Why Fans Love Kingdom Hearts Despite Its Problems
The franchise’s narrative issues are infamous, but there’s an underlying and inescapable value at its heart
I love Kingdom Hearts. I’ve beaten every game multiple times, and I’ve 100% completed all of them except the two DS games and the mobile game, which, now that I think about it, might not be possible without going in debt. I have merch, I listen to the soundtracks, I love talking about it. But at the same time, it’s also pretty exhausting.
There is a lot of Kingdom Hearts out in the world. And even the most devout of fans of the franchise will admit that the series has a lot of problems. Particularly when it comes to its narrative.
But notice I said the word narrative. The running narrative of the franchise is needlessly complicated. The first game in the franchise told a pretty straight-forward story. It was very much like a fairy tale that can be described succinctly:
A boy, Sora, and two of his friends, Riku and Kairi, want to adventure away from their home. But, before they can their home gets destroyed and forces them apart from each other. The rest of the game is about the boy traveling through different worlds to find his friends. In the end, he finds them but at a cost, he is able to return one of them home but they are all still separated.
In the next game, Sora gets mind-wiped and put into a medically induced coma for a year by a blonde witch (that is the fusion of his and Kairi’s soul) and a dude voiced by Christopher Lee. And from each game on, it only proceeded to get more confusing. I can best describe it as the first game was a full course meal of Disney storytelling with a pallet cleanser of anime on the side. With each game after the first, that anime just spilled on the plate and took over all the Disney.
I think the reason the second game, Chain of Memories, included this mind wipe element was a decision of function rather than storytelling. The game was originally exclusive to the Gameboy Advance, which limited the number of people who could play it who were fans of the original on PS2.
This coma cliff-hanger made it so that anyone who played the next game unfamiliar with Chain of Memories would be just as confused about what happened as Sora. Making the player character be on the same level as the player actually worked well for Kingdom Hearts II. Sora uncovered what happened in his lost year at the same time as the players.
But while that worked from Chain of Memories to II, it didn’t work between all the games that happened in between Kingdom Hearts II and III.
All the non-numbered entries between II and III basically had some reason for Sora not to remember or know what happened in them.
For 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, and re:Coded, Sora was barely in them at all, if he even did make any appearance. So of course he wouldn’t really know the story beats.
For 0.2 and Dream Drop Distance, Sora does remember what happened, but those basically serve as a prologue to setup III, so there's only an hour or two of story critical content for Sora to know. It’s the stuff that can (and was) quickly explained during the start of III.
But for the other games, because Sora wasn’t there for the crucial content and they weren’t numbered games, and all on different consoles, III had to find some way to give all this crucial information to the players who only play the “mainline” games. And to that it offered two solutions:
- Basically Square put Wikipedia entries that detail the events of the games in the menu. It’s not the most elegant solution but it is pretty effective. But if you’re not yet accustomed to the games wild lore and tone, it might all sound like gibberish.
- Almost every scene before the final act in the game is just exposition of characters explaining to him events that happened in the past games, reminding him of the past games, or alluding to events that have still yet to happen in the mobile game.
The second option worked in II because it only had to summarize one game and it was handled in a subplot. That’s why that game was digestible to newer players or those unfamiliar. It doesn’t work in III because it had to summarize all the previous games and give a clue as to what was going on in the mobile game on iOS and Android. On top of that, this was no longer the subplot. The coming together of all the spin-off titles and mainline titles stories is the center story of III. It’s completely overwhelming.
And on top of that actual story progression doesn’t happen in III until the final act, so if you’re a new player who was enjoying the game for it’s Disney levels, you might fall off and not care about the ending. It’s way too much information at once.
Hell, some of the plotlines dropped and elaborated on in that final act of III we still don’t know what it means because the mobile game has yet to wrap up its story. It’s not annoying because it’s set up for something in the future, it’s annoying because half the dialogue is alluding to future games we have yet to play so it just makes the scenes feel empty and pointless.
But I’d be lying if this jumbled mess isn’t at least part of the fun of the franchise.
I am about to make a comparison I think a lot of you are not going to like, but just stick with me for a second.
Kingdom Hearts is a lot like Twilight
I can hear your booing from here but stick with me. Both of these franchises aimed initially for a younger audience (that grew older and nostalgic for it over time), both series are primarily about love, and both series know exactly what they are.
Kingdom Hearts is anime melodrama. It aims and is very successful in being one. It aims squarely (pun intended) at its fans and is pretty unapologetic about it. It’s not trying to be the greatest story ever told and it’s not ashamed or tries to retcon its goofy (pun also intended) side. All of these attributes I would say apply to Twilight. These franchises didn’t try to change themselves to appeal to the criticisms of people that wouldn’t consume these pieces of entertainment anyway. They stuck with what worked and what the fans responded to. And because of that, they found a lot of success and still release new entries today.
Just like most Final Fantasy and Kojima games, a key feature of these anime melodramatic stories is wild and confusing lore.
Hell, I would argue that KH is actually better on this front than most Kojima games, because Kojima games try way too hard at being like a movie. Every Kojima game comes across just like a smoothie of whatever media Kojima happened to be enjoying at the time of making it.
Seriously, I never understood why Kojima is viewed as some amazing storyteller in video games while Tetsuya Nomura’s work in KH is viewed as horrible when they’re both equally silly. I just never understood why plot elements like Quiet in MGSV wearing almost nothing because she has to breathe through her skin or whatever is viewed as a higher class of writing than Xion dying in 358/2 causing everyone to lose the memory of her.
That actually brings me back to the point of this piece: the real reason people like Kingdom Hearts. It’s the characters and their stories.
Notice that at the beginning of this piece I called the narrative a mess. What I meant by that is a lot of the franchise's perceived biggest issues come from the overarching narrative that continues through each entry. As I mentioned previously a lot of fans see the confusing nature of it as part of the fun, it’s easy to see how people are turned off by it.
But the individual stories and arcs that happen within single entries are the actual thing people respond to.
While the dialogue and performances in the series have the capacity to be underwhelming, the actual direction saves most of it. This franchise is so amazing and showcasing emotions and getting people to empathize with its characters.
A lot of that is due to most character motivations being rather simple and understandable. Sora is just a happy-go-lucky dude who wants his loved ones to be safe. Kairi just wants to be together with her friends again. Riku just wants to atone for what he did while he was a villain in the first game.
Riku is often the characters fans latch on to the most because many interpret it as a metaphor for dealing with depression. After Riku returns to the side of good at the end of the first game after being manipulated by Maleficent, Riku has a hard time dealing with the figurative and literal darkness within him.
He spends a large chunk of time secluding himself from others, feeling like he doesn’t deserve friendship, and often times feels worthless. He only recovers from this slowly over the course of multiple games with the assistance of his loved ones. Even when he recovers he still has to deal with these thoughts and how to process them.
It’s surprisingly effective for a depression allegory. And for a lot of people growing up with these games who were feeling similar thoughts themselves for the first time, this was very meaningful and helpful to them.
The series is very pro emotions and pro feelings, which is insane compared to most video games. A lot of mainstream games don’t portray emotions this realistically and perpetuate the trope and expectation that men are only allowed to feel emotions like anger that help them kick ass.
Meanwhile, Kingdom Hearts openly lets their characters weep, and it shows that’s okay. Do you know how rare that is? It’s so uncommon that many fans don’t know how to handle it.
Large sections of the fanbase assume that since Sora and Riku are openly emotional and loving with each other, that they must be gay. But speaking as a bisexual man, I really hate that interpretation. Even when people just say it as a joke. I understand and am equally frustrated by the lack of meaningful gay representation in media. But making Sora and Riku gay would ruin the point of their arcs.
Sora and Riku show that male friends can have positive relationships where they are emotionally open with each other. To make them gay would perpetuate the feeling that if men show emotions around each other that are not anger, that means they’re gay. This is why so much male friendship in media and real-life is founded on a base of giving each other shit and making fun of each other. But us gays do not hold a monopoly on emotions. This is just a supportive friendship, and that’s good. They don’t have to be in love to love each other. Which is such a hard concept for most media, and viewers to grasp. But it makes me happy that such a popular franchise has such a positive representation for male friendships.
Back to the direction. Nomura has an excellent grasp on how to manipulate his viewers to feel certain ways. This is one of the hallmarks of good directing.
While most of III was fairly predictable due to all of the previous games setting up the pegs for this one to knock down, he still managed to make the scenes emotionally impactful.
He knows just how to frame shots and control the score and where it swells for maximum feels.
It’s actually kind of amazing how consistently this franchise has been able to make me cry. It does so by tapping into a lot of my latent nostalgia for classic Disney films and, at this point, my nostalgia for the games themselves.
This franchise is exceptionally silly and melodramatic. But that’s part of the charm. Its silliness lends itself well to legit earnestly sincere moments between the characters. The characters grow and adapt to their new problems, no matter how outlandish they are.
That’s why people like this franchise so much. It reminds us that change isn’t bad. We all the power to adapt. We all have the power to bring more positivity into the world and smile in the face of adversity. It’s one of the few franchises where “the power of friendship” is actually tangible instead of a deus ex machina.
And sometimes that positivity and relatability are all we want from a game.
You can find more of Kevin Tash by following him here on medium or watching him have mental breakdowns on instagram.
