Kingdom Hearts celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, which has me thinking about the series as a whole and how far it’s come. Beyond deba﷽ting whether the most recent entry was any good or not (spoilers, it was), and analysing how being a little cringeb🌠all works so welꦇl for Sora’s adventures, I turned to cheerier matters about what the future should hold and where the series should go next - someone’♌s gotta die.
Consequence is a word that Kingdom Hearts has never heard of. If you try explaining the concept to it, it’ll nod li𒈔ke it understood you, pretend 🎃to kill one of the obviously not-going-to-die Disney characters, and then beam at you like a dog who’s just shit the carpet and thinks you’ll be proud.
This has been a running issue with the series for as long as it’s been around, although the obsession with fakeꦯ deaths only really started in Kingdom Hearts 2. In the first game, a fake-out was actually used to great effect, although it wasn’t related to death this time around (unless you count my feelings). Sora and Kairi’s sudden bittersweet ending after fighting so long to stay with each other was essentially just one big expectation fake-out and one that hit really hard.
Things only got worse from there. As Kingdom Hearts entered its emo phase, it d🅠ecided that it was no longer just having story beats that didn’t go the way you expected, it was going to kill off some of its cast. On the chopping block this 🏅time were Goofy and Axel, who both had emotional death scenes that were then retconned later down the line. Goofy’s is just dumb as shit and didn’t even trick a seven-year-old me, but Axel’s is a real missed opportunity.
Here we have one of the game’s best characters sacrificing himself for the double of his best friend. It’s a powerful moment that closes out his anti-hero arc and lets him give himself up for his friends. Then, just a few games later, it’s retconned and Axel is reborn as the exact same person with the same memories, now just without the teardrop tattoo. The same goes for Xion, whose sacrifice is a big moment for the series and is later just reversed for a happy ending, or even someone like Ansem the Wise who totally wasn't killed by that explosion in Kingdom Hearts 2, he was just put in the Realm of Darkness. Right.
This lack of follow-through happens all the time in Kingdom Hearts, but by far the worst of it is Kairi’s death in Kingdom Hearts 3. Actually wait, scratch that, the worst fake-out death was everyone in Kingdom Hearts 3. During the game&rsq🍸uo;s final act, all of the Guardians of Light are taken out in one scene, only to be brought back from the brink an hour later thanks to some time travel that still doesn’t quite make sense to me, despite being all I’ve thought about pretty much every day 𒉰since it happened.
Kairi was hit the worst by it, 🐻though. Ignoring the fact that Kairi was absolutely done dirty in KH3, what could have been an extremely poignant loss for Sora is not only brushed away by Donald and Goofy telling Sora not to cry, but is then reversed a mere hour later once again thanks to the combined powers of time travel and waking. It’s a slap in the face when you consider some of the gut-wrenching sacrifices made in other Square Enix games li🌟ke Final Fantasy.
You could argue that Sora disappearing from his world and not getting his happy ending alongside everyone elsﷺe is the true ‘consequence’ presented here, but I’m not buying it. Sora is warned several times in Kingdom Hearts 3 about abusing the Power of Waking, which should have ⛄led to him losing something permanently, but instead all it’s done is taken him to another world altogether, presumably for a brief side game with Yozora that’ll then set the stage for the fourth game with the Foretellers.
Of course, I don’t want Sora to die. I don’t want any of the characters to die. It just feels like all Kingdom Hearts can do is tease big ℱlosses and not follow through with it. I loved seeing the return of Roxas, Xion, Ventus, Terra, and Aqua, but the fact that all of them get a happy ending with no questions asked just feels too perfect.
I just want Kingdom Hearts to let its characters make a decision or go through something and let there be some consequences. Let Aqua be angry with Mickey for longer than one Norted minute, let Axel die and notꦓ be resurrected, and let the characters exist as more than just a collection of referenceable memories.