Jim

What? I don't- wait... what even- I don't understand. Why? How? Just... I'm seeing so many sites reporting that and I'm so confused right now. Why would they do that? What does that mean? Just... That's so weird.

That HUD has me really curious about the gameplay. The ATB-ish bar seems to fill up when they attack, or something to that effect. And the limit bar is still there. On top of that, the entire HUD strikes me as exactly what the game would theoretically look like if it *did* have the exact same battle system as the original. I'm just kinda wondering if this is actually as different as everyone's making it seem.

I'm game

I've seen this video countless times now, but it still makes me laugh Also is it bad that I knew exactly what this was gonna be just by reading the title? (EDIT: or the previous title anyway)

You forgot "Tactical Espionage Action"

u wot m9

Got this from the newly updated FFXV website, and it's 10x more interesting than that new trailer. "In a matter of days, the Kingdom of Lucis is to sign an armistice, ending a long and bitter conflict with Niflheim. Ahead of the ceremony, Prince Noctis, heir to the Lucian throne, sets forth from his homeland to formalize the union of states through his marriage to the Lady Lunafreya of the imperial province of Tenebrae, The offer of peace, however, is no more than a ruse to lower the Lucian shield, and the imperial army takes the crown city and its sacred crystal in one fell swoop. En route to his destination, Noctis is shocked to learn that he, his father the king, and his betrothed are believed dead. Overnight, the dream of peace has faded into a distant memory. His world crumbling around him, Noctis has naught but his resolve and his loyal companions to see him through the trials to come." Hm, so a political wedding that's actually a ruse to completely destroy the opposing forces? That sounds familiar...

gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8

Toriyama needs to get freaking fired from Square Enix. He does nothing but run his own ideas into the ground. I hope his most likely crappy next project becomes vaporware to make room for more projects from directors with actual talent like Tabata, who actually care about making a good game. He gives us his "raituningu," a character that he's so freaking proud of THAT HE DIDN'T EVEN DESIGN, gives her ok-game-with-some-redeeming-elements a sequel that nobody wanted but with an actual good villain that someone else probably wrote to give his stupid waifu something else to do in the plot, AND THEN COMPLETELY ABANDONS THAT AMAZING VILLAIN AND GIVES HIM ONLY 5 ************ING MINUTES OF SCREEN TIME IN THE FINAL GAME SO HE CAN SPEND THE WHOLE TIME ON LIGHTNING AND HER JIGGLE PHYSICS SO HE CAN PLAY THE GAME NAKED AND RUB LIGHTNING FIGURINES ON HIS SKIN IN THE MOONLIGHT YOU CAN EVEN SEE IT IN HIS INTERVIEWS, HE DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT HIS ACTUAL GAME MECHANICS AND JUST SITS THERE LIKE A FREAKING GOOBER WHILE SOMEONE ON HIS TEAM WITH ACTUAL TALENT TALKS ABOUT THE GAME THAT THEY'RE AT LEAST PUTTING SOME EFFORT INTO, WHILE HE TALKS ABOUT LIGHNTNINGINGNGGNG. JUST LOOK AT LIGHTNING RETURN'S SECRET ENDING. PEOPLE ON THE DEV TEAM WHO ACTUALLY GIVE A CRAP ABOUT THE STORY WANTED TO GIVE IT A GOOD RESOLUTION BY HAVING HER MEET WITH SAZH ON A TRAIN LIKE IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING OF XIII -1. BOOKENDS AND PARALLELISM LIKE THAT ARE GOOD STORYTELLING, BUT NOOO TORIYAMA WAS LIKE "nu it shud begin n end wiff mah waifu liiigghhhhttttnniiiiinggguuuuh [sic]" HE DID FINE WITH 10 BECAUSE HE HAD OTHER DIRECTORS WITH ACTUAL TALENT ON THE TEAM AND NOJIMA WRITING IT BUT HE WENT TO 10 - 2 AND THEN THAT FREAKING AUDIO DRAMA WHICH UNDOES EVERYTHING IN 10 SO HE CAN MAKE MORE GAMES WITH CHARACTERS HE ALREADY DROVE INTO THE GROUND. Long story short, Toriyama is easily the WORST director at Square Enix right now, and I don't want to see any more games from him. Notice how Square announced their big guns this year and they all look like they're actually gonna be good? Notice something in common with all of them? No? Well then let me tell you one reason why they all look so good:

Disney has confirmed via the D23 Expo website that Kingdom Hearts III will appear at D23 Expo 2015. The D23 Expo in America will take place in Anaheim, California. Kingdom Hearts will be in Hall D23 on Sunday, August 16 at 11 a.m. USA Pacific Daylight Time (USA PDT). With this event, Square Enix will bring special guests and surprises to Hall D23 with new information to be revealed about Kingdom Hearts III. If you're interested in D23 Expo 2015 tickets, you can read the details about ticket prices and more below. Now that Kingdom Hearts III is confirmed for D23 Expo in America, have your thoughts regarding Kingdom Hearts III's development changed? What, if anything, do you hope will be revealed at the event? Let us know in the comments below! Click here to view the article

I’m gonna try my hand at actual analysis here. Yeah, I had a joke analysis thread a while back, but there are some things in the trailer that I noticed that I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on yet, so I’m gonna put in my input/speculation here. I’m going to focus on gameplay here, since the whole symbolism of the chess board thing has been done by every youtuber and their mother. First off, I don’t think we should read very much into Sora having his old outfit in the first half. Everyone’s saying that Nomura just used old footage. I’m ready to believe this, but is there an actual interview where he said that? If someone could link me to it, that would be great. Because I haven’t seen any official statement from him about it besides “Sora will start the game with that outfit.” Second, I don’t see any reason to analyze the HUD. They’ve said before that it’s a work in progress, so for all we know, it may look completely different the next time we see this game. It literally looks like they just rearranged the KH2 HUD, and slapped on a command menu on the left. What I am hoping, though, is that the characters faces in the final version are mobile again. They were mobile…ish in the D23 trailer, but I’m hoping for more of a “Final Fantasy Versus XIII 2011 Trailer” type HUD where the characters faces actually correspond to what’s going on in battle. A HUD like that would have been out of place in an FF game, but it would fit well for KH. Also notice how when the first batch of heartless in the trailer show up, it initially seems like the different shots are taking place in the same battle, but you’ll notice (around the 0:32 mark) that Sora has the Olympus-type keyblade in one shot, but the blue starry one in the other. So unless you can switch your keyblades mid-battle (a la Final Fantasy 10), which would be awesome, these probably are from different battles. Why is this significant? I dunno. I just figured I’d point this out. Also what I’m noticing is a very unusual amount of variety in casting magic. Not just in the effects on the environment, but also in the way Sora casts it. In some shots, he is more or less staying in one place when he casts it, like when he first casts Aero. This one isn't really a shield, but it seems to have use as a sort of defensive "push away" kind of attack. In others, he seems to be simply… floating around. On top of this, the attack seems completely offensively based, having the wind spawn away from Sora instead of right around him. It almost makes me wonder if there’s gonna be an ability in this game to let you be mobile while casting magic, similar to the abilities of Wisdom, Master, and Final Form in KH2. Also, I wonder if the game will have multiple different effects for each spell that you can switch between. Say, blizzard could do what we saw in the trailer, or we can perhaps switch it to a form where it has a different effect on the environment. This seems to be the case for Aero, which, as mentioned, seems to have both offensive and more defense-based forms. I also want to put in my two cents about the “limit” that people are talking about at around 55 seconds in. I haven’t seen anyone bring this up yet, but I’m not entirely convinced that what we’re seeing here is actually a limit. I’m actually more inclined to believe that it’s a reaction command. I say this because we see the heartless do the tortoise formation, and try to ram the party, and what Sora, Dolan, and Gooby are doing seems to be a direct response to that. It’s as if they’re setting Gooby up so that his shield would push back that particular set of heartless, and their rush at the end is designed to break up the group formation. Notice how the stance of both parties in the picture are rather similar to each other, with both being in a "v formation" of sorts. I know Nomura said there would be no QTEs, but I don’t think this means the death of reaction commands. We could still have a button that does specific situational stuff, but not make it devolve into setting up a cutscene where we need to hit buttons to continue. I got nothing about the Rock Titan What stands out to me with the Keyblade transformations is that they seem to follow the same general pattern of Limit Breaks in 358/2 Days. Think about it: First we see Sora’s blue keyblade transform into guns, and he attacks with those. Then, they transform into a cannon, which could be the “finishing hit” of the limit like how each limit break in Days was a two-part deal. We see something similar with the Olympus one, but in that case, we don’t see what its first transformation is. If you notice how the camera cuts there, it’s obvious that the keyblade isn’t transforming directly into the chariot. Sora seems to turn it into something else first (although I have no clue whatsoever what that something might be), with the way he breaks up the keyblade and moves that sigil thing to his back. Unlike Days’ Limit Breaks, though, I don’t think these are limited to just two main sets of attacks. In the D23 trailer, we saw Sora attacking with the guns in a way that looks like the player was casting fire while having the guns equipped. It almost makes me think that the transformations operate sort-of similarly to the summons in KH2. For example, remember how Chicken Little would attack on his own, but you could do a special menu command for “FPS mode?” I’d imagine the guns would be a similar deal. Like, you would be able to do normal attacks and magic with the guns, but also go into “Third Person Shooter Mode” which would have a targeting reticule appear like in the trailer and put Sora into that position of rapid-firing wherever the player is aiming. And then to finish, he would transform them into the cannon, and you could do a couple final attacks with it. What would be neat in this case is if the magic spells have specific effects for if you cast them while using a transformation. We saw Sora casting a fire spell with the blasters at D23, and Blizzard(?) with them near the end of this trailer. This would be neat, considering each type of magic used with each transformation could have different effects. Imagine, for example, the Olympus keyblade transformation having an ability where your Thunder spell is much more powerful while that transformation is active. I also wanna say a couple things about the Flowmotion in the trailer. First off, I’m glad they went to a blue hue for it instead of pink. (also notice that if you watch the part of the video where the following picture takes place, Gooby's glitching around and stuff lol) Pink worked in the context of DDD, but it looks better as blue in my opinion. Next, his attack from the wall in Twilight Town seems significantly more brief than any of the flowmotion attacks in DDD. This is a very welcome change, in my opinion. Perhaps the Flowmotion attacks are more of combo starters in this game? Like, going from flowmotion into a quick flow attack, then continuing with a combo with that attack being the first hit. Also, I’m pretty sure the “blizzard rain” thing Sora did isn’t part of this particular attack. Notice how that one soldier gets hit by his first blizzard attack (seen in the above picture), then is still frozen when it shows him using flowmotion attacks on the Large Body (seen in the pic below)? I think what we saw there was a complete chain of flowmotion, with footage of more of his blaster attacks cut into the middle of the flowmotion footage for some reason. I would assume that spinning ice attack is one of the moves at your disposal when you have the gun transformation active, rather than one that activates during flowmotion. Anyhow, that’s all I have. What do you guys think of this analysis? I’d love to hear your opinions!

I thought he did great with his voice in the KH3 trailer. I see where he's coming from in that he doesn't understand why he would sound younger. Based on KH3D, I would think that version of him would sound older, if anything. Still, I liked the sound of his voice there better than in 3D (not that it was bad in 3D, I just prefer this one).

They would dress up as Nazis? No, because the swastika has an "X" in it and then Xehanort would be able to find them. Nice try bro.

When I was a kid, I had an irrational fear of being startled. If it was a heavy thunderstorm, I would try to stay in the basement. If it was a party and one room had a bunch of balloons in it, I'd try to get as far away from that room as possible before any of the balloons popped. I would even sit in movie theaters with my fingers jammed in my ears so that I wouldn't get jump-scared. Now here's the funny part: I've gotten over this fear almost entirely, with one exception: Balloons. I didn't even realize this until last year, when we went to a friends' dorm room and they had a bunch of balloons in their room, and I internally became panicky and automatically flinched when my buddy tried to hand me one. This was the first time I even had to deal with being in an enclosed space with balloons in years, if memory serves, so it was a bit of a shock to me when I realized I was still afraid of them. I can sit through horror movies, I can sleep through thunderstorms, but balloons freak me out. Long story short, I'm almost a twenty-one year old man, and I have a fear of balloons. How's that for a weird fear?