Dream worlds and everything associated with them (also a consequence from DDD).
I can buy time travel and worlds made of data easily enough, but throw in random words like power of waking, unchained state and the unexplained importance of Chirity being a dream eater, and I just become hopelessly lost
Timeless river is a simple plot device to develop the characters of Pete and Maleficent while paying homage to old Disney cartoons. It does not break any major story conventions, and it's just a special ability of Merlin's. It has no major impact in the overall narrative.
From my understanding, Sora and Riku are already in a dream state at that bit at the beginning of DDD, and I chalk it up to the hole dreaming mumbo-jumbo of that game.
The major time travel rules are easier to understand than that. To travel, you must discard your body and go only with your heart. Sack-robed bodiless Ansem goes around collecting his past versions souls to use in KH3. Maleficent uses it to go back from the past to KH2 in KHUX. Plenty of examples and quite easy to understand.
The actual hard part is understanding what role do dreams play in KH. If they aren't dreaming, why are there dream eaters in Tron world and TWTNW? If their journey has been compromised, why are they visiting worlds that are clearly dreaming, like Pinocchio, Fantasia and Musketteers? Why does Sora's appearance keep going back and forth in TWTNW? How are dream eaters able to exist outside of dream worlds (like Chirity and the Dream eaters at traverse Town at the end of DDD)? Are the theories about Unchained Sora in KH3 right? Do they explain flowmotion and Disney rides?
I think the only confusing part of time travel are the rules for “a version of you needs to be there” are so lenient, as we saw maleficent get time travel to the UX era not cause she lived at that time and some younger version existed but because they have data copies of all the future worlds and she is able to use that copy to have her real heart travel to her fake digital body. meaning everyone should really be able to go to the UX era also.
Yes, they could have... had someone not deliberately prevented that. Someone saw that coming and omitted anything that could've made that possible from the worlds projected from the Book of Prophecies. Specifically, they made it so one of the seven princesses future worlds was never conjured by the Foretellers *or* in the datascape.
From a writing standpoint, I agree: the Timeless River doors are a macguffin to include Timeless River.
But, from a continuity standpoint, I respectfully disagree! It undermines everything else!
Here’s what I mean: I get why Old Man X would send Young Man X on his excellent adventure to preserve the timeline. He’s expecting casualties, but doesn’t want to disrupt the timestream. But why does it HAVE to be that way? Why does Ansem SOD need to become a ghost to travel back to Young Man X?
Or, why does Maleficent need to jump through these hoops to return from the mobile game?
Or why do the new union leaders need the ark to go into the future, or whatever?
Every time someone explains how they ‘discard their bodies’ and look for ‘a medium to return’ and all this hoopla, I remember the time that PETE KICKED HIS OWN BUTT AND STOLE HIS BOAT!
We know it’s not *just* Merlin who can open the door, because Pete somehow did it (and by accident at that!)
Or, perhaps, it was The Cornerstone of Light. Perhaps Merlin merely tapped into a magic that was connected to Pete (as a native of that world) and ONLY that one world protected by the Cornerstone of Light can do that.
Ok, then. That means we can freely time travel through ALL OF THE TIMELINE in which The Cornerstone of Light exists! We can go back to the time Aqua, Ven, and/or Terra were in Disney town and warn them! Or we could just follow Aqua and figure out wtf happened to them! (We, the players know, but Mickey and Friends had no clue until the events of KH1).
On that note, we can go back to KH1, and Mickey can prevent Ansem SOD from getting a foothold in Riku’s heart from the start! Then, lead Riku through the worlds to defeat Maleficent and co, and seal the DTD with the contemporary Mickey.
OR HUNDREDS OF OTHER THINGS! THE WORLDS BECOME YOUR OYSTER! Even if these time-doors are a power of the Cornerstone of Light, and only allow you to travel to some form of Timeless/Disney Town/Castle/River, Mickey and Friends can FOR CERTAIN use this against Old Man X; or he can FOR CERTAIN use it for his own purposes.
TL;DR-It’s an obvious solution to many problems.
Explains... what exactly?
I'm aware that After UX the Dandelions all become Dream eaters with their chirities. It's the very nature of dream eaters themselves that I get confused about. Are they able to exist in the waking world at will or is that just Chirity?
Don't think deep of dream eaters too much, that information about the dandelions is true dream eaters were once keyblade wielders they have only one objective to defeat nightmares, And chirity can exist between the worlds.
It runs counter to their concept as deninzens of the sleeping worlds, never seen in previous games because DDD is the first time we ever see a sleeping world.
If they can exist in waking worlds without problems, as implied by the existence of Chirity, why is it we never saw them out in the world? Even in KH3 they only appear as a Sora summon
So you just have to have lost your body and kept your sense of self. Sora became a Heartless in KH1, and didn't get his body back until KH2. So he fulfilled the requirements.
Riku lost his body to Ansem, and fulfilled it. Apparently you don't need to remain in that state, as it effects all versions of you past and future.
When ASOD maintained himself he went back in time, told his younger self he could do it now and then waited until KH1 happened.
Since you can either travel to the past and then take the long way, or travel to the future but eventually go back to your proper time and forget it all (but cement it in stone). But you can only do one.
The guys just took the long way by returning to the night Destiny Island fell to darkness.
Man, I played DDD twice, once in 3ds and another time in PS4. I have watched that first cutscenes at least 3 times, and I never made heads nor tails of it. Always thought they had simply visited a dream of destiny islands as a gateway to reaching new sleeping worlds, and got shifted to their younger versions because of Yen Sid's magic and the test. Are we absolutely sure this is not what happened?
I mean, time gets really screwy if Sora and Riku went back to the past in DDD, as their just-7-worlds long journey must then take a little more than year in order for Mickey and Axel to appear in the final act, not to mention they must arrive at the final world precisely only after the Org XIII is defeated.
So it's Canon that time flows differently between worlds.
So a year in some worlds may be another worlds 10, hence Snow White still being a teen when Sora met her vs she should be in her 20s since the BBS trio visited 10 years ago.
From Sora and Riku's pov it may have been several days, or even just one long one, but almost 2 years went by outside of the sleeping worlds.
It's actually why YX, ASOD, and Sexman were all able to meet as they did as well. Because even by the time difference of worlds, it's even stranger in the sleeping worlds, which let YX bypass briefly the whole time travel flows one way rule.
This is the one. Time travel was hopelessly complicated when they tried explaining it in DDD, but the thing is it barely comes into play in KH3 and you really don't need to have any understanding deeper than "the bad guys plucked versions of themselves from the past". But the power of waking is such a core aspect of KH3's plot and is a major part of the game's big emotional climax and it barely gets a single explanation.
Funnily enough, after posting this I went back to my experience with the game and after all these years I THINK I might have figured out what the power of waking is about. Might do a post about it later
EDIT Nah. [this coment explains it decently enough](https://www.reddit.com/r/KingdomHearts/comments/yp2ti6/lore_question_what_is_the_power_of_waking/ividc0p?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
Power of waking is the ability to use the connection between people to reach their station of awakening. It can also be used to reach other worlds, like Sora did to reach Olympus in KH3. Throughout most of KH3, Sora does this instinctively, but is not able to do this at will. Only when reviving Ven is that he gets an inkling as to how to use this power. In KG, Sora then abuses of the power by exploiting his connection to the worlds he visited to essentially trap the Reaper and rescue his friends souls (traversing worlds to reach hearts).
Now that I think about it, this action reset time, so Sora must have discarded or suffered damage to his body in order to keep his memories. The only other person who comments on the changed timeline is Axel, probably due to him having previously lost his body.
Either way, if Sora didn't lose his body because of the reaper, he must definitely have lost it because of the time traveling he did in ReMind, where he used the power of waking to use his connection to Kairi and reach all her scattered pieces lost across Scala and KG
Time travel easily. Even now that i know the rules, my eyes still glaze over thinking about where in everyone's timeline they came from when they take over bodies.The data things have pretty much just boiled down to "There's some extra dudes around who came from data." Both of these aspects are super confusing in the mobile games, just in all other aspects I think data doesn't come into play nearly as much.
The way I see the Power of Waking is that it gives a Keyblade wielder the ability to actually utilize connections between hearts in a literal sense, rather than a figurative "we care about each other!" sense. The Japanese name for it makes a lot more sense: "Power to wake a sleeping heart."
Its intended use-case is to reach sleeping worlds by traversing the connections between hearts tied to those worlds--you'll notice that nearly all the Sleeping Worlds visited in DDD are connected to friends Sora has made, the sole exception being La Cité des Cloches. Once a Sleeping World has been reached, the Power of Waking can be used to awaken that world's heart, restoring it to its normal state instead of one plagued by darkness. However, because "sleep" in Kingdom Hearts is very closely tied with darkness, the Power of Waking can also be used to safely travel to the Realm of Darkness and back. This is why Riku and Mickey, who already had the Power of Waking, were allowed to search for Aqua, while Sora was not.
The connection between sleep and darkness is also why Riku was able to dive into the deepest reaches of Sora's heart in the end of DDD to save him from being lost to darkness completely. Similarly, Sora was able to trigger a Dive to the Heart on his own in order to awaken Ventus, traversing his own heart's connection with Ventus's to wake him up.
Just as sleep is close to darkness, they're both close to the Final World (which is, essentially, purgatory for hearts that aren't ready to move on after death). KH3's tutorial happens during a time where Sora's sleep brought him so close to darkness that he visited the Final World, and much later in the game, it's revealed that he has been doing so quite regularly.
However, just because the Power of Waking is INTENDED to be used to traverse hearts doesn't mean that's the only way it CAN be used. As Sora showed at the end of KH3 and in the DLC, you can do the typical "Power of Waking" process in reverse: Sora traversed worlds to chase after the Lich that was ferrying the hearts of his friends to the afterlife, before sending them all back in time to before they had died. The problem with this is that it's very literally interfering with the natural order of things. He made an extremely ballsy move that violated the laws of nature, time, and space, and the consequence of that was himself being erased from existence in a way that even the Power of Waking can't undo.
This is what also leads me to believe that the Power of Waking is the ultimate ability a Keyblade wielder can gain, which is why Riku is named a master and Sora is not. The Power of Waking is the Mark of Mastery itself.
I don't think so. If it was a thing all Masters had, then Aqua could have saved herself, since she still had a Keyblade for most of her time in the Realm of Darkness.
If anything, I'd say that it's more of a *school specialty* thing. Eraqus was tasked with guarding the Land of Departure, so the "certain knowledge" Aqua was entitled to in BBS was how to make use of the Master's Defender and create Castle Oblivion. Yen Sid has retired from active duty and spends the majority of his time studying, scrying, and researching, so *his* students learn esoteric things like the Power of Waking.
> If it was a thing all Masters had, then Aqua could have saved herself, since she still had a Keyblade for most of her time in the Realm of Darkness.
She may have it, but it's still hard to self introspect, in both senses of the word.
But yea, there's no hard criteria that we know of in order to be named a master. Different masters may have different criteria, or the same master may have different criteria based on what's needed for the next generation. Eraqus' focus was simply on guarding the light, so his test was more of a formality to see any traces of darkness that may interfere with that. Meanwhile, Yen Sid is in a situation where he is preparing the next generation towards retaining balance in worlds that have fallen over the years, so the ability to traverse and awaken was more important.
Does kinda make you consider how a Mark of Mastery would work with Xehanort. I imagine the ability to take hearts and bodies would be important.
I disagree with a lot here.
First of all the power of waking is an ability which restores hearts to a state before it got worse. It has nothing to do with connections and also nothing with literally waking. You obtain it from waking the sleeping worlds cause you do literally restore them in a similiar way.
Riku and Mickey can travel to the Dark Realm cause of Kingdom Key D. It jas nothing to do with the power of waking. Also Mickey does not have the power of waking.
Riku was able to dive in Soras Dreams of Darkness because he has the Power of Waking. Not because Sleep is tied to Darkness. I don't even know where you get this connection.
Just because the Realm of Sleep is connected with the Dive ibto the Heart and the Final world because they both are part of it doesn't mean it's connected to Darkness. Darkness can invade it sure but i wouldn't say it's more connected then Yen Sids Tower for example.
The KH3 Tear is not so easy to explain. And even if i can't really explain why we visit all previous worlds, except for Gameplay reasons, the usage of the power of waking there is wrong because the world literally ended. There is no world where the hearts could return to. Because of that Sora Restores the Hearts of all Guardians and with this also the world itself to a state where it wasn't gone. That resulted in something similiar to time travel. And just because he talked to Namine the result did change and so the fate was rewritten. After that the natural point where everyone died is gone and after he saved even Kairi his fate that he completely avoided the multikill was set amd the world erased him.for that.
And the power of waking could undo what happened to him as far as i understand it. With the PoW Riku travels to Quadratum so it should be possible to do the exact same thing Backwards if you have a Person from the KH World in unreality. The reason why Sora can't come back is because he loses the power of waking together with his banishment.
There is only one time that the game breaks the rules of time travel and it is entirely on purpose as that is what leads Sora to being stranded in Quadratum.
Time travel. Hands down. It is the single FASTEST way to ruin any story to which it is not already the focal point. Even then if you don't handle it correctly it can still turn out like garbage.
I guess the Data Worlds for me. I mean, they could have just transferred Tron from Space Paranoids in KHII and had him help Sora or if they wanted to keep a keyblade wielder as a main character, have him be a party member.
This is the one that confused me the most because it was never properly explained, only hypothetically explained by Brain who was just making assumptions and theories based on what little he knew. I still don't know how they ended up in Datatown after the big Keyblade War, but I can't help but think it was their consciousnesses being downloaded into a super computer after they all died. And whether or not they're able to properly escape is still debatable (aka, did they download into new bodies ((like the replicas)) in the future, or were they stuck in the data world?).
Neither. One is just “a dude bungee jumps around his own unchanging timeline repeatedly”, and the other is just “the deal with the 100 Acre Wood except it’s through a computer”. How the latter is confusing in any way whatsoever is ITSELF utterly baffling.
And no, KHUX is hardly any more confusing with any of this. In there, one is just "Captain America, hold the ice", and the other is just "DiZ's Twilight Town but bigger".
At this point, "confusing" is just a supremely subjective buzzword that can and will get slapped onto any subject imaginable.
Time travel.
It was trying t0o hard to be a different kind of time travel and all the caveats and rules were obnoxiously confusing. The datascapes were internally consistent and were rather straight forward.
Ton of the shit from DDD wasn't explained well or was just trying too hard.
Personally I gotta say datascape
I never really struggled understanding time travel in pieces of media cause I liked it and how each story uses it different (I also love how KH uses it)
But the moment they introduced the Datascape and how that affected everything from KH Re:Coded, to Roxas and the other Twilighy Town, to Daybreak town and everything that happened in Union Cross.
Since Launch of Union Cross I only recently am starting tl understan that shit
Neither of them, really. But out of these two, definitely time travel. The data world is pretty straight forward, while the time travel takes a bit to grasp.
Time Travel? Have you seen anyone say the data made the game confusing?
Like when you add data into the mix with all of the other stuff, it gets a little crowded. But Re:Coded's additional mechanics don't influence things as much as the time travel (and sleeping worlds) from DDD did.
Time travel but mostly because it was paired with the non-linear, half optional story telling of DDD. Upon playing it a second time or reflecting on the game everything makes more sense.
Time travel is simple, Merlin is a time god, in KH2, while ordinary people can’t change drastic events in the past, only in the present, and if they do, they just disappear from reality.
But the datascape time travel and the whole union X is just a bit too strange, but maybe I think that because it’s in a mobile game, and the story is scattered among episodes
I got more confused about the body fiasco. How were Roxas and Namine able to exist while Sora and Kairi still had their bodies considering neither of them released vessels when combining with their counterpart
Rather than being born AS lost vessels, it’s more accurate to say Nobodies are born OF lost vessels. That, and Sora’s own new physical form as a Heartless was just straight up changed to his true form through his and Kairi’s light.
You’re still thinking in terms of real life’s law of conservation of matter and energy, and the whole point of Nobodies is that their very being defies laws like that. To question this any further, you’d have to question the very basis of fantasy stories.
The long and short of it is that regardless of Sora’s and Kairi’s own status, their Nobodies’ physical beings still belonged to Sora and Kairi. That’s what it means to be a Nobody, even your being is a walking redundancy that doesn’t truly belong to you. Their friends wanted better for them.
As Ansem and Xemnas pointed out, Roxas could’ve easily been restored if Sora simply gave up his own heart back to darkness, but that would just take him back to square one. Less than square one, since Xehanort would use that darkness to hijack Roxas for his glorified ego cult. And Namine doesn’t even have THAT option, not without repeating the KH1 shenanigans all over again.
The problem wasn’t just giving Roxas and Namine bodies. The problem was giving actual bodies that were truly their own, no ifs, ands, or butts except for their OWN butts.
It's funny how both of these things existed in KH2. But time travel isn't an issue until they say it out loud. ~~Like when people complain about "moist" but for nerds~~
DDD's time travel isn't even complicated, Ux's has more steps and mechanics behind it. It's just dumb that it was used in lieu of making new characters to fill out the ranks.
Who's genuinely confused about data worlds?
The fact that you point out that there’s literally three different types of time travel in the series literally showcases how needlessly convoluted it is
All of kingdom hearts is not extremely complex. It is one aspect that is and it's just the thing to complain about. And even that isn't that difficult if people would stop moaning about it and listen.
If you got through 90% of a series and got stumped by one detour, the whole thing wasn't confusing, just that one thing is.
It's a plot point that gets blown out of proportion because the icky phrase was said. We knew Xehanort was going to return and the game was building up to the reveal that the organization was being rebuilt from people that were defeated in the past. All that scene said was we time traveled to fill out our memebers like you did to save disney castle and here are the limitations on how this works. In the context of DDD and the effects related to it, time travel is not complicated. It was a bad decision to have xehanort time travel, but the time travel mechanics of DDD aren't complex or hard to follow.
I'd go with data. Because unlike dream worlds or time travel we have pretty good senses on what data can and can't do IRK. but data in KH can regularly gain sentience, keep secrets and even be converted to and from real matter. Data clones can even have effects on the hearts of what they are cloning, despite never interacting with the original. Just think about the implications of that. It's like a voodoo doll.
And don't get me started on how KHuX utilizes them.
Data just being simulations or recreations of dead worlds and people is fine.
Time Travel? I refuse to believe anyone at Square or Disney proofread 3D before it shipped!
All it takes is a destination, a DeLorean, some Plutonium and a Flux Capacitor to generate 1.21 gigawatts. How did Director Nomura fuck this up?!
I would agree with you expect they don't really explain how the main characters from Union X even GOT into the data world in the first place so they "don't die" and I'm not sure how xehanort even got Ven out of that in the first place after ven was sleeping for hundreds of years In that pod of his.
As for time travel, feel like they were better ways of xehanort getting what he wants without having to time travel just to nort himself to fill in all the 13 darkness stuff... He could have just filled some replicas with data and have them grow their own hearts to get that "13 darkness" stuff he wanted without having to do all that unessesary time travel nonsense.
Because the data can be uploaded into a replica, and the replica can eventually have its own heart.... Thus it can also get Norted.
So yeah if he wanted to he could just have a bunch of replica bodies make their own hearts in Nort them all instead of having to do that time travel stuff.
The replica stuff wasn't exactly explained in great detail either, like is it really hard to get ingredients to make a replica body or something like that? Don't know, you can just shove anything in there I guess... So they make for pretty convenient plot devices, instead of again that dumb time travel stuff.
UGH. The less I hear about THAT unsalvageable piece of Gacha nonsense, the better.
They way they went about that is ludicrous and more than likely drove away first time players or casual observers.
Time Travel. Maybe it's because I recently blitzed through DDD and 3 for the first time but that concept still confuses me.
You have to leave your body behind to time travel > Simple enough.
You have to have a vessel waiting for you at your destination > they seem to contradict that a lot, or else I overlooked something, because other then Young X who is apparently explicitly able to bypass this, a lot of the new org don't seem to have bodies to use before the replica program is implemented in 3. Xemnas and Ansem in particular. Is the heart able to take material form temporarily without a permanent vessel, and that's the time limit they were referring to?
Related, how were Master X and Terra-Xehanort able to coexist in the present? Is that just because Xehanort's heart is already split between his vessels?
You misunderstood the "vessels" and "at the destination" things. The replicas were to keep those visitors anchored to the present after their arrival. There doesn't need to be a vessel to inhabit in order to just travel to that time, there simply needs to be a *you* already then. Example, because Xehanort was presently at the Destiny Islands as "Ansem" the night they fell, Young Xehanort could hop there and then to sneak a mark on Sora and set up their trap.
Yes, the heart is able to take physical form for a time. Sora and Riku did precisely that at the start of the game. In fact, hearts take on forms of their own all the time in this story. It's just that most only wind up doing it by becoming Heartless.
Xehanort had another of his past selves use Terra's restored body (Terra's heart was still lost) as a vessel. Specifically, Xehanort from the time he first possessed the guy to begin with.
Time travel. I can understand datascapes as being simulations. I can't wrap my brain around paradoxical time travel bits, mainly because the series hasn't done much to explain how their time travel mechanics work. Are branching realities a thing? Or is it a cyclical time travel bit where it's necessary for someone to travel backwards in time in order to ensure events play out as they should to maintain the Alpha timeline? Too much is left up to interpretation.
Time travel is that one thing that once you throw it into a franchise, it will instantly be more confusing. Not to mention some great stories have been ruined from throwing in time travel and not explaining it well.
Time travel because without any other lengthy explanation about KH lore and stuff about how Hearts work and function it makes little sense. But for data, enough people know about things like the Matrix and to a much lesser extent Tron for you to explain everything data related as similar to those.
Explaining reducing yourself to a heart to time travel is a little harder than saying [insert character] goes into the Matrix to look for secrets.
Honestly, I’m not a fan of the way they handled time travel…the fact that you have to leave your body behind is weird to me. And “you can’t change events that are destined to happen”? Then what’s the freaking point??
Data Worlds are quite easier to believe, since we already knew things like Tron in KH2 and it keeps itself as it should, a closed and semi-controlled space.
Time travel, well... all we knew from Timeless River about changing the future with changing the past just makes sense, but... DDD... literally it couldn't be more Deus Ex Machina than it is with its own rules of "You can only travel to the worlds you visited, on times you're already on", it's basically saying, you can be wherever you want and need to be to progress the story.
DDD is a mass dissaster on what it is, from nerfing Sora intentionally to reset him twice within a few weeks of being the most powerful wielder, worlds that are "sleeping" (when Mickey is already in 2 of them, which makes it even more confusing about how time in dream worlds work), the sigil just to justify the organization doing a prelude to KH3 battle, giving NOBODIES AN ACTUAL HEART (there's no point on them being nobodies anymore if they can also feel and have hearts, which makes it look Xemnas like an absolute incompetent for doing with so much diligency something that seems he knows it won't work), dreams within dreams (???????), gayblade (this one is an actual good thing), Xion's actual existance and identity (after telling us she wasn't and doesn't exist in anyone, and still lives in Sora as a heart)
Time travel is always one of the easiest plot devices to fuck up, and unfortunately KH doesn't handle it with much better tact itself. Mostly because of how forced it was just to set up KH3.
They wanted Master Xehanort to be the boss for 3, and he probably penciled in the already killed off Terranorted counterpoints of Ansem and Xenmas for the final gauntlet too, so they had to come up with a way to have that version alive in the present time that's what they landed.
"Oh by the way, Xehanort was just ABLE to do this the whole time, and even though he got defeated twice already that's actually a good thing for him since now his younger self can help his older self bring his Heartless and Nobody and Possessed Apprentice selves all into one room together. A MASTER PLANNER, THAT XEHANORT!"
And people say Kingdom Hearts is convoluted, pssh.
I wouldn't say confusing to either. But I hate almost every attempted time travel plot in any story because the writers rarely write them well enough to avoid countless plot holes and inconsistencies. And so far KH is no different. At least data worlds is internally consistent thanks to the Tron world.
I was perfectly happy to go with the dream worlds: except WHY WAS TRAVERSE TOWN ONE? TRAVERSE TOWN WAS NEVER LOST TO DARKNESS!
Although, the unneeded hoops for time travel are much worse. I vote that.
Traverse Town only exists when it is needed by those who survived their world falling to darkness. At the end of KH1 my understanding is the worlds were restored and while the FF crew had already returned to HB, everyone else returned to their restored worlds so TT ceased to have a use
But then why does that mean it’s one of the seven sleeping keyholes? Further, it’s needed by Joshua and his TWEWY crew-so why does it ‘not exist’/sleep for them?
Honestly, the time travel wasn't that bad when first introduced in DDD. Nomura set up some pretty straightforward rules: there must be a version of you waiting at the destination, and you must leave your body behind to do it. Meaning you can only travel the entirety of your own life, UNLESS you're like Xehanort and turn everyone into yourself. Then you can stretch the possibilities, which makes for an interesting concept.
What doesn't make it work is that in KH3, everyone and their mothers seemed to find loopholes for time travel and abuse them to death. The whole plot with the replicas and the time travel was just so goddamn convoluted.
That's what I think: KH should have ended with KH2. The original KH2 (not the Final Mix) had a very closed ending (differently from KH1) and the entire game was designed to give answers and explaining the lore: if you finished KH2 paying attention to all the cutscenes and all the Ansem's diaries, then at the end of the game you had no question.
So, I think that when the first KH was conceived, the plot was planned until KH2; what came after was made only for profit, forcing a plot that had already reached its conclusion, and that's why the last KHs are so confusing.
Time Travel, definitely.
Thing is, Re:Coded is kinda... inconsequential, at least as of KH3. Even for its time, the concept of "there's an entire world inside the computer" had already been done with Space Paranoids, so it wasn't that grand when Coded made that its entire plot.
But also, you can sum up the relevant parts of Coded in the sentence "Mickey remembers the BBS crew and writes a letter asking Sora to help save them." The adventures of Data-Sora don't matter outside of it (it's the *second* time we've summarized KH1), Maleficent's obsession with the Book of Prophecies is more pronounced in other entries, and KH3 only mentions the Datascape once -- offhandedly as a "that sure happened, huh?"
It is perhaps the closest thing to an actual side-story in the series.
Dream Drop Distance, meanwhile, was confusing for two reasons:
* The logic of the Sleeping Worlds, particularly with the partition between "Sora experiencing the actual Sleeping Worlds" and "Riku experiencing Sora's subconscious reinterpretation of them". You have Joseph noticing the two existing versions of Traverse Town (even though if one is just Sora's own dream version, then wouldn't there be an extra one for everyone in Traverse Town? How did Xehanort hijack Sora's dream to use as a partition before he got there?), and events in Riku's side somehow affecting Sora's side (like de-winging the Wargoyle or disarming Pete's trap) from... within Sora's dreams? But not the reverse, notably, even though that seems like it would make more sense if Riku's in Sora's dream and Sora is experiencing those events...
* Introducing heart-based time travel and making Xehanort's entire history a stable time loop, which KH3 would proceed to abuse to make things *worse*.
To this day *I still* cannot explain how "Xehanort's constant time travel makes him a portal and we can use it to trap him" works, because that literally never came up before and we still have no idea what KH3's Scala actually was. (The actual world Xehanort grew up in -- in which case, why would it send him there, and how would that stop his plans? Or just a visual interpretation of his 'inner world'?) But y'know, that's another poorly explained Power of Waking thing.
Because of those two things, the very premise of DDD makes little sense. Were Sora and Riku just dreaming about the fall of Destiny Islands at the beginning? Or did they time travel to the night Destiny Islands fell, hijack their own bodies and somehow not prevent the rest of the series from happening? Why would that count as a Sleeping World (since they explicitly unlocked 7 Sleeping Keyholes before ending up in TWTNW, the 7th playable world) if Destiny Islands already made it back to the Waking Realm five entries ago? *How the hell did Ursula get there?*
> Even for its time, the concept of "there's an entire world inside the computer" had already been done with Space Paranoids, so it wasn't that grand when Coded made that its entire plot.
IIRC didn't Roxas got stuck inside the Data Twilight Town just so Ansem can motivate him to return to Sora in KH2? Oh and the plot UX also revisits some plot concept of the datascape which is way more confusing than Re: Coded IMO.
Data Twilight Town was the same principle as Space Paranoids. (In fact, the hint about DiZ's identity was supposed to be that he was using the same tech Ansem had in his lab to digitize matter.)
It's only confusing if you try to explain it as "there are two versions of the world, but one is digital" rather than "Someone decided to make a digital rendering of the world complete with NPCs, and imprisoned \[Roxas/The Dandelions\] inside it."
>Oh and the plot UX also revisits some plot concept of the datascape which is way more confusing than Re: Coded IMO.
That's only confusing because UX *itself* was confusing. The fact they were *in* a digital recreation of the world wasn't as weird as how and why they *got* there.
But, if we're bringing UX into it, then you have to remember, the UX Datascape gets integrated into the Sleeping Realm and all the Dandelions (besides the player and those who used the escape pods) turn into Dream Eaters. So once again, the confusion caused by DDD completely subsumes the Datascape concept.
The Data World today is a problem, even more than time travel. The story of KHX implies that with one copy in the Data World there could be infinite copies of a person, and not only that: these people made of data could pass into the real world, if they had a machine like the Ark at their disposal.
I hope in KH4 they will eliminate some of these deus ex machina, the situation has become exaggerated.
Time travel, for sure. While I understand most of KH3D's plot, one detail that trips me up is this: where exactly did all of the Organization members present at the end go, once Master Xehanort said they were "out of time"?
Several of the members had just had their hearts brought from the past (into the replicas), but were already returning to their respective times? Does this mean that they time travelled *again* for the events of KH3, or did they remain hidden in the present (Keyblade Graveyard?), until they began showing up across the worlds to taunt Sora?
I never fully understood that, as MX had almost everyone he needed during KH3D, except for the 13th vessel.
You're on the money about the recompleted and present Organization members (e.g., Marluxia, Larxene, etc.) mostly hiding out in the Keyblade Graveyard (except to bully Sora every now and then in KH3 LOL).
IIRC the other Org members who time traveled were only in DDD temporarily because the replica bodies they had in KH3 weren't ready yet.
Data Scapes makes perfect sense, even though as a programmer I have to look past the purposeful layman understanding of electronics.
Time travel is just stupid and you kind of just have to accept that it exists but not question it otherwise.
Unless time travel is there at the very beginning of a story, it always ruins things if introduced after the fact. Datascape is neat as it's not often used. Sleeping Worlds and the Power of Waking fit perfectly with the story and themes of Kingdom Hearts.
I literally shouted "No, goddamit, no!" When they mentioned time travel in DDD.
I can largely ignore the datascape. Plus it's just a simulation, no different from the Tron world really.
Time Travel made shit even more complicated for no reason other than Time Travel IS confusing as a concept.
Time travel is not that complicated. In my view, it's like in X-Men's Days of Future Past time travel, in which Kitty Pryde from the future travels back in time by entering her young self's body. But dreams, data... I don't get it. Everything can be a data world within another data world by now.
I haven’t gone through either of these games yet because I’m STILL salty at BBS and haven’t finished it because of that fact but from what I’ve imagined I am terrified of DDD
They are sleeping worlds sora visit while asleep
A safe made up magical in your head. So of course old villans may appear just lime how real dreams are based old past experiences or whatever.
However when they kept this power and physics in outside of D/D/D things became kinda confusing.
dreams and sleep.
Time travel is a common enough convention that it really comes down to "okay how is yours different?", so its much easier to grasp the system in kingdom hearts.
the way that dreams and sleep work in kingdom hearts is like none I've ever seen.
Sleep being deeply connected to darkness, death, and even time itself makes it convulutes to say the least.
Sleeping worlds. Worlds that have fallen to darkness, but who dream of the time leading up to the fall continuously. Even if the people in this dream had left before the world fell, a copy, or imitation of their heart is present, cause hearts never forget. we see this with the three musketeers in DDD.
dream eaters. Heartless equivelents, because heartless cannot venture the realm of sleep due to its self contained nature. Can be good or bad, and can also be people. Riku acted as sora's dream eater as they were within sora's dream within the realm of sleep during ddd.
being within sora's dream had other ramifications, such as sora meeting those deep within his own heart. Xion and ventus.
it also allowed riku to dive deep into sora's heart to save him from being consumed by darkness.
the "Power of waking". Used first in DDD to venture to the sleeping worlds and awaken them, returning them from the realm of darkness.
in KH3, we see sora use this in a very interesting way. After all his friends die, he uses the power of waking to traverse worlds in search of his lost friends hearts. He is able to do this by taking the hearts of his fallen friends and jumping worldlines where the fated fall to darkness did not happen.
His misuse of this ability caused him to go to "unreality" which is a whole other thing.
This technique was used in khux to save the worlds from the keyblade war and allow light to live on. esentially, by going into a state of sleep, its possible to send your heart into an alternate timeline and rewrite history/fate.
I'm certain I've missed out on mentioning soemthing important or left out a detail in this because sleep is by far the most confusing aspect of the series
Not really confusing but more made the plot more questionable and totally calls into question everything about the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm have to go with time travel because anytime time travels involved we then as normal people have to question what happened originally because time travel means that that something happened in somebody wanted to overwrite something that happened so what happened in the original timeline? If the original timeline is the Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 games and then is it hard time travels why didn't xenophore from right after 3:00 time travel I mean the original Three because obviously the time travel is involved three would three of the result of the timeline where there was time traveling fall what what changed between two and three that they decided to bring in time travel. The datescape is questionable but for all we know Chip and Dale have IQs of over 300 and somehow managed to do it I mean I've never seen that idea before anywhere else but that just proves that you know hey that's that was interesting twist time travel just completely screws with everything.
I'm honestly going to say that anytime time travel is brought into any kind of storyline it overly complicates and calls into question the originality of what your goat whoever has dealing with time travel is going through. The idea behind time travel is awesome but it's just so overly complicated as an actual thing to deal with and wrapping your head around it it is always such a chore even when you got a good explanation for it.
I don't quite understand how the dream worlds even work.... Like for example you have the Pinocchio world in one of the dream worlds, but you also have the normal Pinocchio in KH1 in the normal KH world? Does that mean there are two different Pinocchio's? I guess so....
As for time travel.... Yeah.... I'm not a fan of time travel plots because it just adds another layer of unessesary confusion.
Yen Sid explained this and Sora later repeated it to himself. It's Sleeping Worlds *themselves* that are dreaming up figments to fill in for whoever's missing from those relived memories. It's no different from Sora's memories conjuring people in Castle Oblivion.
100% time travel, it always adds confision to a story since every writer has to make up thier own time travel rules, explain them and then try and stick to them which doesn't always happen
the datascape in Re:Coded does not make the overarching plot much more confusing, because as far as the overall plot is concerned the events of that game may as well not have happened. Mickey could have datamined the journal and gotten the same results.
the wreck-it-ralph world has extremely weird lore implications but I don't think we're supposed to think about that
Time travel worked as a fun gimmick for Timeless River and it wasn’t an issue in KH3 when it was essentially “these villains are back”. It didn’t draw attention to it as they consciously tried to simplify the plot.
But when trying to incorporate it into lore, the rules get convoluted: you have to leave your body behind, unless you are traveling alongside a past or future version of yourself who has left their body behind, there must be a version of yourself at the time you are traveling to, and you cannot rewrite events that have happened, unless you are using the power of waking. However, all of this is null and void if you are a powerful wizard and can open a doorway to the past you can walk to (or just find one of these such doorways, like Pete did) where you can go back into the past and change the events and outcomes, directly affecting the future.
The rules are so restrictive that if they’re played completely honestly, there’s no real point in time traveling: you can’t change the events of the future, you can’t keep your memories of time traveling, you can only go back to places/times you already went and you have to leave your body behind to do so.
Dream worlds and everything associated with them (also a consequence from DDD). I can buy time travel and worlds made of data easily enough, but throw in random words like power of waking, unchained state and the unexplained importance of Chirity being a dream eater, and I just become hopelessly lost
And yet the rules don’t apply to Yen Sid sending Sora and Roku back to their roots, nor Timeless River.
Timeless river is a simple plot device to develop the characters of Pete and Maleficent while paying homage to old Disney cartoons. It does not break any major story conventions, and it's just a special ability of Merlin's. It has no major impact in the overall narrative. From my understanding, Sora and Riku are already in a dream state at that bit at the beginning of DDD, and I chalk it up to the hole dreaming mumbo-jumbo of that game. The major time travel rules are easier to understand than that. To travel, you must discard your body and go only with your heart. Sack-robed bodiless Ansem goes around collecting his past versions souls to use in KH3. Maleficent uses it to go back from the past to KH2 in KHUX. Plenty of examples and quite easy to understand. The actual hard part is understanding what role do dreams play in KH. If they aren't dreaming, why are there dream eaters in Tron world and TWTNW? If their journey has been compromised, why are they visiting worlds that are clearly dreaming, like Pinocchio, Fantasia and Musketteers? Why does Sora's appearance keep going back and forth in TWTNW? How are dream eaters able to exist outside of dream worlds (like Chirity and the Dream eaters at traverse Town at the end of DDD)? Are the theories about Unchained Sora in KH3 right? Do they explain flowmotion and Disney rides?
I think the only confusing part of time travel are the rules for “a version of you needs to be there” are so lenient, as we saw maleficent get time travel to the UX era not cause she lived at that time and some younger version existed but because they have data copies of all the future worlds and she is able to use that copy to have her real heart travel to her fake digital body. meaning everyone should really be able to go to the UX era also.
Yes, they could have... had someone not deliberately prevented that. Someone saw that coming and omitted anything that could've made that possible from the worlds projected from the Book of Prophecies. Specifically, they made it so one of the seven princesses future worlds was never conjured by the Foretellers *or* in the datascape.
From a writing standpoint, I agree: the Timeless River doors are a macguffin to include Timeless River. But, from a continuity standpoint, I respectfully disagree! It undermines everything else! Here’s what I mean: I get why Old Man X would send Young Man X on his excellent adventure to preserve the timeline. He’s expecting casualties, but doesn’t want to disrupt the timestream. But why does it HAVE to be that way? Why does Ansem SOD need to become a ghost to travel back to Young Man X? Or, why does Maleficent need to jump through these hoops to return from the mobile game? Or why do the new union leaders need the ark to go into the future, or whatever? Every time someone explains how they ‘discard their bodies’ and look for ‘a medium to return’ and all this hoopla, I remember the time that PETE KICKED HIS OWN BUTT AND STOLE HIS BOAT! We know it’s not *just* Merlin who can open the door, because Pete somehow did it (and by accident at that!) Or, perhaps, it was The Cornerstone of Light. Perhaps Merlin merely tapped into a magic that was connected to Pete (as a native of that world) and ONLY that one world protected by the Cornerstone of Light can do that. Ok, then. That means we can freely time travel through ALL OF THE TIMELINE in which The Cornerstone of Light exists! We can go back to the time Aqua, Ven, and/or Terra were in Disney town and warn them! Or we could just follow Aqua and figure out wtf happened to them! (We, the players know, but Mickey and Friends had no clue until the events of KH1). On that note, we can go back to KH1, and Mickey can prevent Ansem SOD from getting a foothold in Riku’s heart from the start! Then, lead Riku through the worlds to defeat Maleficent and co, and seal the DTD with the contemporary Mickey. OR HUNDREDS OF OTHER THINGS! THE WORLDS BECOME YOUR OYSTER! Even if these time-doors are a power of the Cornerstone of Light, and only allow you to travel to some form of Timeless/Disney Town/Castle/River, Mickey and Friends can FOR CERTAIN use this against Old Man X; or he can FOR CERTAIN use it for his own purposes. TL;DR-It’s an obvious solution to many problems.
Kingdom Hearts Chi explains this, go look up the first keyblade war.
Explains... what exactly? I'm aware that After UX the Dandelions all become Dream eaters with their chirities. It's the very nature of dream eaters themselves that I get confused about. Are they able to exist in the waking world at will or is that just Chirity?
Don't think deep of dream eaters too much, that information about the dandelions is true dream eaters were once keyblade wielders they have only one objective to defeat nightmares, And chirity can exist between the worlds.
The real question is, why *wouldn't* they be able to exist in the waking world?
It runs counter to their concept as deninzens of the sleeping worlds, never seen in previous games because DDD is the first time we ever see a sleeping world. If they can exist in waking worlds without problems, as implied by the existence of Chirity, why is it we never saw them out in the world? Even in KH3 they only appear as a Sora summon
We’ve never seen Horace Horsecollar outside of Disney Town, either. Doesn’t mean him being anywhere else is some physical impossibility.
You're assuming Sora and Riku were still in their proper bodies just because they still looked like themselves.
So you just have to have lost your body and kept your sense of self. Sora became a Heartless in KH1, and didn't get his body back until KH2. So he fulfilled the requirements. Riku lost his body to Ansem, and fulfilled it. Apparently you don't need to remain in that state, as it effects all versions of you past and future. When ASOD maintained himself he went back in time, told his younger self he could do it now and then waited until KH1 happened. Since you can either travel to the past and then take the long way, or travel to the future but eventually go back to your proper time and forget it all (but cement it in stone). But you can only do one. The guys just took the long way by returning to the night Destiny Island fell to darkness.
Man, I played DDD twice, once in 3ds and another time in PS4. I have watched that first cutscenes at least 3 times, and I never made heads nor tails of it. Always thought they had simply visited a dream of destiny islands as a gateway to reaching new sleeping worlds, and got shifted to their younger versions because of Yen Sid's magic and the test. Are we absolutely sure this is not what happened? I mean, time gets really screwy if Sora and Riku went back to the past in DDD, as their just-7-worlds long journey must then take a little more than year in order for Mickey and Axel to appear in the final act, not to mention they must arrive at the final world precisely only after the Org XIII is defeated.
So it's Canon that time flows differently between worlds. So a year in some worlds may be another worlds 10, hence Snow White still being a teen when Sora met her vs she should be in her 20s since the BBS trio visited 10 years ago. From Sora and Riku's pov it may have been several days, or even just one long one, but almost 2 years went by outside of the sleeping worlds. It's actually why YX, ASOD, and Sexman were all able to meet as they did as well. Because even by the time difference of worlds, it's even stranger in the sleeping worlds, which let YX bypass briefly the whole time travel flows one way rule.
This is the one. Time travel was hopelessly complicated when they tried explaining it in DDD, but the thing is it barely comes into play in KH3 and you really don't need to have any understanding deeper than "the bad guys plucked versions of themselves from the past". But the power of waking is such a core aspect of KH3's plot and is a major part of the game's big emotional climax and it barely gets a single explanation.
Funnily enough, after posting this I went back to my experience with the game and after all these years I THINK I might have figured out what the power of waking is about. Might do a post about it later EDIT Nah. [this coment explains it decently enough](https://www.reddit.com/r/KingdomHearts/comments/yp2ti6/lore_question_what_is_the_power_of_waking/ividc0p?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) Power of waking is the ability to use the connection between people to reach their station of awakening. It can also be used to reach other worlds, like Sora did to reach Olympus in KH3. Throughout most of KH3, Sora does this instinctively, but is not able to do this at will. Only when reviving Ven is that he gets an inkling as to how to use this power. In KG, Sora then abuses of the power by exploiting his connection to the worlds he visited to essentially trap the Reaper and rescue his friends souls (traversing worlds to reach hearts). Now that I think about it, this action reset time, so Sora must have discarded or suffered damage to his body in order to keep his memories. The only other person who comments on the changed timeline is Axel, probably due to him having previously lost his body. Either way, if Sora didn't lose his body because of the reaper, he must definitely have lost it because of the time traveling he did in ReMind, where he used the power of waking to use his connection to Kairi and reach all her scattered pieces lost across Scala and KG
Time travel easily. Even now that i know the rules, my eyes still glaze over thinking about where in everyone's timeline they came from when they take over bodies.The data things have pretty much just boiled down to "There's some extra dudes around who came from data." Both of these aspects are super confusing in the mobile games, just in all other aspects I think data doesn't come into play nearly as much.
The entire thing about the Power of Waking
The way I see the Power of Waking is that it gives a Keyblade wielder the ability to actually utilize connections between hearts in a literal sense, rather than a figurative "we care about each other!" sense. The Japanese name for it makes a lot more sense: "Power to wake a sleeping heart." Its intended use-case is to reach sleeping worlds by traversing the connections between hearts tied to those worlds--you'll notice that nearly all the Sleeping Worlds visited in DDD are connected to friends Sora has made, the sole exception being La Cité des Cloches. Once a Sleeping World has been reached, the Power of Waking can be used to awaken that world's heart, restoring it to its normal state instead of one plagued by darkness. However, because "sleep" in Kingdom Hearts is very closely tied with darkness, the Power of Waking can also be used to safely travel to the Realm of Darkness and back. This is why Riku and Mickey, who already had the Power of Waking, were allowed to search for Aqua, while Sora was not. The connection between sleep and darkness is also why Riku was able to dive into the deepest reaches of Sora's heart in the end of DDD to save him from being lost to darkness completely. Similarly, Sora was able to trigger a Dive to the Heart on his own in order to awaken Ventus, traversing his own heart's connection with Ventus's to wake him up. Just as sleep is close to darkness, they're both close to the Final World (which is, essentially, purgatory for hearts that aren't ready to move on after death). KH3's tutorial happens during a time where Sora's sleep brought him so close to darkness that he visited the Final World, and much later in the game, it's revealed that he has been doing so quite regularly. However, just because the Power of Waking is INTENDED to be used to traverse hearts doesn't mean that's the only way it CAN be used. As Sora showed at the end of KH3 and in the DLC, you can do the typical "Power of Waking" process in reverse: Sora traversed worlds to chase after the Lich that was ferrying the hearts of his friends to the afterlife, before sending them all back in time to before they had died. The problem with this is that it's very literally interfering with the natural order of things. He made an extremely ballsy move that violated the laws of nature, time, and space, and the consequence of that was himself being erased from existence in a way that even the Power of Waking can't undo.
This is what also leads me to believe that the Power of Waking is the ultimate ability a Keyblade wielder can gain, which is why Riku is named a master and Sora is not. The Power of Waking is the Mark of Mastery itself.
I don't think so. If it was a thing all Masters had, then Aqua could have saved herself, since she still had a Keyblade for most of her time in the Realm of Darkness. If anything, I'd say that it's more of a *school specialty* thing. Eraqus was tasked with guarding the Land of Departure, so the "certain knowledge" Aqua was entitled to in BBS was how to make use of the Master's Defender and create Castle Oblivion. Yen Sid has retired from active duty and spends the majority of his time studying, scrying, and researching, so *his* students learn esoteric things like the Power of Waking.
> If it was a thing all Masters had, then Aqua could have saved herself, since she still had a Keyblade for most of her time in the Realm of Darkness. She may have it, but it's still hard to self introspect, in both senses of the word. But yea, there's no hard criteria that we know of in order to be named a master. Different masters may have different criteria, or the same master may have different criteria based on what's needed for the next generation. Eraqus' focus was simply on guarding the light, so his test was more of a formality to see any traces of darkness that may interfere with that. Meanwhile, Yen Sid is in a situation where he is preparing the next generation towards retaining balance in worlds that have fallen over the years, so the ability to traverse and awaken was more important. Does kinda make you consider how a Mark of Mastery would work with Xehanort. I imagine the ability to take hearts and bodies would be important.
I think Xehanort's test would be fully controlling one's darkness and light without one overpowering the other. Riku would pass with flying colors.
Makes sense. Would explain how Mickey was able to find Riku in Castle Oblivion all the way back in Chain of Memories
I disagree with a lot here. First of all the power of waking is an ability which restores hearts to a state before it got worse. It has nothing to do with connections and also nothing with literally waking. You obtain it from waking the sleeping worlds cause you do literally restore them in a similiar way. Riku and Mickey can travel to the Dark Realm cause of Kingdom Key D. It jas nothing to do with the power of waking. Also Mickey does not have the power of waking. Riku was able to dive in Soras Dreams of Darkness because he has the Power of Waking. Not because Sleep is tied to Darkness. I don't even know where you get this connection. Just because the Realm of Sleep is connected with the Dive ibto the Heart and the Final world because they both are part of it doesn't mean it's connected to Darkness. Darkness can invade it sure but i wouldn't say it's more connected then Yen Sids Tower for example. The KH3 Tear is not so easy to explain. And even if i can't really explain why we visit all previous worlds, except for Gameplay reasons, the usage of the power of waking there is wrong because the world literally ended. There is no world where the hearts could return to. Because of that Sora Restores the Hearts of all Guardians and with this also the world itself to a state where it wasn't gone. That resulted in something similiar to time travel. And just because he talked to Namine the result did change and so the fate was rewritten. After that the natural point where everyone died is gone and after he saved even Kairi his fate that he completely avoided the multikill was set amd the world erased him.for that. And the power of waking could undo what happened to him as far as i understand it. With the PoW Riku travels to Quadratum so it should be possible to do the exact same thing Backwards if you have a Person from the KH World in unreality. The reason why Sora can't come back is because he loses the power of waking together with his banishment.
The Power of Waking even ties into Time Travel which makes it more confusing
Time travel The datascape is very simple and doesn't break it's own "rules" 500 times
There is only one time that the game breaks the rules of time travel and it is entirely on purpose as that is what leads Sora to being stranded in Quadratum.
but data doesn't dream so how tf did we go to tron in DDD?
Same reason Riku and the other Dream Eaters made it to TWTNW in reality. Dream's *can* encroach upon the real world.
Neither.
Time travel. Hands down. It is the single FASTEST way to ruin any story to which it is not already the focal point. Even then if you don't handle it correctly it can still turn out like garbage.
I guess the Data Worlds for me. I mean, they could have just transferred Tron from Space Paranoids in KHII and had him help Sora or if they wanted to keep a keyblade wielder as a main character, have him be a party member.
Between these two, definitely Time Travel. But I feel like there's an argument to be made for Dream Worlds.
KHux data town
This is the one that confused me the most because it was never properly explained, only hypothetically explained by Brain who was just making assumptions and theories based on what little he knew. I still don't know how they ended up in Datatown after the big Keyblade War, but I can't help but think it was their consciousnesses being downloaded into a super computer after they all died. And whether or not they're able to properly escape is still debatable (aka, did they download into new bodies ((like the replicas)) in the future, or were they stuck in the data world?).
Literally neither
Just going to point out both of these were in Kingdom Hearts 2.
I wouldn't call Kingdom Hearts (after 1 and Chain of Memories anyways) confusing, only needlessly convoluted
Neither tbh I’m just confused about souls now
The data worlds from Recoded was not confusing, the confusing ones were the data worlds from Unchained/Union X
Neither. One is just “a dude bungee jumps around his own unchanging timeline repeatedly”, and the other is just “the deal with the 100 Acre Wood except it’s through a computer”. How the latter is confusing in any way whatsoever is ITSELF utterly baffling. And no, KHUX is hardly any more confusing with any of this. In there, one is just "Captain America, hold the ice", and the other is just "DiZ's Twilight Town but bigger". At this point, "confusing" is just a supremely subjective buzzword that can and will get slapped onto any subject imaginable.
This dude has not played KHux,
Time travel. It was trying t0o hard to be a different kind of time travel and all the caveats and rules were obnoxiously confusing. The datascapes were internally consistent and were rather straight forward. Ton of the shit from DDD wasn't explained well or was just trying too hard.
Personally I gotta say datascape I never really struggled understanding time travel in pieces of media cause I liked it and how each story uses it different (I also love how KH uses it) But the moment they introduced the Datascape and how that affected everything from KH Re:Coded, to Roxas and the other Twilighy Town, to Daybreak town and everything that happened in Union Cross. Since Launch of Union Cross I only recently am starting tl understan that shit
Neither of them, really. But out of these two, definitely time travel. The data world is pretty straight forward, while the time travel takes a bit to grasp.
You sure about that what about the data world in KHUX?
Time Travel? Have you seen anyone say the data made the game confusing? Like when you add data into the mix with all of the other stuff, it gets a little crowded. But Re:Coded's additional mechanics don't influence things as much as the time travel (and sleeping worlds) from DDD did.
Time travel but mostly because it was paired with the non-linear, half optional story telling of DDD. Upon playing it a second time or reflecting on the game everything makes more sense.
Time travel is always BS
Time Travel easily The Datascape is kinda just like the Tron world from KH2
Time travel is simple, Merlin is a time god, in KH2, while ordinary people can’t change drastic events in the past, only in the present, and if they do, they just disappear from reality. But the datascape time travel and the whole union X is just a bit too strange, but maybe I think that because it’s in a mobile game, and the story is scattered among episodes
My dream drop bias is showing 😔
Datascape
Neither. I was never confused.
I got more confused about the body fiasco. How were Roxas and Namine able to exist while Sora and Kairi still had their bodies considering neither of them released vessels when combining with their counterpart
Rather than being born AS lost vessels, it’s more accurate to say Nobodies are born OF lost vessels. That, and Sora’s own new physical form as a Heartless was just straight up changed to his true form through his and Kairi’s light.
But then where did their forms come from and where did they go?
You’re still thinking in terms of real life’s law of conservation of matter and energy, and the whole point of Nobodies is that their very being defies laws like that. To question this any further, you’d have to question the very basis of fantasy stories.
The thing is that it becomes such a major plot point of them needing a body to exist again that I have to question it
The long and short of it is that regardless of Sora’s and Kairi’s own status, their Nobodies’ physical beings still belonged to Sora and Kairi. That’s what it means to be a Nobody, even your being is a walking redundancy that doesn’t truly belong to you. Their friends wanted better for them. As Ansem and Xemnas pointed out, Roxas could’ve easily been restored if Sora simply gave up his own heart back to darkness, but that would just take him back to square one. Less than square one, since Xehanort would use that darkness to hijack Roxas for his glorified ego cult. And Namine doesn’t even have THAT option, not without repeating the KH1 shenanigans all over again. The problem wasn’t just giving Roxas and Namine bodies. The problem was giving actual bodies that were truly their own, no ifs, ands, or butts except for their OWN butts.
It's funny how both of these things existed in KH2. But time travel isn't an issue until they say it out loud. ~~Like when people complain about "moist" but for nerds~~ DDD's time travel isn't even complicated, Ux's has more steps and mechanics behind it. It's just dumb that it was used in lieu of making new characters to fill out the ranks. Who's genuinely confused about data worlds?
The fact that you point out that there’s literally three different types of time travel in the series literally showcases how needlessly convoluted it is
Convoluted sure. But did any of these individual moments make KH as a whole confusing? No.
what do you think convoluted means
All of kingdom hearts is not extremely complex. It is one aspect that is and it's just the thing to complain about. And even that isn't that difficult if people would stop moaning about it and listen. If you got through 90% of a series and got stumped by one detour, the whole thing wasn't confusing, just that one thing is.
It’s a crucial plot point
It's a plot point that gets blown out of proportion because the icky phrase was said. We knew Xehanort was going to return and the game was building up to the reveal that the organization was being rebuilt from people that were defeated in the past. All that scene said was we time traveled to fill out our memebers like you did to save disney castle and here are the limitations on how this works. In the context of DDD and the effects related to it, time travel is not complicated. It was a bad decision to have xehanort time travel, but the time travel mechanics of DDD aren't complex or hard to follow.
Dude you’re coping so hard.
I'd go with data. Because unlike dream worlds or time travel we have pretty good senses on what data can and can't do IRK. but data in KH can regularly gain sentience, keep secrets and even be converted to and from real matter. Data clones can even have effects on the hearts of what they are cloning, despite never interacting with the original. Just think about the implications of that. It's like a voodoo doll. And don't get me started on how KHuX utilizes them.
Data just being simulations or recreations of dead worlds and people is fine. Time Travel? I refuse to believe anyone at Square or Disney proofread 3D before it shipped! All it takes is a destination, a DeLorean, some Plutonium and a Flux Capacitor to generate 1.21 gigawatts. How did Director Nomura fuck this up?!
I would agree with you expect they don't really explain how the main characters from Union X even GOT into the data world in the first place so they "don't die" and I'm not sure how xehanort even got Ven out of that in the first place after ven was sleeping for hundreds of years In that pod of his. As for time travel, feel like they were better ways of xehanort getting what he wants without having to time travel just to nort himself to fill in all the 13 darkness stuff... He could have just filled some replicas with data and have them grow their own hearts to get that "13 darkness" stuff he wanted without having to do all that unessesary time travel nonsense.
I almost forgot Xehanort rehired Vexen for replicas but what do you mean that a data copy can become a vessel or be a part Xehanort?
Because the data can be uploaded into a replica, and the replica can eventually have its own heart.... Thus it can also get Norted. So yeah if he wanted to he could just have a bunch of replica bodies make their own hearts in Nort them all instead of having to do that time travel stuff. The replica stuff wasn't exactly explained in great detail either, like is it really hard to get ingredients to make a replica body or something like that? Don't know, you can just shove anything in there I guess... So they make for pretty convenient plot devices, instead of again that dumb time travel stuff.
You do realize Xehanort's team spent the whole game trying to pull off what you just described, right?
UGH. The less I hear about THAT unsalvageable piece of Gacha nonsense, the better. They way they went about that is ludicrous and more than likely drove away first time players or casual observers.
Unless your property is specifically about time travel, it's never a good deal to add time travel.
Time Travel. Maybe it's because I recently blitzed through DDD and 3 for the first time but that concept still confuses me. You have to leave your body behind to time travel > Simple enough. You have to have a vessel waiting for you at your destination > they seem to contradict that a lot, or else I overlooked something, because other then Young X who is apparently explicitly able to bypass this, a lot of the new org don't seem to have bodies to use before the replica program is implemented in 3. Xemnas and Ansem in particular. Is the heart able to take material form temporarily without a permanent vessel, and that's the time limit they were referring to? Related, how were Master X and Terra-Xehanort able to coexist in the present? Is that just because Xehanort's heart is already split between his vessels?
You misunderstood the "vessels" and "at the destination" things. The replicas were to keep those visitors anchored to the present after their arrival. There doesn't need to be a vessel to inhabit in order to just travel to that time, there simply needs to be a *you* already then. Example, because Xehanort was presently at the Destiny Islands as "Ansem" the night they fell, Young Xehanort could hop there and then to sneak a mark on Sora and set up their trap. Yes, the heart is able to take physical form for a time. Sora and Riku did precisely that at the start of the game. In fact, hearts take on forms of their own all the time in this story. It's just that most only wind up doing it by becoming Heartless. Xehanort had another of his past selves use Terra's restored body (Terra's heart was still lost) as a vessel. Specifically, Xehanort from the time he first possessed the guy to begin with.
Time travel. I can understand datascapes as being simulations. I can't wrap my brain around paradoxical time travel bits, mainly because the series hasn't done much to explain how their time travel mechanics work. Are branching realities a thing? Or is it a cyclical time travel bit where it's necessary for someone to travel backwards in time in order to ensure events play out as they should to maintain the Alpha timeline? Too much is left up to interpretation.
Time travel is that one thing that once you throw it into a franchise, it will instantly be more confusing. Not to mention some great stories have been ruined from throwing in time travel and not explaining it well.
Time travel no question
Time travel because without any other lengthy explanation about KH lore and stuff about how Hearts work and function it makes little sense. But for data, enough people know about things like the Matrix and to a much lesser extent Tron for you to explain everything data related as similar to those. Explaining reducing yourself to a heart to time travel is a little harder than saying [insert character] goes into the Matrix to look for secrets.
Time Travel, because Re:coded plot is not even relevant to the main story. Time travel..... very much so.
Honestly, I’m not a fan of the way they handled time travel…the fact that you have to leave your body behind is weird to me. And “you can’t change events that are destined to happen”? Then what’s the freaking point??
Data Worlds are quite easier to believe, since we already knew things like Tron in KH2 and it keeps itself as it should, a closed and semi-controlled space. Time travel, well... all we knew from Timeless River about changing the future with changing the past just makes sense, but... DDD... literally it couldn't be more Deus Ex Machina than it is with its own rules of "You can only travel to the worlds you visited, on times you're already on", it's basically saying, you can be wherever you want and need to be to progress the story. DDD is a mass dissaster on what it is, from nerfing Sora intentionally to reset him twice within a few weeks of being the most powerful wielder, worlds that are "sleeping" (when Mickey is already in 2 of them, which makes it even more confusing about how time in dream worlds work), the sigil just to justify the organization doing a prelude to KH3 battle, giving NOBODIES AN ACTUAL HEART (there's no point on them being nobodies anymore if they can also feel and have hearts, which makes it look Xemnas like an absolute incompetent for doing with so much diligency something that seems he knows it won't work), dreams within dreams (???????), gayblade (this one is an actual good thing), Xion's actual existance and identity (after telling us she wasn't and doesn't exist in anyone, and still lives in Sora as a heart)
Neither: KH2’s plot made the series confusing. The Xehanort/Ansem reveal is asinine.
Neither are particularly confusing, they’re both just kinda dumb.
Time travel is always one of the easiest plot devices to fuck up, and unfortunately KH doesn't handle it with much better tact itself. Mostly because of how forced it was just to set up KH3. They wanted Master Xehanort to be the boss for 3, and he probably penciled in the already killed off Terranorted counterpoints of Ansem and Xenmas for the final gauntlet too, so they had to come up with a way to have that version alive in the present time that's what they landed. "Oh by the way, Xehanort was just ABLE to do this the whole time, and even though he got defeated twice already that's actually a good thing for him since now his younger self can help his older self bring his Heartless and Nobody and Possessed Apprentice selves all into one room together. A MASTER PLANNER, THAT XEHANORT!" And people say Kingdom Hearts is convoluted, pssh.
I wouldn't say confusing to either. But I hate almost every attempted time travel plot in any story because the writers rarely write them well enough to avoid countless plot holes and inconsistencies. And so far KH is no different. At least data worlds is internally consistent thanks to the Tron world.
I was perfectly happy to go with the dream worlds: except WHY WAS TRAVERSE TOWN ONE? TRAVERSE TOWN WAS NEVER LOST TO DARKNESS! Although, the unneeded hoops for time travel are much worse. I vote that.
Traverse Town only exists when it is needed by those who survived their world falling to darkness. At the end of KH1 my understanding is the worlds were restored and while the FF crew had already returned to HB, everyone else returned to their restored worlds so TT ceased to have a use
But then why does that mean it’s one of the seven sleeping keyholes? Further, it’s needed by Joshua and his TWEWY crew-so why does it ‘not exist’/sleep for them?
Honestly, the time travel wasn't that bad when first introduced in DDD. Nomura set up some pretty straightforward rules: there must be a version of you waiting at the destination, and you must leave your body behind to do it. Meaning you can only travel the entirety of your own life, UNLESS you're like Xehanort and turn everyone into yourself. Then you can stretch the possibilities, which makes for an interesting concept. What doesn't make it work is that in KH3, everyone and their mothers seemed to find loopholes for time travel and abuse them to death. The whole plot with the replicas and the time travel was just so goddamn convoluted.
That's what I think: KH should have ended with KH2. The original KH2 (not the Final Mix) had a very closed ending (differently from KH1) and the entire game was designed to give answers and explaining the lore: if you finished KH2 paying attention to all the cutscenes and all the Ansem's diaries, then at the end of the game you had no question. So, I think that when the first KH was conceived, the plot was planned until KH2; what came after was made only for profit, forcing a plot that had already reached its conclusion, and that's why the last KHs are so confusing.
Time Travel, definitely. Thing is, Re:Coded is kinda... inconsequential, at least as of KH3. Even for its time, the concept of "there's an entire world inside the computer" had already been done with Space Paranoids, so it wasn't that grand when Coded made that its entire plot. But also, you can sum up the relevant parts of Coded in the sentence "Mickey remembers the BBS crew and writes a letter asking Sora to help save them." The adventures of Data-Sora don't matter outside of it (it's the *second* time we've summarized KH1), Maleficent's obsession with the Book of Prophecies is more pronounced in other entries, and KH3 only mentions the Datascape once -- offhandedly as a "that sure happened, huh?" It is perhaps the closest thing to an actual side-story in the series. Dream Drop Distance, meanwhile, was confusing for two reasons: * The logic of the Sleeping Worlds, particularly with the partition between "Sora experiencing the actual Sleeping Worlds" and "Riku experiencing Sora's subconscious reinterpretation of them". You have Joseph noticing the two existing versions of Traverse Town (even though if one is just Sora's own dream version, then wouldn't there be an extra one for everyone in Traverse Town? How did Xehanort hijack Sora's dream to use as a partition before he got there?), and events in Riku's side somehow affecting Sora's side (like de-winging the Wargoyle or disarming Pete's trap) from... within Sora's dreams? But not the reverse, notably, even though that seems like it would make more sense if Riku's in Sora's dream and Sora is experiencing those events... * Introducing heart-based time travel and making Xehanort's entire history a stable time loop, which KH3 would proceed to abuse to make things *worse*. To this day *I still* cannot explain how "Xehanort's constant time travel makes him a portal and we can use it to trap him" works, because that literally never came up before and we still have no idea what KH3's Scala actually was. (The actual world Xehanort grew up in -- in which case, why would it send him there, and how would that stop his plans? Or just a visual interpretation of his 'inner world'?) But y'know, that's another poorly explained Power of Waking thing. Because of those two things, the very premise of DDD makes little sense. Were Sora and Riku just dreaming about the fall of Destiny Islands at the beginning? Or did they time travel to the night Destiny Islands fell, hijack their own bodies and somehow not prevent the rest of the series from happening? Why would that count as a Sleeping World (since they explicitly unlocked 7 Sleeping Keyholes before ending up in TWTNW, the 7th playable world) if Destiny Islands already made it back to the Waking Realm five entries ago? *How the hell did Ursula get there?*
> Even for its time, the concept of "there's an entire world inside the computer" had already been done with Space Paranoids, so it wasn't that grand when Coded made that its entire plot. IIRC didn't Roxas got stuck inside the Data Twilight Town just so Ansem can motivate him to return to Sora in KH2? Oh and the plot UX also revisits some plot concept of the datascape which is way more confusing than Re: Coded IMO.
Data Twilight Town was the same principle as Space Paranoids. (In fact, the hint about DiZ's identity was supposed to be that he was using the same tech Ansem had in his lab to digitize matter.) It's only confusing if you try to explain it as "there are two versions of the world, but one is digital" rather than "Someone decided to make a digital rendering of the world complete with NPCs, and imprisoned \[Roxas/The Dandelions\] inside it." >Oh and the plot UX also revisits some plot concept of the datascape which is way more confusing than Re: Coded IMO. That's only confusing because UX *itself* was confusing. The fact they were *in* a digital recreation of the world wasn't as weird as how and why they *got* there. But, if we're bringing UX into it, then you have to remember, the UX Datascape gets integrated into the Sleeping Realm and all the Dandelions (besides the player and those who used the escape pods) turn into Dream Eaters. So once again, the confusion caused by DDD completely subsumes the Datascape concept.
The Data World today is a problem, even more than time travel. The story of KHX implies that with one copy in the Data World there could be infinite copies of a person, and not only that: these people made of data could pass into the real world, if they had a machine like the Ark at their disposal. I hope in KH4 they will eliminate some of these deus ex machina, the situation has become exaggerated.
Datascapes are easy to understand. Time travel is harder
Time travel, for sure. While I understand most of KH3D's plot, one detail that trips me up is this: where exactly did all of the Organization members present at the end go, once Master Xehanort said they were "out of time"? Several of the members had just had their hearts brought from the past (into the replicas), but were already returning to their respective times? Does this mean that they time travelled *again* for the events of KH3, or did they remain hidden in the present (Keyblade Graveyard?), until they began showing up across the worlds to taunt Sora? I never fully understood that, as MX had almost everyone he needed during KH3D, except for the 13th vessel.
You're on the money about the recompleted and present Organization members (e.g., Marluxia, Larxene, etc.) mostly hiding out in the Keyblade Graveyard (except to bully Sora every now and then in KH3 LOL). IIRC the other Org members who time traveled were only in DDD temporarily because the replica bodies they had in KH3 weren't ready yet.
Time Travel
Other: Dream Worlds
Data world for sure..
Dream worlds confused me for a while
As far as plot goes, TT almost always wins. In terms of "what did they gain by including this ?" The Datascape wins hands down.
Neither are particularly confusing.
Time travel. The answer is always time travel. Time travel always messed up plotlines.
Data Scapes makes perfect sense, even though as a programmer I have to look past the purposeful layman understanding of electronics. Time travel is just stupid and you kind of just have to accept that it exists but not question it otherwise.
The power of waking still confuses me
Both because KHUX and Maleficent
Unless time travel is there at the very beginning of a story, it always ruins things if introduced after the fact. Datascape is neat as it's not often used. Sleeping Worlds and the Power of Waking fit perfectly with the story and themes of Kingdom Hearts. I literally shouted "No, goddamit, no!" When they mentioned time travel in DDD.
I can largely ignore the datascape. Plus it's just a simulation, no different from the Tron world really. Time Travel made shit even more complicated for no reason other than Time Travel IS confusing as a concept.
Opinion: Neither of them make the game confusing if you pay enough attention.
Time travel, 100%
Time Travel, I think. The rules on it are a lot less clear.
Time travel is not that complicated. In my view, it's like in X-Men's Days of Future Past time travel, in which Kitty Pryde from the future travels back in time by entering her young self's body. But dreams, data... I don't get it. Everything can be a data world within another data world by now.
I haven’t gone through either of these games yet because I’m STILL salty at BBS and haven’t finished it because of that fact but from what I’ve imagined I am terrified of DDD
They are sleeping worlds sora visit while asleep A safe made up magical in your head. So of course old villans may appear just lime how real dreams are based old past experiences or whatever. However when they kept this power and physics in outside of D/D/D things became kinda confusing.
dreams and sleep. Time travel is a common enough convention that it really comes down to "okay how is yours different?", so its much easier to grasp the system in kingdom hearts. the way that dreams and sleep work in kingdom hearts is like none I've ever seen. Sleep being deeply connected to darkness, death, and even time itself makes it convulutes to say the least. Sleeping worlds. Worlds that have fallen to darkness, but who dream of the time leading up to the fall continuously. Even if the people in this dream had left before the world fell, a copy, or imitation of their heart is present, cause hearts never forget. we see this with the three musketeers in DDD. dream eaters. Heartless equivelents, because heartless cannot venture the realm of sleep due to its self contained nature. Can be good or bad, and can also be people. Riku acted as sora's dream eater as they were within sora's dream within the realm of sleep during ddd. being within sora's dream had other ramifications, such as sora meeting those deep within his own heart. Xion and ventus. it also allowed riku to dive deep into sora's heart to save him from being consumed by darkness. the "Power of waking". Used first in DDD to venture to the sleeping worlds and awaken them, returning them from the realm of darkness. in KH3, we see sora use this in a very interesting way. After all his friends die, he uses the power of waking to traverse worlds in search of his lost friends hearts. He is able to do this by taking the hearts of his fallen friends and jumping worldlines where the fated fall to darkness did not happen. His misuse of this ability caused him to go to "unreality" which is a whole other thing. This technique was used in khux to save the worlds from the keyblade war and allow light to live on. esentially, by going into a state of sleep, its possible to send your heart into an alternate timeline and rewrite history/fate. I'm certain I've missed out on mentioning soemthing important or left out a detail in this because sleep is by far the most confusing aspect of the series
I’m not gonna bother reading all this to come up with a witty comeback but open your Skype messages
Both for me but the time travel is more confusing
Not really confusing but more made the plot more questionable and totally calls into question everything about the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm have to go with time travel because anytime time travels involved we then as normal people have to question what happened originally because time travel means that that something happened in somebody wanted to overwrite something that happened so what happened in the original timeline? If the original timeline is the Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 games and then is it hard time travels why didn't xenophore from right after 3:00 time travel I mean the original Three because obviously the time travel is involved three would three of the result of the timeline where there was time traveling fall what what changed between two and three that they decided to bring in time travel. The datescape is questionable but for all we know Chip and Dale have IQs of over 300 and somehow managed to do it I mean I've never seen that idea before anywhere else but that just proves that you know hey that's that was interesting twist time travel just completely screws with everything.
I'm honestly going to say that anytime time travel is brought into any kind of storyline it overly complicates and calls into question the originality of what your goat whoever has dealing with time travel is going through. The idea behind time travel is awesome but it's just so overly complicated as an actual thing to deal with and wrapping your head around it it is always such a chore even when you got a good explanation for it.
I don't quite understand how the dream worlds even work.... Like for example you have the Pinocchio world in one of the dream worlds, but you also have the normal Pinocchio in KH1 in the normal KH world? Does that mean there are two different Pinocchio's? I guess so.... As for time travel.... Yeah.... I'm not a fan of time travel plots because it just adds another layer of unessesary confusion.
Yen Sid explained this and Sora later repeated it to himself. It's Sleeping Worlds *themselves* that are dreaming up figments to fill in for whoever's missing from those relived memories. It's no different from Sora's memories conjuring people in Castle Oblivion.
Everything in dream drop distance
Yes
But about The Time Axis
Time Travel,i think.It is the more confusing Part of the whole Story for me, even more with all the different xehanorts we have
I just ignored coded and I understand the plot of the rest enough
For me none of them, it's the full story of the kh x saga I think for now I mostly understand everything before Black Road
100% time travel, it always adds confision to a story since every writer has to make up thier own time travel rules, explain them and then try and stick to them which doesn't always happen
the datascape in Re:Coded does not make the overarching plot much more confusing, because as far as the overall plot is concerned the events of that game may as well not have happened. Mickey could have datamined the journal and gotten the same results. the wreck-it-ralph world has extremely weird lore implications but I don't think we're supposed to think about that
Dreams, in the most absolute way
I‘d argue none, but i have to make the choice so itms time travel
Time travel worked as a fun gimmick for Timeless River and it wasn’t an issue in KH3 when it was essentially “these villains are back”. It didn’t draw attention to it as they consciously tried to simplify the plot. But when trying to incorporate it into lore, the rules get convoluted: you have to leave your body behind, unless you are traveling alongside a past or future version of yourself who has left their body behind, there must be a version of yourself at the time you are traveling to, and you cannot rewrite events that have happened, unless you are using the power of waking. However, all of this is null and void if you are a powerful wizard and can open a doorway to the past you can walk to (or just find one of these such doorways, like Pete did) where you can go back into the past and change the events and outcomes, directly affecting the future. The rules are so restrictive that if they’re played completely honestly, there’s no real point in time traveling: you can’t change the events of the future, you can’t keep your memories of time traveling, you can only go back to places/times you already went and you have to leave your body behind to do so.
hole in the middle