The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Why I didn’t like Kingdom Hearts 2 reason #4: Goofy’s death scene

So there’s this long-ass boring fight where you have to kill a thousand nobodies (no joke!), and then after that you meet back up with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Then from out of nowhere, this damn great rock falls out of the sky and kills Goofy. Set aside for the moment how absurd and insulting it is for a major character to be killed arbitrarily by an accident after the huge fight is over and you’ll probably get stuck with the same problem I had.

The problem, clearly, is that nobody is fooled into thinking that Goofy is actually dead. We’re smarter than that. We know that Disney would never go for that, and so this whole thing is a complete fake-out. And of course we’re right, and proven right almost immediately, since Goofy’s return from the dead is maybe five minutes later. He just walks back on in and everyone’s all “Goofy, you’re alive?” and then he says “yup” and life goes on. The entire death scene was a cheap attempt to get a knee-jerk emotional reaction out of the player; the designers were perfectly aware of how boring this section of the game was and how this whole big "war" was completely uninvolving since the players have no connection to the world or characters involved in it, so instead of reworking it they added a ten-cent character death. The whole scene could have been replaced with a title card reading "Pathos!" and yielded exactly the same effect. Except I’d probably be writing about how funny it was instead of how stupid it was.


November 1st, 2007 Posted by | Games | no comments

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.