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As someone who has put the Kingdom Hearts series on the tip of my heart, after watching the trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4, I have no waves in my heart, and maybe even a little fear. This makes me very depressed. But Kingdom Hearts 3 has already put an end to the story between Sora and Saianot, so I couldn't really feel the excitement of watching the Kingdom Hearts 3 trailer in 2013 when I saw Kingdom Hearts 4 become bigger than ever, making its already complicated "Disney X Final Fantasy" linkage world more complicated.
Over the years, I've been deaf to a lot of the criticism of the Kingdom Hearts series. Aside from the odd name, I don't have much of an opinion on the series — I don't even mind that a lot of important episodes aren't in the three "digital" RPGs.
Every Kingdom Hearts is an indispensable piece of the puzzle that I've understood since Kingdom Hearts: Chains of Memory was released in 2004. That GBA game wasn't an official sequel with numbers, but it laid the groundwork for Kingdom Hearts 2, which launched on PS2 two years later. It's often criticized as "needing to know all the previous works" as "too much reliance on other works", but I've always dismissed this argument — the story isn't finished, it's normal to go on and on, isn't that normal?
But Square Enix can't move to change the new game to a platform, or even to another host family, this thing still has to be sprayed. Fortunately, they have released most of the game collections across the platform (although several games have been made into cutscenes), which is a good thing to make up for. I think Square Enix will come up with these collections, more or less admitting that the way the game was played before was not very friendly to the average player. And that gives me hope — no matter what kind of storyline Kingdom Hearts 4 will unfold, the series will be open to more players.
But I'm still not sure, do I really want to get on the Kingdom Hearts 4 train? While I knew kingdom hearts 3 wasn't the end of the series, it was just the end of a nearly 20-year storyline, but I was happy with that ending. I love that heroic self-sacrifice and accept that Sora is at odds with the people who love him (although there's a bit of room for improvement in the finale). As a result, there was a DLC again, a new plot line, and then a sound game. Then there's Kingdom Hearts 4 and another mobile game spin-off.
▲ Kingdom Hearts 4 released with the new mobile game "Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link"
It started me thinking, while Kingdom Hearts 4 is a new beginning, has it really changed? "Kingdom Hearts" is it still necessary to continue to squeeze toothpaste, squeeze a little new plot every three to five minutes, and let me wait until the year of knowing the destiny?
There are several Kingdom Hearts 4 storylines that we already know. According to Square Enix's press release, the game will be the beginning of the Lost Master Arc, and according to the trailer's graphics, it seems to be set in a place very similar to the world we live in. Donald Duck and Goofy still have a role to play, they seem to be looking for Sora, and for this reason, they run into the world of Hercules Hercules, trying to find Hades, the King of Pluto.
It seems that the elements of "Kingdom Hearts" that we are familiar with are all there. But this is never a simple and straightforward series, and as the plot continues to stretch, every time Sora passes through a new Disney world, there are different rules to follow, such as this character can not appear that character can not. And for me, the bigger the worldview, the less interested I have in it. The main problem is not that this will make the plot more and more chaotic, but that this ever-expanding approach is too conservative, some of it is not heavy, and it is far less focused on a more specific thing.
Until Kingdom Hearts 3, I was a big fan of the series. In large part, this is because I believe it is gaining momentum and preparing for the day when it blooms (although it has always had the feeling of taking one step at a time). While I'm not particularly fond of Kingdom Hearts 3, at least it provides us with an ending, whether it's satisfactory or not.
But now, the universe is expanding, expanding to a level I couldn't have imagined 20 years ago. I still want to see Sora explore the new Disney world, and I still want to see how Square Enix will adapt those worlds, but I always feel that with each new work, the world of Kingdom Hearts becomes more unstable and ambiguous. When I saw Sora battling Heartless in a city very much like Tokyo, I knew in my heart that we had drifted away from the original Kingdom Hearts.
It's still some time away from the release of Kingdom Hearts 4, and I'm going to use that time to figure out whether to continue to catch the Kingdom Hearts train or whether I'm already thinking about it.
Translation: Unknown party
Edit: Tony