Why being a Japanese-developed game is bad for KH series

nikkuchan

nikkuchan

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The fact that Kingdom Hearts is a Japanese-developed game hurts its potential. The reason I say this is because there are potential worlds that we will never see. Ever since playing the first game I wished there were some worlds based on Disney’s TV shows, not just their movies. Wouldn’t a Darkwing Duck world be fun? Wouldn’t Gizmo Duck be a fun party member? Even a Gummi Bears world would thrill me. Gargoyles was a Disney cartoon as well, but alas, these and the other cartoons that many of us used to watch will almost assuredly never be in the games. Why? Because the Japanese don’t know what they are; the TV shows are virtually unknown in this country.

Looking at the selections made for the worlds in KH, it’s easy to tell that the game was influenced heavily by Japanese tastes. The Nightmare Before Christmas was an obscure choice (though a good one I must admit), but understandable because it is immensely popular in Japan(They think Jack is cute). I also assumed that they’d stick to animated licenses, but then came Pirates of the Caribbean, which is possibly more popular in Japan than in the US (while I never complained I didn’t like that they used live action licenses). And who decided on Tron? That was out of the box.

Anyway, just a little disappointing observation I made. A fair portion of Disney franchises are nearly unknown in Japan and most likely will never be used in the KH. However, there is one world I do want to see that could happen, and that would be a Lilo and Stitch based world. With Stitch being one of the popular Disney characters in Japan (go so far as making a Stitch anime based in Japan), I could see it (and he’d be a great character too).

Btw, they could stand to make a world or two based on Square game. I have a lot of fear that this series is going to fall in quality and go from an innovative series with a few quality releases to an over-milked series with a bunch of mediocre games (much like the Phantasy Star series became).
 
The problem with doing TV shows is that Disney has different stations in many different languages and each have different shows. So I think that's the main reason they stayed with movies. Besides, personaly, I would NOT want to see a Zack and Cody world or any of the recent shows they play today. So I say stick to movies which tend to be universal once translated. I, personaly, think that the Pirates world was a bad choice. Don't get me wrong I loved the first movie, the second was ok and the third was meh. Besides they already did stitch as a summon, I don't see a Stitch world going over well. Tron was a bit of a blast from the past since it's nearly as old as the first or second Star Wars movies.

On a final note the title should be changed to why being a jappanese developed game is bad for the KH series since no other games are mentioned. Plus personaly most of the time I find jappanese games better the us games 90% of the time.
 
GameGeeks said:
The problem with doing TV shows is that Disney has different stations in many different languages and each have different shows. So I think that's the main reason they stayed with movies. Besides, personaly, I would NOT want to see a Zack and Cody world or any of the recent shows they play today. So I say stick to movies which tend to be universal once translated. I, personaly, think that the Pirates world was a bad choice. Don't get me wrong I loved the first movie, the second was ok and the third was meh. Besides they already did stitch as a summon, I don't see a Stitch world going over well. Tron was a bit of a blast from the past since it's nearly as old as the first or second Star Wars movies.

On a final note the title should be changed to why being a jappanese developed game is bad for the KH series since no other games are mentioned. Plus personaly most of the time I find jappanese games better the us games 90% of the time.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you. I would like to change the Title, but I don’t think I can. I also agree that many Japanese games are better, at least for games like Kingdom Hearts. I couldn’t see a US developer pulling off a game like this. I understand that they’re trying to be as universal as possible, but it just kind of saddens me that there are so many great licenses that they can’t use for that very reason.

I think a Stitch world would work, at least as well as some of their other obscure choices worked, though to be honest, I’m just interested in seeing Stitch as a party member (Simba upgraded from Summon to character, so maybe this might work). There are a lot of movies that remain unused. I know many of them (Black Cauldron, Robin Hood) are due to rights issues (which is why Tarzan was dumped), but there are still many very usable ones, so I don’t understand why they would decide on live action films.
 
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Just popping in to let you know I've changed the title of your thread. :)
 
One could argue that while Kingdom Hearts is a merger of Disney and Square Enix, SE clearly has far more influence over the game than Disney. Each Disney world based off the movie basically sticks to the original plot of the movie, however the worlds themselves are just places to go to. The story itself doesn't revolve around the Disney worlds much.

Personally, I haven't paid attention to Disney in the past years and what I see in the KH games I still recrognize anyways, so I'm perfectly fine with what's already in it.

Do you REALLY need all the newer Disney stuff shoved in KH instead of the older time classics that's been around for over a decade for most of the them? I think most people were exposed to the movies than the regular shows, so it makes sense to use them.

I never saw the movie Tron, so I can't really speak for it, but it's the second oldest Disney "world", Timeless River probably originating back a couple of decades. Maybe they thought the computer world would be interesting to the gamers?
 
Why is being Japanese hurting it's potental? All my favourite games were developed in Japan. And to be truthful, I really don't care about the Disney Worlds!:whogives: The Disney Worlds are very little to do with the overall story and are really just in it because of the Disney characters in the Main Storyline. But, I do think that the developers made a very good choice in the worlds, picking worlds that people would otherwise have left out in favour 'Mickey's Fun House'. And it's these choices that make the game so good and innotive. And I also prefer older worlds to newer ones like Pirates, and would prefer if they continued using older movies.
 
Good comments all around. I struck up this thread mostly because I’ve been wondering: There will be at least 3 more KH games, and probably more, and chances are they don’t want to reuse the same worlds, so what are they going to come up with next? Escape to Witch Mountain? Jokes aside, I’ve been wondering. Being this game is Japanese (not that I’m complaining; SE is awesome), the choices are limited to what the Japanese people know and like (for example, if KH wasn’t made in Japan there most-likely would be no Pirates level, and probably not a Nightmare world, either). I wouldn’t mind a more international planning process; getting some developers from SE’s other offices to help decide on worlds.
 
I don't think it's a problem of reusing worlds. They reused the holloween one and others like atlantis. Plus I don't know if rights are a problem since they did use Tarzan in the first one.
 
I personally think that Kingdom Hearts would be better off if it focused less on Disney worlds and more on the original story. The whole Disney and Square merger was pretty much just a gimmick. Like Fusionist said, the Disney worlds didn't effect Kingdom Heart's story much, they were just places to go. There isn't much point to them except to be able to play alongside the Disney characters for a little while.
 
About the worlds in the 3 new KH titles:

I saw a scan, so I know that you can visit the Nightmare Before Christmas World and the Aladdin world in 358/2 Days at least. I don't think I saw any new worlds though.

But there's the Cinderella world in BbS, so that's a new one. There's also a trailer where Terra meets Snow White while she's picking flowers, so there's that world as well I think. Terra also talks to Maleficent with sleeping beauty, well, sleeping in the same room, so that's another new one as well.

So I guess that covers all the Princesses of Hearts: We already visited Alice in Wonderland's world, Beast's Castle for Belle, Agrabah for Jasmine, Hallow Bastion for Kairi's homeworld, so the others we'll visit in BbS I guess

For Coded, the story is that you're visiting the worlds all over again with a Digital Sora copy to find out what one sentence in Jimminy's Journal is suppose to mean, so I doubt any new worlds are added to that game.

So basically, I think it's broken down like this: No new world for Coded because the digitial Sora is a copy of the real Sora's experience, so only the worlds HE visited will be included. 358/2 Days so far looks like only the worlds we visit in KH1 and KH2, but Birth By Sleep will have 3 new worlds at least.
 
GameGeeks said:
I don't think it's a problem of reusing worlds. They reused the holloween one and others like atlantis. Plus I don't know if rights are a problem since they did use Tarzan in the first one.
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It’s not a problem so much as a hassle. Even if a Disney Tarzan movie was made, Tarzan is the property of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so there are few extra legal hoops to jump in order to use it (I’m not going into detail because I don’t know the specifics). It’s much easier to use a property that is entirely theirs. This is why they probably won’t use anything from movies that are based on work that isn’t public or not theirs.
 
hmmm Personally i really hated the idea of the live-action because there are still so many older movies to make first, also they did incorporate a t-v. show because that is what timeless river was... old mickey mouse cartoons.also winnie the pooh was a t.v. show (movies aside) as well. SE prolly went with disney because it had such a great influence on japan, i mean wlat him self influenced a man who invented anime durring ww2 to try and mimic it so yeah disney responsible for todays japanese animation...linking together SE and disney...oh and just to point out i hope they make a FF world because each of those games are there own worlds anyways and incorporate a disney story more to kinda flip the way the games are based
 
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