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HylianSwordsman on 27 May 2019
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Hiku said:
HylianSwordsman said:

Of course he is. I only mentioned him to prove my point that I can just as easily cite example to the contrary, so don't use anecdotal evidence.

I've explained this multiple times. They're spinoffs. I have no issue with the numbering system. I have an issue with how the story was presented. Take Chain of Memories for instance. Why the fuck does it exist as a game? There's so little actual plot in that game, so little real substance, it's mostly just wandering through watered down versions of places we've already been. What little actual plot there was could have been a part of KH2. The whole game could have, honestly, in an extremely abridged form that skipped the endless revisiting of old content, by just having Castle Oblivion be the 1st world, condensing all the actual story moments into an interesting prologue. Just one example of how they could have done it, I'm sure you could come up with a better one with enough time, just please, not the way they actually did it. Of course if did neglect to make Chain of Memories a separate game, then we wouldn't have had that glorious card battle system, oh what a tragedy. But yeah, you're proving my point about how the story is presented. It's just so obnoxious. They are spinoffs, but that's not what makes it obnoxious. Like forevercloud3000 said below, they wear the continuity too thin.

No, I'm asking a different question there. I know what your point is, but I disagree. What I don't get is why you're so emotional over this. So many people in this thread got up in arms about this. You're not going to convince me, so why bother? I'm going to keep playing Kingdom Hearts game, having this opinion, and sharing this opinion when I talk about Kingdom Hearts with other people. No one in this thread will change that. Your gatekeeping changes nothing, because you're not the arbiter of who gets to be a KH fan.

I haven't gone through your guys entire exchange, but could you tell me why Birth By Sleep is a spinoff to you?
(And if your answer involves "You play as different main characters", keep in mind that in Metal Gear Solid 2 you play as Raiden. And in Metal Gear Solid 3 you play as Big Boss. Etc.)
I'd say BBS is way more important to KH3's story than KH2 is. Because Kingdom Hearts 2 essentially concluded the Ansem story arc. While KH3 is the culmination of the Xehanort story arc, which obviously Birth By Sleep is the entire foundation of.

If you go into KH3 having only played KH1 and Chain of Memories, and you have the choice of skipping either KH2, or BBS, you're going to understand a lot more about the story and central conflict of the game by skipping KH2 than if you didn't play BBS. Without playing BBS you wouldn't even know who many of the most important characters are. Even for some of the KH2 elements that carry over, such as Axel, I'd say his story in Dream Drop Distance is far more relevant to the events of KH3.
Otherwise you'd just be left wondering why he's still alive, why he can use a keyblade, who Xion is, why Roxas looks like... Ven..? Whoever that is.

You can argue that some stories are less essential than others, or that some may even be skippable without affecting much of the overall plot. But that's not consistently inherent to what they chose to name the games, because that would be ignoring the PR aspect of it.

If they can avoid making newcomers to the series on other platforms feel like they're missing out on things in an ongoing story with "Kingdom Hearts 6" on the cover, they will often do that. And if they want to bring more attention to a game that's fundamentally vastly different than the rest of the series, they can give it a number, like Final Fantasy 11.

Speaking of which though, I believe I read that BBS was originally supposed to be called Kingdom Hearts 0. Which makes sense, and may be reflected in the fact that the Epilogue is called Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep.

I can think of 0 reasons for why anyone would want to skip Birth By Sleep's story, going into KH3. Quite the contrary.
Although I agree that Chain of Memories is pretty skippable. But you can make that case for a lot of mainline entries in other franchises as well.

Ugh, people just do not get what I'm trying to say at all. I've tried as hard as I can to make it clear that I love the games I'm calling the spinoff games, and that I even agree that a lot of them contain stuff that is essential to really understand the story. I would recommend that anyone getting into Kingdom Hearts that wants to be able to follow along with the story play all of them. Thank God for collections. This whole thing started because I felt that the presentation of the story was flawed, and that the naming conventions was indicative of that failure. People just got hung up over my use of the term spinoff and harped on that endlessly, apparently because they're offended by it. I don't see it as an offensive term because even Super Mario Bros. is a spinoff of Donkey Kong by definition. The definition I'm using is the wikipedia definition, the definition all the offended people seem to be using is "pointless gimmicky experiment game you can ignore" and I just don't get it.

Here's wikipedia on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-off_(media)

"In media, a spin-off[1] (or spinoff[2]) is a radio program, television program, video game, film, or any narrative work, derived from already existing works that focus on more details and different aspects from the original work (e.g. particular topics, characters or events)."

The article then lists Kingdom Hearts as an example of a video game franchise with many spinoffs. It says:

  • The Kingdom Hearts series features a good number of spin offs that greatly expanded the plot of the mainline games, notably there are 4 handheld games and a smartphone game released between the 2005's Kingdom Hearts 2 and 2019's Kingdom Hearts 3, all of which expanded the original thread of the story.

By this definition, which is the one I use and no one will ever convince me to stop using, the non-numbered entries are spinoffs. It's not meant to be offensive. If you want to use your own definition, be my guest. But I really don't appreciate the people who are acting like I'm some idiot or a terrible fan undermining the franchise just because I disagree with them on the definition of spinoff.