Kingdom Hearts Primer – Kingdom Hearts 2 – Episode 6 – The Boy Who Cries Inside Me

Roxas’s last day of summer vacation has come and gone, so now we go some tutorial bits with Sora. 🙂

It makes sense that we would have some sort of introductory sequence for Sora since there’s a change in protagonists. That said, since we already had a 3 hour long intro as Roxas prior to that, as a player I can’t help but feel frustrated at how long it takes for the game to get moving.

The strange thing about video games is that their interactivity gives players a higher tolerance for this amount of front-loading, since it can be broken up through gameplay segments, and players aren’t likely to go through it all in one session.

But at the same time, the fact that players do wish to play and interact with the game, instead of watching a bunch of cutscenes, means that it is often smarter to get right into the action. This is largely why In-Medias-Res is such a popular plot device for video games.

That’s why I have such mixed opinions about how long this intro sequence is b/t Roxas and Sora combined. I can appreciate how important it is to perform setup for the story and plot of the game. Even when that’s considered, this process takes entirely too long, and could have easily been abridged in numerous ways.

It’s not the intro that’s the problem, it’s the aggressive length of it.