I see what the plan was Square Enix. You had ambition. You thought that you should use some of your greatest characters along with some of the most popular characters of all time to create an epic adventure across multiple games so that you could go nuts with all of the crazy ideas you have in your head. Now, I respect such ambition and the Kingdom Hearts series has come a long way. Here is my only gripe with that plan. Why did you feel the need to tell your epic adventure using so many different games and so many different consoles? This only leads to confusion since each game builds upon the last. It’s true that you have too much story for one game, but please tell me how you find it acceptable to just dump a bunch of important story elements in games that can have entirely different rule sets and don’t even seem relevant at first glance. To illustrate this point further, let us imagine how the development of this series went for a second.
Developer A-“Alright guys, we did great work on Kingdom Hearts. Now let’s get to work on the sequel everybody!”
Now at this point we will transition to a man named Josh and his opinions on how to move forward. (Note: Josh is a fictional character created to make a point and is in no way based on anyone that I know. I just felt like naming this guy Josh for some reason.)
Josh-“How about we do Kingdom Hearts 1.5 instead and have it be important to the beginning of the next game with an entirely different gameplay system?”
Now at this point Developer A, who will not be named since he is a sensible minded person and therefore doesn’t exist, believes this is a crazy idea but since he thinks it will be a short little side story to the main event, he thinks nothing of it and comes to regret it and this new game is on an entirely different system picking up right where the last game left off and shows important information of the upcoming villain threat in the true sequel.
Let’s fast forward again to after Kingdom Hearts II is released.
Developer A- “Alright everyone, that was great. now we can begin work on Kingdom Hearts III right? No objections?”
Josh-“…What if… we did Kingdoms Hearts 0.2 instead?”
Developer A- “Why?”
Josh-” To explain some plot holes and set up Kingdom Hearts III and the true final battle.”
Developer A-“…Fine, but not on a random console okay?”
Josh-“So…. the PSP?”
Developer A-“I hate you Josh.”
Josh- “I know. By the way, how do you feel about phone games?”
I could go on with this little bit. I really could but I want you all to take away how absurd it sounds to split plot important games across multiple random consoles and adding new threads to each on of them. There is no way that you can add that many threads to that many different games without losing track of a couple of them. More importantly, there is no way the fanbase is going to be able to keep track of all that stuff so they just wonder what exactly is going on with certain characters every few games. I mean, why pout one of the most important games in the saga on the PSP of all things? It just boggles my mind how they could spend so much time developing threads that you actually have to hunt for and yet take forever actually trying to tie them all together. I have no problem adding in prequels that lead to answering important questions for future games. I do have a problem with the fact that they thought that anyone was actually going to be playing it on a PSP. I just can’t wrap my head around it. Look, if I had to boil all of this down, I just want to say that if Kingdom Hearts IV ever becomes a thing, I don’t want to be playing it on an iPad. However if you want to talk about VR, then I might be listening.
That Casual Gamer Guy 