Kingdom Hearts Sucks (But it Doesn't Have To)

After a decade, two main games, and four spinoffs, Kingdom Hearts has solidified itself as an RPG juggernaut. A cross-platform, cross-universe, East meets West monster of a game. And after learning about Keyblades, princesses, and this Ansem guy, one thing has become abundantly clear:

Kingdom Hearts, as a story, totally sucks.

Not saying the games as a whole suck. In fact when it comes to pacing, battle systems, and core gameplay, pretty much everything except the platforming mechanics, Kingdom Hearts shines. But then you try and explain the story out loud and all that comes out is a garbled mess of emo kids and Orlando Bloom cameos.

But why is the marriage of spikey-haired heroes and whimsical talking animals a sad, loveless affair?

There are two inherent problems with the storytelling in Kingdom Hearts. The first is Disney.

Disney is very protective of its properties, and doesn't allow people to portray its characters in ways it deems out of character. It's why Epic Mickey had the evil choice parts taken out. It's why you'll never get a Disney-themed Super Smash Bros clone (even though that would be so awesome). And it's why the Kingdom Hearts writers had their hands tied when it came to portraying the worlds. The worlds in Kingdom Hearts have to match the tone of the films they represent, sometimes through a lighter, inconsequential plot, or by following the film exactly. You can see both at work in worlds like Atlantica, where dolphin merman Sora helps solve the issues of Hans Christian Anderson's misogynistic cautionary tale by… singing terrible songs about fins.



Such is the rub when one works with Disney. There are more clever ways to handle it, sure, but as gamers we can forgive the fact that the worlds are just retellings of films because that's essentially what they should be. The other problem is much more serious: everything outside of the Disney worlds is poorly written.

This is where Kingdom Hearts falls apart. Nomura and crew could have put anything in here, so the blame rests solely on them. After six games, the story of Kingdom Hearts is so muddled and confusing that it's hard to even remember what the point was. It's an increasingly unfortunate case with JRPGs that the story seems to just be a collection of dialogue that makes no damn sense. For example:


You're not saying anything. Conveying emotion (poorly by the way) is not the same as a plot. It's like Twilight for boys.


But worse than that, each new character gets somehow less relatable, more annoying, and further unable to hold an entire game. It's hard to imagine a less engaging main character than Roxas, and then Ventus came along in Birth By Sleep as his less likable doppelganger.