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Ansem, Ansem the Wise, Aqua, Axel, Donald Duck, Goofy, heartless, humor, Kairi, keyblade, King Mickey, Kingdom Hearts 3, Lea, Master Eraqus, Master Yen Sid, Namine, Nobodies, Organization XIII, parody, Pitch Meeting, Riku, Roxas, Sora, super easy barely an inconvenience, Terra, Unversed, Vanitas, Ventus, Xehanort, Xemnas, Xion
Similar to what I did for the Fairy Dance arc of “Sword Art Online” and “Violet Evergarden”, this is a parody of Screen Junkies’ “Pitch Meeting” series; taking a look at what it would be like if they did this video game. If you haven’t seen “Pitch Meeting” yet, check it out on YouTube. It’s quite funny and enjoyable. And you’ll get the style and humor of some of these jokes better if you watch a few installments of that first anyway. 😀
Without further ado…
*SPOILER ALERT!*
[Scene opens on the outside of a Square Enix meeting room, then cuts to a beaming video game executive.]
EXECUTIVE: So I hear you got a new Kingdom Hearts storyline for our new game?
[Cut to an equally beaming writer]
WRITER: Yes sir, I do!
EXECUTIVE: Fantastic! Because we left the fans on a cliffhanger seven years ago at this point and they’re really looking for a very satisfying payoff.
WRITER: Well, I did my best, pulled out all the stops, and I think I came up with something that they’ll definitely find C+ acceptable all the way.
EXECUTIVE: What?
WRITER: Nothing.
EXECUTIVE: Anyway, let’s hear about it.
WRITER: Well, at the start of the game, everyone has their own mission so they can get ready to fight the true Organization XIII. Mickey and Riku have finally found a way to get into the Dark World.
EXECUTIVE: Awesome! So they’re finally going to go save Aqua after she’s been stuck there for thirteen years?
WRITER: Yes! For about ten minutes then they’re going to go home to take a break.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really?
WRITER: Yeah, the very first enemy they run into ends up being really hard so they figure they can’t go on and decide to regroup.
EXECUTIVE: So they’re cool with just leaving Aqua in a world they know has to be filled with those things?
WRITER: Hey, she’s either dead or she’s already been dealing with them for 13 years. What’s a little longer?
EXECUTIVE: Well, ok then! What about Sora, Donald, and Goofy? Aren’t they helping out?
WRITER: Oh no. You see, you can only go into the Dark World if you have the ‘Power of Waking’, and Sora never got that, so he has to learn that if he wants to join up with Riku and Mickey.
EXECUTIVE: So he’s immediately going to go and try and master that so he can go lend a hand?
WRITER: No, he’s going to visit a lot of Disney and Pixar worlds.
EXECUTIVE: Oh. But visiting those worlds is going to teach him how to do that, right?
WRITER: Not really. He’s mostly going to ride theme park rides, play Tiger Electronics games, and gather ingredients for a rat who’s going to control him against his will to make French cuisine. But he will get a chance to be a self-insert into a lot of popular cartoon films. He’s going to have loads of fun visiting all those worlds and playing all sorts of crazy minigames and having fun-loving shenanigans. Like he’s going to ski down the North Mountain from “Frozen” and he’s going to dance at the festival in “Tangled” and he’s going to ride on the rails of the door vault from “Monsters’ Inc.”.
EXECUTIVE: All while he knows full well Aqua is alone and surrounded by bloodthirsty monsters in the Dark World and could be dying at that very moment? Or that his friends could be dying trying to save her?
WRITER: Yeah-yeah-yeah!
EXECUTIVE: Speaking of Sora’s friends, where are Kairi and Lea?
WRITER: Oh, it turns out Yen Sid has a Room of Space and Time somewhere and he sends them into that so they can train how to use their Keyblades to help out. And while they’re there, they’re really going to connect and become friends.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really? How does that happen?
WRITER: Kairi writes a letter saying they connected and became friends.
EXECUTIVE: That’s all?
WRITER: Oh, they also sit around staring at a landscape and eat sea salt ice cream.
EXECUTIVE: Oh, that’s right! I forgot! People who sit around staring at a landscape and eat sea salt ice cream together are immediately best friends.
WRITER: Exactly!
EXECUTIVE: But what’s the real Organization XIII doing during all of this?
WRITER: Oh, they’re doing what they do best.
EXECUTIVE: Which is?
WRITER: Appearing out of nowhere, smugly taunting Sora with a vague threat, and then disappearing when Sora runs at them.
EXECUTIVE: Hmm…
WRITER: Oh, is something wrong?
EXECUTIVE: It’s just that we’ve kind of done that for, oh…every single game in the franchise until now. Don’t you think it’s starting to seem a bit cliche?
WRITER: Oh, I got that covered! At one point, Sora’s going to throw out a line where he says all they ever do is appear out of nowhere, smugly taunt him with a vague threat, and then disappear when he runs at them.
EXECUTIVE: Ah! Gotcha!
WRITER: Right! Because if we call out that we’re doing a cliche, that automatically makes it not a cliche if we keep doing it.
EXECUTIVE: That is exactly how it works. Smart thinking!
WRITER: Oh, also, when Sora goes to “Toy Story” world, there’s going to be this sudden fake advertisement for a game called “Verum Rex” that’s going to feature this character named Yozura who looks like he’s from a Final Fantasy game, and it’s going to have lots of high-detailed combat style against giant monsters, over-accessorized costumes, a pair of cliched friends, and scenes of him going after his true love in these bright, colorful, over-elaborate backgrounds… You know, just like what happens in most Final Fantasy games these days? And it’s going to all end up being a commercial that Rex is watching.
EXECUTIVE: Ha-ha! That’s fantastic! It’s nice to see how we can parody ourselves by making up this totally fake game that has all of the modern day Square Enix cliches rolled into one! Shows how we don’t take ourselves too seriously and like showing off things we tend to overdo!
WRITER: I know, right? (Quickly and quietly) Anyway…Yozura’s going to end up being real along with the game and in a secret ending.
EXECUTIVE: Wait, what?
WRITER: (Normal volume) So eventually Mickey and Riku are going to run into Aqua, but there’s trouble.
EXECUTIVE: Oh no!
WRITER: But luckily, Sora jumps into the Dark World to help.
EXECUTIVE: Wait, I thought he needed the Power of Waking to do that?
WRITER: Oh, it turns out he had the power all along. He just forgot how to use it.
EXECUTIVE: Why couldn’t he remember how to use it earlier?
WRITER: Because the game would have only been four hours long if he had, you silly goose.
EXECUTIVE: Well ok then! What happens next?
WRITER: Sora find out that Aqua’s been corrupted and turned evil.
EXECUTIVE: Oh no! That sounds bad!
WRITER: Oh, it is. Her eyes are all yellow like a Heartless and her clothes turned dark and shredded and she can duplicate herself and fly and she’s just really powerful and evil now.
EXECUTIVE: This is going to be really intense. Having one of the franchise’s more beloved characters become a major antagonist like that.
WRITER: Oh yes, it will be. For about five minutes.
EXECUTIVE: What?
WRITER: Then Sora’s just going to beat her up a little and she’ll be fine.
EXECUTIVE: (Puzzled) Really? Don’t you think that was kind of unnecessary to begin with?
WRITER: Well, you see, I’m thinking if the only cutscene we include in the trailers that has Aqua in it shows her for the five minutes in which she’s evil, the fan community will go ballistic and really want to play the game.
EXECUTIVE: (Grinning) Awesome. Baiting and switching the audience is tight.
WRITER: So now that Aqua’s had the evil knocked out of her, she’s going to go with Sora to wake up Ventus. But just as she does, Vanitas shows up.
EXECUTIVE: Oh? How did Vanitas come back?
WRITER: Well, you see, I’m going to set up this whole side plot throughout the game in which the real Organization XIII has been working with Even and kidnapped Ansem the Wise from back outside of the Dark World in order to make flesh puppet bodies that can pretty much become real people if you give them a heart, so when Xehanort did his whole bit of time compression in the last game he put all of their hearts into these flesh puppets and now they can all run around at the same time even though half of them are already dead.
EXECUTIVE: Oh! It was a good thing you put in that pointless part in Chain of Memories where Even was doing all that.
WRITER: Yeah, I thought it was only an excuse to have Sora fight Riku for the fourth-out-of-a-bajillion times, but it ended up working out for my story.
EXECUTIVE: Awesome.
WRITER: So Sora is going to step in with Donald and Goofy, but Aqua tells them to stand back and she can handle this.
EXECUTIVE: Super cool. Aqua wasn’t able to stop Vanitas last time when he took over Ventus, so now she finally gets to have her redemption by defeating him by herself. It’s like her moment to both prove herself as a true Keyblade Master and a successor as well as to avenge Terra and defend Ventus for real this time. Sounds great.
WRITER: Yeah, it really does. Anyway, I have her lose again instead of doing any of that.
EXECUTIVE: Oh.
WRITER: But Sora manages to wake up Ventus during this and then he jumps in.
EXECUTIVE: Oh…oh ok! That’s good too. This is Ventus’ chance to prove he’s the “true” version of the two, to defeat him once and for all, and to prove all of Vanitas’ taunts about him wrong and that it was never hopeless.
WRITER: Right! Or it would be if I didn’t just have Vanitas run off right after that.
EXECUTIVE: Oh.
WRITER: Anyway, now that everyone’s gathered, they all go together and head to the Keyblade Graveyard to fight the real Organization XIII and, like, a gazillion Heartless, Nobodies, and Unversed all coming together to form this giant Level 5 Tornado of Heartless.
EXECUTIVE: Oh my! It’s a good thing they’ve got four more Keyblade users, one a master, to help them out, right?
WRITER: You’d think but I’m going to have Aqua and Ventus be really bad at it, Lea is just plain terrible, and Kairi needs Sora to defend her again.
EXECUTIVE: I thought they were in a place where time didn’t matter so they’ve had literally years to master how to use Keyblades?
WRITER: Yeah, well, none of that helped.
EXECUTIVE: Didn’t Lea used to be, like, really good at fighting before he had a Keyblade? So…he’s worse now that he has one?
WRITER: I dunno, I guess.
EXECUTIVE: And don’t you think having Sora needing to defend Kairi again is pretty much just reducing her to her former role? Like, why did she even need a Keyblade if she wasn’t going to be any help?
WRITER: Listen, I’m going to need everyone to be terrible at Keyblading for this next part so you’re going to need to get off my back.
EXECUTIVE: Ok then!
WRITER: So Terra is going to show up but he’s still possessed so he just straight up murders Ventus…
EXECUTIVE: Oh my gosh.
WRITER: …but then Donald is going to kill himself to blow him away using Exaflare…
EXECUTIVE: Whoa, this just took a dark turn.
WRITER: …but then the huge Level 5 Heartless Tornado is going to kill everyone in an instant, just like all the bad guys kept saying it would.
EXECUTIVE: That is dark. All of the protagonists just instantly dying. It’s going to be hard to pull the series back from that.
WRITER: Actually, super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really?
WRITER: Yeah, Sora’s going to go to…I dunno…Keyblade Limbo or something and he’s going to meet up with Chirithy.
EXECUTIVE: Who’s Chirithy?
WRITER: Oh, that’s a character from Kingdom Hearts Union χ, which is a remake of a 2013 Japan-only PC game. If you haven’t played that, you’ll have no idea what most of the significance of the scenes in Keyblade Limbo or the end of the game are or what any of the stuff the sub-members of the real Organization XIII keep babbling about vaguely means.
EXECUTIVE: Didn’t we just go to all the trouble of re-releasing every Kingdom Hearts game so that all the players could get caught up on the entire series?
WRITER: Yeah, but we left that one out and replaced it with just a vague extended cutscene of people who like dressing like animals in robes. However, I’ll still expect people to be totally familiar with it before getting to this part.
EXECUTIVE: Well, alright, if you say so.
WRITER: So anyway, Sora’s going to get everyone to come back to life and come back to right before they were going to go fight the real Organization XIII.
EXECUTIVE: How is that possible?
WRITER: Sora’s love for Kairi.
EXECUTIVE: Oh, so that’s why she had to come to the final battle!
WRITER: Exactly! And that fully justifies her existence in the game and her role as Sora’s love interest!
EXECUTIVE: And the best part is you don’t need any relationship development between the two of them whatsoever now in spite of the fact they’ve only spent about 30 minutes out of all four games they’ve been in together with each other and all they’ve done really is stare at the ocean.
WRITER: Right, because that’s exactly what soul mates who are perfect for each other do. Dating, common interests, and working through emotional problems are for losers!
EXECUTIVE: So I guess Sora tells them all what happened last time so everyone is ready?
WRITER: No, he just goes forward exactly like before doing absolutely nothing differently.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really?
WRITER: Yes, but this time, instead of them all getting killed, the Lingering Soul shows up!
EXECUTIVE: Oh, the Lingering Soul!
WRITER: Yeah, I remembered he was a thing just in time to put him into the script!
EXECUTIVE: But…why didn’t he show up the first time?
WRITER: Oh, you see, while Sora was in Keyblade Limbo he ran into Naminé and she got him to come.
EXECUTIVE: Oh, Naminé is in this game?
WRITER: Possibly!
EXECUTIVE: What does that mean?
WRITER: You see, there’s only one point in the game you can possibly interact with her, and it’s when you’re in Keyblade Limbo and surrounded by a bunch of these blips of light that all look totally identical and are very easy to get mixed up with one another or forget ones you’ve already talked to, and if you talk to one of them it ends up being her.
EXECUTIVE: So if the player was to miss talking to her at that point, then…?
WRITER: (Shrugs) He or she would think the Lingering Soul just showed up for some reason, I guess. After that, though, all the ghosts of all the Keyblade Wielders from the first Keyblade War are going to pop up and get rid of the Level 5 Heartless Tornado for everyone. And I think it’s going to be real cool if the special moves the player uses to destroy the tornado are the names of all of the Kingdom Hearts Union χ’s best players. Y’know, as a tribute to them.
EXECUTIVE: Won’t that make the players who never got a chance to play that game feel kind of mad?
WRITER: I dunno, am I still mad about the increased cancer risk in the country from the first two atomic bombs?
EXECUTIVE: What?
WRITER: Anyway, then after that, Yen Sid will show up to blast a path through another army of Heartless, Nobodies, and Unversed and finally the group will go to fight the real Organization XIII. So we’re going to get to see a lot of great battles we’ve been waiting for. Like Aqua and Ventus will finally confront Terra.
EXECUTIVE: Oh? And do they save him or at least put him out of his misery like he wanted?
WRITER: That would have made from a dramatic end to their arc, but, again, I decided not to do that. They both lose extremely easily and nearly die. Sora comes in and saves all three of them.
EXECUTIVE: So it kind of feels like after having an entire game that you had to play through three times devoted to these characters, now they’re in this one just to be practical NPCs.
WRITER: Pretty much. I got tired of juggling characters and plot points even though I kind of dug my own hole by wasting entire games on these side stories to begin with. Anyway, it’ll turn out in a plot twist that the last member of the real Organization XIII is Xion.
EXECUTIVE: How does Xion exist when supposedly all records, both physical and metaphysical, of her should have been totally erased when she faded into nothingness?
WRITER: (Grinning) If I told you that, you’d have no reason for any DLC content.
EXECUTIVE: (Laughing) Oh yeah, that’s right! I forgot that’s how we roll nowadays.
WRITER: So Xemnas tries to get Xion to kill Lea, but Sora gets her to remember her identity and Xemnas is going to kill both of them, but then guess who shows up?
EXECUTIVE: I don’t know. Who?
WRITER: Roxas!
EXECUTIVE: Wow! How does that work?
WRITER: Oh, it turns out that all of the guys who betrayed Ansem the Wise, including Even, are good now.
EXECUTIVE: Didn’t they all try and murder him for the sake gaining ultimate power? That kind of sounds like very mean and evil people.
WRITER: Yeah, but they got betrayed too, so they kind of said: “Hey, being evil and wanting ultimate power really sucks. Let’s go back to being faithful, devoted, and nice.”
EXECUTIVE: People can just change their moral orientation like that?
WRITER: Oh, I haven’t even gotten into the worst yet…
EXECUTIVE: Well, anyway, now that Roxas and Xion are back, it’s going to be really fantastic and exciting to see them both take down Xemnas. I mean, he used both of them, manipulated them, treated them like trash, and caused them to hurt people they cared about. This is their big chance to show they were both more “real” people than he’ll ever be. And it’ll be an ironic but satisfying ending.
WRITER: Yeah, it really would have been.
EXECUTIVE: (Realizing what this means) Oh sh(bleep)…
WRITER: But I’m just going to have them help Sora out against Saïx and then they’re going to disappear and contribute absolutely nothing to the finale.
EXECUTIVE: Do you have hot hands? Because I kind of feel you’re dropping a lot of balls.
WRITER: So Sora goes on and takes out the rest of the real Organization XIII except for Xehanort, but then Xehanort is going to reveal that he wanted Sora to kill everyone in the real Organization XIII.
EXECUTIVE: Why?
WRITER: Because he needed them to be defeated so that he could forge the χ-blade from the pieces inside them.
EXECUTIVE: So why did he purposely set thousands of bad guys including the Level 5 Heartless tornado against them if he wanted his side to lose all along?
WRITER: Unclear.
EXECUTIVE: That works.
WRITER: And now that Sora’s made it this far, he has twelve out of the thirteen pieces he needs-
EXECUTIVE: Eleven.
WRITER: Excuse me?
EXECUTIVE: He only has eleven. Xion changed sides, remember?
WRITER: Oh… (Realizing) Oh, I did have her change sides, didn’t I?
EXECUTIVE: You did.
WRITER: Whoops.
EXECUTIVE: Whoopsie.
WRITER: Well, we can explain that in the DLC.
EXECUTIVE: Fair enough.
WRITER: So to get the last piece, he just up and kills Kairi.
EXECUTIVE: Hmm.
WRITER: (Puzzled) Wait, you…don’t have any other reaction than that? I mean, Kairi just died.
EXECUTIVE: Yeah, but if there’s one thing the Kingdom Hearts series has pushed it’s that death is pretty much just a temporary status condition. I mean, Kairi’s already died twice. Once already in this game.
WRITER: Yeah, well, I’d prefer if you pretended like it was a big deal and really dramatic.
EXECUTIVE: Well ok, if you say so, but I’m pretty much going to start my watch on how long it takes her to resurrect.
WRITER: So Xehanort gets the χ-blade and is pretty much a god now.
EXECUTIVE: Uh-oh!
WRITER: So instead everyone is going to trap Xehanort in time and then Sora, Donald, and Goofy are going to go defeat him, and they end up going in Scablahblahblah world from game-you-Westerners-will-just-have-to-look-up to finish him for good.
EXECUTIVE: Alright!
WRITER: But sending Xehanort there just lets him unite with all thirteen of his own copies somehow so he turns into a big scary devil goat man.
EXECUTIVE: Oh, so we’re going with the angle that Xehanort is basically the Disney version of Satan now? So how is Sora going to be able to beat him? I mean, at this point we’ve shown Xehanort can pretty much stop time, manipulate his environment to crush you, and move so fast that he can look like he’s just standing there while you look like an idiot trying to hit him with your Keyblade. We’ve stated he’s the strongest of all Keyblade Masters and now he’s got the χ-blade which pretty much allows him to control the universe.
WRITER: Well, you see, here’s what I did. You know all the ways I’ve shown over the years that Xehanort could easily kill Sora with just one gesture or move?
EXECUTIVE: Yeah?
WRITER: He’s just gonna…you know…not do any of those.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really?
WRITER: Yeah, Xehanort is going to kill him for real at one point, but since by now we’ve kind of established death doesn’t apply to Sora, he’s just going to immediately come back and mortally wound Xehanort instead.
EXECUTIVE: Didn’t Sora need MacGuffin, I mean, Kairi to come back the last time though?
WRITER: Yeah, but Sora needs to win or the game series ends so I just had him come back to life on his own.
EXECUTIVE: Fair enough.
WRITER: So now that Xehanort is finally defeated, he actually hands the χ-blade over to Sora and says: “Very well done.”
EXECUTIVE: And Sora immediately uses it to cut Xehanort’s head off?
WRITER: Wait, what?
EXECUTIVE: I mean, he killed his girlfriend, like, five minutes ago. Isn’t he mad?
WRITER: Kinda, I guess. I mean, he doesn’t grin or throw out some childish joke for a change. Then everyone else shows up.
EXECUTIVE: And they all take turns kicking Xehanort in the head and breaking his ribs?
WRITER: What? No!
EXECUTIVE: Well…why not? This guy is literally responsible for ruining all of their lives.
WRITER: Well, you see, as it turns out, Xehanort only wanted to remake the universe because he thought that for it to stay ordered it needed the most intelligent person to run it properly, and he thought it had to be him. So he was really just misunderstood and misguided the whole time.
EXECUTIVE: In the last scene you pretty much turned him into Disney Satan and now you’re wanting the audience to think he really wasn’t a bad guy all along?
WRITER: Hey, it worked with Thanos in “Infinity War”!
EXECUTIVE: You think the audience will buy it?
WRITER: Sure! All they have to do is overlook the fact that he basically tortured Ventus to death, the fact he tried to sacrifice him later to become a vessel for Vanitas, the fact he manipulated Terra into turning on his friends and the man he saw as his father, the fact he literally stabbed his only childhood friend in the back, the fact he tried to murder Terra and took over his body, the fact that he got Aqua banished into the Dark World for thirteen years, the fact that he manipulated Maleficent into destroying multiple worlds looking for the princesses of heart, the fact that he manipulated all of Ansem’s followers into betraying him and then tried to use them to copy himself, the fact he killed tens of thousands of people in a bid to try and create tens of thousands of clones of himself using Organization XIII, the fact he used both Roxas and Xion and forced them to fight each other to the death, the fact he turned Riku against his own friends and possessed him, the fact his experiments with the Unversed and the Heartless killed trillions of people including the entire populations of several planets, the fact that he was planning all of this ever since he was a child, the fact that earlier reports from him in earlier games already stated he wanted to destroy the universe only because he was curious about what would happen after that, and the fact that he never actually shows any remorse for any of this but kind of just says: “Well shucks, I lost even after all that.”
EXECUTIVE: Alright then! I guess we’re all set! Xehanort was totally not a bad guy! So everyone goes back home after all that?
WRITER: Well, not everyone. Sora goes off to find Kairi. So in the final scene everyone is happy and together and Kairi’s back, but Sora isn’t.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really? Why isn’t Sora back?
WRITER: Because he went to the next game.
EXECUTIVE: Well why is Kairi back?
WRITER: I don’t know. I just needed a reason for there to be a Kingdom Hearts 4, so Kairi did the thing she’s best at and motivated Sora to go through another game.
EXECUTIVE: Awesome.
WRITER: Oh, and as it turns out, Xigbar was really a true Keyblade Master the whole time.
EXECUTIVE: Oh! So Xigbar is the Master of Masters?
WRITER: (Shocked) What? How did you- I mean, uh, no! He’s Luxu! (Nervously chuckling) I mean…w-w-why would you say he’s the Master of Masters?
EXECUTIVE: Well, it’s pretty obvious. They both have the same movements. They both sound the same. They both have the quasi-Deadpool way of talking. Plus there’s the fact that the Master of Masters put his eye into the Goat Keyblade and there is literally no one else in the entire cast who is missing an eye except Xigbar.
WRITER: But…but what about the fact that Luxu and the Master of Masters were talking?
EXECUTIVE: Well, we’ve already established time travel exists as well as the fact that the Master of Masters obviously came from the future. It was even a plot point in the last game that Xehanort became who he was because his older version came back in time and told him what to do. So…yeah, Luxu is totally the young version of the Master of Masters.
WRITER: (Hurriedly) No he isn’t! Two totally different people! Absolutely definitely probably two different people!
EXECUTIVE: Well, if you say so. What about Maleficent and Pete?
WRITER: Oh, they appear in the game.
EXECUTIVE: What do they do?
WRITER: I just told you.
EXECUTIVE: Awesome.
WRITER: So what do you think?
EXECUTIVE: Well, that’s going to be quite a lot of battles toward the end. Especially if Sora has to fight all the members of the real Organization XIII together. In the past we kind of overloaded the players with how many different boss fights they had to go through and they were all super-difficult.
WRITER: Oh, don’t worry, I got you covered.
EXECUTIVE: How so?
WRITER: Pretty much the whole game is going to be set on “Super Easy, Barely an Inconvenience” Mode. Even in the hardest difficulty it’s going to be so easy to continuously bombard the enemies with special moves that are unblockable and simple to pull off that the player could pretty much take a selfie in the middle of a boss battle.
EXECUTIVE: That sounds awesome. So awesome, in fact, we’re going to actually put that in the game.
WRITER: Wait, what?
EXECUTIVE: But don’t you worry that some players might find that a little too easy?
WRITER: Well, I did have this one idea…
EXECUTIVE: Oh yeah? What’s that?
WRITER: I’m thinking, like…heh…we could put out the game’s original difficulty modes, and then if too many people complain we put out this super-duper, ultra-hard, “Dark Souls” mode where pretty much they’ll get killed in normal battles continuously.
EXECUTIVE: Oh really?
WRITER: Yeah, it’s like we’ll have had the game difficulty settings at 0, 1, 2, and then we throw 11 at them.
EXECUTIVE: Kind of like a reverse “Devil May Cry 2”, huh? That would be something. But I think the players are a bit tired of having to grind through really difficult Kingdom Hearts boss battles so I’m sure they’ll be perfectly happy with the default difficulty modes.
WRITER: You think?
EXECUTIVE: Absolutely.
KINGDOM HEARTS 3 RELEASES CRITICAL MODE IN FIRST VERSION UPDATE