What is Kingdom Hearts?

8/5/2017

Kingdom Hearts seems to be back in the spotlight lately what with the possibility of the third main game actually existing popping up again. And yet here I am, I haven’t played a single game in the series, and I don’t exactly intend to at the moment, just trying to figure out the whole deal about it.

I think the basis is that it’s somehow Final Fantasy crossing with Disney franchises, for some reason, and there’s unique types of enemies that spawn from some kind of darkness, meanwhile everyone who is an original character is incredibly anime and uses a giant key for a sword because they didn’t want the kids swinging around actual swords or there’s some sort of meaning or symbolism to it.

And then somehow the plot apparently became so complex with the second game showing up that they had to make at least a dozen intermediate sorts of games to try to explain it all, and ended up re-releasing those about six times each, I think you can get them all on the PS4 now as a result. Also there’s a phone game because Square Enix knows what phones can do now and how to get money from them. There’s also a ton of Final Fantasy phone games. I actually play one of those fairly often because it’s pretty decent. It’s not the city build attack game they made to tie into the newest Final Fantasy. Anyway that’s not Kingdom Hearts but I should probably talk about Final Fantasy too later. Not just Final Fantasy II either.

But maybe on a related note, I didn’t entirely get Final Fantasy until I picked up the PSP remake of the first game and got into the series, maybe you just have to jump headfirst into whatever Kingdom Hearts is and hope it works out. I might be able to get the first game easily enough on PS2, maybe. But it depends, maybe if the price is right. But I also need just enough interest to look at it. However I’ve looked at it and I’m still wondering what would get me into this.

It’s not the crossover with the Disney stuff but it’s more how it’s trying to expect me to take it seriously, I’ve played RPGs with a weird mix of characters but can manage to accept them being in serious situations even if they’re more of the comedic relief type, if they’re written well and can believably be there in the universe. I just naturally expect more wacky crossover antics with something like this.

And then there’s also the thing where the story focuses a lot on the original characters, which I understand is to make it so it can be its own thing and not just overly draw on the Disney universes, but I also kinda want it to for some reason, not overly but more so seeing as it’s the multiverse it’s set in. Also the side games focus a lot on just random kids who are somehow important to the plot which is complex and goes all over the place. The weird twists that exist in Final Fantasy VII were weird enough, plus how that got so popular it had a ton of spinoffs, essentially Kingdom Hearts looks like it became a more complicated Final Fantasy VII with Disney in there. And I think that Sephiroth might also be a bonus boss in Kingdom Hearts for some reason. Either that or they keep making bad guys look like him a lot.

In fact, the games have gotten such a weird convoluted plot going that even the game titles and their remaster titles are just a bizarre collision of about five types of numbers with weird anagrams involved, essentially maximum anime levels of titles. Why are words capitalized weirdly and there’s some kind of random punctuation and decimal points somehow apply to Roman numerals. The actual main games look weird compared that whole mess since it’s just a number. And how many times can you make a “final mix” until it’s actually final?

Even game mechanics got weird, I think in one of the 3DS games there’s some thing where you just automatically switch characters when this one timer expires, no matter what you’re doing, it just closes you out of it and you just become another person for some arbitrary period of time until it switches back and you have to redo whatever fight you were on, maybe. For all I know Kingdom Hearts III will be one of the most normal games or the weirdest ever game in the series. It might just somehow become Tetris.

Long story short, I know this goes all over the place, but so does the series, and I’m not sure how I could begin to follow what’s going on.

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