Kingdom Hearts coded/Headscratchers

• So why is Roxas's super move the one from 358/2 instead of the one in II?
  • Re:coded uses the same engine as Days.
  • Data-Sora can only reflect Sora as far as the end of Chain of Memories, because this is where the Journal ends. Logically, therefore, the same must be true of Data-Roxas. By the time Chain of Memories ends - which is in the middle of 358/2 - Roxas has his 358/2 super move, but we haven't seen him use his super move from II. Perhaps he acquired the latter nearer the end of 358/2, in which case it's unclear why he never used it. Or maybe he learned it at an even later point, somewhere within Sora's heart. It's even possible that he always knew the move, but never used it during 358/2 for some reason. In any case, he's using the same super move that he used during the time that the Journal covers.
  • If Data-Roxas only used Event Horizon, that might make sense, but he uses Magic Hour, which he only gets after Day 357, which happens a long time after CoM ends.
  • Weirdly enough, it's Sora's Heartless who has the move from II. I assume you're talking about his rain of keyblades attack (the one which, in II, caused the background to transform into a sunset).
• How can Maleficent hack into a computer when she lives in a world without computers?
  • Pete got sucked in at the same time as Mickey and company, and Maleficent teleported to him. Presumably, she actually didn't get digitised and is in effect her normal self, unrestricted by the usual rules of the data (which explains her potentially being such a pain to fight: She's not following the program.)
• So, if Data Sora forgot everything because it wasn't in the journal, then why didn't Jiminy just write the events of the game in the journal?
  • Because it'd take too much time? Because screwing around with something already screwed up is probably not the best idea? And even then, the way they did things was probably easier.
• According to the main page, the game sets up a mission to rescue Terra, Ven, Aqua, and Axel in another game. I don't know the exact details, but I can accept most of that. But wasn't Terra's body essentially destroyed when Sora killed Ansem/Xemnas? He killed Xehanort's Heartless and Nobody, so there is nothing left of him nor Terra's body left anywhere to rescue. Or is that explained in the game somewhere?
  • Since he BEAT both sides, they are going to return in some form, as the secret cutscene showed. Terra, being in the same heart, is bound to come back in the same way.
  • Basically, Nomura has indicated that when both the Heartless and the Nobody of Someone is destroyed, they come back as their original self. So, if Sora happened to randomly off Axel's Heartless sometime during the first two Kingdom Hearts, Axel would have come back as Lea after his Nobody was destroyed. And since we know both Xehanort's Heartless and Nobody were offed, he will be coming back. If Terra's heart was residing with Xehanort's heart, like Ven's heart was with Sora's, though, I can see some interesting twists and turns coming our way when III comes out.
    • Does this mean a lot of random people will be coming back after Sora offed their corresponding Heartless and Nobodies? Where do they come back? Will they remember their past? I mean, that would be a nice twist. Axel coming back with a memory wipe. But I would think that Axel's heartless is more likely to be a nice boss in the next game, instead of a random one offed sometime in the game. This... bears thinking about. An amnesiac heartless Axel boss. ...This should really be under Wild Mass Guessing, shouldn't it?
• So Riku gets chosen to protect the data in the Journal from getting corrupted. Because as we all know, Riku is 100% immune to being corrupted in any way, shape or form, right?
  • On the other hand, you could see it as Fridge Brilliance. Assuming that Riku was chosen by Naminé (since she was behind all the manipulation in the journal) to safeguard the journal's contents, she would have done it after witnessing Riku in Re:Chain of Memories vowing to fight the Darkness with everything he had, and succeeding, as well as likely having noticed him all throughout Days working to protect (and help) Sora while he slept.
• Why are the changing gameplay styles even in the game? Shouldn't Square have remember what happened with the Gummi Ship in the first game? We have a 2-d scrolling platformer which was only scrolling to add Fake Difficulty it seems, a bland shooter with crappy controls, and tedious RPG which makes battles take ages even when you're overleveled and are coming back for a trophy! Square, why do you keep up with these crappy gameplay shifts? Don't you realize that the gameplay people want is the action RPG?
  • Let me sum it up for you: Jiminy's journal is glitched, therefore things would be kinda wonky, right? Besides, the different gameplay styles weren't all bad.
  • I agree with the above troper. I don't understand why you would dislike the alternate play styles, as they're some of my favorite parts of this game. As for what we want, speak for yourself. The same thing over and over gets boring, this brings in a nice breath of air and reduces some of the tediousness of the game.
    • As someone (not the original poster) who likes the gameplay style the other games use, I maintain they're not tedious at all. Kingdom Hearts did just fine using (mostly) the same system in all its other games, I see no reason to bog it down with a bunch of meaningless shooting and side-scrolling (and turn-based RPGs in Olympus Coliseum, which was by far the worst of the lot). I for one think it's these new gameplay styles, along with the Debug Sectors, that made this game tedious, as every time I went through the Keyhole and had to do them all I could think was "Hurry up, I want to get back to beating up monsters. The shooting was probably the most tolerable, but even it was pretty boring and just served to pad out the fights it was used for.
• Going slightly meta here. Why do people complain about how this game is crap compared to BBS and Square should have learned their lesson and made a better game?(not exact words but variations crop up often). This game was made before BBS and possibly even Days so given the time it was released I think they actually did a fantastic job. Is it just redirected frustration from 3's long development time?
  • Pretty much. Any game that isn't 3 gets backlash simply for not being 3, regardless of how good the game actually is.
  • I respectfully disagree. Birth by Sleep didn't seem to get backlash for not being Kingdom Hearts III. In fact, most people I've talked to think it's one of the best games in the series (either in gameplay or in story), and I for one think it is the best. People don't like coded or re:coded because it's pretty much a completely unnecessary game, and they should have just let us wait before announcing 3D rather than giving us this game. Its gameplay is bogged down by Unexpected Gameplay Change (none of which are really that good), command melding without the fun of getting new commands half the time, and Debug Sectors. And unlike Chain of Memories or 358/2 Days, both of which have faced some criticism for their gameplay mechanics, coded doesn't even have the saving grace of having a good story. Excuse Plot is in full effect, making this game seem like little more than an attempt to cash in on the franchise's success, something which the other games managed to avoid fairly well. Really, there are only two things this game added to the story, both of which could have been fit into other games with minimal effort: it addresses What Measure Is a Non-Human?, which was already present in Kingdom Hearts II and could have had exactly the same impact had they handled it differently, and it reveals the contents of King Mickey's letter at the end of II, which could have been mentioned either in the epilogue itself, the end of Birth by Sleep, or even the beginning of 3D. And that, as a rabid fan of the series, is why I think people dislike coded (or at least, why I personally dislike it, but it seems like other people have a lot of the same complaints). I'm not going to lie, it is frustrating that it isn't KHIII, but the fact remains that there are other issues with the game that make it less than desirable.
  • All things considered, it is important to remember that this is an international release of a cell phone game. Limited formats such as that aren't exactly designed to build the next Kingdom Hearts epic. Was Re:coded one of the weaker of the games? Yes. Because its original format had more limits, and that carried over into the subsequent DS release.
• Is this just me, or is the Xehanort twist at the end of this game incredibly stupid? Sora killed the Heartless, he killed the Nobody. Now how the Hell does the original person come back? Subtract two halves and you get nothing, not one. Also, how can Xehanort even be a credible villain anymore, considering that we've defeated him like four times already now? If Aqua could kick his ass, why should Sora have any problems these days?
  • Well, hearts apparently can't be destroyed. When the dark shell is destroyed, they just go to limbo or something. When the body is killed and a heart is waiting for it, they merge together to remake a person. If there is no heart, the body just vanishes. It's more like his two halves being freed and now they can merge together again. As for the defeats, think of it this way. It's not, "Come on, this guy's a wuss, we beat him so many times." It's more like, "Damn, we beat him up good four times and he still won't die!!"
  • And besides, this time it'll be the whole, the complete Xehanort; to get rid of him, Sora and co. are going to have to kill him. Not destroy his darkness manifested or his empty shell; they have to kill a human being. Imagine the implications. If this is indeed how it is to play out, it is sure to become a huge plot point, in the vein of "Can you really do it?" or "Kill me and you'll become just like me" villainous mind screws.
• Does it bug anyone else that Xehanort is coming back when you killed Terra's nobody and heartless, not Xehanort's.
  • Xehanort was piggybacking off of Terra. Presumably the spoilered person is also coming back, but needs rescuing and isn't as urgent and/or immediately obvious of an issue as the Big Bad.
• Okay, so the point of the story, particularly the events in Castle Oblivion, was so Sora would be emotionally prepared to rescue Roxas, Xion, Axel, Namine, Terra, Aqua, and Ven from their suffering, right? But since Data-Sora's the one who actually experienced all that necessary sadness and loss, isn't the real Sora unprepared in that regard? King Mickey's letter could explain what needs to be done, but Sora's still lacking that critical firsthand experience. Or am I missing something?
  • Sora needed emotional preparation to unlock the memories of those people. Considering how hurtful some of those people's memories are, there would likely be quite a bit of trauma there. Namine probably didn't want to put the real Sora through all that, and so set all of this up so that Data-Sora could act as a proxy. This allows Sora and the others to access the needed info without potentially breaking his heart. Whether or not Sora will still need to understand such pain in order to bring these guys back has yet to be seen, but the pain was only explicitly stated to be needed to unlock the memories.
    • Maybe in 3D Sora will experience a Heroic BSOD at some point from the sheer shock of it all? After all, Vanitas of all people will be showing up. If he appears, with non-kid Sora in the same game, it's definite something bad will happen.
  • Data Sora was basically a litmus test for Sora's heart. Data Sora went through the castle and accepted the pain of loss, and then took on all of Data Roxas's pain without wavering. If Data Sora can do that, then it's clear that the real Sora can do the same.
• Kingdom Hearts II suggests that Mickey's computer illiterate (he doesn't seem to have any more idea of how to work Ansem's computer than Sora, and he doesn't understand when they say they need a password to access it)... so how is he capable of digitizing the contents of the journal? Arguably Chip and Dale actually did the digitizing, but how does he have any idea what to do?
  • It's possible he's been studying in the interim.
• How the hell did Pete and Maleficent bypass the Cornerstone of Light?
  • Maleficent never entered Disney Castle. She only teleported to Pete after he was in the Datascape, which is out of the Cornerstone of Light’s range. As for Pete, he isn’t really evil. Just bumbling and an idiot.