**** SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN”T PLAYED AND HAVE MANAGED
TO AVOID SPOILERS, RUN AWAY NOW! *****
Still here? For real, there’s going to be spoilers because I
can’t talk about this without them. Staying? Okay! Here we go!
I’ve been a fan of the Kingdom Hearts series since the early
days. The thought of Final Fantasy mashed together with my fave Disney
characters was just odd enough to make me check it out, and that gorgeous
opening sequence with Utada Hikaru’s Simple and Clean absolutely drew me in. The
game was beautiful and strange, and it had a compelling story that somehow made
these characters from completely different franchises work.
I bought a Gameboy Advance to play Chain of Memories, and I
eagerly snatched up KH2 when it came out, but after that, I couldn’t keep up. There
were too many games on too many platforms, and while I love my gaming
collection, I’m not much of a handheld gamer, and I couldn’t justify all these extra
purchases for a single game.
Still, I eagerly awaited Kingdom Hearts III, and twelve long
years later, Square-Enix finally released it. The game was ridiculously sold
out locally, but I finally got my hands on it in March.
I have thoughts, too many for one post, but I’m going to
start with this one because it hits my writer nerve, and I can’t stop thinking
about it.
The story in this game is a mess. Not even the recaps
accessed from the menu screen could completely pull the story together for me. The
timeline of events was difficult to place with the different side stories that
had been woven into the main game. The main characters of the original
storyline were shuffled off to the sidelines, doing things that were given
cursory attention while the characters from the smaller games became the focus.
I wanted Kairi, Riku, and Sora to finally be a team and to
get to fight together. It would have made sense after KH2; our team was
together at last! What can they do now they’re united! I wanted to see their
story coming to a satisfying conclusion, but instead we set off on a half-ass
journey to regain powers and maybe put Roxas back together. Which leads me to a
major storytelling fail in this game:
Sora should not have been the main character.
With the story we’re given, Riku should have been our
protagonist. He’s the one doing important things, struggling with his darkness
and against enemies even with great power, and progressing the story. When he
struggles, it matters.
When Sora struggles, it’s blown off so easily and quickly
that there’s no sense of urgency at all. We follow him around and listen to
half-pint jokes, but it feels like we’re on a road trip rather than a mission.
When the matter of Roxas came up, I thought, “Finally, a real mission!”
Nope. We continue the road trip, and the whole Roxas issue
is resolved without us, and other than the convenient fact of Sora acting like
a heart footlocker, we’re not necessary to that plotline at all. If you took
Sora, Donald, and Goofy out of this game, for the most part, nothing would
change.
Towards the end, there’s this kinda cool thing where Sora
helps the different teams reunite during one of last battles, and I thought, why
couldn’t this have been the story? Reuniting these friends, restoring their
hearts and bonds in order to defeat Organization XIII once and for all would
have at least given our journey purpose.
That would have been a cool game.
But no. We got the meh, messy tale of a sidekick and his
buddies wandering around doing the job with the least impact.
You might argue in the end that Sora’s the only one who
could have defeated Xenahort, but I’m not sold on that. The rest of the game
didn’t sell it. And that’s a storytelling fail.
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