Kingdom Hearts III DLC 'Re:Mind' announced

[Azuren]

HylianSwordsman said:

Hiku said:

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.

HylianSwordsman said:

Azuren said:

They're not. They're main entries that aren't numbered. Based on your surface-level understanding of what a spin-off is, KH2 and KH3 are also spin-offs of Kingdom Hearts, and the only thing you're basing them not being spin-offs is the inclusion of a sequential number. You can pretend to be right, but anyone who knows what a spin-off is and what the unnumbered titles in Kingdom Hearts are will just cross their arms and shake their heads.

Tell that to the guy that wrote the Wikipedia article. Or better yet, fix it, if you're so sure of yourself. I don't get why you can't let go of the fact that some people disagree with you.

The same wikipedia page that says there are four handheld Kingdom Hearts titles?

Chain of Memories (1)

358/2 Days (2)

Birth By Sleep (3)

Re:Coded (4)

Dream Drop Distance (also 4?...)

Sorry, but it would seem like whoever is running that page doesn't really know jack about Kingdom Hearts. If they did, they would recognize how at the very least Chain of Memories, Dream Drop Distance, and Birth By Sleep are main entries in that can't be skipped.

Also, based on their own logic, the only thing preventing Ni no Kuni 2 from being a spin-off is the fact that a number is in the title. You know, since they changed the setting, characters, battle system, story...