#myinterpretation

In play writing and screenwriting, it is said that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, then it better go off by the third. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be hanging on the wall.  This is well-known as Chekhov’s Gun, basically saying that if something is mentioned, it better be mentioned because it furthers the plot in some way.  This technique has been discussed by far more educated people than me, so if you want to know more about this, you can do your own research.  For the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say that if something is brought up, it needs to payoff in the end somehow, or else it’s not important enough to mention.

 Let’s look at a few Final Fantasy moments that do setup and payoff well, and there are quite a few. The Hymn of the Fayth in FFX is mentioned, and sung, several times over the game, and it is revealed that when Sin/Jecht listens to it, he calms down.  It ends up being a key part of making Sin docile enough to be attacked, infiltrated, and then destroyed from the inside, thus ending its thousand-year destruction of Spira.  Final Fantasy VIII has the mention of Squall’s ring named Griever, which later ends up being the Guardian Force summoned by Ultimecia in the final boss battle of the game.  (The significance of this is left up to the player.)  And, very famously, there is Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith and her white materia, which she claims does nothing but is actually what saves the world from Meteor by casting Holy magic at the end of the game.  There are many others, but those are a few examples.

 That being said, both FFXV and KH3 suffer from issues of setup and payoff, but in sort of opposite ways.  Let’s start with FFXV.

 First, this is not to say that FFXV completely fails at setting ideas up and then paying them off in the end.  The entire situation with the Ring of the Lucii is set up and pays off by the game’s end, and the story of Shiva and Ifrit’s love story sets up the end of the battle with Ifrit when Shiva is summoned to finish him off (at least, the set up is there better in the Royal Edition).  Episode Ignis also has the alternative ending where Ravus ends up coming to terms with his sister’s death and gives Noctis his father’s sword willingly, rather than dying and Noct finding it after the fact.  The setup of Ravus having issues with Noctis finally has a proper payoff when he accepts that Noctis is the Chosen King and supports him, and Ravus finally gets the character development he so desperately needed and was cheated out on in the original version of the game.  This concept of setup and payoff is not completely lost on SquareEnix.

 There are times, however, when the setup is there but the payoff is little to nothing.  The Royal Arms are brought up by Cor roughly at the start of the game, but then they become nothing really more than a tidbit of information at best and an optional sidequest at worst.  During my first playthrough, I actually forgot all about them between meeting Titan and obtaining the Katana of the Warrior.  I was like, “Oh, right.  Those things.”  They are brought up again at the end of the game where the Kings of Lucis all kill Noctis to purge the Starscourge and defeat Ardyn, so I guess that’s some payoff, but it seems so minor compared to the other plot points that I find this debatable.

 I also have big problems with the use of Luna.  Her character is absolutely fine, don’t get me wrong there, but there is an almost complete lack of use of her character as she relates to Noctis.  If they are supposed to be close, possibly in love or at least in like, then the flashback sequences from their childhood don’t really do it justice.  They show interactions that don’t advance their relationship at all.  As such, when the “payoff” of Luna’s death and Noctis’ despair from it happens, it doesn’t really mean anything to the player.  We’re sad for Noctis, but not necessarily sad that Luna had died.  There was no setup for her relationship with him, so her loss isn’t all that poignant.  This could have been fixed if the journal the two share could have been read by the player, even with just small snippets of their written conversations with each other, but this wasn’t an option.

 Next, I want to talk about the DLC.  Ignoring the fact that I’m one of those people who think the events of Episodes Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto should have been included the game proper from the start, the absence of them also hurts the setup and payoff techniques of the story.  The setup is in the DLC, but the payoff exists in the original game.  So, in a way, we’re getting the payoff before the setup even happens, chronologically speaking.

 For starters, let’s look at Episode Ignis.  This episode is arguably the best of the three DLC, so it is no surprise that it has the strongest story.  There is actually an example of really good setup and payoff within the episode itself, and it starts where Ignis and Ravus are hiding while they wait for the Niflheim soldiers to leave the area.  Ravus mentions that he tried to use the Ring of the Lucii for himself and lost his left arm in the process.  So, anyone who isn’t of Lucis Caelum blood pays a price for using the ring.  Okay, plot point established.  With this knowledge, when we see Ignis put on the ring, we know that there will be some kind of price he has to pay to use it, and this is confirmed when he loses his eyesight.  And there’s the payoff.

 The problem is that Episode Ignis wasn’t released until December 13, 2017, just over a year after FFXV was originally released.  So, we already knew about Ignis’ blindness and saw the consequences of it, but we just didn’t see the event that caused it. Heck, we didn’t even really know the reason why he became blind, just that it happened during the events in Altissia. So, when Gladio goes off on Noct about how “Ignis took one for you too,” instead of thinking that Gladio has a point and Noct needs to step up, we just think that Gladio’s being a jerk.  Ignis could have been shot by a Niflheim soldier or fell off a building and his eyes were injured for all we know.  The context of how Ignis lost his sight is lost on not only the player but Noctis as well, so the payoff feels empty.  We see the consequences of him being blind in that he can’t fight as effectively and can’t cook for the team, but again this is all after the fact.  The payoff is there, but it seems like it came out of nowhere because there was no setup for it.  Seems like they set of Chekhov’s Gun without ever showing us it was there to begin with.

 And then there’s Prompto…

 Oh Prompto.  I feel he really got the short end of the stick when it came to his background. His story is actually a really good one and could have been a really turning point for his friendship with Noctis, but it is so rushed at the end of the game that it feels a little forced.  The slower pace of Episode Prompto fixes this, but just like with Episode Ignis, the payoff that happened in the main game had already been seen by the players.  

 The whole conflict for Prompto during his DLC is that he worries his origins will mean that Noctis and the others will no longer want to be friends with him, and as a child that grew up very much alone (where the heck are his parents?!), friendship is vital to this poor kid.  The sequence where Prompto dreams he is an MT that is being pursued by Noct adds so much suspense and is an excellent visual to the anxiety he is feeling…or it would be if we didn’t already know that Noct accepts him with practically no convincing at all.  We already know that their friendship survives this revelation, so there is really no suspense for the players as they watch Prompto go through the motions of coming to terms with his origins.

 All of this could have been avoided if the darn DLC had been included in the main game in the first pla—No! Not getting on that soapbox!  I could go on about how much that bugs me, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

 Now, if FFXV suffers from lots of payoff with very little setup, then KH3 has a lot of setup but very little payoff.

 For those of you who have read this far and didn’t see the spoiler warning at the top, this is your final notice:  There are major spoilers for the events of the recently released Kingdom Hearts III.  Turn back while you still can if you don’t want to be spoiled!

 With that out of the way…

 There are a lot of cutscenes in KH3, and I mean a lot.  It’s one of the controversial points I’ve read in a lot of reviews, but the presence of a lot of cutscenes doesn’t bother me too much when the game is trying to tie up loose ends and explain things in what is perceived as the final installment in a series.  Metal Gear Solid 4 had the same problem, but again, they were trying to tie up loose ends. The fact that the series has continued from there and thus only added more loose ends is also a topic for another day.  My point is that several long cutscenes are not necessarily a bad thing if they are used well.

 The problem with KH3 is that many of them are not used well. There are numerous cutscenes with Ansem the Wise, Ienzo, Dilan and the others that don’t really seem to have any point to the plot.  Sure, Ienzo talks about trying to find a way to help bring Roxas back, but they never end up doing that anyway.  They bring back Namine, certainly, but what were they trying to accomplish with all their talk about atoning?  I get what they want to atone for, but what are they doing to actually do that?  It’s a bunch of talk that doesn’t really go anywhere.

 Along the same lines is the scene with Even and Demyx. They talk about atoning and being benched and betraying the Organization, but the only thing that comes of it is Demyx brings Ansem and a vessel for Namine to Ienzo.  And then the conversation between Even and Demyx is never mentioned again.  What was the point?  Is Namine being brought back supposed to be the payoff?  But then we never interact with her at all.  She’s only seen during the ending cutscenes and has no dialogue with anyone.  Not very satisfying at all.  Where did her heart for the replica even come from anyway?  Her heart was in Kairi, who by that point is dead...sort of.  I actually think she was sent to the heavenly place Sora went when he had to gather up pieces of himself, but I have nothing to support that theory.

 Speaking of Kairi, her scenes with Axel during their keyblade training are great.  They are cute and provide good setup for both Axel’s vague memories of Xion and their abilities in wielding keyblades…which end up being pointless since Kairi ends up kidnapped (again) and Xemnas destroys Axel’s very cool fire keyblade, although it does come back later, so there is really no reason for Xemnas to taunt Axel about not being a guardian of light anymore.

 I’m not going to talk about how Kairi being kidnapped robs her of the agency she should have gained during her training (again, plenty of people have already talked about that), but it does make the scenes regarding her training seem like a cop out.  What was the point of showing all that if she was just going to be a kidnapped damsel again?  She doesn’t really do anything with the keyblade that we see, so it doesn’t add much to see that she was even training to begin with.

 Axel has the same problem since he loses his keyblade. He was training to use it, but then Xemnas destroys it at the first possible opportunity.  There was no scene where he saves the day with it or manages to defeat Isa or something along those lines with it, so watching those scenes again feels empty.  The setup was there, but there was no payoff.  What use is it to show the player that these two characters are training hard with keyblades if they end up not ever really using them?  The gun was shown, but not shot.

 Conversely, and very briefly, it was good that there was setup of the Riku Replica earlier on in the game so it didn’t seem like he completely came out of nowhere when he came to help Riku against the Organization’s Riku (man, there are a lot of Rikus here).

 Then again, there was supposed to be some reason that Marluxia, Larxene, Luxord and Demyx were brought back?  Some “important purpose”?  The “ancient keyblade legacy”?  Which is…what?  It’s not explained and it’s never mentioned again.  And what about all the scenes with Maleficent and Pete searching for the box? The game kept cutting back to them but never went anywhere with them.  What was the point?  Wouldn’t it have built more suspense if we hadn’t seen what they were doing? Otherwise it added nothing to the plot other than the fact that the black box was missing, which the player already knows…or at least most of us do, who know about the Master and Masters and all that.  Hey, look, there are a bunch of guns hanging on the wall, but they remain unfired!

 But...And it’s a big but…There is one way that Kingdom Hearts III really does setup and payoff well, and that’s when you look at the story of the game as a whole.

 Near the end of the game, Young Xehanort warns Sora that using the power of waking too much will cause him to “condemn your heart to that same abyss,” meaning that Sora will fall into darkness, something that almost came to pass at the end of Dream Drop Distance.  Mickey also warns him that he might not come home from his journey to find Kairi.  The final cutscene (not the secret ending) of the game shows Sora disappearing from Destiny Islands while everyone else is partying and having fun.  It is presumed that he died after finding Kairi again, though personally I’m not sure if death is really what happened or if it was more of falling into darkness.  I think that’s left up to the interpretation of the player.

 Whatever the case, Sora is separated from the group, having given himself up to darkness in one form or another to bring Kairi back. Believe it or not, this is actually foreshadowed during the events of the various Disney worlds Sora visits over the course of the game.  What is the common theme seen through each of the Disney worlds?  The loss of a loved one.  

 The Toy Story world has all the toys worried about whether they’ll ever see Andy again.  The Caribbean shows Will and Elizabeth separated, just like at the end of the movie that world is based on.  The Kingdom of Corona shows Rapunzel being willing to sacrifice her freedom for Eugene’s life, and Eugene ends up giving his own life to cut Rapunzel’s hair to defeat Mother Gothel.  Arendelle…do I need to explain?  Elsa is terrified of hurting Anna, which she unintentionally ends up doing.  The 100 Acre Wood has Pooh worried that Sora will go away, leading to Sora worrying that their bond has grown weaker. Monstropolis has less to do with the loss of a loved one and is more about Sully and Mike needing to protect Boo, whom they care about very much.  And San Fransokyo has Hiro dealing with needing to destroy the first version of Baymax, his good friend.  Only Olympus doesn’t fit this pattern in terms of its plot, but that’s probably because that was already done in Kingdom Hearts II…but Sora and Hercules do have a conversation about Herc wanting to save Meg with all his heart.  Sort of parallels Sora’s desire to rescue Kairi, doesn’t it?

 And what ends up happening?  Sora does exactly the same.  He ends up sacrificing himself to bring Kairi back from…wherever it is she is. It’s Kairi that ends up losing her loved one in the end.  That’s the ultimate payoff for the pretty strong setup that was building throughout the game.