Why ‘Kingdom Hearts’ Shouldn’t Abandon Its ‘Final Fantasy’ Elements

Earlier this year, Tetsuya Nomura spoke to Game Informer about Kingdom Hearts IV. There wasn’t much in the way of revelations in what he said: he confirmed that Sora will stay the main character, that there will still be visits to Disney worlds, and that he wouldn’t have any more updates for a while. Based on past experience, “a while” could end up being quite a while, so unless you plan on jumping on the new mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing-Link, there’s no sense in holding your breath in anticipation of breaking news. But in the same interview, Nomura took time to address a few questions about Kingdom Hearts’ past, and what it might mean going forward. Among them was an inquiry as to the fate of the Final Fantasy elements of the series.

The original Kingdom Hearts was filled with references to Square Enix’s flagship series, both big and small. Item names and secret bosses served as fun Easter eggs for canny players, while the presence of moogles throughout the game offered a more visible nod. Of more consequence were the characters incorporated into the story. Sora’s home of Destiny Islands was populated by aged-down versions of Tidus and Wakka from Final Fantasy X and Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII. They’re all presented as longtime friends of Sora, Riku, and Kairi. Later on, when he reaches Traverse Town, Sora encounters a team of Final Fantasy exiles: Cid, Yuffie and Aerith from Final Fantasy VII, and Squall – now going by the name Leon – from VIII. And then there’s Cloud, star of VII, waiting out in the Disney worlds.

None of these characters is just there for show in Kingdom Hearts. Leon and his gang are in league with King Mickey to fight against the darkness consuming the worlds. They’re around to give Sora, Donald, and Goofy (and the player) key pieces of exposition. As local leaders in Traverse Town, allied with the king, they’re well-positioned to pass on information. On top of that, they’re all from the same world as the game’s ultimate villain Ansem, Hollow Bastion, giving them additional insight into what’s going on. Cid offers transportation services, Leon provides training, and he and Yuffie both turn up for friendly competition at the Olympus Coliseum. That’s also where the player finds Cloud, initially bound to do Hades’ bidding until Sora and Hercules come to the rescue. That’s all for his part in the plot, but Leon and company are there for Sora right up until he heads for the End of the World.

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While not physically present in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the impressions of the Final Fantasy cast generated by Sora’s memory cards still play a significant role in certain levels of that game. Their role as allies to the Disney Castle crew is expanded in Kingdom Hearts II. They even get a Disney member to join their ranks; Merlin (The Sword in the Stone) is at their side (and rather antagonistic toward the tech-minded Cid). They keep up the good work of dropping plot and lore details, they serve as Sora’s battle partners in a key bit of gameplay, and Cloud gets a subplot based around his conflict with Sephiroth, also from VII, that ends on a cliffhanger if the player unlocks all of it. And that’s leaving out the significant role played by X’s Auron and the cameos made by VII’s Tifa and the Gullwings from Final Fantasy X-2.

Yet for all their prominence in the first three games of the series, Cloud, Leon, and the gang were nowhere to be found in Kingdom Hearts III as it was originally released and make only a brief cameo in the Re Mind DLC expansion. As Kingdom Hearts III was intended as the finale to the “Dark Seeker Saga” that the Final Fantasy characters had been so involved in, their sudden absence left many a fan puzzled and wanting. It was just one of the many, many, many problems with Kingdom Hearts III – but it was among the most visible.

Concerns over the fate of the Final Fantasy characters came up in Nomura’s recent interview. He responded by challenging the popular description of Kingdom Hearts as a crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy. The early games used Final Fantasy elements to help introduce Sora and the other original characters to the series and better integrate them into a world shared with Disney’s stable of cartoon stars. As Kingdom Hearts acquired more original characters, and as their popularity increased, it was hard to find room for everyone, so Leon’s crew fell by the wayside. Speaking to Game Informer around the time of the game’s release, co-director Tai Yasue added that the team behind the series was surprised at the disappointment over their absence; since Kingdom Hearts III was the conclusion of the Dark Seeker Saga, a conflict involving multiple trios of heroes and a large roster of villains, all original characters, why wouldn’t they take focus?

Yasue is deeply involved in the production of these games, and as the chief creative force behind the entire series, Nomura would know better than anyone what it’s intended to be. But those answers don’t satisfy or fill the void left in Kingdom Hearts III by Final Fantasy’s lack of representation.

Whether or not Kingdom Hearts was intended as a crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy specifically, that is the impression given by the early entries in the series. Leon’s crew are as thoroughly integrated into the story as Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are, and by the time of Kingdom Hearts II, they’re arguably more relevant to the main story than a few of the Disney worlds. The villains are from their home world (at least until later games decided to make Xehanort a Destiny Islander because…reasons), a world they ravished. Leon and friends play a major role in fighting the darkness unleashed by those villains, and later in restoring Hollow Bastion to Radiant Garden. They may not be main characters, but the Dark Seeker Saga is as much their story as it is King Mickey’s or Yen Sid’s, and they were in it for longer than, say, Xion or Terra. That makes their absence from the saga’s finale harder to swallow.

There’s also the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the Final Fantasy figures who appear in the Kingdom Hearts games are original characters. With a few exceptions, their origins and occupations are rewritten to fit within the world of the series, just like the denizens of Disney Castle. Leon goes by another name than he does in Final Fantasy VIII. Cloud and Aerith underwent significant personality changes in adaptation, and Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie are so altered in age, role, and character that they could be anybody. And for those who came to this series by way of Disney, with little to no knowledge of Final Fantasy – and I speak from experience on this – these may be the only versions of these characters that they know, or at least the ones they know best. And since Leon, Cloud, and the others have more direct interaction with Sora and the Disney crew than some original heroes introduced in later games, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to want them to stay active in the story.

Finally – things are just more fun with the Final Fantasy characters around. On paper, Kingdom Hearts is a concept that should never work. Tetsuya Nomura’s artwork is nothing like most of Disney’s content and many of the stories told in Square Enix games could never fit Disney’s house style. If the series didn’t exist, and someone told you that there should be a video game where Donald Duck was a red mage who served as a battle companion to a kid in Mickey Mouse shoes wielding a magical key-shaped sword against Cloud and Squall in a tournament set in Disney’s Hercules, you’d probably think they were nuts. But the series does work, and in its early days, it worked phenomenally well. If it wasn’t meant to be a full-blown crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy, it still functioned as one, and that was a big part of its charm. As surprised as Nomura and crew seem to have been at people mourning that charm’s absence in Kingdom Hearts III, bringing it back in Kingdom Hearts IV could be a very welcome surprise.

Of course, that would only exacerbate the series’ issues with an overstuffed cast, unless some original characters were dropped. Nomura seemed to acknowledge that was a possibility. It also wouldn’t address the ridiculously convoluted nature of the plot at this point, the growing irrelevance of the Disney worlds to the story, the sidelining of Kairi, or the flattening of Sora’s character – but that’s a matter for another day and another Nomura update, “a while” from now.