I was watching Patrick H. Willems’ latest video on the radical possibilities of letting shit end and I got hit with a brainwave that sent me back to the end of 2019 and my first “Game of” article for the site, which “rewarded” Kingdom Hearts III for being “an incredibly cynical game, devoid of joy and a raison d’être” and “an attempt to cash in on nearly 15 years of nostalgia and speculation, trying to activate the 13-year-old soul of an audience who was in their mid-to-late 20s at this point.”
I think, almost six years removed from that piece, I would be gentler to Kingdom Hearts III than I was. Part of that has to do with the very scant morsels of information we’ve been fed about the inevitable continuation of Kingdom Hearts, the fourth numbered* installment in the franchise, but I think the other bit has to do with what I’ve learned about the development of what would become Final Fantasy XV in the course of doing Children of Lightning (and if you were wondering why this post is a numbered section of that series, well, there you go). Yes, there’s a lot of what I would call “phoned-in” Disney bullshit in Kingdom Hearts III, but even in 2019 I recognized what was going on with the addition of Verum Rex in the Toy Story world, with the formulation of a character – Yozora – who looks like both FFXV‘s Noctis and Kingdom Hearts’ Riku, with the inclusion of scenes that looked like those from trailers for Final Fantasy Versus XIII. If game development is art and devs are artists, which very few would argue against at this point, then Nomura was clearly working through the after-effects of FF Versus XIII‘s rough development cycle. Toy Story became the world where Nomura’s work on that part of Fabula Nova Crystallis had materialized. Verum Rex seemed to become a means to approach closure.
And so when we got the first glimpses of KH4 and learned that, at least for a while, Sora’s part of the game would take place in the afterlife world of Quadratum, and that Quadratum would look like the same slightly-to-the-left rendition of Tokyo that has appeared in Nomura’s work since the first Versus XIII trailer, I was kind of excited. Coming back to the Patrick H. Willems of it all: it would be kind of rad if Kingdom Hearts 4 was the series’ swan song, a rumination on endings, on seeing the work through to its conclusion and finishing what was started all the way back in [checks notes] 2002. The ghost of Nomura’s unfinished business hangs over both Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, and this would be the perfect place to bring it all to a close. It won’t be, I know that it’s silly to hope otherwise. But man, what if shit actually got a chance to end? Especially something in video games?
