As a court licensed Kingdom Hearts Hater™, I will always complain about Nomura’s decision to exclude Final Fantasy characters on the premise that there “isn’t any room for them since there are so many original characters in the main story already.”
This new interview (6/14/2022) has Nomura repeating the same thing, but what makes it harder to swallow is that in the same interview he also says characters from the previous side-games, like RAX and TAV, might not be super involved in KH4 since their arcs are done.
So it’s like…
If the issue is that there isn’t room for FF characters since there are so many original characters…yet you’re also sidelining a bunch of those original characters…how is there still not enough room for Squall or somebody to show up and say hi?
If you have room in the plot to introduce a dozen more black coat-wearing dudes with stupid names, then there’s enough room for Leon to link up with Rinoa, or Tataru to open a shop in Twilight Town.
Furthermore, side quests are a thing. If there isn’t space for FF characters to help out in the main story, you can just relegate them to background stuff like synthesis tasks or minigames to fill up the journal. (This can also be applied to characters like Dilan or Aeleus, who have said a total of 0 words since 2012.) Or have them cameo in Disney worlds like Auron and Zack once did, since a lot of the Disney worlds don’t have major “main plot integration” in the first place – it’s just fun side stories where Sora gets to goof off.
If the concern is that there’s no room for them in the main story, put them someplace where the main story is taking a break. Pooh Bear or Jack Sparrow have nothing to do with the main story, but they still show up and get to fuck around with Sora for a little bit.
Part of the interview has him saying that he doesn’t feel like he agrees with fans when they refer to Kingdom Hearts as a “Disney x FF crossover,” and it’s like…okay, it’s your series, if that’s how you feel that’s how you feel – but at the same time, if you understand that a *large* part of the fanbase DOES view the series like that, then what you think doesn’t super matter.
Like,
the first game is predicated on the concept of Sora interacting with FF characters. You wake up on a beach with Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie, then get blasted to another world where you meet Squall, Aerith, Yuffie, and Cid. You fight Cloud in Olympus, and you even encounter Sephiroth as a superboss. KH2 and BbS ups the ante by adding more. So even if you don’t view the game being a collaboration between FF, you can’t blame a fan for thinking otherwise when the original games were scripted the way they were.
You’re the one who made the games that way. I get it was done to boost popularity by drawing in a bigger audience by showing off well-known characters, and that’s not something that necessarily needs to be done these day. But that’s what a lot of people know the series for – for being “that Disney game with FF characters.”
It honestly feels like a bait-and-switch to hear Nomura say things like “this isn’t a collaboration between Disney and Final Fantasy characters,” when it quite frankly 100% was.
By this point, the FF cast are established characters and should honestly be treated the same way as character like Hayner, Pence, and Olette.
I personally didn’t even know what FF was when I played KH1, so Leon and them were original characters from my point of view (they still kinda are anyway, as they’re not actually the same people they’re paying homage to, besides maybe Auron), so them being missing in KH3 was pretty sad. Cuz for the most part, they’re not just cameos. They have their own lore here. Leon isn’t Squall from FF8 – he’s a resident of Radiant Garden, for example.
I don’t think anyone’s saying the series *needs* FF characters, but I think a good portion of the fanbase would say they would still very much like them to be around. No one thinks the series won’t be able to thrive without Final Fantasy characters or something ridiculous (that’s just a real off-the-mark bad faith take) – we just want them because they’re fun.
Same as wanting the Disney cameos.
This is a fanservicey, crossover franchise from the ground up. Half the fun of the series is seeing who you’re going to bump into along the journey. And the FF cameos are one of the pillars of what initially made the franchise iconic and memorable, and it’s part of its identity and character. It’s charm. It just feels disingenuous to remove them completely, especially if the excuse is something feeble like the ones Nomura gives in interviews.
At the end of the day, Kingdom Hearts is a video game. There’s an infinite amount of space for characters (well, within data limitations or whatever), since you aren’t confined to some arbitrary runtime like a movie or TV show. You can have side quests, you can have minigames. You can even have branching story arcs with less important characters. I will just never believe there’s “no room” for FF characters when a lot of games have just as many characters as Kingdom Hearts and still make room for all of them.
And personally, I think KH is at its best when you have FF characters interacting with Disney characters. Seeing Leon’s group help take out the MCP and save Space Paranoids is fantastic. Zack and Hercules training together? Super fun. Kingdom Hearts needs fun wacky moments like this to counterbalance all the main story depression. I can’t think of a single positive from removing them.
As a side-note before wrapping up, I don’t like seeing the sort of “revisionist history” approach some people take to this whole topic, saying that it’s fine the FF characters are being removed because they were “never important anyway.” It’s like…my brother in christ, did you not play KH1? Because if nowhere else, they sure as hell were important there – they were Sora’s main lifeline and the only recurring characters beyond the original cast and Donald, Goofy, and Maleficent. Sora wouldn’t have even been able to keep traveling worlds without Cid upgrading the Gummi Ship. Ansem and Maleficent were introduced via Aerith and Leon. And then they go on to fix up Radiant Garden to its former glory (something which they get no credit for since they were not involved in KH3 and the apprentices reclaimed the castle).
It’s an argument that only spawned because people saw those that were upset about the absence of FF characters in KH3 and they wanted to write off their [completely valid] disappointment by acting like schmucks about it (possibly just out of an extension of KH fans being super defensive about criticism in general). If FF characters *had* been in KH3, everyone would’ve been fine with it, even those saying they were never important. It’s just a super weird stance to me, and I don’t get where it comes from because FF characters were obviously integral once upon a time.
Sadly now, thanks to Nomura putting in his two cents with this interview, I’m already seeing people acquiring this false sense of entitlement from being “right all along about FF cameos” and using it to dismiss a very reasonable complaint about the evolution of the franchise. Which is super frustrating. “Hah, you’re wrong about FF characters. Even the creator agrees with me! If you liked them, too bad, so sad~! If you want FF characters, go play FF!”
Anyway, this is way longer than I though it was going to be when I started typing, so I’ll sign off now.
In any event, I do hope some Final Fantasy characters show up in KH4. I mean, we’re traveling to a city literally named “Square” that features a 104 building and a Noctis knockoff. If there aren’t any cameos from other Square Enix properties, I feel like they just aren’t taking advantage of the playground of an idea that they’ve created to its fullest potential. I’d be pretty disappointed.
