Investigating an Old Kingdom Hearts 1 Myth

I heard that if you lose to him 99 times, he calls you a b*tch in Hollow Bastion. Can you test this pls xx

triggering riku's revenge value at the beginning of the game but he doesn't act on it until 15 hours later

Not a myth but something that I remember back in the day playing through the game for the first time. Got to the Secret Place on Destiny Islands to collect the Mushroom and my TV was to dark so when Ansem starting talking to Sora I couldn't see him. His voice literally came from the "darkness". It wasn't until much later when I found out that it was supposed to be Potato Sack Ansem. I feel my original encounter with him was much more intimidating haha.

I think there are two reasons this myth persisted long enough to end up on TV Tropes: -It's so time consuming to test that most people just aren't going to bother, they'll either believe it or they won't -It's genuinely a good idea. A narrative foil you have repeated encounters with taking you more seriously if you defeat them the last time you fought works so well on both a narrative and game design sense that it probably should be a standard video game trope at this point.

I had never heard this one but it would have been believable. Pokemon Yellow immediately pops to mind for me. Your starter in Yellow is always Pikachu and your rival starts with Eevee. Based on whether you win or lose to him in the first battle against him, and win lose or skip the second battle, his Eevee evolves into different forms. If you always lose it becomes a Vaporeon, much easier for your Pikachu to beat than either of the other two forms. So this kind of adaptive difficulty was definitely a thing JRPG makers were doing at the time.

I love how the one in-game myth KH has is just "Riku get more angy at hollow bastion if u beat him"

No bro it's totally real you just didn't do it right. It only works in the original PS2 JP KH1 because they removed it in US and Final Mix, and it only works if Riku gets the killing hit on Parasite Cage unless you picked up the cloth before the log in which case he needs the second to last hit. If you do that it changes his coding to summon Kurt Zisa in the entrance hall!!

It all makes sense now. That’s why Sora says, “It’s Riku. They put bugs in him!” The bugs being his stronger form, naturally.

The fact that you played the entire game twice to make sure a random obviously fake myth was actually fake is so insane that I respect it.

I remember being a kid and being stuck on Riku-Ansem for literal days. I always had my older brother do the really tough fights and he was the only one who could beat him at the time. During out childhood, we never beat Kingdom Hearts. He was stuck on the second Ansem fight at the end of the game and both of us tried so hard but were never able to do it. I actually didn't beat KH1 for the first time until I was like 14 or 15 and I remember it being such a special moment because it felt like I finally laid to rest an important piece of my childhood.

This reminds me of Pokémon Yellow where the first two fights determine what your rival evolves their Eevee into. I believe if you beat him both in the lab and route 22, they get a Jolteon. If you win one/lose one, they get Flareon. If you lose both, they get Vaporeon. Seems like someone played that and just thought that could work in other game

The big KH myth when I was in middle school was that you could obtain Mickey’s Keyblade at the end of the game. I don’t remember if it was like you had to do something but I had the strategy guide at the time and I looked at the kid that told me that like “but.. but the strategy guide doesn’t say that.. 🥺”

I feel for a joke post on CheatsGuru talking about how you could get Cloud in your party by giving the Male NPC outside the Accessory Shop in Traverse Town the Metal Chocobo Keyblade. You had to do it before Hollow Bastion, come back before the second visit, talk to him again he'd ask "How's my Chocobo doing?", then Cloud would appear in Olympus and you could ask him to join you. Learning you could get Cloud as a party member in Coded was a wild experience after learning I couldn't do it in KH1.

Not Regular Pat testing a 2000s era myth of a 2002 game on a 2010s era remake that had to be recoded (pun intended) since they lost the original source code.

But what people don't know is that Xemnas watches you on the giant metal heart on the cross in the middle when you take the big lift across the castle in Hollow Bastion in Final Mix ;)

Ah man. Loved the internet infancy days when so much theories like this popped up for games. I recall my cousin telling me if I answered a question wrong in FF7 you’d be dropped to the shinra building where your party would be massacred. Or that if you spoke to a random slum guy he’d battle you and one hit you. I believed both. Man I was such a gullible dipshit.

As someone who absolutely adores KH1, your content always warms my heart.

Whenever I replay KH1 and I get tired of beating my friends with a stick, I move onto the race against Riku and suggest the name Highwind for the raft because it is always amusing to me to see Sora get mad that the raft got the name he wanted.

Never heard about this one but it sounded believable because otherwise the score system on the island is literally pointless. Wish it was true just because hidden mechanics are interesting sorta like the anti form points that are never explicitly stated in the game.

Can you debunk more KH myths like this? This was really cool!