User blog:SomeoneYouUsedToKnow/SYUTK's V5E7 - The Gang is Back (almost) - Impressions/Recap

I've been playing Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix lately, in Critical Mode. And I have to say, I'm very disappointed.

See, things in Critical change somewhat to make the game harder, most notably enemies hit twice as hard, and you only get 3/4 the EXP from defeating enemies, and only half the Bonus HP and MP from Bonus Levels. HOWEVER, you're also given 50 Bonus AP and many useful skills even before you finish Roxas's section, your AP increases by 3 points instead of 2 points, and the amount of damage you actually deal is pretty much the same.

So the result is that, while you take more damage and can handle less, that only means you need to be a bit more careful, and you have so much AP that you can equip practically everything if you use every AP Boost you find on Sora. The overall game isn't really that much harder than playing on Standard mode, really.

....Or that's what I thought, until I got to Xaldin. Hits very hard, just doesn't stop attacking, has very wide attacks and one that's borderline-impossible to avoid, and most of his combos have JUST the right delay between hits (which were like 7 or 8 hits long) to hit me right before I recover from the flinching, just to add insult to injury. Xaldin was impossible to defeat.

.....Or that's what I thought, but then I realized that you literally cannot lose on boss battles. You just choose "I won't give up!" and BAM, Mickey comes in and you can control him to beat up the boss with awkward combos, to charge Sora's Drive Gauge and then revive him. Of course, Mickey has HP, he's not invincible. Xaldin actually kicked my ass harder as Mickey. I was still doomed.

.........Or that's what I thought, but it turns out that charging the Drive Gauge as Mickey is unnecesary, he'll revive Sora anyway once his HP drops to 1. And if Sora dies again, Mickey can come back and do it again. The result was me struggling to damage Xaldin, dying, Mickey comes in, dies, revives Sora, and so the cycle repeated like 7 or 8 times. Meanwhile, Xaldin's HP kept dropping, little by little, and eventually I won.

.....So, yeah. KH2FM's Critical Mode is a joke beyond taking more damage. You can't even die against bosses like you could in, say, RE:Coded or Birth By Sleep Final Mix.

Still a good game though.

In other news, this thing.

For newcomers to this thing, this is basically me, making an informal recap of what happened in the episode, while giving my thoughts about what happens. It also includes fancy color speak. 2 are particularly notable:

Red means truth, fact  in the eyes of the user, le me.

Blue means a guess, an hypothesis, a theory.

This was made before/during Tuesday, but is posted after the episode because when I post it, the Recent Activity page gets filled with all the images I use, which would spell Spoilers-Galore. I also have classes on Tuesday from 10am to 5:30pm with some lucky exceptions, and then I have to spend time uploading every pic I'm gonna use. It's time consuming, but it doesn't spoil everyone in one flash.

Now, onto the episode. We start our day with:

Triumph, or Triumph!
I saw tons of complains about the lack of action in this episode, and the last, and the one before that one. I made a blog about it, but even before that it gave me an idea of what to expect in this episode.

And that's all the filler this time, folks. It's a very short episode, 12 minutes, or rather 10 mins if you remove the Opening and Ending. We're back to Volume 2, ladies and gentlemen. The show is regressing. At this rate, the V5 Finale will be 3 minutes long.

For a small Ep, we should have small Filler. So let'sa GO!

Ramen's over, but the fun is not
Oh, finally, Main Expositioner Ozcar Pain and his loyal sidekick Kurow Branwhen have finally entered the scene.

Hopefully, we'll finally get something actually important revealed this time.

2) Time 4 Seerious Talk
Aaaaand I'm skipping the last following bits of the scene because Nora just turns into Annoying Nora because the writers think that's funny.

I mean, I don't hate Nora, though she's far from my favorite, but there are times, especially since V4, where I feel her VA just....well, she fails at basic speaking like a normal person and does what I can only describe as "grrrr while speaking to the extent that the only thing whose speech is less comprehensible is Stitch".

And the result makes Nora go from "Pinkie Pie with a hammer" to "Most Annoying Sound".

Seriously, I had to watch it like 3 consecutive times to understand what Nora said. And what she said was basically "RAVEN. QROW. THE BIRDS". Soooo funny -__-

.....That's what she said, right?

3) You didn't forget about us, right?
This is more a tease than anything, but I swear, it is beautiful to see Merc and Emerald....well, doing anything this time after spending a whole Volume doing nothing, or saying nothing in Merc's case.

Speaking of Merc, did they change his VA again? Or is it just me thanks to not hearing his voice for a year, Chibi-aside?

Conclusions
I have to say....I liked this episode.

I mean, it spends at least half it's short length just showing friendly interactions between RNJRWY. Like with Raven's scene last week, we don't really get any useful info, or in this case any info whatsoever. If anything, Raven's scene was more informative than the entire 1st half of this episode.

However, while Raven wasted our times telling us everything we already knew as if it was some apocalyptic revelation, this time we're just given fun interactions between friends. Both scenes didn't give us anything new, but the latter was actually enjoyable and fun to watch.

Then Ozpin arrived, and we got small revelations that, on their own, amount to little ("Ozpin is the Wizard, his power is finite, he can give people magical powers"), but they have big implications not just for the story but for the setting in general, as I described previously.

And automatically the entire 2nd half of the episode pre-Evil Guys Scene, got more narrative worth than Raven's entire scene did.

Speaking of the Evil Guys, I have to say, Cinder has a lot of bad luck with Team Acronyms.

>In Vol.3 her team with Mercury, Emerald and Neo gave us the amazing Team Acronym (that follows the CNR!) of.....CMEN.

>And now in Vol.5, her team with Arthur, Mercury and Emerald give us the also-amazing Team Acronym of.....CAME.

I have no idea if this was planned by Miles and Kerry or if it's just a pair of coincidences, but, seriously. Happens once, we're just pervs, but if it happens twice........

...................Wait a minute. I just realized....No one, either RNJ or RWY, especially not Yang, ever mentioned Blake in this entire episode.

.....Ouch. At this rate Blake will go from sidelined to irrelevant.

FUNNY V5E7 PICS!!! :D
This time, it's the exact oposite of the previous episode in this regard. I got quite a bunch, and I'm pretty sure there's far more in this episode.