Interactive Friction (and Guest) - Detroit: Become Human (All 5 Parts)

Over the course of almost 2 months, my Interactive Friction co-host Sam, and Chris, the other half of the Marvelous Duo, came together to subject ourselves to David Cage's latest disaster-piece: Detroit: Become Human.

Why did we do this? Because David Cage's game have always proven to be a strong source of unintentional comedy. The plot's are usually so badly written that they are practically incoherent, with characters that act like they're from an alien planet.

That's certainly present in Detroit: Become Human, but it is a lot worse in so many ways.

Here are the streams, all 5 of them. If you wish to view content like this as it's recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

Interactive Friction Presents: A Way Out - Part 3 (Twitch VOD)

Welcome to the final part of Interactive Friction plays A Way Out. This is the final part of our playthrough of the game, and one of the better parts of the game. Or at least, one of the most interesting parts of it.

If you want to watch content like this as it is recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

Interactive Friction Presents: A Way Out - Part 2 (Twitch VOD)

Interactive Friction returns with the second part of our three part series on A Way Out.

We successfully found A Way Out of jail. And now, we're in another predicament. With Harvey and the police after us, we need to evade our pursuers and get revenge. Will we find A Way Out of this? Or will the Oscars defeat us once and for all?

If you wish to see content like this recorded live, be sure to tune in to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

Interactive Friction Presents: A Way Out - Part 1 (Twitch VOD)

Welcome to a new chapter in Interactive Friction. Sam and I are glad to get back to playing games, but the sad fact is neither one of us has enough time to produce the highly edited content you guys are used to from us. For that reason, we've decided to transition to the more accessible territory of streaming, much like my Dishonored LP.

To that end, here is the first of our VODs from our 3 sessions on A Way Out. If you want to see more content like this live, as it happens, by sure to subscribe to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

Apologies for Sam's audio early on. After about 10 minutes, he eventually recognizes and fixes the problem.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - X: Back Cover - Episode 2 - So Whatever

At last, the Kingdom Hearts Primer comes to a close.



If you're curious about Sam's thoughts on Persona 3 and it's extra epilogue, The Answer, you can check out his post on them here.

Remember, as of the time of this post, the reveals regarding Riku's new outfit, Vanitas, and the new footage from the Monster's Inc world had not happened. Considering how much time Sam and I have spent on this project, we were getting exhausted by the hype train. I still stand by what I said, in that I need to see Kingdom Hearts 3 in my hands before I believe it's done, but you have to understand the context behind the statement.

This movie as a whole occupies a bizarre place. The fact that it's part of "Final Chapter Prologue" implies there is some relevance to Kingdom Hearts 3, but I just don't see it. Nothing here feels like it is of any consequence.

I'm left with a bizarre mixed of excitement at Kingdom Hearts 3, exhaustion from the Primer series, and confusion as to what Back Cover implies is in store for the franchise's future.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - X: Back Cover - Episode 1 - Bearly Deloved

We're so close to truly, honestly finished out this Primer series. Just one more episode after this one.



I don't actually have a whole lot to add here in the post-script. It's almost sad that Back Cover is the last thing we talk about in this project. Not much of note happens, and the whole film comes across as milquetoast.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage - Episode 4 - The Kingdom Hearts Hype Train

And here comes the finale of 0.2



At the time we recorded this video, the trailers that were release earlier this month had not yet come out. Nor was the announcement that the game's release date would be formally revealed at E3 this year.

As much as those reveals did a lot to warm my heart to the idea of Kingdom Hearts 3 again, I still stand by my earlier statements that Kingdom Hearts 3's hype train started to grow into a massive problem. Part of why the most recent reveals were so important was that they give off the impression that Kingdom Hearts 3 might actually be finished some time soon.

Sam and I also talked about the prospect of shorter, character-focused RPGs and how much we'd be willing to spend on them. I'd like to pose that question to you guys reading this as well:

• Would you be interested in a shorter, 4-6 hour RPG?
• How much would be willing to spend on it if you are?

Mostly, I want to know if you guys are as into that idea as Sam and I are.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage - Episode 3 - A Good Character Piece

Surprising everyone, we have a lot of good things to say about Kingdom Hearts in this episode.



At the end of this episode, we begin to talk about how A Fragmentary Passage is a solid, 2-4 character piece (that also shows off the technology that will be used in Kingdom Hearts 3). The fact that it is such a concise, yet mostly complete experience is a large part of what makes it so successful.

As much as I love RPGs, the commitment required to finish most of the games in that genre is a huge barrier, especially as I come into a part of my life where I generally don't have to worry about being able to afford games. Persona 5 was one of my favorite games last year, but it's not easy to recommend a 100+ hour game to somebody. And it's especially not easy to dedicate the time to it.

Though it's hardly a great example of the genre, stuff like this and Alpha Protocol shows that it is possible to make RPGs that players don't have to spent months of their life playing. Undertale also did that only a few year ago. I'd love to see more RPGs so this route, if only for the selfish reason that it slides into my schedule more effortlessly.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage - Episode 2 - Lost to Time

Settle in, ladies and gentleman, because things are getting self-referential and existential.



It's very ironic to talk about how people watch YouTube content podcast style when the footage for this "Let's Play" got corrupted.

It feels strange to talk about YouTube and how to work around it's many problems in the wake of all the recent controversies surrounding it. With the "adpocalypse", the rise of YouTube criticism in video games, and the rest of the "YouTube culture", it's a subject that probably won't go away anytime soon.

In a way, the whole reason I came up with the queue system in the first place was that the intended way to watch content on YouTube, to follow the recommended videos and keep watching through Autoplay, just didn't fit into my schedule. I found myself annoyed at all of the great content I wanted to watch and missed out on. Thus, the queue was formed.

I know it's weird, and I doubt many other people use systems like that, but it works for me.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage - Episode 1 - Pretty Dress Up

Remember when I said we were done with the Kingdom Hearts and considered it closed?

Well, I lied....



It's really painful to listen to how giddy we were to do a Let's Play... knowing that the footage corrupted and we ended up doing a sudo-podcast anyway. After the incident with Watch Dogs, and the corrupted recording of our first Kingdom Hearts 1 Primer, we swore off ever re-recording something again. We also decided that we wouldn't be able to recreate the magic that was this recording.

It's also nice to not be as critical about this game as we have been to other Kingdom Hearts games. Without spoiling the upcoming episodes too much, we had a great time with this recording. We had some criticisms to be sure, but this was largely 2 hours of praise.

Lastly, kudos to Sam for taking the footage from Gamer's Little Playground and meshing it with our audio to make a final piece that is still largely cohesive. This was quite an effort on his part, and I don't want it to be overlooked.

So yeah, you asked for it, and we'll deliver.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 10 - The God of Sora's Heart

At least, we have completed the primer series. We're done.



And that's that. Sam and I stand by what we said at the end this. Despite the many trials and tribulations to get this series to you guys, we are glad to have done it and hope it was as fun to watch as it was for us to record.

However, I think it's also worth going over some of the lessons we learned doing this series, so that the audience, should they choose to follow in our example and do long form video let's plays on games, can learn from our mistakes.

• Don't get too attached to your original plan and adjust to changing circumstances: When we originally conceived this idea, it was intended to be an easy to produce mini-project. Instead, it dominated our production for over a year. Realistically, after first recording of original Kingdom Hearts, we probably should've scaled back to do smaller, more focused retrospectives (either as a podcast or in smaller episodes where we just took chunks of footage as B-roll). Learn from our mistakes and don't be afraid to scale back when a project it bigger than you anticipated.

• Make sure the game/series you talk about is "Let's Playable": In hindsight, the fact that it never even occurred to us to play through Kingdom Hearts for the channel should have been our first hint we were taking the wrong approach for a long-form video series. Even doing cutscenes only, there were large chunks of the Primer series where we didn't have much to talk about. A lot of Let's Players refuse to play RPGs like Dragon Age because of the way they're paced is not conducive to keeping viewers entertained. Kingdom Hearts is in that vein, and we should have acknowledged that while we were planning the series.

• Pace yourselves: This is something I think Sam and I did fairly well. With any project, especially once this long, it is important to keep a steady, but workable pace. It's a marathon, not a sprint. When it gets finished is not as important as the fact that it did get finished. Since this is a passion project and not paid work, that's even more important. Passion projects live or die by how willing the project owners are willing to put in the work. If you burn yourself out, that dream project you've always wanted to complete will never get off the ground.

And give credit where credit is due. As the person who writes these articles, I have more "presence" than Sam does, but he's been the one diligently editing all of these videos together for your entertainment. A more even distribution of the workload, whenever we return from our long-deserved break, is a crucial element we'll need to work on going forward. I'm not as good an editor as Sam is, but I can do it myself (as seen in my Hitman LP) and it's not fair to him to have to do all of that.

Speaking of new video content, it may be quite some time before we get back into the swing of things. This was a tough project, and both Sam and I have jobs now. As a result, we need to have some serious talks before we can even think of continuing. Odds are we'll be back eventually, and I've been thinking about getting more heavily into writing again, but for now Interactive Friction will go silent.

Farewell for now, and I hope to see you all soon. Kingdom Hearts has been quite the ride.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 9 - Open Dark Surgery

Almost done. After this, just one more episode until we've completed the Kingdom Hearts Primer.



Let's begin my first establishing the timeline, as we know it:

• Master Xehanort, way back in Birth by Sleep, tried to create the keyblade by separating Ventus and his darkness and recombining them. Though he failed, he gained Terra's body as a new vessel to replace his old, frail body.
• In the original Kingdom Hearts, that new Xehanort (now Ansem) became a heartless and tried to use the 7 princesses of heart to open the door to Kingdom Hearts. He failed, and was destroyed.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, the nobody that Xehanort left behind formed an Organization with 12 other nobodies. This group has 2 objectives: To both gather enough hearts to create Kingdom Hearts, and to gather 13 vessels of darkness as a contingency. He also failed, and got destroyed.
• With both the heartless and nobody defeated, Xehanort was restored, and was free to take up the backup plans set up by his heartless and nobody. Gathering his past and future selves, along with the vessels he could gather, to form True Organization XIII.

Take another look at that last part, he planned so far ahead (presumably with future sight) that he had already prepared for everything to fall apart. He even built preparation for future contingencies into his contingencies.

Let's not forget that the significance of the X in each Organization members' names is also explained, along with the gold eyes and pointy ears. If I Nomura hadn't already revealed in an interview that he deliberately leaves elements of each plot vague so that he can fill in details at a later date, I might be impressed this level of forethought. As it stands, just thinking about how likely any one of these events is, let alone all of them occurring in this exact sequence, is mind-shattering.

This is the point where even fans of the franchise question the credulity of the story. Fortunately for Nomura, Kingdom Hearts love the series so much that we (Yes, I still count myself in this group) are still willing to put up with pretty mediocre writing so we can hang out with our "old friends": Sora, Riku, and Kairi.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 8 - Sora-Nort!

Welcome to (almost) the end of the game. Like most Kingdom Hearts finales, this is where all of the main plot twists and story beats start actually getting explained. Unlike other Kingdom Hearts finale, it's crazier than a Metal Gear story.



If you thought that Birth By Sleep did a terrible job with how it linked the stories of games that chronologically (by release date) came out before it, then wait until you see what they did in Dream Drop Distance. There's no other way to explain how what is about to unfold other then Xehanort being literally clairvoyant, or having a copy of Nomura's notes.

But we'll get more into that in the next episode. For now, the most interesting thing to note is, as we'll note in the next episode, Riku is the true protagonist of this game. Sora is actually the victim of a sinister plot that has been unfolding over the course of the whole game. Despite our constant complaining, the game does a good job foreshadowing that something bad is going on by continuously bringing Sora into contact with Xemnas and Young Xehanort.

Buckle up, we haven't even begun to jump down the rabbit hole.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 7 - Sucks To Be Terra

A land of musical, magical wonders... trapped by Kingdom Hearts.



Again, credit to Square Enix for being bold enough to tackle this kind of source material. That said, I don't have much to add here that I didn't say in the recording.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 6 - We Ran Out of Movies

"So that's where this episode came from," Brandon said to himself.



(Before you correct him, I have told Sam that there were actually four musketeers in the original novel. Don't worry about it.)

Though we groaned a lot during this episode, I think it is really cool that Nomura tied a lot of the older Disney movies into established Kingdom Hearts canon. Without calling attention to it, they also explain King Mickey's backstory, even if they use time travel in a dream to do it.

The plot device of the sleeping worlds, despite how silly it is, actually gave the writers an excellent excuse to work with previous Disney films. I appreciate the originality.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 5 - Don't Ask Questions

I completely forgot about this second trip to Traverse Town.



One thing I will actually praise Dream Drop Distance for, it's that it does a pretty good job at foreshadowing many of the twists and plot points that come up in the end game. It's nothing I can get into now, but I look forward to elaborating on it later.

And as for Maleficent... who cares? I don't. She stopped being relevant a long time ago.

Sam also brings up a great point that there is a degree of casual sexism in the game with regards to how it treats female characters. We went into it with Kairi way back in Kingdom Hearts 1, and Sam was right to call it out with Shiki in this game.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 4 - Feeling Sora

Oh great, just what this game needed: A shoddy tie-in to a movie that was "coming soon" when the game came out.



In between when we recorded this episode and the time this episode is released, Joe Parlock from Let's Play Video Games wrote an article criticizing Disney for treating it's games like advertisements. He used Tron: Legacy's inclusion in Dream Drop Distance, and Pirates of the Caribbean in Kingdom Hearts 2, as examples for this, and he was right to do so.

For Port Royale, one could argue that there were interesting things Nomura could do with it that were new and exciting. Here, not only are we treading old ground by going back to Tron, but we're doing so in a way that raises far too many questions about how much any of it matters or even if could plausibly happen. On top of that, the source material isn't that great.

It has all the hallmarks of a shitty move tie-in, and it drags down the whole game as a result.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 3 - Don't Let's Play RPGs

In this episode, we had some plot occur for about 3 minutes, then the Disney worlds took over.



I don't really have anything to say about Pinocchio. It's just kinda there... like many other Disney worlds in this series.

That said, I really do enjoy that Riku, in particular, is getting to explore how his character has evolved since the first game. It was a good idea to contrast him with his "dark side" from back then to see how far he's come.

Now if only we could get some more time with the former-Nobodies.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 2 - Piledrive That Gypsy!

For something as decidedly family-friendly as Kingdom Hearts claims to be, The Hunchback for Notre Dame is such a strange choice.



For reference, this is the "Hellfire" song I mentioned during this episode when talking about how dark this story is.



First off, I have, since the time of the recording, been informed that "gypsy" is a racist slur. (The correct term being Romani.) Had I known that at the time, I would've pointed it out and the conversation that we had would've played out quite different. That said, it further underscores the point I was making in this episode.

Even in the lexicon of Disney movies, this isn't one of their more beloved works. Not to say that it's bad or that it doesn't have fans, but it never reached the kind of popularity that a lot of their movies from this time period did. That might explain why it's in a side game and not one of the bigger games in the Kingdom Hearts canon, but it's still such an odd choice when it's dark tone is combined with it's relative obscurity.

At least we get some good character moments with Sora and Riku out of it, even if I'm left disturbed by Frollo's Romani/Esmerelda obsession to this day.

Kingdom Hearts Primer - Dream Drop Distance - Episode 1 - This Game Gets Weird

At last, we are in the home stretch on the Kingdom Hearts Primer. This is the last sub-series in this major project that has taken Sam and I over a year and tons of our sanity. Finally, we will have recapped all the story you need to know for Kingdom Hearts 3.

After the long and grueling season on Re:Coded, we needed that break to get this started.



First off, the actual reason we had to wait is because when Sam went to edit the footage, Adobe Premier decided that he wasn't allowed to and crashed.

Second, I'm glad to know that Sam reads my articles like the one he mentioned where I talk about Neku and the story of The World Ends With You. I would appreciate it if you did too! (Side note: Man, I really need to get back to writing.)

As for any actual commentary on the story: Man, this Kingdom Hearts game is the most confusing of the bunch. Kingdom Hearts already has a massive problem where it was difficult to explain the story to someone who hasn't been playing the series. Dream Drop Distance adds parallel worlds, dreams, and time travel to the mix all in the introduction. There's no real way to get around how much bloat that adds.

I also feel really bad for all the people out there who saw the cast of The World Ends With You in this game and thought "I'm sure glad Square Enix didn't forget about this IP". Since DDD, there has been nothing done with those characters or that IP. It's such a shame. :(