Meredith Sweet

Not that long ago, I found myself faced with a rather perplexing dilemma: my Trinity Mark wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

See, I was very nearly done playing the original Kingdom Hearts, and before facing down the final boss, I opted to go on a finishing spree, getting all the Trinity Marks, the ultimate keyblade, every last dalmatian, and however many Gummi Ship plans I could. To that end, I’d made sure I was following my strategy guide almost religiously. The official BradyGames guide comes with a cheesy-but-somehow-fun giant pull-out map with stickers to put on for the dalmatian and Trinity Mark locations. And me having “stereotypical girl” moments, I grinned and happily started looking forward to scouring the game, looking for opportunities to put those stickers on my giant map.

I’d been putting these stickers on their appropriate spot whenever I found some dalmatians or a Trinity Mark, and I was down to just two marks left: a green one in Hollow Bastion’s library, and a blue one in Chamber 5 of Monstro. Only problem was, when I went to Hollow Bastion’s library, the elusive green mark was nowhere to be seen. I thought of a few possibilities:

1. My save file was special. In that “sparkly vampires think I smell yummy” way.
2. All the maps and guides online were wrong! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
3. The guides weren’t wrong; it was somewhere on the floor of the library. It just blended in with the lovely green tiling and I was just blind as a bat.
4. It was exactly where the guides and maps said, and it wasn’t blending in, either; a certain immovable NPC was standing right on top of it and I couldn’t get access to it.
5. Or, the worst of the worse: I’d actually gotten this Trinity Mark and neglected to stick my sticker, but put a sticker on the wrong Trinity Mark somewhere else (after all, Jiminy’s Journal indicated I was missing two marks, just like my sticker map did)!

If it was option 5, then I was royally screwed: I’d have to find every single blue and green Trinity Mark, just to see where the one of each color I’d missed was. Needless to say, that’s almost an irksome an endeavor as playing through a gauntlet of every awful mini-game to ever grace the gaming world. So, I turned to the bastion of all gamers: the Internet.

After porn, the Internet is also quite useful for things like game maps, walkthroughs, and other nifty guides. For many games, these “guides” also include something truly incredible: pictures. And yet, as I scoured the World Wide Web, from Google to Wikia, I could not find a single guide that contained screenshots of the exact locations of the Trinity Marks. See, for a completist like me, it’s not enough to say “the Trinity Mark is in Chamber 5 of Monstro.” That’s pretty much saying “Look for the blue spot on top of the blue with all the spots on it.” Yeah, real helpful.

Not even BradyGames’ all-knowing guide could help me; it, too, only gave the general location of the Trinity Marks, not anything close enough as to pinpoint the area by square foot or whatever. And, according to the Internet, the only Trinity Mark that could be “lost” once you played through that area the first time was one in Halloween Town. But I’d gotten that one: even Jiminy said so.

At present, I have yet to find my missing two Trinity Marks, even with the help of a fellow gamer who’s beaten the game before. I’m sorely tempted to start a new playthrough and, using my TV tuner, take screenshots of every location of every darn thing, because apparently no one’s thought of it before (shocking when you consider how huge the Internet is and how much gaming-related stuff you can find throughout it). After all, doesn’t the saying go “If you want something done [right], you’ve got to do it yourself?” It’s a heck of a project though, and I’ve already got a lot on my gamer plate besides just finishing a bunch of games. It’s also a bit obsessive, even more a completist like me.

But I don’t know how else to find my Trinity Marks, and I want to find them all, dagnabbit! It’s only two! Two small marks that will likely spawn a frustrating spree of start-pushing and mouse-clicking to see if I’m truly crazy or just a thorough gamer. I really hope it’s the latter.

I might want something done enough to do it myself, even if it means tacking on a good two days’ worth of gamplay hours to a new save file, but I’m also savvy enough to wonder about taking on a project so large unless it could help others somehow. After all, Kingdom Hearts isn’t exactly a new title, and it’s been pretty fairly dissected by gamers since its release. If gamers haven’t made a screencap gallery of the Trinity Mark locations, then having a general gist of the locations (and not any footnotes regarding possible changes in those location later on in the game) is probably enough, right? Why put something out there if no one’s going to see it or use it?

Or maybe it really is out there…somewhere, and it’s just too big an Internet and I’m too small a gamer. Time and Google will tell. But eventually I’ll get my marks!