Heads up! This opinion piece contains spoilers for ‘Kingdom Hearts’. Tread carefully!
Recently, I was reminded again, if not the first time, about the existence of ‘Kingdom Hearts IV’, rung in the better parts of our public Discord server by a good mate. Announced some years back featuring an uncanny Sora, a long-lost character by the name of Strelitzia, and a hyper-realistic looking Shibuya, and lots of Heartless—creatures that are borne from “the darkness of hearts”. I remember seeing that trailer and not even letting out a harumph, much less any sort of excitement. Which is a little bewildering to me even today, seeing as I’ve always loved Kingdom Hearts. It is a shounen story at heart, light versus darkness, Final-friggin’-Fantasy characters meshed in with some originals and various Disney cast members! I don’t think I need to explain why it’s such an appealing property that the Mouse House keeps funded and around especially since they’ve long-since dissolved Buena Vista Games all those years back (and I’m still a bit hurt about this one).
But no, we are here at number four and I… Couldn’t care less. What was once a selection of quality game titles slowly but surely wore my patience out over the two decades plus it took to end a single story arch, stretched out by a number of middling to completely pointless titles across a multitude of handhelds, mobile devices, and home consoles. And no, putting all those Kingdom Hearts games into a few collections isn’t going to do much of anything when it’s the very games within that are as bland as they could be.
Pardon my French, but this is going to be a fairly short rant about my mixed feelings with the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Bottled up feelings I’ve confided to close friends and at blank walls when I’m home alone (because what else am I supposed to do, something remotely productive?), it’s all going to be plopped onto this page for your reading pleasure—because you, too, have nothing better to do.
For the uninitiated, Kingdom Hearts is primarily an action role-playing games series that started all the way on the PlayStation 2. A chance meeting between SquareSoft and Disney executives resulted in an absolutely cool adventure game where players take on the role of a young boy named Sora as he battles the forces of darkness across Disney worlds and those that belong to his. You’d also see Cloud, Sephiroth, Aerith, and a selection of Final Fantasy characters living out their lives and doing their part to combat the evil that attempts to take over their worlds.
If that doesn’t sound cool to you, you’re either getting in on your years or too young and have since eyebrow-raising collaborations like ‘Genshin Impact’ and ‘Among Us’ come to life. SquareSoft was shipping some incredible titles up to this point (games, not movies) and while Disney was shipping games of their own with some excellent titles like ‘Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire’, a collaboration between Final Fantasy and Disney characters was surely going to be a treat—and that it was! Kingdom Hearts for the PlayStation 2 took many films from the golden era of Disney films and adapted them into their own original stories for Sora and the gang. Things got hectic, clumsy, and downright weird, but that was the appeal and it was a hit with critics and players alike.
From then on two sequels were spawned: one on the Gameboy Advance and one for the PlayStation 2. The former was dubbed “Chain of Memories” and acted as a bridge between the first game and the sequel on the PS2, ‘Kingdom Hearts II’. While it wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary to own a GBA and a PS2 at the time, it was unlikely for a lot of people to realise that such a bridge game did exist (and is part of the problem I have had with this series, but we’ll get there) and if you were to just jump into the second game, the beginning and some later facts would very likely confuse some players.
Kingdom Hearts 2 is a lovely title. It’s relative short for most Japanese role-playing games, clocking in at about 25 hours of mainline play which helps with replayability. And while some aspects of the original Kingdom Hearts saw a reduction (such as the more exploration-focused style progression and platforming) what was put in its stead was a fun combat system that was fast-paced and featured intense fights. If you were in Japan, a “Final Mix” version would later launch that added additional content and even more fights that tested your wits and knowledge of the combat mechanics.
If this sounds great to you, by all means, go play the games! The first Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 collection or whatever it’s called is available on every device under the sun. Play the first, play Chain of Memories, move over to the second, and then feel free to stop playing.
Kingdom Hearts is the only series I think can say that you had to have been there for the emotional story scenes to have any impact on you. A lot of people, namely old farts, will primarily complain that Kingdom Hearts’ story is nonsense and that the dialogue is a clumsy mess. And look, they’re not exactly wrong: Kingdom Hearts has a presentation problem. Its story themes are not difficult to grasp, but the series has placed itself in an awkward position where the side games exist for brief moments of exposition and bridging the former titles to the next one while the mainline games simply exist to ride the coattails of what was set up prior. Funny enough, it almost reminds me of ‘Halo’ where 2 and 3 really don’t make too much sense unless you’ve read the books—but the difference here is that those games are fun and the books do a far better job of introducing themes, characters, and most importantly making said characters bleeding relevant.
Dialogue delivery is an issue for this series as well and I can’t really deny it. Actors talk to each other in cryptic or stilted sentences that either make no sense or convey the intended message awkwardly. The cast does their best to deliver these lines (Mickey Mouse in particular, bless his actors’ hearts) but there’s only so much you can do with an awkward script and dissecting what’s wrong with how these games are written is an article in of itself. But I want to point out that this isn’t a Japanese script to English localisation issue, because truth be told the dialogue comes off just as awkward to me in the games’ Japanese dubbing as it does in English.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but what you get when you combine the majority of those issues above is a series that leaves a lasting impact to its super fans who have followed the games and manga for years but utterly confuse anyone else jumping into the games because they thought Donald and Goofy beating up some baddies looks kind of neat. Time travel, hearts within hearts, Nobodies, Heartless, this guy is actually this guy who is half this guy, it goes on and on. These are all dumped onto players only through dialogue delivery and very rarely through environmental storytelling. The few scenes that do utilise the latter device are great (i.e. the Keyblade Graveyard) but are otherwise few and far between.
Now I have no qualms with the way the game delivers dialogue. Gosh, I quite love it. It’s part of the series’ charm! But what I can’t excuse is the latter, or rather how poorly every game past the second Kingdom Hearts delivers story—or to be more precise: stops delivering its story all together. Let me explain:
At some point past Kingdom Hearts II, the way SQUARE ENIX began building Kingdom Hearts games fundamentally changed. You’ll notice this slowly as you wade past 358/2 Days and particularly Birth By Sleep; by the latter title, Kingdom Hearts began to overtly focus on its Disney worlds instead of its original story and worse yet, it was simply retelling the vast majority of the Disney works it was adapting rather than weaving the Kingdom Hearts cast into the narrative. Essentially, you were spending 20 hours in Disney worlds, with brief bits of Kingdom Hearts story in-between, and then suddenly the finale would smack you in the face. People argue that the games’ stories are nonsense because of its writing, I’d argue they’re nonsense because Sora and company simply began playing third-wheel and then their business would suddenly have to be dealt with with very little fanfare.
It makes for very awkward storytelling and the irony here is that the fanfare would only build up for a player if, and only if, they had been patiently waiting for each dust speck of story. If you’re a newcomer and you marathon the games all at once, you’ll inevitably tune out all the story moments that would hit hard otherwise (namely the final scene of 358/2 Days, which still hides itself in my heart…).
And look, even if you did ignore the story and simply focused on the gameplay, most of the side games are awful. Birth By Sleep is a slog, Dream Drop Distance is repetitive, and Melody of Memories is by far the worst rhythm game I’ve ever suffered through. Chain of Memories is good, though, so do play that! Both the 3D version in the collection and the GBA original are good fun.
And now we’ve arrived at Kingdom Hearts III. With such a shaky foundation, there was only one way this game was going to go. I knew ahead of time that they were going to follow the same format of progression they’d been doing for the last 10 years or so, but I was this deep in anyway—I might as well see things to the end.
Kingdom Hearts III had some really cool moments. Seeing a fraction of Twilight Town in HD was amazing, the Monsters Inc. world was awesome, we got to witness Sora actually punch something without his keyblade for the first time! Other parts were horrendous, like the Frozen world which was a beat-by-beat play of the awful film that Disney shat out to box office success somehow (like Avatar, but at least Frozen has princesses to sell). It was obvious which scripts series director and producer Tetsuya Nomura and company were allowed to weave original stories in and somehow the Frozen team thought their awful sludge to be above what Kingdom Hearts sells. Ha!
But above all this, I immediately noticed what was wrong. I was bouncing between Disney worlds aimlessly while the real Kingdom Hearts story “unfolded” in the background. By the time I finished paying my blood tax to the Mouse, there were only a few hours left to wrap up the series’ first major narrative arc. Consider the following: imagine setting up a cacophony of story plot points, characters, organisations, entire backdrops to why all this was happening across multiple games and an absolutely awful mobile game—and then trying to tie up all these loose ends in 5 hours.
By every stretch of the means, Kingdom Hearts III was a massive disappointment for me. Fights set up years prior were an absolute cakewalk, character who should have pulled their weight absolutely jobbed, and the absolute worst way to absolve a villain who had done nothing but cause immense pain to millions of people for his nonsensical pursuits: this is Kingdom Hearts III. A waste of time and money for anything more than spectacle and the rather fun DLC fights (you need to fork over half the games MSRP for) that can be had once you’ve cleared the pitiful main story.
I hold no excitement for Kingdom Hearts IV. I don’t care for it and I sadly can’t care for it despite how much I’ve enjoyed the games’ setting, themes, and gameplay in the past. To my fellow XboxEra community member CryOn: look mate, Silksong is finally out and it seems to be all that you asked for. Don’t bother keeping your hopes up for another game that will come out when the other half of the series’ Disney cast dies out. Live free, and run away from all things Kingdom Hearts. And to you, my amazing reader, pretend nothing exists beyond Kingdom Hearts II and you’ll find yourself saving plenty of time.
I myself should learn about not pining for video games but alas, I am waiting for a gacha game. Anyone want to join me in clown make up and shoes for Whenfield? ∎
