that Mushu is one of her family’s guardians, making Goofy all concerned that they “were borrowin’ somebody as important as a family guardian.” I get that Goofy is trying to be respectful here and also pretend that he thinks Mushu is important, but the other summons in Kingdom Hearts included an all-powerful genie and a literal king. Mushu ain’t shit. But neither are the Mouseketeers, and Mushu is at least one up on them in the not being fucking idiots department, so he leverages this to claim, “And that puts you three up to your eyeballs in debt to Ping here.” This is clever, so I’m not going to focus on the fact that Junior will help literally anybody if asked, unless it happens to also advance one of his own goals, in which case he wants nothing to do with it. “Hmm, sounds fair,” says Junior to this, without even knowing what he’s signing them up for. It had better not be finding Mickey or Riku, though! He won’t stand for that!