This discussion may contain minor spoilers.
Kingdom Hearts is a video game series with a deep and involved story full of metaphor and metaphysics, revolving around themes of what makes us human and what gives life value. Unsurprisingly, it is one of my favorite stories of all time. So when Kingdom Hearts 3 was released last month, promising a grand finale to the story that had been building up for many games over 17 years, I and millions of other fans dove into it and lost ourselves in Square Enix/Disney/Pixar wonderfulness.
For a while, it was great fun, taking Sora on an adventure through the worlds of Tangled, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc., fighting alongside Buzz Lightyear and Mike Wazowski. But then I started to feel disillusioned with the game, and looking at the internet, a large portion of the fan base was too.
Why were we disappointed? Was it because we had been excited for the game for so long, and there was no way it could possibly live up to our expectations? That might be part of it, but thinking back on the story with a critical perspective, I have identified a couple of major weak points with it.
The first weak point, and most important, is that the writers seem to have forgotten that the story was meant for a video game. A video game has something that movies and books do not: a player. The person experiencing the story is playing the game, doing work and overcoming challenges. In a good video game story, the actions of the player are what drive the story forward.
In the Kingdom Hearts games, Sora flies off to a bunch of worlds taken from Disney movies, on a quest to save the universe. However, in Kingdom Hearts 3, the reason Sora is sent off to the worlds is because he is missing an important magical ability, and he has to go find it. After each world, we get a cutscene about the story. But instead of relating to what Sora has just done, it jumps far away to where other characters are doing the important things. It makes the player feel Irrelevant. This is fixed at the end, of course, when Sora becomes the key figure in defeating the bad guys and resolving all of the loose ends, but the players are already frustrated, and that frustration colors the ending.
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| A very important scene, which happens far away from Sora. |
The second big weak point with the story is the heroes’ goal. The good guys know the bad guy’s evil plan: to have seven guardians of light clash against thirteen seekers of darkness, which will reforge the 𝜒-blade and give him power over Kingdom Hearts. (If you are confused about what this means, don’t worry, everybody else is too.) So then, what is the good guys’ strategy to foil this evil scheme? It is . . . to gather seven guardians of light to fight the thirteen seekers of darkness.
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| If you're wondering why there are 9, Donald and Goofy don't count. |
The solution to this is easy. The characters already have an a compelling alternative reason for their mission; their friends need to be saved. They have no reason to want to gather seven guardians of light, so they should not talk about that as if it is important to them. Instead, they should worry about what it will mean for the final battle, and that should hang over their heads as they knowingly but unwillingly serve the bad guy’s goal.
Also, they could have just gone into the final battle with six heroes instead of seven, intentionally leaving one behind. (One of the characters is an obvious choice, as I’m sure all of you who have played the game will agree.) This could have made for an interesting twist, where the bad guy reveals that he has foreseen this possibility, and has a way to bring their number back up to seven.
Despite its flaws, I love the game. I was a big Kingdom Hearts fan before Kingdom Hearts 3, and I still am after it. The ending was everything I hoped for, and I am quite pleased that they are going to continue to make games with a new story.
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