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2022 is a year of cross-border linkage everywhere. In order to make a lot of money, media companies have learned how to get along, from "Fortnite" to "Slam Dunk in the Air 2", and the list goes on. What is more convenient is that individual companies do not even have to join forces with others after completing the acquisition. In this regard, the most typical example is Disney , as the owner of Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Twentieth Century Fox and many other companies, Disney now has countless IPs. Perhaps, that's why the announcement of Kingdom Hearts 4 and the rumors of Star Wars characters in the game are so bittersweet.
Moreover, "Kingdom Hearts 3" already has a bit of a dog-tailed sable feeling. This could be because the Pirates of the Caribbean part is a bit of a uncanny valley, or it could be because Elsa sang the whole "Let IT Go" instead of cutting out a chorus or two to save some time. Or maybe it's because the pop culture landscape has changed dramatically in the 20 years since kingdom hearts 1 was released. Today, Sora has an even bigger villain to deal with: people are already aesthetically tired of "linkage", especially Disney stuff.
This was not the case before. In 2002, Kingdom Hearts was a thunderclap, bringing an unprecedented cross-company collaboration across the film and game realms, which was a refreshing sight. In a speech at the 2010 DICE conference, Disney executives Steve Wadsworth and Graham Hopper pointed out that for Disney and Square Enix, mixing the two characters together was a "very radical" move, and many employees feared that it would create an "ugly stitching monster." They couldn't figure out how Disney could have agreed to such a thing, claude Striff and Donald Duck in the same game? How is this plot to be written?
Kingdom Hearts deals with it this way: Riku and Kelly, the protagonists' friends Sora, disappear into a bizarre multiverse of Disney and final fantasy worlds, and although it has been shrouded in mysterious darkness, Sora breaks into it in order to find her friends. Along the way, he meets Donald Duck and Goofy, Alice from Final Fantasy 7 and Squall from Final Fantasy 8, and discovers that his friend Kelly is a Disney princess (and therefore, she's a runaway girl in need of rescue — but this is, after all, an early 2000s story with age limitations).
Meanwhile, The Sleeping Beauty witch Maleficent successfully provokes Liku to put him on the opposite side of his friends. This sparked a conflict between Sora and Liku, but also led to a final reconciliation (and two decades of enduring CP homogeneity). At the end of the game, Sora and his friends work together to fight against the darkness that is the embodiment of self-doubt and negativity in their hearts. And the ending of the story is also a royal ending - love overcomes everything. Kingdom Hearts 1 sold like no other.
I played the first three games when I was 19 years old. I was a cynical young man struggling to find identity. The friends I play with have a similar situation. Both of us found resonance in the stories of Liku and Sola. That sounds heartwarming, right? However, we also enjoy imitating Mickey Mouse's speech, and every time Donald Duck opens his mouth, it makes us laugh. These games are really weird, but while making people feel outrageous, they also make us can't help but be "really fragrant". It's a series that makes a lot of sense to us, but it's really super weird.
Kingdom Hearts is a bit like a fanfiction, specifically like a fanfiction from the early 2000s. Fanwork at the time explored many groundbreaking concepts, but remained in the gray area of the law and was often ridiculed by original authors who did not like "two creations". Nowadays, fanworks are seen as a compliment to the original and even welcomed as free publicity. This ethos also coincides with the media giants' penchant for linkage and multiverseism. Now there are "Kingdom Hearts" everywhere – but not before.
Disney is in full swing, so it's hard to imagine it ever been Cinderella, but in the early 2000s, Disney was mired in a quagmire. Disney's partnership with Pixar was a huge success, with works such as "Toy Story" in 1995 and "Bugs Crisis" in 1998 being a box office hit, but Disney's own animated films did not perform well. Pixar became the pillar of more effort, which made Disney and Pixar very unhappy and had a conflict. This situation was not resolved until Bob Eger succeeded Michael Eisner as the new CEO in 2005. Bob Iger reportedly repaired the relationship between the two companies, eventually leading to Disney's formal acquisition of Pixar in 2006.
The original Kingdom Hearts was the fruit of that time. In early 2000, when Disney was in poor shape, Square Enix and Disney talked about Kingdom Hearts. Series director Tetsuya Nomura revealed in an interview with IGN that it all started with a chance encounter between Square Enix game producer Shinji Hashimoto and Disney executives in the elevator. I don't know how Shinji Hashimoto moved Disney, but the result was that he succeeded. Disney signed a creative agreement with Square Enix, and development of Kingdom Hearts began in February 2000. According to the plan, the game will cram characters from the Final Fantasy series into the same story as classic Disney characters such as Donald Duck and Goofy, and will also use characters from newer animated films such as The Little Mermaid and Tarzan.
In 2000, large-scale linkages were often difficult to negotiate. The closest thing would be the 1996 fighting game X-Men vs Street Fighter, or 1999's Nintendo Smash Bros. Brawl. These games are like the best fandoms and the best stage to discuss "who will win" – for fans who have been looking forward to "Guan Gong Zhan Qin Qiong" for many years, these games are simply gifts to them.
Disney also engaged in this kind of "Zhang Fei beat Yue Fei" work, in 1988 'Who Framed Roger rabbit?' In it, Disney and Warner Bros. cartoon characters interject and joke with each other and interact with live actors. The collaboration brought quite a few classic episodes, such as Disney's Donald Duck and Warner's Duffy Duck for a piano duel, and Duffy Duck still laughed at Donald Duck for not being self-aware. The shot came because the two companies not only agreed to have their characters on camera, but also allowed them to make fun of each other, and even allowed them to make fun of the animation industry as a whole— and there were many criticisms of the entire show business. Who Framed Roger the Rabbit? " was an expensive and adventurous film, but it eventually won both box office and word-of-mouth.
In 2000, though, Disney executives working with Square Enix to advance Kingdom Hearts weren't very confident. According to Nomura, Disney didn't want to let the household name Mickey Mouse appear at the time, and only promised to give one shot, so Square Enix had to do its best to make the most of it. According to CBR, Square Enix originally wanted Mickey Mouse to be the protagonist, but Disney did not agree, but proposed a compromise plan to let Donald Duck be the protagonist. Let the grumpy Donald Duck be the protagonist of Kingdom Hearts? It's also fun.
▲ From one Big Brawl game to another Big Brawl game
However, Nomura proposed a third option. He designed a completely original human character, Sora, who had both the childlike curiosity of a Disney protagonist and the washed-and-blown hairstyles and zippers of Final Fantasy outfits. Sora is the protagonist of the two families and the key to bringing the two worlds together.
Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Nintendo Smash Bros., Kingdom Hearts succeeded. It was popular not only among kids who liked Disney, but also among teenagers who couldn't help but laugh when they saw Squall and Claude in the same frame as Snow White and Goofy.
Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7 is a fantasy-cyberpunk RPG that climaxes in tears, with ups and downs, and a traumatic past that has been often used as an argument for "games are art" from many years ago – but the protagonist of this game is now in a clichéd Disney game, in a game in which Donald Duck is a powerful mage (and, as always, a master of mockery). "Alice smiling softly and listening to Goofy tell jokes" is an outrageous-sounding scene, but as they run through samsara town, it really happens.
Putting together serious Final Fantasy protagonists and more bizarre Disney characters creates a stark contrast that makes the game seem quirky and comical. The success of Kingdom Hearts 1 paved the way for subsequent productions, allowing Kingdom Hearts: Chains of Memory and Kingdom Hearts 2 to use more characters and allow more absurd scenes to appear. This also earned Square Enix the trust of Disney, finally adding a little more drama to Mickey Mouse, letting him play a main role and providing a more detailed backstory for his mysterious debut at the end of Kingdom Hearts 1.
This spawned a wonderful and strange character: somehow, the big-eared, high-pitched Disney mascot became a legendary strongman with superpowers after running into Kingdom Hearts, wearing a cool trench coat, and occasionally saying mysterious lines that were like gold, talking about the darkness that was constantly eroding Sora and his companions. However, these words are read out in the voice of Mickey Mouse, which is very surprising.
After the release of Kingdom Hearts 2 in 2005, the entertainment landscape gradually took on a future look. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and two years later, in 2008, Iron Man kicked off the first phase of the Marvel MCU. In 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm, and "Avengers" and "Invincible Destruction King" also landed in theaters in the same year, and introduced the concepts of "Movie Connected Universe" and "Big Game Linkage Movie" to the public respectively. By 2019, Disney has completely come out of its slump. In January 2019, Kingdom Hearts 3 was released. Two months later, Disney acquired Twentieth Century Fox. In November, Disney+ officially entered the public eye with "The Mandalorian", and finally "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" came to an end for 2019.
There is a long gap of 14 years between Kingdom Hearts 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3. Over the years, Disney has produced a whole bunch of works that have oversaturated the market several times. In the past 14 years, there have been several slightly smaller Kingdom Hearts games, but none of them have a satisfactory reputation. Many players said that these games are the reason why they can't enjoy Kingdom Hearts 3, after all, some games started with Japanese versions, and several games only came out with handheld versions.
If you want to watch the plot in its entirety, you have to play 2009's "358/2" and 2011's "Born in a Dream", but one of them is on NDS and one is on PSP. Then you'll have to buy another 3DS, because the original 2012 DreamDown is exclusive to 3DS.
Several games between Kingdom Hearts 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3 have undergone some strange shifts. Disney is still there, but Final Fantasy is gradually fading out of sight, with more and more original characters, and most of them have novel backstories, and they have added a lot of magic settings and a lot of things to learn and understand. The Kingdom Hearts series still feels like fandom, except that the author suddenly wants to write an original fantasy story halfway through. The results are interesting and strange, but honestly, they lack the appeal to mainstream audiences that made Kingdom Hearts 1 and Kingdom Hearts 2 so popular.
Some Kingdom Hearts fans — such as Despicable — are happy to see that the series has chosen a more bizarre route instead of pandering to the market. But this led to a divergence among players' expectations of Kingdom Hearts 3. Meanwhile, Disney, a big company, has become as ridiculously evil as Maleficent, seemingly devouring everything and pulling countless A-list stars into the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. By the time of 2019, the audience not only had aesthetic fatigue for superheroes, but also tired of Star Wars, linkage, Disney and other things... Basically, audiences are already tired of Kingdom Hearts
I actually love Kingdom Hearts 3, but it's probably because it reminds me of my lost years. Sora's indomitable and childlike optimism in desperate circumstances inspired me, the 19-year-old me who was already chilling the world in 2005. And the setting of "Mickey Mouse is a super master" will always amuse me. Every time I see people on the Internet cutting out the funny collection of Kingdom Hearts and trying to laugh at this series, I can't help but roll my eyes, because these people really don't understand it at all - it is such a series. Seeing Donald Duck and Claude standing together will always amuse people. This series is really funny, it's really amazing!
But it also sucks. At least, it's bad now. Because from a certain time, every large company realized that this kind of linkage work like people can make them rich. Modern linkage is not to let people see what a character will experience and grow in other worlds, but more like to tell the audience that a certain work has been recognized. As the critic Cameron Kunzelman wrote in his Space Slam Dunk 2 analysis: "The Kingfisher enters the matrix, and the Beep bird and the Crooked Wolf make a fuss in the Universe of Mad Max... The problem is not in the linkages themselves, but in the fact that they are facilitated by a system of high IP concentration that encourages people to define their value by how much they know in a work."
Still, I'm hopeful about Kingdom Hearts 4. Although Disney has become a behemoth, a company that requires board approval for everything, and has become afraid to take risks and can only make conservative and boring and cookie-cutter things, this symptom has not yet been contagious to the Kingdom Hearts series. It has a complex, stuffed plot with background settings, and even most players can only barely understand it, which is not comparable to the "cookie-cutter" eight rods, and it is by no means a series that can be directly started without playing the previous game. It doesn't blindly want to be a popular game. Compared to the rest of Disney's 2022 titles, this is simply a clear stream.
I don't expect the Kingdom Hearts series to be a hipster again. I remember when it was cool, and it allowed me to add a sentimental filter to Kingdom Hearts 3 so that I could enjoy it even more. But in 2022, I don't expect Kingdom Hearts to bring something groundbreaking or surprising. It can't do it either: it has already done it once, and the result has inspired the big companies to emerge in this situation of linkage flooding.
So let me say, let it continue to be strange. Make it like Nomura's other game, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, as a responsive piece (Final Fantasy 7 Remake is like an exploration of the player's expectations of the original classic). Let it be with "Who Framed Roger the Rabbit?" " is full of confrontation. Let it continue to be as ridiculous and funny as Kingdom Hearts 1. In Kingdom Hearts 1, in the face of havoc, Goofy once said of the power of love: "Even if this place disappears, our hearts will not disappear." So let's continue to feel the power of that love.
Translation: Unknown party
Edit: Tony
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