I mean I'm not exactly a literary critic or anything, but looking at this thread. I can't exactly work out why people vehemently dislike Kingdom Hearts' story to the point of there being multiple posts by different people going "I have played several Kingdom Hearts games and I dislike it so much that this game I have not even played must have a better story."
Most of the arguments against it seem to boil down to:
- It was confusing.
- I don't care about it.
- It was presented badly.
So for whatever reason the main emotions this game seems to draw from people is confused apathy? In a series where almost every game is structured like the MCU, there's an overarching plot (the crossover films) and you go to each world and do a subplot there (the individual superhero movies). Maybe this forum thinks Ant-Man was really confusing, I don't know.
Anyway, all I can really do is talk about how the games made me feel, why I liked them, why I didn't like them and hope it brings more valid discussion than "game bad because belt man make brain hurt"
Note: Even though I played the 1.5+2.5 stuff, I'm not exactly going to defend or really talk a lot about 358/2 and Recoded. They're pretty much cliffnotes versions of the games. It'd be like judging an episode of a show based on just watching the "Previously On" segment, or asking your friend what happened and taking them going "Oh yeah so there was this guy who showed up earlier who I forgot to mention" as a damning indictment of the show.
KH1
Fifteen years ago, one of my friends phoned me up and went "Dude have you played this game called Kingdom Hearts, it's totally wack, it's got like Donald Duck and Cloud from FF7 and you summon Bambi.". I was like "That sounds fucking sick, come down to my house in a couple of days and we can play that and some Double Dash" we played the intro together and cracked up at Kairi's weird laugh during the footrace. It was a pretty chill experience, since you know, tutorial island, but he had to leave before I finished the area.
The next day I played it by myself and played it for 10 hours straight. At this point, the plot was on the level of "Something happened to my home and my friends are missing, I have to find them", I legitimately cannot think of a more simple plot, but well, I was invested. The game was fun to play, hitting things with my giant key and trying to find my friends stimulated my lizard brain, I was not bored, which is more than I can say while playing swathes of FF14. Maybe it's my ADHD, maybe the game is "not for me", who knows.
The Disney plots are fine. If you go to a world to look for your friends and you realize there's a problem, you're gonna stay there and try and help out whoever needs it. It also lets you know that this shadow cabal of evil who are sitting in a dark room and being evil are actually, you know, evil? In all honesty my fave plot was Halloween Town, something about the Disney world actually reacting in a 'realistic way' to the issue of Heartless, in this case by going "Huh, they are also weird fucked up monsters, I thus have dominion over them so let's make them have a party", is actually pretty neat.
Anyway, you eventually find out your friends are in trouble, and in ways that can't be solved by hitting them with a giant key! Riku has a terminal case of being a jerk and Kairi is comatose, oh no!
So we come to Hollow Bastion, which is probably the best part of the entire game to me. Riku pretty much humiliates you, calls you a failure, humiliates you even more, your friends ditch you and you're all alone with a literal joke weapon. This actually works? You feel bad, you feel crummy and confused, you're meant to be the chosen one but instead you're just some dumb kid getting clowned on by someone who knows more rules than you.
Beast is there though. Beast is you, he's someone whose world got fucked up who is also looking for someone he loves, unlike you, he didn't even attempt to follow any rules, he just went from world to world through sheer force of will (can I say just how fucking cool this is, I think literally the only other person who does this in the entire game is Xehanort, and Beast somehow DOESN'T go crazy while doing it). Like you though, he also fucked up, Sora helps him out because Sora is actually just a good guy. So you're just two failures trying to make things work, you want the same thing, and well, he's also taught you that rules don't matter. You spend the entire game thinking you need the Keyblade to vanquish Heartless and then Beast just eviscerates them, once again, through force of will. Maybe being a hero is actually based on that and helping out people who need it rather than some weird rule?
Spoiler: It turns out it is, isn't that cool? Sora gets his friends back, he helped people who needed it, and has the will of a hero, and now he's a hero and gets his keyblade back. Now he gets to have lots of fun.
As an aside, I'm not really sure how I feel about Donald and Goofy switching back and forth so quickly. I guess they went with Riku pretty quickly because of the King's original orders, had some 'serious thinkies' while Sora was getting his groove back, and then realized that Riku was a jerk and this Sora guy is pretty okay even if isn't the actual keyblade wielder. Maybe it can be discussed? On this board for discussion? I don't know, does someone want to? It might be fun?
Riku decides he wants to get stronger too, he thinks he should be strong, he's pretty mad since he had the Keyblade and lost it through reasons he didn't even understand. It should be his, but it's not, that's bullshit! So he pretty much accepts a deal from a Satan in order to get more powerful. He is ARROGANT and DOES SOMETHING UNWISE to get POWER, this is not a hard theme to follow! I am terminally stupid and it makes sense! Riku is now evil and strong. He talks to Maleficient who is also evil and they both basically go "Let us use the evil here to get more powerful", they just want power. Riku has lost sight of what he wants in the pursuit of power, and Maleficient is just a jerk who heads up the Council of Evil. These are simple motivations! I am not melting down!
Anyway, Sora solves the next few problems with his Keyblade. Sometimes you just gotta hit stuff I guess? Riku realizes that maybe the pursuit of power isn't really everything, and his good side and bad side fight over this. This is represented in the game by his good side and bad side literally fighting each other. Sora learns that sometimes you have to give things up to do a good thing, I mean in case it was his literal body and soul, but still, lesson learned. You also find out that this Ansem guy who was a scientist was not entirely on the level.
I wasn't expecting to write 7 paragraphs about Hollow Bastion so time to rush. Sora defeats Greek Satan, European Satan, and then gets to fight against Scientist Satan. Ansem thinks he's found the mother-lode of darkness but it turns out ironically he's the one who understands nothing. Riku has won the struggle within himself, he loves Little Brother (or heterosexual life partner, or boyfriend, make any reading you want). Mickey shows up, woo! Mickey goes away, boo! Everything is pretty okay, Kairi is safe, but Sora and friends still have to find those people they're looking for. It ends on a cute open ended cliffhanger.
So in conclusion, Kingdom Hearts is a story about trying to find your friends and what those friends mean to you and what it means to be a hero and a good person, and also thinking about things before you do them.
Anyway I wanted to write about the other games but then this one got away from me. Here's some short things I liked in the other ones.
Chain of Memories
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
What is your relationship with someone? Apart from the fleeting moment that is the present, it's the times you've spent with them, and the dreams of time you're going to spend with them, which is influenced by the times you've spent with them. So if you banged your head and forgot about your best friend, are they still your best friend? What if someone fucked with your brain and made you think you'd done all those things with someone else?
It's actually a pretty interesting philosophical question, and it's also completely and utterly terrifying to me. It's actually compelling seeing Sora get more and more unhinged as he's experiences a literal retcon in front of you. But yeah, I guess it's just "the weird card game where Sora ends up in an egg".
KH2 - Prologue
The Team decide to Gangstalk a literal child
The prologue of KH2 is probably one of the most fucked up things ever if you play it in isolation. You're a kid, you're enjoying your summer vacation and you just want to do something neat in those last few days. However your town has all these weird things happening in it. Giant spheres are flying out of walls, grey zipper monsters are appearing, time literally stops, people show up and claim to know you. Meanwhile you, the player, get to see these cloaked figures in shadow going "the experiment is proceeding as planned."
It's a game for children so you assume this will end with the kid finding out what's going on and throwing the bad guys down a laundry chute directly into a police wagon and Roxas gets to enjoy his summer vacation. Instead Roxas gets gangstalked into near insanity and essentially kills himself to save a random person who he is informed is a superior, complete version of him.
Seems pretty horrifying, but I guess the next decade of discourse turned it into merely 'boring', oh well.
I am writing paragraphs again, I've written almost 2000 words on Kingdom Hearts, I think I have actually doubled the word count of this entire thread, and now I want to die.
Most of the arguments against it seem to boil down to:
- It was confusing.
- I don't care about it.
- It was presented badly.
So for whatever reason the main emotions this game seems to draw from people is confused apathy? In a series where almost every game is structured like the MCU, there's an overarching plot (the crossover films) and you go to each world and do a subplot there (the individual superhero movies). Maybe this forum thinks Ant-Man was really confusing, I don't know.
Anyway, all I can really do is talk about how the games made me feel, why I liked them, why I didn't like them and hope it brings more valid discussion than "game bad because belt man make brain hurt"
Note: Even though I played the 1.5+2.5 stuff, I'm not exactly going to defend or really talk a lot about 358/2 and Recoded. They're pretty much cliffnotes versions of the games. It'd be like judging an episode of a show based on just watching the "Previously On" segment, or asking your friend what happened and taking them going "Oh yeah so there was this guy who showed up earlier who I forgot to mention" as a damning indictment of the show.
KH1
Fifteen years ago, one of my friends phoned me up and went "Dude have you played this game called Kingdom Hearts, it's totally wack, it's got like Donald Duck and Cloud from FF7 and you summon Bambi.". I was like "That sounds fucking sick, come down to my house in a couple of days and we can play that and some Double Dash" we played the intro together and cracked up at Kairi's weird laugh during the footrace. It was a pretty chill experience, since you know, tutorial island, but he had to leave before I finished the area.
The next day I played it by myself and played it for 10 hours straight. At this point, the plot was on the level of "Something happened to my home and my friends are missing, I have to find them", I legitimately cannot think of a more simple plot, but well, I was invested. The game was fun to play, hitting things with my giant key and trying to find my friends stimulated my lizard brain, I was not bored, which is more than I can say while playing swathes of FF14. Maybe it's my ADHD, maybe the game is "not for me", who knows.
The Disney plots are fine. If you go to a world to look for your friends and you realize there's a problem, you're gonna stay there and try and help out whoever needs it. It also lets you know that this shadow cabal of evil who are sitting in a dark room and being evil are actually, you know, evil? In all honesty my fave plot was Halloween Town, something about the Disney world actually reacting in a 'realistic way' to the issue of Heartless, in this case by going "Huh, they are also weird fucked up monsters, I thus have dominion over them so let's make them have a party", is actually pretty neat.
Anyway, you eventually find out your friends are in trouble, and in ways that can't be solved by hitting them with a giant key! Riku has a terminal case of being a jerk and Kairi is comatose, oh no!
So we come to Hollow Bastion, which is probably the best part of the entire game to me. Riku pretty much humiliates you, calls you a failure, humiliates you even more, your friends ditch you and you're all alone with a literal joke weapon. This actually works? You feel bad, you feel crummy and confused, you're meant to be the chosen one but instead you're just some dumb kid getting clowned on by someone who knows more rules than you.
Beast is there though. Beast is you, he's someone whose world got fucked up who is also looking for someone he loves, unlike you, he didn't even attempt to follow any rules, he just went from world to world through sheer force of will (can I say just how fucking cool this is, I think literally the only other person who does this in the entire game is Xehanort, and Beast somehow DOESN'T go crazy while doing it). Like you though, he also fucked up, Sora helps him out because Sora is actually just a good guy. So you're just two failures trying to make things work, you want the same thing, and well, he's also taught you that rules don't matter. You spend the entire game thinking you need the Keyblade to vanquish Heartless and then Beast just eviscerates them, once again, through force of will. Maybe being a hero is actually based on that and helping out people who need it rather than some weird rule?
Spoiler: It turns out it is, isn't that cool? Sora gets his friends back, he helped people who needed it, and has the will of a hero, and now he's a hero and gets his keyblade back. Now he gets to have lots of fun.
As an aside, I'm not really sure how I feel about Donald and Goofy switching back and forth so quickly. I guess they went with Riku pretty quickly because of the King's original orders, had some 'serious thinkies' while Sora was getting his groove back, and then realized that Riku was a jerk and this Sora guy is pretty okay even if isn't the actual keyblade wielder. Maybe it can be discussed? On this board for discussion? I don't know, does someone want to? It might be fun?
Riku decides he wants to get stronger too, he thinks he should be strong, he's pretty mad since he had the Keyblade and lost it through reasons he didn't even understand. It should be his, but it's not, that's bullshit! So he pretty much accepts a deal from a Satan in order to get more powerful. He is ARROGANT and DOES SOMETHING UNWISE to get POWER, this is not a hard theme to follow! I am terminally stupid and it makes sense! Riku is now evil and strong. He talks to Maleficient who is also evil and they both basically go "Let us use the evil here to get more powerful", they just want power. Riku has lost sight of what he wants in the pursuit of power, and Maleficient is just a jerk who heads up the Council of Evil. These are simple motivations! I am not melting down!
Anyway, Sora solves the next few problems with his Keyblade. Sometimes you just gotta hit stuff I guess? Riku realizes that maybe the pursuit of power isn't really everything, and his good side and bad side fight over this. This is represented in the game by his good side and bad side literally fighting each other. Sora learns that sometimes you have to give things up to do a good thing, I mean in case it was his literal body and soul, but still, lesson learned. You also find out that this Ansem guy who was a scientist was not entirely on the level.
I wasn't expecting to write 7 paragraphs about Hollow Bastion so time to rush. Sora defeats Greek Satan, European Satan, and then gets to fight against Scientist Satan. Ansem thinks he's found the mother-lode of darkness but it turns out ironically he's the one who understands nothing. Riku has won the struggle within himself, he loves Little Brother (or heterosexual life partner, or boyfriend, make any reading you want). Mickey shows up, woo! Mickey goes away, boo! Everything is pretty okay, Kairi is safe, but Sora and friends still have to find those people they're looking for. It ends on a cute open ended cliffhanger.
So in conclusion, Kingdom Hearts is a story about trying to find your friends and what those friends mean to you and what it means to be a hero and a good person, and also thinking about things before you do them.
Anyway I wanted to write about the other games but then this one got away from me. Here's some short things I liked in the other ones.
Chain of Memories
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
What is your relationship with someone? Apart from the fleeting moment that is the present, it's the times you've spent with them, and the dreams of time you're going to spend with them, which is influenced by the times you've spent with them. So if you banged your head and forgot about your best friend, are they still your best friend? What if someone fucked with your brain and made you think you'd done all those things with someone else?
It's actually a pretty interesting philosophical question, and it's also completely and utterly terrifying to me. It's actually compelling seeing Sora get more and more unhinged as he's experiences a literal retcon in front of you. But yeah, I guess it's just "the weird card game where Sora ends up in an egg".
KH2 - Prologue
The Team decide to Gangstalk a literal child
The prologue of KH2 is probably one of the most fucked up things ever if you play it in isolation. You're a kid, you're enjoying your summer vacation and you just want to do something neat in those last few days. However your town has all these weird things happening in it. Giant spheres are flying out of walls, grey zipper monsters are appearing, time literally stops, people show up and claim to know you. Meanwhile you, the player, get to see these cloaked figures in shadow going "the experiment is proceeding as planned."
It's a game for children so you assume this will end with the kid finding out what's going on and throwing the bad guys down a laundry chute directly into a police wagon and Roxas gets to enjoy his summer vacation. Instead Roxas gets gangstalked into near insanity and essentially kills himself to save a random person who he is informed is a superior, complete version of him.
Seems pretty horrifying, but I guess the next decade of discourse turned it into merely 'boring', oh well.
I am writing paragraphs again, I've written almost 2000 words on Kingdom Hearts, I think I have actually doubled the word count of this entire thread, and now I want to die.
