Kingdom Hearts

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"Alright, Our next project is the Kingdom Hearts manga, now most of you should be familiar with this great game. Now how do we proceed? What parts of Kindgom Hearts made it such a great game? I have some ideas as to how we proceed.
1. For the story: We use the beginning and ending videos from each world and pretend like there's a coherant plot going when really all we're doing is rushing a plot that really shouldn't be rushed.
2. The videogame has alot of action and RPG elements in it. Let's keep the ridiculous spells like "Freeze" and "Cure" and ... make them say it but eliminate Sora using the Keyblade for anything other than locking a keyhole."
3. Let's use a RIDICULOUS amount of chibis, like if we have less than 10 per chapter the chapter will have to be completely redrawn.
4. Let's eliminate the single most fun world: Halloween Town, so that we can focus on other exciting worlds like.......WONDERLAND!"

That was, in my mind at least, how things went down. They probably have better reasons, such as they would need Tim Burton's permission for using Halloween Town, and they wanted to tone down the violence for a more kid-friendly audience. But there is a point to where kiddifying something robs it of all value.

Story: If you watch the beginning and end of the cutscenes of the world you'll understand EVERYTHING that goes on in this manga. To me there was nothing in here that I couldn't see or extrapolate from a cutscene, except for a couple bits that were put in for failed humor. The Fourth Wall is broken once...and it's horribly done. I was disapointed with the story, they chose to make this 4 volumes worth, but in total it's about 500-600 pages long. They don't spend alot of time on each world, which is a real gip. If they had fleshed out the storyline, made it 5 proper volumes with 1000 pages...then things would be ALOT different.

Art: Chibis......INCREDIBLY annoying Chibis are EVERYWHERE. I have nothing against that form of expression but the sheer amount of them and the other childish forms of expression in this manga are really annoying. They eliminate all depth from the manga, and scenes where feeling can be shared and character developed they choose to use for a chibi shot. The backrounds in most cases are ok. There was never a single time the art struck me as great, it was just "ok." The adaption of Disney characters is quite astonishingly good. Some feel alot like disney characters, but most of the princesses feel incredibly comfortable in their manga role. I for one found Malificent to be quite hot....in a creepy way.

Character: There is no character development in this manga. In the game, most of the character development is DURING the action of the worlds or between them, and since the story essentially takes the beginning and end of each world it skips out on any development that could take place.

Enjoyment: I was so disappointed by this manga...but then again I was expecting something great...this is Kingdom Hearts after all. The format is also flipped...so it read Left to Right instead of the more amazing way of Right to Left. It came in a box-set though...so at least that made me a little happy.

I'm a huge fan of Kingdom Hearts, as many of you who will be reading this review (i presume). I read the manga for some time and at that moment i thought: "I should write a review on this!" ... but i never had the courage; until now. I made it short, so here it goes:

Kingdom Hearts, the manga, is a disappointment to all hardcore and "softcore" fans of the series. The story is confusing and hard to follow. The dialog fails and the art is not that astonishing.

Like in the game, you follow the story and adventures of Sora, a young boy that ... holds an incredible power and his two companions Donald and Goofy.With his keyblade, Sora and co. travel from world to world killing heartless and closing "doors".
The story is much the same as that from the game, disregarding just some places such as the Halloween Town, preferring others that can be seen as less interesting (like the "little mermaid")

As for the structure and overall story, i have a great critic i would like to present to you. And this is: the development of the story.
While reading the book, you'll find yourself jumping from world to world, from scene to scene, never really understanding what's going on.The story simply develops never explaining what really is happening, leaving you to discover it for yourself.If you played the game, you will not have many problems knowing whats happening, but if you never played game or even heard of it you'll have a though time following the story.

Besides this major fluke, the dialogs (Tokyopop version) are very poor, leaving few interest in keep reading the book to the end. Regarding the art, there are some cute images but in general they're not surprising.


As for my conclusion:
If you're a hardcore fan of the series, and you played all the games, you'll enjoy reading the book. You'll definitely rouse some great memories, you'll remember some exciting parts of the game and maybe, you will even have your own time of nostalgia. But if you never played the game and you just picked this manga randomly, or you just heard of it from a friend, or any other reason; read it at you own risk.

I started reading this manga because I, like many other fans, am (im)patiently waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3. As a Kingdom Hearts fanatic, I really wanted to like this manga... but I couldn't get into it. I have completed it, but nothing really came out of it for me.

If you've been living under a rock for 15 years, Kingdom Hearts is a Square Enix game with RPG elements about a boy whose island is invaded by heartless. It's also a crossover between Final Fantasy (and as of KH3D, The World Ends With You) and Disney.

STORY: 10- Outstanding. The same as the original Kingdom Hearts ... 1's story, which is quite amazing.

ART: 7- Good. The art has a consistent style and doesn't change much, but it tries to fit too many events on each page.

CHARACTER: 5- Mediocre. This is part of where the manga falls short. In KH1, the characters were more lively and had more personality. Of course, they weren't perfect characters, as there are minor flaws with their development. However, in the manga, they don't have development at all.

ENJOYMENT: 3- Poor. This is probably the biggest reason why the manga stinks. Everything worked so much better in the game. Kingdom Hearts had amazing music and beautiful worlds and cutscenes, which the manga couldn't pull off.

Overall, the manga didn't have much potential anyway. However, I think that the rest of the KH mangas will be better than this one (or at least I am hoping.)