![]() ![]() Marooned with angsty new lead Roxas, we spend a seemingly interminable week in this so-called Twilight Town, wandering its ghostly streets, playing abysmal minigames for peanut prizes, loitering with our unrecognisable friends on clock towers and in alleyways. ![]() Where other games front-load themselves with action setpieces, KHII instead makes a quite bargain with the player: it knows full well our desire to get back into hero Sora’s clown shoes and run around Disney worlds, yet still it traps us in an urban purgatory devoid of any such spectacle. Take, for instance, the reflexively reviled opening of the otherwise beloved Kingdom Hearts II. We don’t want quiet, oversharing companionship by the fire we want loud, expensive games with all-American hero dads who will open any slightly-too-heavy door to save their families. We as Gamers™ have collectively decided that we are “over” JRPGs and their childish sentimentality, preferring instead to chase the smoke-and-mirror highs of filmic storytelling. We brand their teenage outbursts clumsy, conveniently forgetting all the times we’ve responded to “enjoy your food” with “you too”. We roll our eyes at their trailers we laugh at their every repeated battle joke. The power of friendship as a narrative theme is “cringe” now, and no games draw more ire from fans than those beacons of adolescent embarrassment, Japanese RPGs. Yet in its rightful media abundance, we have lost all interest. When did we turn our backs on friendship? Do our teenage years leave us so humiliated that we gag-reflexively shut down any opportunity to take a second shot at high school, and the relationships that come with it? In this time of ever-growing hopelessness and government indifference, the appeal of the coming-of-age genre, with its raw sincerity and furious punk aesthetic, should be higher than ever. We try to ignore the cold and the dark, none of us wanting to be the one to break us off back down to Earth. The food sucks, but that’s okay: we have the company of our friends, if only for a moment. We speak in what if s and remember when s. ![]() Music splutters from the speaker of an iPhone, its screen blurred by raindrops and finger grease. We hunker motionless under the streetlights, hands stuffed with lukewarm French fries, asses damp from prolonged exposure to British weather. How many of our most profound memories were made in a McDonald’s parking lot? ![]()
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