とある飛空士への追憶 / To Aru Hikuushi-e no Tsuioku / Recollections For a Certain Pilot / The Princess and the Pilot

I'm not entirely sure why I decided to get hold of The Princess and the Pilot a while back - it took a while to get around to watching it and I've forgotten whether I just wanted another interesting-looking Madhouse film to watch or if somehow, from the Japanese title, I thought it had something to do with the 'To Aru' series (Index, Railgun et al), which I am currently enjoying. Either way, I got it, forgot about it for a while, and then finally got around to watching it. 

The Princess and the Pilot is something a little different from the usual Madhouse film, which I suppose is to be respected. Most Madhouse standalone films have a certain everyday quality, a real-world grounding, even when concerning werewolf children or time-travelling teenagers. There's a remoteness to The Princess and the Pilot, an otherworldliness to its fantasy setting, even though its fantastical elements are rooted in reality and nothing magical or particularly outlandish happens. 

In the world of this film, which largely resembles our own in the early 20th Century, there is a war on between the Levamme Kingdom and the Amatsukami Empire. If that sounds vaguely European and heavily Japanese to you, respectively, I suspect that this is no coincidence. Levamme could be Imperial Russia or Britain or even the US, and we can extrapolate a few things from the names which are largely either British or Italian, and possibly even from the hatless American-style indoor salute, but when it comes down to it, this is a fantasy world and Levamme is a homogenised 'The West'. Levamme, meanwhile, is a slightly unsettling fantasy of Japanese empire. They are the 'bad guys', yes, but they are an established Empire with superior technology to all around them, honourable and highly skilled pilots and - in case you are unsure if this global empire is really Japan - a code of 'samurai' one-on-one duels. To make things worse, the two eponymous main characters are really the only likeable characters in the whole thing, save perhaps the pilot's one friend at the start and the captain at the end with the twinkle in his eye, and other than that everyone in Levamme seems to be a nasty piece of work who is deeply racist against 'bestados', not far from the Portuguese 'abestado' but more like 'bastard' - the racist term for half-Amatsukami kids who suffer a life of extreme prejudice. 

In this unpleasant world, one bestado has managed to rise up to become the flying ace of the Levamme Kingdom - our hero Charles, amusingly rendered 'Sharuru'. He is entrusted with an important mission - to take the kingdom's princess covertly through enemy lines to her Prince, that they may be married and troop morale bolstered. Of course, things don't go smoothly, the princess Fana is extremely good-natured but accident prone and the idiot prince has leaked the nature of the mission to the enemy, leading to many close calls. There is a nice moment where the mercenary Charles reveals that what he said about being incentivised by money was not actually true, and that really what he wants is to finally take on a mission to save someone rather than to kill, but largely their trip is a long, tedious one and the romance that springs up between them is strained and awkward, entirely lacking in chemistry largely because neither of them is very interesting. 

This is the central flaw of the film that all the high-octane aerial dogfights and near-drowning scenes can't make up for - it never makes its central characters interesting, and with almost no other characters getting significant screentime, that's a huge problem. It doesn't have the redemption, comedy or subtle romance of Porco Rosso,with which it shares much terrain, so to speak. It is all very sincere, but there's very little heart there, and the contrivance that the two had met in their childhoods is very strained and lacks credibility. 

Not a waste of time to see, but certainly not a favourite, or one I would recommend to any but the biggest fans of aerial combat. 

 

ソードアート・オンライン Extra Edition / Sword Art Online: Extra Edition

Not a whole lot to write about this 'special episode', but since it is, after all, movie-length, I thought it worth an entry. 

Extra Edition is a mishmash of throwaway extra episode - about an underwater quest that gives Kirito yet another chance to be the one who saves the day - a recap of the series and a whole lot of swimsuit fanservice of the main girls. None of them are particularly interesting, and it's quite odd to say that it was actually the part that usually so rankles - the flashbacks - that I enjoyed the most. Because it reminded me of what Sword Art Online looked like it was going to be back when it first aired. 

I don't think that the backlash against any popular season has been so universal and so harsh. Attack on Titan is beginning to have the customary backlash every popular series has, but it's still mostly small pockets of detractors against legions of fans. My personal dislike for Code Geass outweighs my dislike for Sword Art Online, but I was aware that was a minority view. With Sword Art Online, though, not only was the swing from it being a big hit to what seems like every anime fan in the world sneering at it more extreme than even what the likes of Naruto and Dragonball Z suffered, it happened before the initial two-season run had even finished. 

Which, of course, SAO did to itself. What the recaps reminded me was that the series began with great promise - a likeable, vulnerable adolescent protagonist adrift in a fantasy world, stuck yet given the tools to protect himself, even putting himself forward to be seen as a villain for the greater good. Only later did it devolve into the meanderings of a do-no-wrong sap and his bland harem overcoming the constraints of computer programs through the power of feelings. For a while, Sword Art Online looked like it was going to be very good. 

Which is why, I suppose, it got a big fandom, and why episodes like this could be made. But what follows is pretty embarrassing. The underwater adventure is sub-Digimon prattle, without a likeable crew to spice up the journey. And the swimsuit parts are the kind of brainless fanservice that people rolled their eyes at - yet bought - in the early 2000s. Everything about this feels regressive, well-trod and boring. I didn't even watch the whole thing in a single sitting, or even two - something very rare for me. 

Yet something keeps me coming back. This was bad, but I know that if another special were released tomorrow, I'd watch that too. I still like the art style, and Kirito's design - and want to see him become vulnerable and interesting again. I still like the concept and am curious about the other worlds I've seen on the covers of the light novels. I still feel like something clever might come out of the whole thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And if I'm a sucker for thinking so, oh well - it's not a whole lot of time to commit, and I will go on being suckered for as long as they pump this stuff out. 

Transformers - G1 season 1

I may have been very keen on Thundercats, and probably consider it the better cartoon today, the cartoon I loved above all others as a young child was Transformers. There's a long list of cartoons I loved and will eventually revisit - MASK, Inspector Gadget, He-Man and She-Ra, plus all the home-grown cartoons like The Raggy Dolls, The Poddington Peas, The Family Ness, Trap Door, Stoppit and Tidyup and The Shoe People. And now that we're making a list I can't leave out the quirky Mysterious Cities of Gold - need to finish Season 2 soon - and its sister Ulysses 31. Or, indeed, that Betamax to the VHS of Transformers that is the Go-Bots. 

For all that I loved the Transformers, though, I can't say that these episodes of the very first season were familiar to me - and they deserve their reputation for being very low-quality in production terms. Of all the big 80s cartoons, only He-Man is this clunky. There are constant colouring errors, with characters that share very similar designs constantly being confused, layering errors and plain bad animation choices. Grimlock and Devastator have robot heads that keep changing. Thundercats had its iffy parts, but every episode of Transformers is stuffed full of them - something compounded by the DVD I was watching, from the Kid Rhino remasters, had gone back to pre-broadcast masters that contained even more animation errors than made it to the original airings, for the sake of better overall picture quality. Luckily, the latest DVDs from Shout! have mostly fixed these problems - but I don't have those. 

My Transformers is really the Transformers of the latter part of the second season and the movie - which I will still defend. I didn't see much of season 3 - I don't think it made it to terrestrial television in the UK, so what episodes I saw were bought on VHS. Similarly, I don't remember a this season either, with only Heavy Metal War as part of my modest video collection. My brother and I didn't know at the time that the Marvel Comics continuity was different from that of the cartoon, so until I rewatched these initial 16 episodes I thought the Dinobots were created to deal with Shockwave but trapped in a tar pit. That's only in the comics - here, they are simply built. If anyone asks about the later need for Vector Sigma to activate new Transformers, you either hand-wave frantically and talk about supercomputers being needed to make intelligent bots but regular ones being able to make simple-minded robots, or you just point to the numerous contradictions within the cartoon (just try to trace the Constricticons' origins) and run away. 

The fact is that Transformers is simply not well thought-out. The plots are clearly utterly thrown-together and often nonsensical. Reasons for the Decepticons retreating can be as simplistic as having some foam on them. In one episode, Skyfire is honoured as having sacrificed himself for the rest, and then after only a couple more, they dig him up when they need a lift and he's alive and well. The pilot episodes end with the Transformers preparing to return to Cybertron...and then they just pretend that never happened. Most egregiously of all, the show never gives adequate reason for the robots to ever need to transform, which is rather the key point of the whole series. Soundwave will turn into a tape player to sneak into a station...but the giant robots can just rip the walls apart and walk in anyway, so why bother? Why does Reflector need to change into a camera to look at a code when the robots all have these capacities in their eyes? There's a vague sense of powering up by transforming - the Dinobots' dinosaur forms are like heavy artillery, Megatron's entire form being a gun makes him more powerful than just using his fusion cannon, and the Autobots who for whatever reason cannot fly get places faster by being vehicles, but the premise is robots in disguise, and given that they do not fool one another and are so much stronger than the puny humans that they have no need whatsoever to fool them, there's never any call for a disguise.

For this first season, I must say that I entirely sympathise with the critics who condemn the cartoon as a poorly-made excuse to sell toys. It's undeniable that this is not a cartoon made out of love for telling a story. A whole lot more effort could have been put into this. The times it looks awesome are far outweighed by the times it looks stupid, the human characters are all absurd - especially 'hacker' Chip Chase, who can somehow completely remote-control a super-advanced living robot on his 80s computer - and Megatron's vague plans to get 'energy' soon becomes bizarre, once he has access to Cybertron and could go and harvest energy anywhere. The cast is also plain outsized, so the likes of Skywarp, Blue Streak and Windcharger aren't exactly unique enough to be well-remembered. 

And yet - there is a certain sparkle here, and it's not just nostalgia talking. There's a reason Transformers excelled beyond various very similar franchises, and it wasn't just the marketing machine, which was also present with its competitors. Even if the series never really gets there with the explanations, the transforming robots thing still captures the imagination and the sound they made for it is perfect. And in common with the Go-Bots and Thundercats - especially once the Lunataks arrived - one of the key factors to Transformers being compelling is that the bad guys are not just cackling maniacs, though Megatron is little more than this, with plenty of hubris. What is crucial, though, is that he is surrounded by such a colourful crew of fellow baddies - the hilarious Starscream, always trying to usurp Megatron and mocking him yet being entirely ineffectual, the hilariously deadpan Soundwave with his awesome shoulder bazooka, and his snappy little streetpunk tape Rumble, who I'm oddly glad became the nicer-looking blue robot despite the well-known controversy. Looking into the extant fandom I found lots of cutesy 'Daddy Soundwave' art, with Rumble and Frenzy as his badly-behaved kids and Ravage and Laserbeak his pets, something which has no more support in canon than Soundwave stroking Ravage in 'Heavy Metal War', but my god it plucked my heartstrings in a funny way. 

This first series was laying the groundwork for something better. In season 2, there would be a lot more development for the primary cast, the animation would gradually improve and the new characters would often add a lot to the dynamic of the teams rather than simply exist somewhere in the background. I still feel the Transformers series is defensible - even good. But that's with a few provisos, and one of those is that it isn't judged purely on its first series. Because much as I enjoy every episode, that's with a fair bit of cringing. 

Bambi

Bambi is not a familiar Disney film to me, though of course the little deer and the fate of his mother are deeply entrenched in popular culture now and I doubt it's possible for any but the youngest child to be surprised by what was reportedly such a harrowing scene for original audiences. It was not harrowing for me, however: it's a favourite family anecdote that when I, as a very young child with work-addicted parents, was taken to a theatrical re-release I reacted to Bambi's mother's disappearance by telling the rest of the cinema, 'Don't worry! She's only gone to work.'

If IMDB's rerelease years are to be trusted, I was two years old at the time, and I haven't seen the film since. At least, not all of it. I had a Bambi duvet cover in my childhood, though, and through clip shows and cameos the process of cultural osmosis has meant that most of the film's major elements were not entirely unfamiliar, but still, I was able to watch the film with a fresh eye.

Quite famously, the film didn't do particularly well on release, clashing with the Second World War, upsetting children with its middle-act bleakness, annoying hunters with its political message and making animation fans question if it had lost the point of animation by focusing on realism. But it is now considered one of the greatest Disney films, its middle act is certainly front-and-centre in any debate on emotive issues in animation and of course it has been very profitable in the long run. 

It's also another remarkable reminder of how technically accomplished Disney were in their early years. There was really no competition for them outside the United States. While Princess Iron Fan and Momotarou show animators still struggling to make characters walk naturally or seem like they have any weight at all, Bambi showcases how characters and scenery look reflected in water, heavy snowfall and storms and even a fire raging out of control, which may not quite be up to the standard of later fires, but is certainly both impressive and cleverly-done, especially in how it is often offscreen. Similarly, the character animation is superb, with the mixture of studies in animal motions and cute faces much more advanced than it may at first seem to one very familiar with the cute Disney animal aesthetic. One need only look at the rather more dated, strange motions of Friend Owl - and his gimmick of suddenly getting very close to the screen - to remember how the staples of character animation were not yet locked in place, and to remember how unusual this sort of animation was in a wider context, and how very accomplished. 

But Bambi is of course an extremely simple story. Bambi is born, a 'prince' amongst the woodland creatures, and has an adorable time learning to walk and talk with the annoying hyperactive bunny Thumper and the gender-confused skunk Flower. He is impressed by the adult deer, and by his father despite how utterly emotionally remote he is (apparently the subject of Bambi II, though I've not seen it). Then his mother is shot, which is terribly sad, but he grows up to happily find a mate and fight off nasty hunting dogs. The wicked men - never actually shown - get their comeuppance when they cause a forest fire they clearly couldn't escape from (apparently Walt had to be dissuaded from showing their agonising deaths onscreen), and the story ends optimistically with the new generation. It is very simple, and a lot less arbitrary than the likes of Pinocchio or Alice in Wonderland, yet quite surprisingly given its reputation as amongst the most babyish of the Disney films, it is also remarkably mature and uncompromising. More of it is about death and sex than it is about cutesy animals. 

Apart from the cyclical framing of death with births, Bambi has a lot in common with The Lion King. Both present their talking animals as just that, rather than giving them human bodies or funny hats, which is my preferred form of anthropomorphism. Neither have human characters, though of course they have their mark on the world and the story of Bambi. Both follow up their heart-wrenching scenes with high-energy contrasting scenes, and allow their protagonist to grow up - albeit very quickly. But there is a distinct difference in tone - The Lion King has the epic proportions of power struggles between royals, whereas Bambi is contemplative and almost detached, in a way perhaps masked by memories of Thumper skating on ice or skunk romances. 

Though the story is very light on the ground, there is certainly more to Bambi than I ever gave it credit for, and it remains part of a body of work of a studio far, far ahead of anyone else at the time. Don't let it being the story of an adorable baby deer fool you - there is some depth here, if you allow yourself to look for it. 

The Lego Movie

You can colour me surprised. Even with all the rave reviews and the excellent word-of-mouth, I really didn't think that The Lego Movie was going to be much good. The Lego franchise has felt overbearing to me over the past few years, with all the tie-in games - Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Marvel superheroes...none of which I've been remotely interested in. Then came the trailer for this film, full of humour that seemed to be trying way, way too hard and the less-than-appealing tagline of 'From the creators of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs'. That it was animated by Animal Logic, whose Happy Feet and Legend of the Guardians I enjoyed would have been a bit of a plus, but I didn't actually find that out until the closing credits. 

By which time, of course, I was completely converted. The thing about glib, self-effacing humour is that out of context - like in a trailer - it's a lot harder to tell that it's undermining parts of the character and just seems goofy. In the film itself, it was a lot funnier, and a lot more likeable. 

And that's what The Lego Movie has done well - be likeable. And that despite also going for a biting bit of satire on modern life, which is quite an impressive feat. Plus it is very clearly aimed at Generation X as opposed to the teeny kids of today, who I imagine were mostly confused by the trippier moments and cameos from Teenage Turtles and Lando Calrissian.

This is one way that the Lego movie could really stand out - being able to use the characters from their toy ranges and mash them together...though I'm guessing there was some kind of deal with DC so that only their comic superheroes made it. It's a hell of a lot of fun to see Batman interacting with the crew of the Millennium Falcon, especially with them all exaggerated versions of themselves, not to mention a council that includes Dumbledore, Gandalf and Abraham Lincoln in his space chair. And, of course, Michaelangelo the artist and Michaelangelo the turtle. 

From the beginning the film establishes its silly tone: a very funny prologue sees Will Ferrell's character Lord Business stomping on brilliantly ridiculous boots to overwhelm Morgan Freeman's silly old wizard character Vitruvius and establish control over the film's Macguffin. We then have the main character introduced: the construction worker Emmet, who lives in a world that despite what you may have read is far more Huxley than Orwell: everyone is kept brainlessly happy, placated by mindless entertainment and overpriced coffee instead of Soma, which has the added appeal of, y'know, actually being a recognisable critique of modern American culture. Though everything is awesome - as the earworm song goes - Emmet is not only incredibly dull, but very lonely as well. He has no real defining characteristics and no friends. His comfortably life is shattered, of course, when he sees a (beautiful) intruder on his construction site, then happens upon the 'Piece of Resistance', a piece that can put a stop to the evil plans of Lord Business. 

Now a target of Lord Business and his brilliant henchman Bad Cop - who also has a good cop face, and is voiced by Liam Neeson having the time of his life - but falls in with the faction of the Master Builders, including Vitruvius and the beautiful Wyldstyle, who have the ability to disassemble the Lego parts around them and reassemble them into things that suit their needs. With them, Emmet discovers the other worlds kept apart from his - the Wild West, the medieval world, and even the mish-mash of 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' where denizens like the intensely cutesy Uni-Kitty reside. But since Emmet has the 'Piece of Resistance', Lord Business will not rest until he is captured. 

The broader context of this, of course, ends up being that classic of self-referential toy franchises, the tension between the adult collectors who become obsessive about perfection and the idea of children actually using toys as intended and being creative. Hinted at from the start with 'relics' like highlighter pens and Vitruvius' chewed-lollipop staff, there's a live-action portion that jars a little at first but ultimately works and for all that it is an obvious concept, also seems like exactly the statement a Lego movie ought to make. 

The film perfectly balances its silly humour, its epic adventure and its more serious message about creativity being stifled - with an amusing stinger about a little sister to boot. There's an eagerness to undercut sacred cows that works particularly well here, with an incredibly goofy Green Lantern, Batman's hilarious angsty song (with a final line in the version played at the end credits that is possibly the edgiest thing I've heard in a kids' film, in a song parodying edginess no less) and a very amusing version of Lando Calrissian from Billy Dee Williams himself. Add in spices of The Matrix and Toy Story, and it’s a success story.

What the Lego Movie does, it does very well - it's hilarious, it makes you like its characters, it's irreverent and it looks good, too. It's restrained, of course, by the need to look like Lego, but while that could have been a disadvantage, it also makes for the best visual idea here, which is to make all the explosions and lasers and other visual effects be constructed from CG Lego bricks as well. Great idea. One of many, which is why this unlikely film can be such a success story. It's also nice that I'll be able to have this critical success to point to the next time someone claims that 80s cartoons being toy adverts precludes any sort of artistic merit. 

劇場版 HUNTER×HUNTER 緋色の幻影 -ファントム・ルージュ- / HunterXHunter movie: Phantom Rouge

Along with Magi, HunterxHunter is really the only series running just now that I really want to be able to watch as soon as it comes out. So it's perhaps a little strange that I didn't jump at the opportunity to watch the movie as soon as somebody translated it. I'm not sure why I kept putting it off - one day I was looking and finding no decent-quality video, and then all of a sudden it was months later and I could have seen this weeks and weeks ago. 

But it certainly gave me my fix. It wasn't quite what I hoped it would be, especially given Togashi's involvement and the rather cute tie-in chapter in Jump that remains the most recent thing he's released, but it was certainly something I enjoyed. I am somewhat disappointed that it wasn't largely a prequel, promotional materials showing a younger Genei Ryodan and of course the manga tie-in being set in Kurapika's childhood, but it was in other ways satisfying.

Like most of the best Jump tie-in movies, it takes something that is a bit of a question mark in the actual series and expands upon it. In fact, it covers two things - Kurapika's childhood, though I have to say it rather neuters the idea of the Kurta clan as fearsome warriors, and the previous member of the Ryodan that Hisoka defeated and replaced. 

Here, we find out that former member is named Omokage, and has a rather complicated ability - to see into the minds of his enemies and create puppets of the people they know, with a great degree of their abilities and fighting prowess. These puppets have no eyes, but can steal the eyes of other people, whereupon they become more or less completed and operate on their own. He can also absorb the puppets into himself and use their powers. The trouble with Omokage conceptually is that (a) his survival means that Hisoka didn't do his job - though claims to have known he was fighting a replacement puppet and enjoyed the idea of getting to fight him again, and (b) his motivations as antagonist here are unclear. He wants to get Kurapika's eyes because they're valuable, and new eyes for his beloved doll of his little sister Retz, and there's never any real explanation for why he chose to come out of hiding and execute his plans so conspicuously just at this point in the HunterxHunter timeline. 

He is also not very visually striking, especially compared with the others in the Ryodan. He has an indifferent design that looks like something rejected from Trinity Blood, and a typical driven-mad-by-loss raving personality. More interesting is his sister Retz, who presents herself as a boy in dungarees and is later dressed up very much like Shinku in Rozen Maiden, who befriends Gon - inspiring jealousy from Killua - and then later defies her nature. She is not the best-developed character in the world, but she certainly stands out from a lot of random kid characters in Jump movies. On the other hand, she somewhat highlights this film's tendency to over-exaggerate the homoerotic bonds between both Gon and Killua and Kurapika and Leorio, taking something that is enjoyably subtle and taking it into the realms of fanservice.

That said, it's in fanservice that this film really succeeds, especially for those of us who think that the York Shin saga was the highlight of the title so far. It has Leorio and Kurapika reappear - both completely absent for the totality of the Ant arc and Kurapika only having a single-frame cameo in the Election arc - but it also has appearances from all of the original Ryodan and even Uvogin, who of course has died in the main series. Nobunaga is made to really shine here, and Hisoka even gets a chance to fight Kuroro, even if only a puppet of him. 

I can probably categorise this one as a guilty pleasure. Objectively, it's really not great - the plot is confusing, the antagonist unconvincing and lacking motivation, and the main characters get little development beyond 'these two pairs are very, very close to one another' and 'Killua is being controlled by Illumi', which of course gets largely aborted with the discovery of a v-chip-like device during the Ant arc. 

But these are characters I really, really enjoy in the first really original offering the anime has been able to offer - and since the manga is back to HiatusxHiatus, I'll take what I'm given. And feeling just a little guilty about it, I'll love it. 

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Remix - Part 2: 358/2 Days

Of course, I don't normally have Playstation games on my animation blog, but here - since this extra is not really a game, and you are just watching computer-generated figures in an animation - I feel justified.

Of all the Kingdom Hearts games, 358/2 Days was my least favourite - yes, even including Re:Coded. An overlong game of the same thing over and over, with exceptionally easy hidden bosses, an irritating angst-fest of a story, characters I have never liked and one of those horribly annoying boss fights where you win, then in the cutscene afterwards you are immediately overpowered, making you wonder why you had to do the fight in the first place. 

But the HD remix was quite a different prospect. For one thing, it was the most dramatically-improved game graphically in this HD set - though the cutscenes in the original game looked impressive for the DS, that's still quite a significant qualifier. For another, with all-new voice acting, it was the part of the project that had the most new experiences attached. And honestly, not having to play through the whole damn game again - possibly even several times if they kept the same trophy structure - was a blessing. My original plan was to play this after Re:Chain of Memories, or perhaps to watch the cutscenes up to the point when the Organization members depart for Castle Oblivion and then play the game, returning for the rest of the cutscenes afterwards - probably the best chronology of the remastered trilogy - but then I discovered that there are cards I'm not going to get in CoM if I don't get through 358/2 Days first, so I prioritised this. 

My feelings haven't changed, exactly, but I felt a lot more charitable towards the characters and the game as a whole after experiencing the story a second time. Remove the frustrating player experience and one headache is taken away, which is a major plus point, but I also have a somewhat better understanding of the idea of Nobodies in the series - when I played, I thought the hints in this direction were just the characters being misled, where by now we have learnt that in fact, the central characters' proximity to the 'hero' actually has made them recover some aspect of a heart. I was annoyed before that Nobodies had been established as a kind of heartless, incapable of true feelings, and thus the variety of feelings on display here were illusory - which is no longer a possibility. Of course, this brings about a variety of complex implications to Sora's moral path, centred on the fact that he could have subdued and rehabilitated all but the most evil of the Nobodies and through just being near them returned them to a kind of humanity, and though he could not have known this, it will feel like a horrible oversight to me that he will likely never realise and come to feel deep remorse.

This is a story conceived entirely to be tragic - to build something pleasant to revel in tearing it down. Roxas, whose fate we already know when we begin the game, is already a miserable enough character even before the development of the Riku Replica storyline leads to Xion. The set-up has Roxas and Xion unable to coexist indefinitely, each causing the other misery - at first through insecurity as they don't understand the effect each has on the other, and then later through a pointless struggle against inevitable loss. The fact that the focus then shifts to the fact that they begin as friends - and the added factor of the necessity for Xion to be entirely forgotten for the plot to continue - results in the most angst-ridden of all Square Enix's recent angst-a-thons, to the order of The World Ends With You cubed.

Yet, partly because I now know they are indeed supposed to have developed genuine humanity rather than merely acting according to memories of genuine feelings - which was the set-up - I liked all the characters more this time. I still dislike Axel and first and foremost will remember his smug, swaggering character in Chain of Memories and, indeed, Kingdom Hearts II,  but his helplessness towards the end here is actually quite appealing, and the glimpses beneath the facade his diary entries afford show there is some depth to him - overlaid, at least, on what has been established prior to this game. His actions throughout the series remain the result of his stunted, selfish personality, and I don't look forward to how Kingdom Hearts 3 will portray the restored Lea (especially in relation to Ventus, who I really don't want to become a Roxas substitute), but when his plans finally go awry and he is adrift and helpless, I could begin to sympathise with him. With Xion, her imposition on the storyline still rankles somewhat, but she is a victim - one of the purest victims any video game I've played focuses on - and ultimately a plaything of cruel men, and I found myself feeling more protective than before. I prefer this voice actress than when Kairi's steps in, and the insubstantial quality to her feeble struggle is quite moving. I also noticed that the HD version seems to highlight her facial similarities to Sora more than to Kairi, which changes the dynamic very slightly, reminding me more immediately of the impossibility of her sustaining any kind of existence.

Then there's Roxas. Roxas, who I didn't want to have to deal with at all in Kingdom Hearts II, and less still here. I have never liked Roxas - making it perhaps bizarre that I love his doppelganger Ventus so much and would consider his showing up here to reflect Braig's odd obsession with one rather unremarkable moment in what is still one of the series' best moments of foreshadowing the highlight of this whole experience. But Roxas doesn't have as much of an attitude problem here as I recall him having - and perhaps I find the adolescent outbursts more ridiculous (and therefore cute) than before, like when he bothers to get his diary out to break off into a one-line all-caps mini-rant about how he won't put up with this treatment.

It is also probably the game where Riku is the most tolerable, as a harsh yet dependable sounding-board for Xion despite their conflicts (and another adorably adolescent diary entry, from her this time). He is in a place of repentance, here, but also put into a mentor position, authoritative, standoffish and ultimately self-sacrificing - it makes a big difference from the rash brat of the first game.

Ultimately, I still think that Organization XIII was a huge mistake for the writers of the series, especially how they have dominated every game since Chain of Memories except Birth by Sleep. In DDD we discover that the whole thing was a sham anyway. As characters, they are not a compelling bunch - I find only Xigbar to be enjoyable (and Braig, who is very much the same) - the idea of them completing and then using a recreated Kingdom Hearts never feels like enough of a threat for game 2 (especially in light of Master Xehanort eventually declaring them all failures and making a new Organization XIII out of various versions of himself) and the more they are developed, the worse it is for the character of Sora - who becomes an unfeeling psychopathic butcher if you make the characters too human...though of course it has since in one of the worst plot-wriggles of the series been revealed that defeating Nobodies and the heartless formed when they were created somehow brings Somebodies back to life...as opposed to the hearts going to Xemnas' Kingdom Hearts like everyone else's. 

For all the convolution, this is a period of time the series needed to cover in some form - from Roxas' inception to his being captured and digitised by DiZ - and the sheer unrelenting tragedy is probably appropriate. The trouble is that it just seems so juvenile...in a way that, perhaps paradoxically, the cheerful adventures of Sora through Disney worlds does not.