Welcome to another episode of Vistory. Today, we discuss ROM Hacks.

This world is best world.

As much as I love Halloween Town, we’re still getting tired of all these world stories. And as a result, we were still in the middle of losing our minds.

I would apologize, but I think it’s fun to watch.

Welcome to a new project I am undertaking with a friend of mine: Andre Doucet. This is Vistory, a podcast discussing the history of games one topic at a time.

Our inaugural topic is Genre. This is an interesting one to start with, because while games of yesteryear generally stayed within the confines of one genre, that’s less true in the modern era. These days, you’ll mostly find rigid adherence to single-genres in the indie scene.

We hope you enjoy our first episode and many more to come.

Sometimes we make interesting, serious points about Kingdom Hearts.

And sometimes we look at copyright and just say “screw it”.

This is one of those latter times.

If you lost Sam and I lost it before, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

It’s a tournament plot. You’ve seen it before. Moving On.

Finally, we get to the part I HATE!

I’ve written about it before, but I can’t even fathom how anyone though Atlantica was a good idea. It’s a concentrated does of everything wrong with Kingdom Hearts 2.

I hate this world, and I hope it they never come back to it in future games.

Welcome back to Port Royal. We’re barely hanging on.

This is roughly the point where Sam and I start to lose our minds and slowly slip into madness. It’s not quite so visible at this point, and we’re still able to mostly hold a coherent conversation. But we start making a ton of diversions and side conversations, which will become a more common occurrence later on.

In the meantime, enjoy the sanity while it’s still there.

While Kingdom Hearts rolls in the background, Sam and I talk about the JRPGs we have (and haven’t) played.

I want to point out that while Sam seems to have a chronic inability to finish the JRPGs he starts, as of the time of writing, he has completed a single JRPG: Final Fantasy XV, otherwise known as the Beautiful Boy Band Adventure.

Given how long this series has gone on, and Kingdom Hearts status as one of the biggest JRPG franchises out there, it was only a matter of time before an episode like this came out. Sam and I spent a while just talking about the various games we’ve played in the genre, lightly comparing them both to each other and to Kingdom Hearts.

Also, props to Belle for not being another captured princess. Even when held hostage, she still manages to be the only sane person in the room.

And now that we’ve finished with some of the important stuff, we can do nonsense for the next 5-10 episodes.

A recurring problem we’re running into with this series has more to do with the nature of these long RPGs than any inherent flaw with Kingdom Heart’s actual story. Our objective here is to help explain the lore and story behind this franchise. That said, so much of the content, even when focusing purely on the cutscenes, has little, if anything to do with the story.

Most of this “filler” story comes from the Disney worlds. This is an interesting problem, because those Disney worlds are a major draw for many, if not most, of the people who play this franchise. A lot of the reason people come to Kingdom Hearts is to fight alongside characters from classic Disney films.

But for us, who are only interested in the overall plot, most of this is just a waste of our time. It’s almost shocking that, if you remove most of the Disney-related worlds from any given Kingdom Hearts game, and focus on the original story, without losing much. Some details are lost, but the series as a whole will still make sense.

If anything, I would want to have the main story thread woven into the Disney world storylines with much more grace than this. Considering worlds like Beast’s Castle can do that, it doesn’t seem like too much of an ask.

Then again, I wasn’t on the team for this project, so what would I know.

It’s so refreshing to have cool, interesting conversations about the story.