Kingdom Hearts made crossovers cool — cursing us all, and itself too

It’s 2022, and crossovers are everywhere. To Fortnite To Space Jam 2In the interest of making huge money, media companies have come to learn how to get along with each other. It helps that a few of those corporations now own all of the other ones — and there is no media company more notorious for that accomplishment than Disney, the proud owner of Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and more. Perhaps that’s why the announcement of Kingdom Hearts IVIt’s bittersweet to hear that Star Wars characters might appear in the game.

It doesn’t help that Kingdom Hearts 3 It was difficult to recreate the magic. Maybe it was because Sora and his friends sailed into the uncanny valley during the Pirates of the Caribbean section; maybe it’s because Elsa performed “Let It Go” in its entirety rather than cutting out a chorus or two and letting us be on our way. Maybe it was the changing landscape of pop culture since 2002’s Kingdom Hearts. Sora now has to face a bigger enemy: The exhaustion people feel toward crossover events, and Disney-related ones in particular.

It didn’t used to be this way. In 2002 Kingdom Hearts was a revelation — a never-before-seen example of corporate collaboration across movies and video games. In a talk at DICE 2010, Disney exec Steve Wadsworth and his colleague Graham Hopper looked back on Kingdom Hearts’ legacy, with Hopper noting it was “so radical” for Disney and Square Enix to mash up their characters that many staffers worried internally that the result would be “an abomination.” Why would Disney have agreed to something like this, they wondered? Cloud Strife and Donald Duck were in the same game. What the hell was that? That Going to work

Here’s how Kingdom Hearts pulled it off: The game’s hero, Sora, ventures into a wacky multiverse of Disney and Final Fantasy worlds. He’s looking for his best friends Riku and Kairi, who’ve disappeared into the multiverse as well, even as it’s being overtaken by a mysterious darkness. Along the way, Sora befriends Donald Duck and Goofy, meets Aerith and Squall, and finds out his friend Kairi is a Disney princess (and, therefore, a damsel in distress in need of his rescue — it was the early 2000s, after all). Maleficent, however, has been manipulating Riku and his friends. This leads to conflict that eventually resolves between Sora’s and Riku. It is this story that inspired decades and years of queer fanfiction. Sora is reunited with his buddies to defeat the darkness. It turns out that the dark manifestations are their own self-doubts, and unhappiness. The best way to sum up their triumph is love conquering all. This album sold like gangbusters.

The first three games were played by me when I was 19. I was cynical, still struggling with my queer identity and I played them alongside a friend. Both of us found similarities to our experiences through Riku and Sora. That makes it all sound heartwarming, doesn’t it? Well, we also spent the entire time imitating Mickey Mouse’s voice and shriek-laughing every single time Donald Duck said anything. These games were simply amazing. It’s weirdThese were queer-coded, meaningful and just plain crazy.

Kingdom Hearts felt like fanfiction. Specifically, it felt the way fanfiction felt in the 2000s; back then, fan-created works explored groundbreaking, risky ideas (like queerness), but they were also on very shaky legal ground, often mocked by authors who didn’t like to see their characters re-interpreted by fans. Today, fanfiction can be celebrated or even used as marketing free of charge by media creators. This fits in nicely with the corporate multiverse and cross-overs. Everything is Kingdom Hearts now — but it didn’t used to be.

It’s hard to even imagine current-day Disney as an underdog, but in the early 2000s, the company was in the midst of an infamous slump. Disney’s partnership with Pixar had resulted in huge successes, like Toy StoryIn 1995, A Bug’s Life in 1998, but Disney’s own animated films were underperforming. This led to strife between Pixar and Disney as the former increasingly carried the latter; the situation didn’t resolve until 2005, when longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner got ousted and replaced by Bob Iger, who reportedly repaired Disney’s relationship with Pixar. This also led to Disney’s formal acquisition of Pixar in 2006.

At the beginning of 2000, the rocky period in Disney’s history saw the creation of Kingdom Hearts. According to Kingdom HeartsDirector Tetsuya Namura talks about how it began with Square Enix’s Shinji Hashimoto, a game producer. They met in an elevator and had an interesting conversation. They believed what Hashimoto had to say, and the game was able to go into development in February 2000. The game would take characters from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series mash them together with Disney icons, like Donald Duck and Goofy, but also characters from more modern animated movies like The Little Mermaid and Tarzan.

Square Enix

In 2000, it was often hard to make crossovers at a massive scale. Fighting games such as X-Men vs. Street Fighter in 1996, or Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.1999. These games felt like the best of fanfiction and “who would win” debates — gifts for players who’d spent years imagining what it would be like if their favorite characters met one another in battle.

Disney shared a similar story. Roger Rabbit, Who Was He Framed?(1988), a film in which Disney cartoon characters and Warner Bros. live-action actors exchange quips. This resulted in sequences like a piano battle between Disney’s Donald Duck and Warner Bros.’ Daffy Duck, with the latter hypocritically mocking the former over his “speech impediment.” That gag is only possible because both corporations allowed their characters to not only appear but to make fun of one another — as well as the animation industry itself, given the film’s larger critique of show business. Roger Rabbit This was a high-risk gamble, but it proved to be a good investment in box office results and critical acclaim.

In 2000 however, Square Enix executives at Disney worked with them. Kingdom HeartsHowever, they had their reservations. According to Nomura, Disney wouldn’t allow its best-known character and worldwide icon, Mickey Mouse, to appear in the game — except for in just one shot, so Square Enix had to make it count. CBR’s history of the series states that Square Enix had originally wanted Mickey Mouse to be the game’s protagonist, so Disney offered the compromise of Donald Duck instead. It’s hilarious to imagine Donald Duck as the grouchy hero of Kingdom HeartsNomura instead came up with an alternative. Sora is a totally original character created by Nomura. He has the innocence of a Disney heroine and the zip-laden jackets and hair wax of a Final Fantasy hero. He’s the best of both worlds, and the key to uniting them all.

Similar to Roger Rabbit Smash Bros.It worked. Kingdom Hearts not only succeeded with young kids who loved Disney, but tweens and teens who couldn’t help but chuckle at seeing Squall and Cloud alongside Snow White and Goofy. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 (1997) was a fantasy-meets-cyberpunk RPG with a tearjerker climax and multiple twist-laden reveals about its hero’s trauma-filled past, cited early and often in debates about whether games could be art — yet, here was its roster of characters, also appearing in a corny Disney game featuring Donald Duck as a high-powered magic wielder (and, as always, masterful shit-talker). It made absolutely no sense for Aerith to be smiling gently at Goofy’s jokes, and yet here they all were, running around Traverse Town together.

It was hilarious because of the mix of Disney-wackier Final Fantasy heroes and serious Final Fantasy ones. Kingdom Hearts’ success paved the way for Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories Kingdom Hearts 2To add more characters and bizarre scenarios to the mix. Having earned Disney’s trust (and having padded its pockets), Square Enix incorporated Mickey Mouse into the series as a major character, fleshing out his mysterious appearance at the end of the first game. It’s a strange result. The Kingdom Hearts series features a squeaky voiced, large-eared Disney character as a legend bad-ass with extraordinary superpowers. He is outfitted in a Matrix trench and gives him mysterious one-liners on the dark forces that threaten Sora. Except, again, those one-liners all get delivered in Mickey’s voice. It’s wild.

After Kingdom Hearts 2’s release in 2005, the world as we know it began to form. In 2006, Pixar was acquired by Disney. Iron ManThe first phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was launched. Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. The Avengers Ralph Wreck-ItThat year saw mainstreaming of the concept of a movieic multiverse as well as a huge videogame crossover movie. We were already in 2019, and the darkness was over. Kingdom Hearts 3 In January 2019, it was released, and then two months later Disney purchased 20th Century Fox. Disney Plus launched with Disney Plus in November. MandalorianPlease see the following: Rising of Skywalker The year was closed.

Square Enix

Between them, 14 years of long time passed. Kingdom Hearts 2 And Kingdom Hearts 3And clearly Disney experienced a lot more oversaturation during that period. However, many Kingdom Hearts players also cited the mixed reaction to other games.Kingdom Hearts 3 didn’t work for them. Some of these games weren’t available at all in Japan, while others were limited to handheld devices. You are now caught up. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days2009. The Birth by Sleep (2011) required you to own both a Nintendo DS and a PlayStation Portable — and then you also needed to purchase a Nintendo 3DS to play Dream Drop DistanceIn 2012.

These are the various Kingdom Hearts Games that were published between KH2 And KH3 Some things took unexpected turns. Disney remained, but Final Fantasy fell to the background as the game’s world expanded to include more original characters, often with new and unusual backstories and new magical lore to learn and understand. The Kingdom Hearts series still felt like fanfiction, but now it felt like a story by a writer who’d realized they’d rather be writing an original fantasy novel. These results were delightfully bizarre and lacked the mainstream appeal of the original. KH And KH2 This was an instant hit for Square Enix as well as Disney.

Some Kingdom Hearts fans, like yours truly, love that the series didn’t always pander and got weirder instead. However, divergent audience expectations led to a disappointing outcome heading into. Kingdom Hearts 3. The Disney Corporation had grown to be as villainous and comical as Maleficent. It seemed to take over everything, attracting dozens upon dozens A-list actors into the rapidly expanding Marvel movie roster. Audiences weren’t just facing superhero fatigue by the time 2019 rolled around. They had Star Wars fatigue, crossover fatigue, Disney fatigue … basically, audiences had Kingdom Hearts fatigue.

It’s actually something I like. Kingdom Hearts 3, but maybe that’s because it reminds me of a past that’s long dead. Sora’s unyielding, boyish optimism in the face of impossible odds used to inspire me, even as a cold-hearted 19-year-old back in 2005. I am always going to laugh at the idea that Mickey Mouse is, and will continue to be, a bad-ass. Everytime I watch compilations of ridiculous clips from Kingdom Hearts, often shared by people attempting to mock the series, I roll my eyes because those people don’t understand that everyone who loves these games Learn more they’re ridiculous — and that’s the point. You can’t not laugh at Donald Duck standing next to Cloud Strife. It’s funny as shit. This rock!

But it can also be annoying. It does, at least it does right now. This is because every corporation recognized that cross-over fanfiction could be made into a monetizable concept. Modern-day crossovers don’t exist for the sake of showing audiences something more about who these characters could become if they had the chance to visit one another’s worlds. Instead, today’s crossovers seem designed to inspire a sense of recognition and little more than that. Cameron Kunzelman stated it in an analysis of Space Jam 2: “Tweety Bird ends up in The Matrix. In the vicinity, Wile E.Coyote and The Road Runner hang out. Fury Road universe … The problem here is not simply that the references happen, but that the references are made possible by a system of intellectual property concentration that encourages us to value things in terms of how much recognizable content is in them.”

Square Enix via Polygon

But, despite it all, there is still hope. Kingdom Hearts IV. Even as Disney has grown into something so massive and so boardroom-approved that it can’t help but be boring, samey, and homophobic, you can’t quite say the same for Kingdom Hearts as a series. Its complex, lore-packed story is barely understood by most audiences; it’s anything but samey or accessible. It’s not always aimed at a mass audience. And compared to the rest of the Disney media lineup in 2022, that’s fascinating.

I don’t need Kingdom Hearts to be cool again. However, it helps that I can remember the times when I was cool. Kingdom Hearts 3More thanks to my nostalgia. But in 2022, I don’t expect Kingdom Hearts to be groundbreaking or surprising. It can’t be; it already did that job by inspiring our current corporate hellscape.

Instead, let it be strange. Let it be reactive, more like Nomura’s other project Final Fantasy 7 RemakeThis is a comment on players’ expectations of the classic. Don’t be afraid to confront the truth. Roger Rabbit, Who Was He Framed? And let it be silly, like the very first Kingdom Hearts game, in which the enduring power of love in the face of an apocalypse earned this succinct description from Goofy: “Even if this place goes poof, our hearts ain’t goin’ nowhere.”