Ranked #2204

Kingdom Hearts (Manga)

"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. read more

Well being a extreme Kingdom Hearts fan of course I had to read the manga. For those of you who don't know Kingdom Hearts is a manga based on the Video game so of course I'm going to compare it to the game. It's starts off in Destiny Islands where Sora, Riku and Kairi are attempting to escape their island by building a raft. Of course the night before they leave there's a big storm, (who didn't see that coming?) and next thing you know everyone's seperated and Sora has a giant key which can some how defeat the shadowy bug like Heartless.
I thought the manga did a good job of covering what happens in the game, of course its not as fun as acutally beating up the Heartless yourself but thats kinda of hard to do when your reading a book. I thought the story was a little too rushed and there wasn't as much character developement as in the game, but once again I can't help but love the combination of Final Fantasy and Disney. I think this manga is good if you like either or the two or you like the game. I think if you don't know anything about Kingdom Hearts you might get a little confused, but I can't tell you for sure as I already knew all of the story when I read this. If you're a die hard fan you might be a little disappointed but they can't do everything exactly like they did in the game so just enjoy what you've got! read more