It came before the novel! And it wasn't great - not much of a budget, for a start - which, iirc, is why Gaiman decided to novelise it.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Saying Kingdom Hearts has a confusing story strikes me as disingenuous
- Thread starter malyse
- Start date
Or anything related to Blazblue - seriously - that is the one franchise that tops KH in confusing as hell video game plots.
Blazblue's plot makes KH look comprehensible in comparison
Oh wow. Thats kind of amazing! I had no idea Gaiman's novel was based on a tv series.
Also, I'm looking through Neverwhere quotes and theres so many that apply to KH!
For example: "Beware of Doors.". and "I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again."
Then fucking play it.
if you want the full experience, DO THE FULL FUCKING THING.
People don't want the full experience.
They want cliff notes cause they want to play the new cool thing.
I wouldn't call Kingdom Heart's story difficult to understand but I also think DDD dropped a fucking nuke on the entire series and the end result is a shitshow where DDD doesn't explain what's going on well at all. I love the KH series but lets face it, Dream Drop Distance attempted to connect BBS, KH1, and KH2 together and it failed miserably. Part of that is because the game is literally 95% filler and it tried to squeeze so much damn information in the last hour it made the players' head explode. The end result of DDD was a game that did a piss poor job at setting up KH3 and I say that as someone who once I understood what the basic setup for KH3 was I actually liked it.
Frankly if you just ignore DDD, BBS,KH1, CoM KH2 and Days tell a fairly good and easily understood story. I mean the hardest concept to grasp in these games is that
Frankly my biggest complaint with DDD is that it's effectively made the events of KH2 pointless, and even fucking Square knows this. If you go watch the KH3 recap videos they barely spend any time on KH2. 358/2 days and fucking Chain of Memories are more relevant to the plot now than KH2.
Frankly if you just ignore DDD, BBS,KH1, CoM KH2 and Days tell a fairly good and easily understood story. I mean the hardest concept to grasp in these games is that
Ansem is Xehanort's heartless, and Xemnas is his nobody.
Frankly my biggest complaint with DDD is that it's effectively made the events of KH2 pointless, and even fucking Square knows this. If you go watch the KH3 recap videos they barely spend any time on KH2. 358/2 days and fucking Chain of Memories are more relevant to the plot now than KH2.
You know it's bad when people go it's easier to understand then Metal Gear.
Like the lack of self awareness
Like the lack of self awareness
Yeah, Neverwhere is basically Kingdom Hearts: 270 Stations/11.
If I had a more targeted criticism of the story in Kingdom Hearts, beyond just my general "the games have a lot of things going on in general so it can make the plot difficult to absorb," it would be that too much exposition is delivered through antagonists. It feels like DDD is almost all that sometimes. Even if I can feel like I can trust them, they inject too much of their ego and motives into the explanation to firmly grasp everything, and there's less room for Sora/the protagonist to ask questions. I felt like every scene of DDD in that Org XIII council room was just me going "wait, can you reword that?" Pretty sure Xehanort and Venitas were also like this in BBS.
But like I've said, I think playing the games are bad at communicating their own plots. So if they want the plot, they can watch a YT video. But that's not very entertaining, because people want the most out of the stories, so you play the game. So it's a catch-22.
"KH is extremely confusing and that's why it has a bad story" is just short-hand for how much people dislike the series' story but put in a form of criticism that seems more objective. There are many more issues with the story than the confusion.
-Sora is an extremely unlikable character in KH2.
-KH thinks it's very deep but has nothing whatsoever to say. KH has the same major flaw of Star Wars in never defining what "Light" and "Darkness" actually are, but KH basically is navel gazing most of the time. There is no insight or even coherence in the series' rambling about Light and Darkness and the series seems to have no idea what it would even define as Light or Darkness or what that would mean but it keeps talking about those things incessantly.
-The Disney story sequences are robbed of joy in KH2 and are just horrible because Sora is often just along for the ride with his story and the Disney characters story having nothing to do with each other. Square puts together a very low production value (with poor dialog and really bad directing) version of a Disney movie and then shoves together a story about Sora chasing the Heartless. Sora leaves most of the Disney worlds having gained no knowledge or insight about life and is the same going out as he is coming in. Meanwhile, Sora has no impact on the Disney story, making the plot boring because we know what's going to happen and making you feel like the random hanger on in the Disney story that you are.
-There are way way way way too many cutscenes.
-All the clones do legitimately get confusing to keep track of at times (I was baffled when Replica/Data Riku showed up, wondering why Riku got young again in the trailer) but they're also just lame and boring. A villain that is just Sora or Xehanort but a clone is incredibly uninteresting at this point.
-The forward momentum in the plot often doesn't occur within Disney stories, making plot progression feel extremely slow and making the Disney worlds feel like filler when they should be most of the point.
-Sora is an extremely unlikable character in KH2.
-KH thinks it's very deep but has nothing whatsoever to say. KH has the same major flaw of Star Wars in never defining what "Light" and "Darkness" actually are, but KH basically is navel gazing most of the time. There is no insight or even coherence in the series' rambling about Light and Darkness and the series seems to have no idea what it would even define as Light or Darkness or what that would mean but it keeps talking about those things incessantly.
-The Disney story sequences are robbed of joy in KH2 and are just horrible because Sora is often just along for the ride with his story and the Disney characters story having nothing to do with each other. Square puts together a very low production value (with poor dialog and really bad directing) version of a Disney movie and then shoves together a story about Sora chasing the Heartless. Sora leaves most of the Disney worlds having gained no knowledge or insight about life and is the same going out as he is coming in. Meanwhile, Sora has no impact on the Disney story, making the plot boring because we know what's going to happen and making you feel like the random hanger on in the Disney story that you are.
-There are way way way way too many cutscenes.
-All the clones do legitimately get confusing to keep track of at times (I was baffled when Replica/Data Riku showed up, wondering why Riku got young again in the trailer) but they're also just lame and boring. A villain that is just Sora or Xehanort but a clone is incredibly uninteresting at this point.
-The forward momentum in the plot often doesn't occur within Disney stories, making plot progression feel extremely slow and making the Disney worlds feel like filler when they should be most of the point.
Yeah, and your argument hinged on folks being too caught up in shit like spacial awareness and platforming. i don't take that even kinda seriously.
Nothing in those games outside of DDD is hard to follow, cause the shit is simple.
It's poorly told, full of anime tropes, and unnecessarily complicated, but it isn't hard to follow if you pay attention.
I'm baffled that people could get confused by it, unless they've missed games out.
I'm baffled that people could get confused by it, unless they've missed games out.
This is easily the worst part of 2. None of it really matters. It makes half the game feel like filler.
I haven't played KH 3D yet, but my main desire for KH3 is that the Disney stories actually are impacted by Sora.
Like, have the same basic outline of what will happen and hit the scenes people want to see in a video game, but like... have some differences so people can be surprised by what is happening and have the plot progress during the worlds.
KH2 retold the stories line by line almost except with each world having 1/100 of the budget of these films and with Sora standing in the background randomly.
Like, have the same basic outline of what will happen and hit the scenes people want to see in a video game, but like... have some differences so people can be surprised by what is happening and have the plot progress during the worlds.
KH2 retold the stories line by line almost except with each world having 1/100 of the budget of these films and with Sora standing in the background randomly.
Nah, in Chain of Memories it's the worst. The Disney Worlds are complete filler
It honestly doesn't even matter in the end if you understand everything. The games are mainly from Sora's POV so stuff like BBS isn't a big deal is you missed a plot point becasue someone has to explain it to Sora in KH3.
There aren't even stories in Chain of Memories worlds, it just feels like dialogue for dialogue
In KH3 4 of the Disney Worlds are original stories and not movie retellings so it should be a lot more interesting. For the ones that are more like adaptations it seems like it'll be slightly different since the villains have more of an active role.
To be clearer, the arguments I've made in this thread aren't like my main problems with the story. It's just the best way I've come up with to reconcile how so many people can talk about the games' stories like they're super easy to get while others think they're more complicated than physics. Not everyone is equipped to absorb the two halves of the games at once.
I find Kingdom Hearts the Naruto of videogames: sometimes it messes previous things up, sometimes it fucks with your brain, but deep down it's a tale of friendship that anyone who has had a real friend can genuinely enjoy. It is also anime-like, so the comparison is good in that sense too.
I understand it, mostly, cause I've played through the collections but it is ridiculous. I can't think of any other video game series that has as many games that are important to understanding plot points. What's even worse they are all RPGs, not short games, with the exception being the gacha crap that has a story that moves slower than a snail's pace which the film apparently doesn't cover all of.
It's just bad. Baffling when Disney modern animated movies are amazing simple to a child and also has depth to adults. Kingdom Hearts have neither.
I don't think it was that difficult to follow until DDD.
Once you get past the "Ansem is actually this dude named Xehanort" confusion, I think the series does a good job of answering the questions of the plot until they randomly threw it all out the window for time travel.
Once you get past the "Ansem is actually this dude named Xehanort" confusion, I think the series does a good job of answering the questions of the plot until they randomly threw it all out the window for time travel.
I agree the most with two points said so far. Kingdom Hearts is very very bloated, there's so many games now, and they're long meaty games that add tons more characters and new types of enemies with each one.
The other is that the incessant jargon of KH is vague, they don't actually concretely define what light/darkness/hearts, etc actually is and the character use those worse in all kinds of different contexts so you get insane sounding sentences delivered by mostly villain characters who like to monologue in saturday cartoon Shakespeare villain style.
The other is that the incessant jargon of KH is vague, they don't actually concretely define what light/darkness/hearts, etc actually is and the character use those worse in all kinds of different contexts so you get insane sounding sentences delivered by mostly villain characters who like to monologue in saturday cartoon Shakespeare villain style.
IIRC Nomura said it's the ending of the Xeharnot saga.
I'd love if the game ends with the Master of Masters coming back and just saying Xeharnot was nothing compared to him and the story continues lol.
Per Nomura it's the finale of the "Dark Seeker Saga" that's been told since KH1.
Which may be true, but it in no way means that there wont be 50 spinoffs dealing with who knows what that raise more questions.
I honestly would not be surpised at all if Xehanort turned out to be some mid level flunkie. Lol.
Haha no my friend, you must be a digital sora or something, I have no idea what's going on even in the second game alone.
"It's the guy who's not Ansem!"
And Kingdom Hearts was ruined forever.
I kinda want to visit the dimension where Nomura went with his original plan to have Chernobog as the final boss/true antagonist of the original game...
Its one of the worse series I think of in terms of making thngs needlessly obtuse. Why do Vanitas/Sora look identical? I'm not asking the in universe reason, I understand that. I'm asking in what way does that in benefit the story? It doesn't and just serves to making things harder to follow.
There's so much completely abritatry fluff like this that drags the story down.
There's so much completely abritatry fluff like this that drags the story down.
The depths that line plunged Kingdom Hearts into are, frankly, amazing.
In a series that practically prides itself on hamfisted writing this is the little crown it wears on its head.
This will always be amusing.
I love that literally after that Sora says" "That's Nuts!"
Great job taking part of a sentence out of context to try and what say that I'm wrong? Can't include the whole rest of that sentence which you conveniently left out? Great job ignoring the entire rest of my post too. Can't even argue against anything I'm saying just post a meme and let that do your work for you huh?
I keep saying this: the KH story is not confusing, it's just dumb.
People confuse a story being poorly thought with it not making sense, but KH's story makes perfect sense within the context of KH, it's just dumb, very very dumb.
Mind you it's part of the charm and i wouldn't have it any other way.
People confuse a story being poorly thought with it not making sense, but KH's story makes perfect sense within the context of KH, it's just dumb, very very dumb.
Mind you it's part of the charm and i wouldn't have it any other way.
I've played every game and I don't really get the full story. Do I need to spend hours on the internet in forums talking to people to get it? No, it should be obvious from the medium itself.
Okay I guess that all makes sense. I just remember in kh1 Leon referring to it as THE keyblade, thus implying there's only one and or his is special. But I guess the answer could simply be that nomura retconned that whole idea
I mean, it is, that's what i just said lol. You dont have to be explained anything unless you were not paying attention.
You can claim to not like the story, you can claim that the plot decisions in it are stupid or ridiculous...those criticisms are fair and subjective. However, saying that the story is "hard to understand" strikes me as very strange. Its not hard to get what's going on as the explanations are clearly doled out very liberally.
Last edited: