I was wrong, the """post-game""" after beating Shadar was approximately 4 hours long, consisting of about 10 minutes of essentially 3 new bosses, and then 3 hours and 30 minutes of 1 extremely long, tedious, completely symmetrical dungeon, and then the final final boss.
Now i'm in the actual postgame and I have no clue what awaits me.
Although... I'm honestly pretty disappointed with this ending. Over the course of the game the cutscenes with the White Witch and her council were some of the highlights of the story, the way she and her council interacted and schemed made them all very interesting characters.
But then, as soon as you beat Shadar, the game's plot moves at breakneck speeds. IMMEDIATELY, she essentially sends the world into an apocalypse with magic that turns people into basically zombies, but that magic is subsequently easily reversed before anyone knows what the fuck it is. This is the 10 minutes of 3 boss battles i mentioned.
Right after that, it's off to her castle to fight her.
And here's where the game really starts to fall apart.
The White Witch's castle is nearly 4 grueling hours (if you try to actually collect everything like i do, if you don't its probably 2:30 to 3) of exploring this massive symmetrical castle (it's essentially just a bunch of hallways, not rooms).
There's one interesting boss fight near the middle with one of the council members and then after that you get to the throne room, and surprise! none of the council is real.
You fight her, she becomes a monster in phase 2, and then becomes good again because Oliver said some things about hearts and feelings and kingdom hearts and then, surprise! the council is real now because her magic was so powerful that it became real.
Thats not a bad twist, but it just is so rapidfire that it is just confusing.
Side note: that final boss fight with the council is ridiculous. It's the 2nd boss in the entire game with minions, so naturally it becomes way harder. Annoyingly, it has an attack which i swear is nigh impossible to dodge for some reason, and another attack which seemingly does nothing, except it actually debuffs all your stats, which is fine, except it happened to me like 6 times before I actually noticed because its very hard to see what status effects you have.
Anyway you beat them and the game ends.
and then after the credits Oliver rides down into Motorville on a broom, even though magic brooms were never established as an ability he had, but who cares!
side-tangent, they just kinda drop on you that like half the kingdoms have an airforce?
I at least understand Hamelin, they're all about mechanical stuff, and it had been mentioned before that Xanadu, before it was destroyed had a massive airforce, the remnants of which became the sky pirates, but Al Mamoon? why do they have an airforce? why does Ding Dong Dell NOT have one? who cares!
Overall some of these complaints go for the entire game, the plot seems to move at breakneck speeds quite a lot, leaving very little time for character development or emotional moments to actually work well.
I decided to actually look into the development of the game a bit just to see if i could figure out why it seems to have so many weird issues, and I think the answer lies in the fact that both this and the DS version were developed simultaneously, but had different staff and the only connecting tissue was the general story, and the PS3 version released roughly 11 months afterward. Despite this they decided to add a """postgame""" to this version which is 4 hours long? why not just have the same story for each? but thats confusing too, because up until the """postgame""" the exclusive stuff (AKA, everything with the White Witch and her council) is fine, it's great actually!
Its worth noting that as of 2020, the developers, LEVEL-5, have only 300 employees, but released up to 5 games a YEAR until 2019. From what I can tell, the main writer for both versions of the game was the same, but he's also the CEO and main writer of basically all their games. thats spreading yourself pretty damn thin for any part of game development, especially writing.
I can't help but feel like the White Witch was a last minute addition, because the last Ghibli animated cutscene was after you beat Shadar. I feel like maybe they said "We need a reason for people who bought the DS version to buy this one, how about we add just a tiny bit of extra plot", even though they had already finished their work with Ghibli. Which is completely and utterly stupid. Why would you add the big finale of your game AFTER you stop working with them??? If they wanted to add more stuff, they should've just added more character building and story inbetween already existing stuff, since that wouldn't have warranted a long Ghibli animated cutscene anyway. On top of that, I highly doubt ANYONE would buy the PS3 version of the game after playing the DS version simply because it had a bit more story. If anything it'd be because it has different gameplay, and because it was a game they already enjoyed.
This game was good, but it could've been better, and I think a key part of doing that would've been scrapping the DS version entirely.
