Kingdom Hearts is the abyss
This essay was originally published in three parts on Medium (which are linked in the green buttons) - 9/30/2023
Additional links updates 10/4/2023
If there are any discrepancies between the Medium articles and the essay here, please assume the essay here has the most accurate revisions.
Table of Contents
Part 1: 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.
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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.
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And you absolutely did not believe me.
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Mostly because you don’t remember Kingdom Hearts all that well, but still.
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You have given a nerd a mission and just barely enough free time. So I will convince you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He’s actually one of two characters like this — 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody expected this to be the fan experience of “Kingdom Hearts” when the first game was released. Not even the series creator.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We’ll get to that.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everything in Kingdom Hearts is about Sora while pretending it’s not.
Part 2: Kingdom Hearts doesn't start in an elevator
This is a retrospective of Disney's corporate history, working backward. I'm assuming that we know (at least) the first Kingdom Hearts game will exist as it does now. At the time the first game was released, critics were quick to point out how strange this combination of Disney and Square Enix was.
So it's worth asking:
Why does Disney get involved in something like Kingdom Hearts? And, more importantly, why does Disney stay involved in Kingdom Hearts?
A classic cartoon approach
The kids who pick up Kingdom Hearts in 2002 love the Disney movies that came out recently: The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Hercules (1997) and Mulan (1998). Maybe you've heard of them.
The characters and settings from these movies show up throughout the series. They are most prevalent - as in, they do the most direct thematic work with discussions about what a heart is and how to keep emotional connections with others despite physical separation.
That makes sense. The Disney Renaissance movies are structured around lyrical music and musical theatre-style drama. The heroes are strong, complex, and have clearly defined goals. Mundane settings transform into fantasy through adaptations of fairy tales. These elements work, just like the classics from the forties and fifties. Kingdom Hearts will borrow them heavily, even a little bit of the singing.
But Walt Disney is dead. He was focused more on EPCOT and theme parks than filmmaking towards the end. The Nine Old Men, some of Disney's founding animators, start retiring. Most of them are retired or dead by the turn of the millennium. Disney Animation Studios makes a few movies - Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers (1977), The Fox and The Hound (1981) - but none of them get the same love as Walt's classics. Don Bluth, who contributed to both The Rescuers and The Fox and The Hound, leaves and establishes his own rival animation studio. Walt is gone and so is the spirit of Disney animation, for the next twenty years.
Until "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in 1988. The movie combines animated cartoon characters with live-action actors and combines a gritty noir setting with sight gags. It should not work.
It makes two hundred million dollars, almost three times its budget. It won four Academy Awards and three other nominations. Does this sound familiar?
And Disney Animation says, "Hey, maybe we remember how to do this thing."
Kids like video games. They must be pretty easy to make. Power line companies and real estate publications in Japan can make video games. Disney can, too.
So the Walt Disney Consumer Software team released their first video game, made in-house and directly based on a movie: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. WDCS releases a few other games in the next few years based on their TV series, but they have no long-term sense of direction through the nineties. This is partly because the Roger Rabbit game is bad and mostly because families don't have personal computers yet.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (the movie) makes critics and audiences take Disney seriously for the first time since the sixties. This movie, along with The Great Mouse Detective in 1986, kicked Disney into a period of quick, high-quality animated movie production: The Disney Renaissance.
WDCS Studios reorganized into Buena Vista Games and later Disney Interactive Studios. This is the version of the studio that eventually released Kingdom Hearts in 2002. I'm stressing the production of the Disney Renaissance because, from the perspective of the Disney executives responsible for making Kingdom Hearts into a cultural artifact, those movies just came out.
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The turn of the millennium
Disney's not the only hit-making animation machine around now.
Don Bluth movies, like An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988) are major box office competitors for Disney with their own complicated histories.
Pixar had a great critical reception with Toy Story (1995) and A Bug's Life (1998). Disney will purchase Pixar in 2006, but that's not right now.
DreamWorks has been critically successful with the traditionally animated The Prince of Egypt (1998) and computer-animated Shrek (2001). Disney director/producer John Lasseter and DreamWorks co-founder/ex-Disney producer Jeffrey Katzenberg have been… not getting along.
Studio Ghibli has been successful with My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001), but Disney helps produce Spirited Away and even kind of sabotages it, so that's fine.
Blue Sky Studios (part of 20th Century Fox) made Ice Age (2002), which did well commercially, but the studio had difficulty replicating that movie's success for a while.
The kids who will play Kingdom Hearts in 2002 have seen or at least heard of most of these movies. So Disney has a lot of incentive to be competitive.
This means leaning into a fantastical, fairy-tale formula that is the core of their brand.
This means capitalizing on the recent successes of the Disney Renaissance, especially with the children who have just grown up with those stories.
This means maybe giving this internal game studio a sense of direction and partnering with a Japanese studio that also seems to care a lot about storytelling. Square is about to begin its own merging adventures with Enix.
And, just for fun, one of the character designers for that huge Final Fantasy 7 game wants to run the project. Neat. And one of the Square studio executives happens to meet a Disney executive in an elevator.
That's how Disney gets from Roger Rabbit to Kingdom Hearts. The point of inspiration may have felt like a coincidence, but the business motivations that made Kingdom Hearts possible were decades in the making. Because, wouldn't you know it, meeting in an elevator means you have to be in the same building to begin with. There was going to be some project in this form, even if it would not eventually become what we know it as.
This perspective on Disney pre-Kingdom Hearts helps make sense of Disney's megalomanic tendencies. Kingdom Hearts appears at just the right time to go somewhere new.
Part 3: I wonder when Kingdom Hearts 3 is coming out
Kingdom Hearts 3 is a notorious example of game discourse nonsense. Besides some of its classic problems with long-term serialized storytelling (massively premature hype, cultivating deep emotional attachment to side characters and then discarding them, multiplatform design constraints) Kingdom Hearts 3 suffers from a reputation as unfinished, even after over a decade of development time.
Consider this article as a footnote to that idea. There is significantly more to “over a decade of development time” than most fans would like to admit.
It’s important to recognize that a lot of the sources in this section come from fan translations of game magazines originally written and published in Japanese. Kingdom Hearts Insider, Square Elite and The Cutting Room Floor all have archived breakdowns of sources that appear here.
Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix comes out in 2006. Kingdom Hearts 2 is widely considered the best game in the franchise and held in high regard by the fandom as a whole, except for some complaints about button-mashing. It’s a return to form in many ways. The heavy RPG elements of Chain of Memories (2004, Game Boy Advance) switch back to the PlayStation 2 and the action gameplay of the first game. The dramatic stakes feel just as high as the first game, instead of the smaller and more introspective journey of Chain of Memories. The emotional conclusion is strong for the characters. This game remains an important focal point of the franchise’s discourse.
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But this installment is also where the narrative’s problems start to show up with clarity, especially the first major appearance of retcons.
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At this point, there has been the first game and what players reasonably assume is a spinoff for the Game Boy Advance. After 1 and 2, it is also reasonable to assume the next game will be Kingdom Hearts 3, released on the brand-new PlayStation 3. There is even a secret movie to tease the next game, just like the secret movie in the first game to hype up a scene we will eventually see in 2 (and later).
69% of respondents to a poll on popular fan forum GameFAQs said they were waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3 since 2006, the release of Kingdom Hearts 2.
Spoilers: they’re waiting a long time. I know because I’m one of them. This is the cheap version of the argument.
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The beginning of 2010 shows up with a new game. It’s not Kingdom Hearts 3. It’s Birth By Sleep.
Don’t worry. There’s an interview with the series director, Tetsuya Nomura. The next title after Birth By Sleep is Kingdom Hearts 3.
That’s not exactly true. The quote from Nomura is: “About the next title, Kingdom Hearts 3 depends on Final Fantasy XIII Versus, but development of the next title is already underway. There are two titles other than Kingdom Hearts 3 in conception, and I think I’ll release one within this year.”
It’s likely there was an assumption that this “next title” was referring to the game we know now as Kingdom Hearts 3.
But even at the time, there is confusion and noise to sift through. Here’s this interview with Nomura from 2010:
“For any sequel of the mainstream storyline of the Kingdom Hearts series, that would be Kingdom Hearts III.”
And when the interviewer specifically asks about Kingdom Hearts 3:
“It is my desire to develop the next Kingdom Hearts on the existing platform, but the problem with a new console is that it has new technical requirements, new technical limitations, so we need time to make new research for that new title.”
The only other mentions of “Kingdom Hearts 3” in this interview are by the interviewer.
This is a running theme in game journalism coverage from 2006 to 2018.
Nomura from 2006: “I feel that it's not the right time to talk about the future of Kingdom Hearts.”
The first mention of Kingdom Hearts 3 on popular fan forum KH13 is February 2009 but it does include a disclaimer that the game has not been officially announced yet.
Nomura from 2009: “It’s entirely possible that the next game in the series won’t be Kingdom Hearts 3.”
From 2010: “One of them must be Kingdom Hearts III, yes? Nope: Nomura said that as far as he's concerned, he's never formally revealed its existence.”
From 2012: “Kingdom Hearts 3D connects to the yet-to-be revealed Kingdom Hearts 3, both in terms of gameplay systems and story.”
Nomura from 2012 about when Kingdom Hearts 3 was coming out: "I'll leave that to everyone's imagination."
There were announcements and a trailer at E3 2013.
Nomura from 2013 after the E3 trailer: “As you know, it took a while to actually announce Kingdom Hearts 3, but in the meantime we announced several spin-off titles in the series, and each time for the spin-off title we did experiment and challenge with new things.”
And even in 2013, Nomura mentions that Kingdom Hearts 3 might have been announced too early.
Game journalists were reporting on unofficial tweets from voice actors saying Kingdom Hearts 3 would come out in 2015.
There were plot guides discussing the imminent arrival of “Kingdom Hearts 3” in 2017.
From 2018: " Although the long-awaited ‘Kingdom Hearts 3’ has no official release date within 2018, D23 Expo Japan just dropped a brand new glimpse of the video game.”
At that point, there was worry that all the game’s content would even fit onto the disc.
Even as late as 2018, there was no official release date for Kingdom Hearts 3. And there is no definitive evidence that Kingdom Hearts 3 was ready for release before 2018.
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Some fans talk about Kingdom Hearts 3 like it had been imminent since 2006. And that is blatantly untrue. The game was not in development for even half of that time. If that was your experience of waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3, that’s valid. What the developers kept promising, though, was not a video game. It was just fanfiction.
No wonder there was so much theory-crafting on places like KH13.com. Fans were looking for another game that was around the corner, would answer all the questions, and seemed like it was never going to actually arrive. I don’t blame them for doing that. I thought the same thing. It’s easy to get angry about something like this. The next step seems so clear. All the other games feel like they’re getting in the way, like they’re not the clear next step, like the development is stalling.
And now that it’s here, it can’t end. DLC and Melody of Memory and extra bonus content appear from the wings.
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That kind of sounds like Disney brand integrity all over again. The players need the story recapped again for when the next game comes out. The players need 1.5 +2.5 Remix and the Ultimania guide and people like me explaining everything. Because if you don’t have that, good luck understanding the next stupid thing that happens.
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There are a lot of uncritical interviews and thinkpieces here that are eager to show there has been any sort of change to development. But those changes are often so vague or deniable that the hype is for nothing. Again and again, hype for nothing. Fans can’t make heads or tails of whether Kingdom Hearts 3 is even really in development until the E3 trailer. And it’s also difficult to parse how close to finished the game is until 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, which is announced in 2015. The same story, again and again.
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But don’t forget to pre-order Kingdom Hearts 3 the day it comes out to get a Kingdom Hearts-themed PS4!
The series itself, across decades, is nostalgic and referential to its own iconography. Kingdom Hearts 3 feels like it is constantly trying to recapture the novelty of its premise. And that doesn’t work when the idea is not new anymore. Kingdom Hearts 3 wasn’t new before the idea even existed. Fans and reviewers both felt burnout over how long the series had been going, how long they waited for Kingdom Hearts 3. An empty shell of itself.
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Now that we remember, we cannot forget. Now that it took so long to get here, the ideas that got us to Kingdom Hearts 3 cannot leave.
Conclusion
Here we have a video game series that feels like it was designed by an auteur but was not thought out at all and had pressure from two giant media companies.
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Here we have a video game series that is supposedly meant for kids but was largely inaccessible as a “complete” whole for fifteen years (when 1.5+2.5 remix came out).
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Here we have a video game series that is comfortable throwing increasingly ridiculous ideas on top of one another, that did not have an interest in being a cohesive story, and had the resources and structural looseness to continue going, for our purposes, forever.
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There are three different ideas trying to coexist all at once and succeeding awkwardly. Nomura is trying a long-form story style that Disney and Square Enix have been fundamentally against in their most successful projects. Final Fantasy is getting phased out. Disney is taking over on all fronts.
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Kingdom Hearts fits right in with so many other franchises of recent years.
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It has a pinpoint precision for the ultimate escapist fantasy. Sora and you start on a tropical island with no adults. Roxas is on a summer vacation that would have probably gone on forever. It’s plot-important to hang out with your friends. You travel to places that are fun and different but still familiar enough that you want to stay around. You get to hit things with a sword. You get to be a special little kid, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. And there are no parents, except for one scene to show that Sora isn’t in his bedroom. (There are no other lore-important reasons for that, you nerds—)
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Kingdom Hearts sticks with its fans. There is still incredible fanart being made now, only encouraged by fan communities.
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It's about fun. And the fun never ends.
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This can, at first glance, seem childish. But a game series with dense, detailed, contradictory storytelling told across seventeen years (from the first game to Kingdom Hearts 3) has to acknowledge that it tried to grow up with its fans. It failed. Dense does not necessarily mean good. At some point, the game-playing kids became the console-buying teenagers and adults. If they could afford it. Big companies like Disney and Square Enix are more interested in those adults now than ever. The story is not suddenly better told because a younger person is playing it. The older kids who arrived at the first game in 2002 because they were Final Fantasy fans deserved an enjoyable, playable experience, too.
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One of the main criticisms of the first Kingdom Hearts game before its release was how strange it felt to have Disney and Final Fantasy characters side by side. And Kingdom Hearts 3 finally listened to the feedback, and it’s all the worse for listening. Because there was a noticeable lack of Final Fantasy in that game. Kingdom Hearts pays lip service to Final Fantasy with the aesthetics of the main Keyblade-wielding characters. But the personalities are almost nothing like in their actual games. Almost like the director is more interested in aesthetics, character designs and flashy moments than a well-told story.
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Critics complaining about juxtapositions like that were never going to have a fun time with that game, no matter how hard they tried. It was stupid to expect that they would have a fun time jumping in at the very end. Same problem all over again. This is not an anthology. It is a series.
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The reputation of Kingdom Hearts is that the story is big and unnavigable. We know that it’s weird and cheesy. That didn’t suddenly change twenty years in. We know how long it’s taken. We know we deserve better. We know we deserve better from the people whose job it is to tell these stories. We know we deserve better from the people whose job it is to bring these stories into public view. That’s what a game journalist does.
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The scary part of this story is there are certainly instances of doing game journalism for every time a development team tweets. I personally think it is annoying at best and untenable at worst. Even I can’t care that much. But it happens. And it may have been necessary for Kingdom Hearts because of how split up the games were.
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The scariest part is when a development team starts making games with game journalism thinkpieces in mind.
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We can make the solution to this puzzle as obtuse as we want. A magazine article will tell the players how to solve it. We don’t have to finish this art asset. It will probably be helpful as a speedrun glitch. It doesn’t matter if this plot is nonsense. A gaming YouTube channel will make a lore breakdown. We don’t have to make a good story. We can make a dense story, and the fans will do the rest.
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That’s not game design in service of a story. That’s game design in service of clicks and attention and ads. Hate-playing a game or hate-watching a show is still money. A poorly-told story is still a consumable story. Kingdom Hearts 3 isn’t good, but at least it’s finally here.
We’ve seen the interviews, and there was a lot more than that from fansites and other places around the Internet. That’s how players who do not have their own dedicated blogs and fansites and forums know about any of those development details. One person can’t experience all of it.
Here, at the end, let me tell you. I love Kingdom Hearts. I do not think it is confident in itself. I do not think it is told well.
 
The scary part is the things that people were complaining about with Kingdom Hearts are now coming to roost for other IP that Disney has acquired. Kingdom Hearts happened when Disney turned from big to inescapable. And more than that, it is emblematic of a larger cultural approach to storytelling.
Nothing can be a mystery. We have to complete Jiminy’s journal. We have to explain and easter egg and point out what you missed and how this single frame in a trailer explains the entire movie. Everything connects to everything else, whether we mean it to or not. But anything can change later for any reason. And when it is a mystery, the solution doesn’t matter. The story is spread out.
Kingdom Hearts hits a perfect Internet sweet spot of being popular enough that lots of people know about it but obtuse enough that it’s difficult to experience all parts of it.
“Suspension of disbelief” is for a boy fighting monsters with a giant key sword with a duck and a dog. It is not for Xehanort lying about his identity and also having amnesia and also being someone else entirely and being a time portal…
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Kingdom Hearts is no longer the only one, or even one of a few stories sustaining this type of nonsense. Kingdom Hearts is no longer the only story relying on the goodwill of single people to represent multi-billion-dollar companies. Disney is the perpetual motion machine and everyone wants to keep up.
 
The Star Wars Extended Universe is just completely non-canon now. That new sequel trilogy notoriously made things up as it went along. (Princess Weekes’s “How The Jedi Built A Sith Lord” is also a great supplementary watch.) Dave Filoni is taking a looser approach to canon either way. And a loud part of the fandom wants Star Wars in a future Kingdom Hearts game.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe has planned for movies decades in advance and connected all the characters, so we don't know the consequences of anything until years later in a TV show. By the time a crossover on the scale of the first Avengers movie was starting to be seriously considered as a possibility, there were six Kingdom Hearts games. The Avengers have to stay separate or else they would solve most individual hero’s problems immediately. And their visual effects are subject to change at the last possible moment. When critics complain about “superhero fatigue” or “doing homework” to keep up with the MCU, all I hear is, “When is Kingdom Hearts 3 coming out?” When critics complain about “empty worlds”, all I can think of is the shot-for-shot remake of “Let It Go”. Another loud part of the fandom wants the MCU in a future Kingdom Hearts game.
Fans were begging for the Snyder Cut.
 
A Song of Ice and Fire changed because readers guessed plot points. Game of Thrones decided to completely reinvent its characters in the last season.
Known bigot J. K. Rowling keeps adding Harry Potter lore on Twitter just because she can.
The enormous nonsense plot of The Vampire Diaries was in constant threat of being cancelled.
The Fast and Furious franchise couldn’t take itself seriously if it tried and has a track record for villain redemption that rivals Sora.
Naruto invented a brand-new alien supervillain manipulating everyone the whole time in the last twenty chapters of the manga and decided that the main characters were actually the most important people in the universe the entire time. And it has the same villain redemption problem as Dom Toretto and Kingdom Hearts.
That BBC Sherlock mystery show dug deeper into retcons and made fun of its own fans for trying to solve mysteries.
One of the main characters of the Supernatural TV series was allowed to satisfy a gay fan-ship for four minutes and eight seconds before that character gets sent to super hell.
The source for an unconfirmed rumor about Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 was from 2021, two years before the game was even released.
The creation of P.T. led to a lot of theory-crafting and corporate nonsense collapsing around a central auteur, which I don’t really regret because it eventually gave us hiimmarymary, which rules.
Call of Duty definitely isn’t political, just like Disney definitely isn’t political while it takes over entertainment.
At time of writing, Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard.
Auteurs finding space in massive IPs and corporate reputations is in vogue at time of writing with discourse like Barbenheimer.
Those Disney live-action remakes are bad in lots of the same ways, and hating them became its own economy. Just like explaining the plot of Kingdom Hearts again and again and again and again.
We can’t get copies of movies except for across a half-dozen or more consoles streaming platforms.
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It all reeks of the same Kingdom Hearts nonsense I’ve already been dealing with for years.
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Any scrap of information must be important to the story. It must have fans personally offended and passionately defended. It must tell us a lot about the future. It has to. We can’t know otherwise. We are willing to love a story that turned into proud nonsense and has no clear intention of changing.
The exact same thing is happening with Kingdom Hearts 4.
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I look to the wider internet and all I can see, stretched out past the horizon, is the abyss. An island consumed by darkness.
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The most annoying chronically online people learned it from being Kingdom Hearts fans.
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They love it because it gives them a sense of identity, like it listens to them and reflects who they are back at themselves. Exactly what Walt Disney wanted to do over his career. Despite everything, I am still one of them. I look, and it looks back at me.
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We love the abyss.