Backlog Dialogues
Backlog Dialogues is the nerd culture podcast where we dig you out of your backlog, BEFORE it buries you. We attempt to bring a literary eye to nerd culture media, like video games, films, TV shows, and more. Think of us like a book club, but for video games and other types of media. Our first backlog-buster is: Kingdom Hearts!
Episodes
Backlog Dialogues, a new video game discussion podcast that aims to dig you out of your backlog BEFORE it buries you! Come meet the assholes responsible for this mess. John, Jared, and Matt introduce themselves, lay out the goals for the show and introduce their first discussion project, which is the entire saga(to date) of Kingdom Hearts! Don't worry folks, this one's actually pretty easy. Enjoy roundtable discussion, random digre...
Let's start discussing Kingdom Hearts right, by jumping in at the very beginning, with a dream-like Dive to the Heart, followed by wandering around Destiny Islands! Any story lives and dies with its cast, so its time to introduce them Meet resident good boy Sora, his moody boyfriend Riku, and mysterious cute girl Kairi, as well as some fan favorite Final Fantasy characters, including Tidus, Wakka, Selphie, and, of course, Donald Du...
Weird stuff starts to happen to Sora as he shows up in Traverse Town! It's a Final Fantasy town as seen through a Disney filter, and it has a bunch of Final Fantasy characters sent through the Disney filter as well! Sora meets Yuffie and Squall- er, Leon, and Donald and Goofy meet Aerith. Riku gets lost in the void. Sora joins up with Donald and Goofy and learns Final Fantasy magic from Donald.
Discussion takes us and Sora through three Disney Worlds, Wonderland, Olympus Coliseum, and Deep Jungle. We learn about the nature of level design in Kingdom Hearts and its many Chaos Mazes. Sora is given a very brief crash course on the stories of Alice in Wonderland and Tarzan and trains to be a hero under Hercules. Also, Cloud from Final Fantasy is here!
We set out to experience the next pair of Disney worlds, Agrabah and Monstro. Sora meets a stiffly animated Genie, then gets eaten by a giant whale. John lays out the reason the most dangerous characters in a setting are the ones that know the most lore. We start to see Riku is on some shit. Someone needs to call him on that
Sora, Donald and Goofy become horrific abominations, but still are not as terrifying as the swimming controls in Atlantica. Then they only manage to become mildly spoopy as they work out the first principles of Kingdom Hearts with Jack Skellington in Halloween Town. Finally they learn to fly in Neverland without ever actually going there. We learn the secrets that only kings about other worlds, but it makes them highly paranoid. Ri...
Kingdom Hearts is BACK, bay-bee! Sora, Donald, and Goofy make it to the ruins of Hollow Bastion, which is the best part of Kingdom Hearts 1. Sora loses some friends through Riku being a jerk to him again. Luckily he gets bailed out by making a big fluffy BADASS friend in The Beast. Sora learns proper combat strategy by letting his friends be his power. Then Sora also makes a bunch of characters in the most important scene in the en...
Boy, last episode was a little heavy, huh? Let's try switching tracks, and dealing with existential dread of a different kind in the Hundred Acre Woods! Come along with Winnie the Pooh and the people he torments and yet calls friends. After, we return to Hollow Bastion and discuss the cuteness of Behemoths. And also read off a bunch of Ansem Reports, because LORE.
We reach the end of our journey through Kingdom Hearts. John goes nuts with completion, resulting in a discussion of crafting and optional bosses. Then we traverse through the End of the World and face off against Chernobog(watch Jared's inner music nerd go nuts!). At last, we finally confront Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, and prove that, Without a Doubt, Kingdom Hearts is Light.
And then we get a preview of what is to come.
We take a break from Kingdom Hearts to discuss one of the best action video games of the last decade, Hades! Meet Zagreus, loveable but fumbling Disaster Bisexual giving the entire underworld a headache, and his many... friends? Bouldy is a friend, at least. Listen to Bouldy. Love Bouldy. Bouldy is always there for you.
Things get weird in the first non-numbered title of Kingdom Hearts! Sora goes in to Castle Oblivion because he is a good boy incapable of distrust, and meets a bunch of internet trolls wearing black cloaks. Axel, Larxene, Vexen, and Marluxia give us our first taste of the mysterious Organization that may or may not have thirteen members. If only their name gave us a clue. KH Fanfic writer Namine turns Sora's mind in to swiss chees...
Well, that Sora stuff was wild! Anyways, now let's follow Riku in to the basement of Castle Oblivion to see an incredibly great character piece interspersed with terrible revelations about what darkness smells like. Meet Zexion and Lexaeus, the slacker stoners of the mysterious organization, and join us in our utter delight at Riku's cringiest outing. Why can't ANYONE in this place find the light switch? The gameplay is better too!...
Let's hang out for a week with Roxas and his friends Hayner, Pence, and Olette in the sleepy, pleasant Twilight Town! But it's gonna be the worst week of Roxas' life. We recover the concept of pictures that were stolen by zipperjacket flappy dudes, beat up Smarmy Git Seifer and his posse of Fu, Rai, and Vivi, do odd jobs to go to the beach only to have our money stolen by a cloak dude, do our homework as reality starts to break dow...
We're Sora again! Mickey is trying too hard to be cool and sends us to meet with a bunch of lorebooks in a wizard hat and cloak, Yen Sid. We meet the best mook ever, Pete, and Sora gets new clothes, fortunately not inspired by Pete's special threads. Then we visit Hollow Bastion again, get membership cards to a nebulously defined organization that needs a better name, and then another nebulously defined organization shows up to tro...
We finally make it to the first batch of Disney worlds in Kingdom Hearts 2! First we visit the Hollywood set version of Mulan with Land of the Dragons. The Chinese Army has more use for kids, ducks and dog things than it does women. Mushu chases clout by trying to act like we're friends just because he was a summon in the last game. Sora begins a new run of self insert fanfic by involving himself in other peoples stories. Then the...
It's the sequel to the Hades minilog that no-one expected as we return to Olympus Coliseum! We keep on brand with it by spending most of the time trying to escape the underworld! But before all that, Merlin interrupts the story to drag our asses back to Hollow Bastion to introduce us to Kingdom Hearts 2's Winnie the Pooh story. Lets just save that for later. We discuss the coolness of Auron, revisit the question of what Zexion and ...
We got a short trip to the distant past in this episode! Bad stuff is going down in Disney Castle so it's up to Sora, Donald, and Goofy to enlist the help of a possibly evil wizard to break the rules of time and space so that they can return to King Mickey's roots and save the cornerstone! Lots of Pete antics on the plate today, double the Pete, in fact! So much Pete you can hardly believe your Petes! Wait... just what the hell sha...
We have our first live action Disney world represented in Kingdom Hearts with Port Royal, a terrifying world filled with spooky, horrifying abominations of nature that delve deep in the uncanny valley. And also it has ghost skeleton pirates! After that we head back to Agrabah and stumble through a clumsy half retelling of our first Disney direct to video sequel story. And most importantly, we stay away from going under the sea for ...
Alternate Episode Title: How the Witch Stole Christmas.
In Halloweentown, SDG join a skeleton named Jack that is not Johnny Depp in the ritual harassment of Santa Claus, who Sora is very horny to meet. Matt pulls out an absolutely amazing Goofy voice that we regret not having him try way before, but hey, we know about it now! Maleficent makes two of the worst decisions in her career as a villain, and its all in hiring. She needs to...
It's Final Fantasy Day(YAY!) as we return to Twilight Town and Hollow Bastion! Oh and then we learn how to computer in Space Paranoids. We poorly try to put a pitch filter on a voice to make John sound like Donald for a scene. Saix and Lexaeus get our Organization XIII discussion focus. We meet the weirdest Final Fantasy cameo in the fairy forms of Yuna, Rikku, and Paine. Yes, this is weirder than Setzer. Tifa decides to roll an in...
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