Everything in Kingdom Hearts is about Sora.
I know it’s been a while, but do you remember that video game Kingdom Hearts? We played it on the PS2, and we had to buy another copy because the disc got scratched. There’s that guy with the spiky hair and the sword that’s a giant key. He meets all the Disney characters. He beats up the darkness monsters. There’s a bazillion of those games.
We had talked the other day about how people in charge of stories (not necessarily writers, but people in charge) just don’t seem to care about telling good stories anymore. And I told you that Kingdom Hearts was the reason for that.
And you absolutely did not believe me.
Mostly because you don’t remember Kingdom Hearts all that well, but still.
You have given a nerd a mission and just barely enough free time. So I will convince you.
The guy with the spiky hair is Sora. Again, he had the sword that’s a giant key. He lives on an island with his friends. Then, that island gets destroyed by darkness monsters. So he has to go meet all the Disney characters and find his friends again.
At first, we think Sora is the only one who can use the giant key sword in the whole universe. They call it the Keyblade. This makes Sora really cool because all the darkness monsters are coming after him particularly. But it also means he can protect entire worlds at a time from those monsters. That sounds like a good video game. Or as good a reason as any to hang out with Winnie the Pooh.
Sora is an easy character to like. He’s funny and sincere. He doesn’t take this plot too seriously most of the time. Other characters have secrets and agendas to manipulate each other. It gets complicated. Sora is not like that. He wants to hang out with his friends. He makes new friends. Cool.
But this is the kind of game that doesn’t let Sora stop making friends. He says cheesy things like “my friends are my power, and I’m theirs”. Except he means it. Like he means it so much, at one point his friends get attacked and he unlocks time travel to undo it.
He’s actually one of two characters like this —
Everything in Kingdom Hearts is about Sora.
These games have been going on for a decade of in-game time and twice as long in development. The plot feels super spread out when you take a look at the whole thing. It’s fair to say there are a lot of characters.
Good news is they’re all connected to each other.
Bad news is almost all the characters are either parts of Sora’s heart, his memories or have personally met Sora. Sora is not one part of a much larger setting. He’s a shonen protagonist, the most important person in the universe. And oh boy, does he get treated like it.
Let’s meet everybody
At the start of the first game, Sora hangs out with his friend Kairi and boyfriend Riku. Fans call the group of Sora, Riku and Kairi the “Destiny Islands Trio”, because that’s where they live. Riku is Sora’s rival. Remember that the island gets destroyed by darkness, but Riku is edgy and thinks that’s cool. As punishment for his edginess, he gets possessed by a monster. Sora helps him get better and in return, Riku does everything he can to help Sora in secret. Kairi is a character who is definitely on screen sometimes. By the time they reunite as a group again, they have grown strong enough to each use their own Keyblade.
Donald Duck and Goofy get involved in the plot because Mickey Mouse tells them to find someone who can use the Keyblade. They find Sora near the start of the first game. Their official reason for being here is over. The whole rest of the series is technically a side quest for them. We know this for sure because when you’re fighting a boss, Donald only occasionally looks up from playing on his Game Boy to heal you. After the first game, Sora, Donald and Goofy lose their memories and fall asleep for a year to get them back.
Then we meet Roxas, who can use the Keyblade and apparently helped the evil villains Organization XIII in the past. The simplest way to explain this is that Roxas is a copy of Sora’s body and soul, but he has his own identity. This has some lore implications. Don’t worry about it. Most of Roxas’s part of the plot happens during that year Sora is asleep. He gets brainwashed into thinking he was on summer vacation. He has to reunite with Sora and loses his identity as Sora regains his own memories. This is a known Sad Event. Fans tend to like Roxas.
We meet Axel. He’s friends with Roxas. Axel helps Sora and eventually comes back later to fight the bad guy at the very end. Because he’s friends with Roxas. Fans tend to really like Axel.
We meet Xion, who can also use the Keyblade, is also in the Organization and develops a friendship with Roxas and Axel. She is a replica, an extension of Sora’s memories like a Nobody but not exactly because the story is inconsistent. Fans call this group of Roxas, Axel and Xion “the Sea Salt Trio” because they eat sea salt ice cream together often. It’s cute. Roxas eventually has to destroy Xion, leaves the Organization and fights Axel. We know about this before we see it happen. It is dramatic irony, a known Sad Event.
We meet Ventus, a Keyblade wielder from a previous generation. He ends up in Sora’s heart. Again, lore implications. Don’t worry about the details. He and his friends Terra and Aqua have their own backstory that gets them involved in the plot. Fans call them the “Wayfinder Trio” because they all share tchotchkes called wayfinders. They all get separated by the big villain, Xehanort. It is dramatic irony, a known Sad Event. This is the first time we see Xehanort before he… splits himself into multiple other characters and time travels. This guy is the reason for a lot of the plot nonsense. Terra gets possessed by Xehanort. Riku and Mickey travel to this story’s equivalent of hell to find Aqua. (Sora shows there, too.) And Ventus is in a coma and only Sora can wake him up because they had interacted exactly once before.
Something has changed here.
Sora used to be special in the universe of Kingdom Hearts because he was the only one who could use the Keyblade. That is not true anymore. There are eight more characters (at least) who can use the Keyblade now. But fans like Sora. Sora is special. Something has to keep Sora involved in the story. Something has to be special about Sora. Or: everything in Kingdom Hearts is written to be about Sora.
When we meet Roxas, we learn that because he’s a copy of Sora’s body and soul, Roxas doesn’t have his own emotions. He can only vaguely remember having emotions and imitates them to manipulate people, just like the rest of Organization XIII. We eventually learn that’s not true. Roxas does have genuine emotions because not only is Sora still alive, but Ventus’s heart also has some amount of influence over Roxas, somehow. Because Ventus’s heart was in Sora’s heart. That’s why Roxas and Ventus look identical, too. The player has to understand this because it is the core relationship between Sora, Roxas, and Ventus. It is common for fans to resort to graphic design in an attempt to explain this. And when the characters in the first Organization XIII die, they come back as the split-up or possessed or time-traveling versions of Xehanort.
Everyone is connected: people, places, experiences. That should be a comforting idea. It should be soft sand on a warm beach. But it’s tied to the darkness, soon to be completely eclipsed.
If you’re getting the sense that there are a lot of small groups of characters that are connected more by relationships than real interactions, you’re right. This is a great way to structure a long story that covers so much material. But all of these characters have a stake in the final battle at the end, so they all show up together. This makes the repetitive structure of “Sora and his friends” more obvious. They’re not just symbolically repeated across generations anymore. They have to actually talk to each other.
And the story isn’t interested in that. The two major plot-driving worries of Kingdom Hearts 3 are that Sora hasn’t unlocked “the power of waking” and that not all of the heroes have shown up for the final battle yet. Kingdom Hearts 3 (17 years into the story) was the first time most of these characters met. They literally get text messages and Instagram posts about each other’s backstories before they go fight all the versions of Xehanort in the final battle.
For a story that seems so much about friendship, the characters don’t feel like they work together as a larger, unified team at all. Each of those trios had their own games on completely different consoles. We meet Sora on the PlayStation 2. He loses his memories on the GameBoy Advance. We meet Xion on the Nintendo DS. We meet Ventus on the PlayStation Portable. We find out Xehanort time traveled on the Nintendo 3DS. The final battle, Kingdom Hearts 3, is on the PlayStation 4.
All of these characters are extremely likable by design, and each has their own fans who appreciate them. A lot of the fanart about Kingdom Hearts focuses on the characters instead of exploring settings, revising plot points or other common purposes for fanart. The games are structured to encourage the player to care about one trio of characters at a time, instead of a larger overall setting. Some set pieces are iconic. The introduction of each game is a recap-style music video for nonbinary pop star Utada Hikaru. They’re especially effective for games like Kingdom Hearts 3, which assumes the player is already versed in the plot so far and further alienates the unversed.
There is no room for thematic interpretation or even guessing based on established rules, which, for reasons we will get to later, ended up being a core part of fandom. Everything has to have an explicit explanation in the text, even if those answers are not easily accessible. Again, this isn’t like an easter egg in a secret movie, although that happened, too. It’s “go buy another console to find out who these core characters are” inaccessible. In the early years of the fandom, it was reasonable to guess things, like that Roxas behaved differently because the characters in Organization XIII are basically ghosts but Sora is still alive, so the rules are a little different. But nope. It’s this other, more convoluted answer. Organization XIII actually did have hearts all along. The game just lies to you sometimes. Don’t worry about it.
Roxas is a copy of Sora’s body and soul. The games call this a creature called a “Nobody”. A player needs to understand what a Nobody is because Roxas is a Nobody, and Roxas is important to the story because Roxas is Sora’s Nobody. Remember, everything is about Sora.
This is why so many fans dedicate themselves to plot recaps. It’s difficult to know which parts of any particular game will have sudden ramifications two, three, or five games later. Fans had to find each other across consoles, especially online, just to figure out what all the puzzle pieces are. There is an entire economy around telling you what happens in this video game series. And this article is also a part of that.
Nobody expected this to be the fan experience of “Kingdom Hearts” when the first game was released. Not even the series creator.
Reinventing characters and their relationships over small parts of a larger story is not a bad storytelling tool, either. NieR: Automata strengthens the relationships between its android main characters by giving them permanent emotional damage, even when their physical damage is temporary. But that sense of connection is in direct service to the story’s themes and gameplay.
Sora makes dismissive jokes about how much he and the other Keyblade wielders have had to save the world. He doesn’t consider the in-universe historical implications of that. King Mickey never sees what Roxas looks like or puts together what that means about Ventus and Sora. King Mickey meets Ansem the Wise. Both of these characters have been in the Realm of Darkness for extended periods of time and can use dark portals to travel between worlds. Neither they nor Riku ever look for Aqua before Kingdom Hearts 3 because Aqua didn’t exist as a character yet.
The player has to know who all of these characters are because they show up for Kingdom Hearts 3. And the characters show up because the player knows who all of the characters are and expects them to show up. It’s that awful paradox of fanservice. The games weren’t separate games. They were all leading up to Kingdom Hearts 3. Definitely. I promise. Trust me, guys. Kingdom Hearts 3 is the biggest thing to happen to the fandom since Kingdom Hearts 2.
We’ll get to that.
The Sea Salt Trio and the Wayfinder Trio have compelling arcs that mirror Sora, Riku and Kairi. But they don’t get the same sort of agency as Sora. They get to wait.
The player and the characters know that Kingdom Hearts ends with saving Aqua and going to the Keyblade Graveyard. Sora spends most of Kingdom Hearts 3 not doing this. He’s on a mission to learn “the power of waking”.
Riku and Mickey go to the Realm of Darkness to save Aqua because they’re the characters most comfortable in that setting. But Sora has to show up out of nowhere and save them, too, after spending most of the game being told he can’t do that. And it turns out he already knows “the power of waking”. He could solve this problem the entire time. It is completely against Sora’s character to not charge headfirst into danger to help his friends. He is so straightforward that the plot itself has to stall him as long as possible. And then when he does use the power of waking, he immediately dies.
Then, in Melody of Memory, which is a celebration of renowned composer Yoko Shimomura framed around Kairi’s memories and making sense of the plot from her perspective, the final battle is mostly from the perspective of Sora. In Kairi’s game, you play the final battle, the climax, the most dramatic part of the story, as Sora. The game all about Kairi is dedicated to reviving Sora.
So, the story has so many characters and motivations and conflicts across decades of plot just to end with Sora as the only one who can fix everything. Characters have to put their arcs on pause until Sora shows up.
The Disney animated canon and the Final Fantasy series deliberately avoid this problem because they’re anthologies. The audience could have a pretty complete experience watching Big Hero 6 without watching Steamboat Willie for the Deep Michael Mouse Lore. There weren’t many roadblocks for an American kid whose first experience with Final Fantasy was the seventh game. The stories don’t interact with each other. That’s not an accident. That’s a fundamental design feature. That’s what makes experiences like Disneyland work. Visitors can hop from ride to ride, story to story, and are not made to feel like they have missed something necessary to the park itself.
Kingdom Hearts doesn’t do this. Everything is about Sora. Everything ties back into the main story somehow. Those games that were largely meant to tide players over between home console releases are not filler. They are not optional. Kingdom Hearts 3 assumes you know who all of these characters are. It definitely assumes you know who Ephemer is. And, oh boy, that is its own rabbit hole.
The series trucks along. It expects you to keep up across decades and consoles. Keep up with this much story happening. Keep up with all of it being important somehow. One of the main things players know about Kingdom Hearts is this problem. That is not a good thing.
And just when it seems like there are actual stakes and Sora has been removed from reality, Re:Mind and Melody of Memory fix everything. Sora has saved his entire reality and Kairi’s memories. We don’t know if there’s a limit to what he can do. The universe is his plaything.
Kingdom Hearts isn’t willing to embrace being a collection of fairy tales, even though that is most of the content of the games. Sora travels to Disney worlds on the way to his other goals throughout each game. The Disney worlds often receive criticism for this, that they feel empty or boring, with no connection to Sora’s main goals in any given game. And even the newer games don’t fix this. All of it has to be important, or else, realm of light forbid, maybe most of it isn’t important.
Hayley Joel Osment, Sora’s English voice actor, describes Sora in a GQ interview about Kingdom Hearts 3. “[The story] has the potential to become confusing, but we always know where we are. And luckily, Sora, his value system is pretty consistent throughout, so he leaves the villainy and doubt to other characters.” That’s the English voice actor for Sora admitting that Sora doesn’t change much.
Whatever was special about this character was repeated four or five more times, each with their own compelling conflicts. Everyone else survived. Sora was lost along the way. Sora has to be the hero. Forever. He can’t change.
Everything in Kingdom Hearts is about Sora while pretending it’s not.
