Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep

Birth by Sleep, originally released for the PSP, is a great prequel that succeeds in expanding the Kingdom Hearts’ universe and lore, even if it never quite justifies the existence of its three main stories, which encourage the player to basically play the same game three times even though it does not always reward them for the commitment.

The story follows the separated journeys of three friends, starting on the eve of an important exam. It’s night-time and the young Ventus is training with his childhood friends Terra and Aqua, who will need to prove they can become Keyblade Masters the following day. Before each one goes to bed, Aqua gives them pendants that symbolize the unbreakable bond between them – and they will need them, as, in true Kingdom Hearts fashion, events will make them thread different paths and be kept apart for most of the time. Kingdom Hearts was always about, among many other things, the bonds of friendship and how time can work against them: childhood friends can easily fade into sweet memories as people grow up and each treads their own path – sometimes meeting each other again only at opposite ends of moral and political battlegrounds.

After a brief introduction, the player has the choice of following their separate stories, with the promise that seeing them all is vital if one wants to completely understand all the events. Terra’s story, however, is by far the superior of the three and the most important one from a thematic standpoint.

Terra is a conflicted boy. His master, Eraqus, claims there is darkness inside him and calls on the boy’s obsession with power, with winning and proving that he’s the best among his friends, but Eraqus doesn’t offer solutions, only reprimands. Terra may be kind and loyal to Ventus e Aqua but, at the same time, he’s also the kind of person that agrees with Maleficent when she calls the creatures he just killed “base” and insignificant. For inside him hatred and rage breed, born from the fear of being weak and impotent. The problem is that Eraqus’ remarks only make the matters worse for the boy: since it is Terra’s insecurity that allows darkness to grow inside him, being called down by his master only aggravates the situation. Lost amidst his conflicted feelings, Terra, then, becomes easy prey for the series’ villain, Xehanort, who immediately channels his inner Palpatine to tell Terra that he must embrace his dark side. Xehanort tells the boy that he cannot escape what he is, defending that “Darkness cannot be destroyed. It can only be channeled.”

The ideology of Terra’s master doesn’t help his pupil at all, because Eraqus’ binary view of the world, also shared by Aqua, only serves to condemn the boy: for them, there is only light and darkness; there is only good people and bad people. Therefore, when he sees the darkness in Terra – and also in Ventus – he gets scared, much like Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. And, much like Luke in The Last Jedi – and it’s fitting that both characters are played by Mark Hammil – Eraqus makes a grave mistake that ends up pushing Terra and Ventus further apart from him, making them easy targets for Xehanort.

Terra and Ventus have the most interesting stories in the game, precisely because of their conflicts and their attraction and connection with the dark side – with anger, frustration, and doubt. Terra, when he travels to the Disney worlds in search of answers regarding his nature, often meets and is even enlisted by the villains of those worlds. When visiting Snow White’s kingdom, for instance, he assumes the role of the huntsman, hired by the Evil Queen to kill Snow White. Terra, then, struggles with his own nature, always being tempted to do a cruel thing by those around him. It’s his loyalty to his friends, the power of that bond, and his unwavering desire to remain good that keep holding him back from the darkness – although they may not be enough, as Xehanort, being no fool, plans to use those same things against the boy.

Ventus goes through a similar journey, but only by the end of his story. For the most part, he’s just going from place to place looking for Terra and fighting monsters: there’s no strong conflict in him. But a twist/revelation about him put his narrative back on track and thematically close to Terra’s.

Finally, we have Aqua, who has the least interesting story of them all. She is a great supporting character in Birth by Sleep, serving as a good counterpoint to Terra and Ventus’ struggle with darkness with her unshakeable altruism: her quest is to save both of her friends, being a bastion of light and a role model to them. However, the story doesn’t give her much to do when it decides to focus on her. She will often visit a random world in search of her friends, find out that she has arrived too late to help, remain for a while to assist those that live there, and finally depart to the next world, where everything will happen in the same way. There is no conflict in her, and the story doesn’t even question her righteousness – as it should have – leaving Aqua with nothing much to do.

As the three characters visit the same worlds – albeit in a slightly different order and focusing on different characters and locales inside that world – by the third time the player has to go through everything again boredom could very well have settled in – especially if the third time is with Aqua. The problem is a simple one: her story and most of Ventus’ don’t add much to the overall discussions in the grand narrative. Terra is the heart of the narrative, and Ventus’ ending share some characteristics, but Aqua is just there, and her story is just repetition. When the player completes the three journeys, though, she gets a final chance, with the epilogue and final ending focusing on her, but she still brings nothing new to the table.

Xehanort, on the other hand, is an interesting antagonist in Birth by Sleep. His goal may be eventually twisted by his greed, but, at first, it’s not completely villainous: whereas Eraqus thinks light must reign absolute, Xehanort appears to seek only balance. He is even capable of acts of kindness, as some of his reports – which serve as collectibles in the game – reveal: “The boy deserved a place to spend his final moments peacefully,” one of it says.

The game also succeeds in expanding the universe’s lore, introducing and expanding on events – like the Keyblade War – that help make the series’ central battle between light and darkness – compassion and hatred – an endless cycle of tragic decisions and stories. And it’s also worth mentioning that the narrative reinforces the series main motifs of light and darkness by finally making them less abstract: “What else is darkness but hate and rage,” Aqua explains to Terra at one point, for example.

On the gameplay department, Birth by Sleep remains an Action-RPG, and brings an interesting addition to the series core gameplay: now, abilities and spells can be fused together to create a new, more powerful one. This leads to an addictive sense of progression – similar to the Shin Megami Tensei games where you can fuse demons – as each battle earns experience points not only to the main character but also to their abilities, unlocking new things in a faster pace. Birth by Sleep also leans more heavily on its RPG elements than its predecessors, in the sense that having the right and more powerful abilities easily trumps being able to dodge and block at the right time.

Being a Kingdom Hearts game also means that Birth by Sleep – besides having an inscrutable title – also has its share of bizarre and unnecessary minigames. Here, there’s – of all things – a monopoly game, where the player can level up their abilities, a racing minigame, a minigame that is a mix of volleyball and soccer, and, of course, a rhythm minigame that makes that Ariel’s bit in Kingdom Heart 2 feel like it was wonderfully designed in comparison.

Birth by Sleep is a competent prequel that further complicates the series’ lore, but in a way that has thematic resonance. If only it had decided to focus on just one story, instead of three, and offered a more concise experience.

May 28, 2020.