POTC fanfiction + KHII
I’m not too happy with the progress I’ve made with Odessea thus far… I think I sorta lost interest in Norrington halfway through the POTC craze. I do want to finish it, and while I pretty much have the ending sketched out in mind, there seems to be a serious lack of motivation to go on. The third chapter can attest to that… it’s so incredibly boring.
After doing a short on Sri Sumbhajee, I’ve also been wanting to do backstories for each of the pirate lords. I currently have my eye on Gentleman Jocard or Capitaine Chevalle. I would’ve liked to do Villanueva if not for the fact he looked like a monkey, sounds like a gorilla, and me having a serious disinterest in Spanish history. But of course, these ideas are pretty much going nowhere because I am a big lazy piece of incompetent shit.
I’ve also been wanting to write more Calypso/Davy Jones, but I’m also fresh out of ideas. It seems like every aspect of their ZOMGtragic!love has already been stomped on and done to death… and I’m still waiting for a conclusion, Disney!
Speaking of Disney, I finally beat Kingdom Hearts I (by cheating; I found myself throwing the controller at the TV while wailing something along the lines of ‘NO, I WILL NOT WASTE ANOTHER 15 HOURS LEVELING UP TO DEFEAT THE FINAL BOSS’), so I’m now on KHII. KHII is infinitely better than the original. Most of the gripes I had with the first game were solved - the right analog stick finally has some purpose, the music isn’t blasting away, and the combat isn’t as grueling. Selecting magic isn’t as tough, and the items also have their own shortcuts. Also, the special commands look absolutely awesome to watch, and it’s great that you just have to hit triangle when the game invites you to, instead of scrolling all the way down on the menu to execute it.
The spacecraft shooting levels are now more dynamic and less technical, although I’m not too sure why now we have to mash X repeatedly to fire instead of holding the damn thing down. My thumbs hurt, and the ship still looks like something made in 1995. The graphics look much better instead of just giving us a big damn square to run around in, but there are still some levels that look like that.
Despite all that marvelous improvements, the storyline falls a bit short. I’ve only played for 12 hours, but first impressions of the story were not so great. Firstly, the player controls this new character named Roxas, and the storyline gave me to him for three hours before releasing Sora. For the first hour and a half I was yelling ‘WHERE IS SORA? WHY THE FUCK AM I CONTROLLING THIS ROXAS?!’ before finally accepting my fate (by that, I mean I didn’t dawdle around anymore and sped through the game so I could get to Sora quickly).
The game also gives you the overall storyline in bits and pieces. It seems like everyone around you knows what’s going on, but you haven’t got a clue. This really calls for some frustration, where you have long, LONG cutscenes that talk about things that you don’t get, and it just seems to be a call for ‘replay the game again and you’ll see everything makes sense!’ In the original KH (or any other Square-Enix game, actually), you always start out with everyone knowing nothing and revealing the plotline together. There aren’t any stupid flashforward/flashback sequences with characters you hardly know, talking in riddles that you’ll probably only get on the second replay.
Eh… But anyway, so far, I like KHII. I suppose the nicer combat system is this main driving point for me this time, instead of the storyline that did it for me in KHI. But we’ll see… that might change.
