Backlog Dialogues

Time for Kingdom Hearts to make its saving throw on portraying Pinocchio with Prankster's Paradise! Sora gets to explore a fun theme park and interact with characters he's met that don't remember him, while Riku gets to go through a much better version of Monstro that isn't a chaos maze. The reality shift for this world enables some utterly delightful nonsense against the lobster themed dream eaters we face. Various discussions of gross anatomy are had. Fun!

This week in the world of dreams, Sora and Riku find a world almost but not entirely unlike Space Paranoids! We go in to the legacy of Tron Legacy and then see all the ways Dream Drop Distance kinda just makes a rather mid Kingdom Hearts world out of it. There's still fun to be had, though, as Sora gets great lines, Riku gets great character development, and the evil version of Tron, Rinzler, gets to beat us up for an hour.

The first Disney world in Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance is also the wildest tone misfire in the entire Disney Animated canon! Join Sora and Riku as they grapple with such horrors as anti-Roma racism, Catholics, and awkwardly out of place talking gargoyle statues in La Cité des Cloches, because the French would complain if we just called it Paris. We discuss the movie that spawned the world, then observe just how much of it is pared back in the traditional Kingdom Hearts way.

Time to start the time traveling adventure in the world of dreams, Dream Drop Distance! This week, after we introduce the basics of how DDD works, we begin our journey with a revisit to Traverse Town, which is much bigger than we remember. Also it's been crashed by characters from Tetsuya Nomura's best game, The World Ends With You! Fun and Flowmotion await us on the next leg of our journey!

Welcome to the back half of Kingdom Hearts Coded!
And that means it's time to hurt.
Join Data John, Data Jared, and Data Matt once more for a Data Podcast, this time in the wheel spinning, repetitive, glurge-y, and just genuinely awfully told story of how two Data Soras have to learn the important lessons that real Sora should be learning. There's some good to be found, but you have to dive deep in to the data to get it. 

It's our first Data Podcast (whatever the heck that means.) Join Data John, Data Jared, and Data Matt as they unpack the weird as heck, but ultimately good, first part of Kingdom Hearts Coded. Experience the story of how Mickey created digital life to try to solve the mystery of a strange message appearing in Jiminy Cricket's journal. What starts as another retread of the Kingdom Hearts 1 worlds becomes so, SO much more. Donald and Goofy finally get their time to shine with major character moments! The animation engine improves dramatically! Maleficent and Pete show up to move chess pieces further down the line! It's great, we promise!

This week on Backlog Dialogues is a Minilog that will pierce the heavens! Join us as we discuss the now classic Mecha anime Gurren Lagann, and trace the character arc of Simon as he goes from a simple digger in an underground village to a liberator of humanity and warrior among the stars. Before the spoiler section we break down the first three episodes, and after we discuss the series on the whole as it builds its themes of confidence, love, and hope.
And Drills. Drills are also a theme.

It's time to complete Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep! Complete in the positive sense as we unpack both Final Episode and Secret Episode and their ramifications on Kingdom Hearts as a whole, and complete in the negative sense as in, *gulp*, completionism. Sandwiched between the very excellent epilogues we discuss the very not so excellent completionism experience, including ice cream, minigames, the mirage arena and more! Rounding off with the four optional bosses, of which only one is actually unquestionably fun, and one other is kinda fun, but the others are hot garbage, in what John describes as the worst experience he has ever had with completionism in any game ever.

We've made it to the end of Aqua's route! Aqua has a brief encounter with Riku and Sora on Destiny Islands. Afterwards she heads to the Keyblade Graveyard in a desperate attempt to keep her friend group from falling apart. There, she faces Braig for some strange reason as well as Vanitas in Ventus's body. But while it's the end of the route, it's not the end of her story in Birth By Sleep...

Aqua confronts the greatest evil in all of Disney - sexism! But before that she has to finish up what passes for a story in Disney Town while becoming a Fruitball star. After we cancel Phil for being a sex offender, we have some marginally less bad worlds in Deep Space and Neverland (though Neverland still has a racism problem...) It's not a great set to close out Aqua's time in Disney stories, but we're still talking about it here!