5 Things We Can Really Do Without In Kingdom Hearts 3
Will Kingdom Hearts 3 ever be released? Who knows! But if it is, there are a few franchise staples we are all, frankly, completely sick of.
Once, I loved Kingdom Hearts. I loved its mix of Disney innocence with the depth we’d come to love from Final Fantasy. I loved its myriad worlds, straight from my childhood, and its pervasive optimism that there was good in everyone, and that this good would win out. I tried to continue loving this series through its early sequels, such as Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 2. But, it’s grown difficult to love in the last fifteen years.
It’s Kingdom Hearts’ fifteenth anniversary, and I couldn’t be more exasperated. Years and years of development and delay on the Number-Three game in the series would be bad enough, but during the wait time, Square Enix has desperately tried to fill the gaps with various spin-offs, preludes, and other misadventures to dig themselves out of the holes they dug with their overly complex, convoluted plot points. Sure, there’s some beautiful storytelling on occasion (Aqua is one of my favorite characters ever), but it’s so tough to mire through the lore to figure out how anyone stands that it’s almost not worth trying to understand.
But deep down, I still remember those early moments of Disney purity and Final Fantasy magic, and long to have them back. No one knows how Kingdom Hearts 3 is going to fare–we’ve seen so little of it up til now. I’m trying to remain optimistic, but there are five things that I just flat-out do not want to see when the game finally shows up on my shelf.
Roxas
This is an easy one. Let’s have as little of Roxas in this game as possible. I immediately disliked this punk the minute he took up a solid 3-4 hours of gameplay at the start of Kingdom Hearts 2, just basking in the spotlight when I was looking for my good buddy Sora. Roxas, with his non-existent personality, melodramatic subplot, and mediocre friends, was just not a substitute for the charismatic main character with the big shoes who captured my heart in the first game. His sidequests were horrible and time-consuming, and he got his own handheld spin-off game where he, the main character, was entirely upstaged by an amazing chick who everyone promptly forgets at the end. Great, thanks.
Roxas is absorbed into Sora now or something, so we’d better not see him again. Surely he’ll show up anyway due to some heart/light/memory mumbo-jumbo, but I’d just as soon see him take up residence in Sora’s heart (whatever that means) and never trouble us with his paper route again.