It goes something like this...
Kingdom Hearts is a franchise in trouble, and I don't think it's realised it yet. How could they when it's visionary director is off making 15 games out of Final Fantasy 7, and I know originally said that as a joke but now that I think about it; Tetsuya Nomura has already announced or released five games based around Final Fantasy 7 so it is very possible he makes it to fifteen before he's done. He just needs to add a party-game stumble spin-off set on a Mako Reactor and then a farm sim within the Wutai clans and he's golden! But whilst all this is going on, Kingdom hearts is circling the drain it doesn't even realise because the second half of that franchise collaboration isn't living up to their weight of the deal. Disney is failing to provide what Kingdom Hearts needs in order to grow.
It is movies? No, Disney is still popping out the odd new animated films with Encanto, Turning Red and... um... 'Strange World'? But what is it that all of these movies don't have that Kingdom Hearts sort of needs... hmm... oh, that's right; Villains! Kingdom Hearts, love it or hate it, is a traditional action adventure lightly RPG adventure built around very basic plotpoints underneath a supremely complex overall narrative. You visit the world of a Disney movie, meet the heroes and then beat up the bad guy, usually in a scene vaguely reminiscent of how the villain dies in the respective movie. How exactly would Sora and crew slide that formula into those three properties, the last 3 animated Disney movies released? Encanto has good songs but there's no real villain, Turning Red doesn't even have good music and the only antagonist of Strange World is generational friction. How is Kingdom Hearts supposed to feed off that to base a grand Japanese RPG story off?
Recently Disney has shifted away from the traditional big bad villain in order to present other types of conflicts in stories they try to pitch as being more emotionally intelligent; which is a quite warm prospective until you look at their slate and realise that 9 times out of 10 that just means a story of "You don't understand what it's like to be me, mom!" In their desire to shift from a style of narrative they believe to be pastiche and overdone, Disney has slipped into another trope, inherently more boring, that they're trying to squeeze the life out of one movie at a time. An attempt that is leaving us with a generation of Disney movies all desperately falling over each other to bark the exact same message about connection between family members; and none of it makes for good gameplay fodder. Unless we actually got a chance to beat the heck out of the dad character in Strange World; because he is a deadbeat ass who deserves it. Just saying.
So then we have to ask ourselves the question; just how many more Disney movies does Kingdom Hearts have left to squeeze for inspiration before the animated movie well runs dry? At a guess I'd perhaps say Zootopia, but then I'm immediately realising the problem there is Sora would have to be turned into an animal furry and that opens a whole can of worms that the Kingdom Hearts community is absolutely not mature enough to navigate. Raya And The Last Dragon was pretty but literally no one watched that. The Ice Age movie was- there was an Ice Age movie in 2022? What the what? Oh, and I guess that is a Disney franchise now because they bought out Fox... Still, does anyone really want to see Sora interact with the likes of Sid and Manny. Urg- or the baby? Frankly, I think Kingdom Hearts should have a little more self respect than that. So then what does that leave?
Franchise hopping, I say. Pull in all takers and make Kingdom Hearts a franchise that grabs other properties for content! Dreamworks, Bluesky... um...Studio Ghibli? Whatever, whoever; just find someone who still has villains to buff up the Kingdom Hearts slate, because whenever you leave Kingdom Hearts alone to come up with badguys they consistently fall back on overly anime-looking characters stuffed in baggy black robes. It's like a fetish for them, it makes me uncomfortable. We need some more creativity in this franchise, and I fear that Star Wars is only going to do so much considering the vast creativity issues that franchise is having on it's own recently. Sure, we can have a Darth Vader and Emperor boss fight, but what then? The fish face people from The Book of Boba Fett? Nah, give me some fresh stuff!
With that in mind, why don't I just throw caution to the wind and tell Square to seek out a collaborative relationship with the Yugioh owners post haste! Yeah, that's right. I'm talking Yugioh, the franchise of ancient Pharaoh's inhabiting the bodies of young boys, 'Heart of the cards' and "It's not fair. It should have been me, not him!" But seriously, think about it- an entire Kingdom Hearts world where the fighting becomes a turn-based RPG card game with legendary card summonables like Blue-eyes White Dragon! The villains can be Kaiba or the Tyler sisters! (just so long as they're voiced by the 4Kids actresses who gave them both inexplicable valley girl drawls) I'm telling you the overblown complexity of Yu Gui Oh makes a perfect fit for the similarly overblown Kingdom Hearts narrative! It's such a perfect collaboration it isn't even funny!
And heck, whilst we're at is, why not give a World over to the Hallownest? Yeah, let Sora pick himself a bug persona and join the Hollow Knight on his journey to free his kingdom from The Radiance! (And 'The Knight' is 'The Hollow Knight'; no matter what pseudo-intellectuals across the Internet might try and say.) Switching up the action to a side-scrolling platformer would really stretch the limits of Kingdom Heart's creativity and really freshen up what we come to expect from the games. Or maybe they'll just translate Hollow Knight itself into 3D in a bizarre clashing of styles. I won't say I'd love to see how that would turn out, but I'd be curious to see it anyway. Either way, Hollow Knight is dripping with great villains to spice up a Kingdom Hearts game; with Radiance presenting great sub main antagonist potential!
Kingdom Hearts has to do something before it gets desperate for new crossover characters! And you might consider the possibilities I've already presented as 'getting desperate', but at least I'm offering some ideas and solutions! I fear Tetsuya was only riding the Kingdom Hearts train to give him enough pull and credibility to take control of the rights to Final Fantasy 7; now he has that Kingdom Hearts is just a slowly disappearing dot on his windshield. By my guess, Kingdom Hearts 4 is going to need to generate at least five years worth of spin-off content in order to delay long enough for a new slate of strong animated Disney movies to come out and give the franchise some inspiration. Which, knowing how much the KH story loves to procrastinate, is totally possible; but I prefer a cleaner, more insanely ambitious, solution. Does that make my ambitious dreams synchronous to the dreams of a madman? Yes. Yes it does.
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