- UnintelligibleKingdom Hearts, which brings together characters from Squaresoft's Final Fantasy series and Disney's various cartoons, is probably one of the strangest and most ambitious projects in video game history. It's easy to see how Shiro Amano got the task of creating the manga adaptation; his renderings of both the Disney and Final Fantasy characters are flawless.
Amano's artistic abilities are the manga's only redeeming feature. The story revolves around a young boy, Sora, who finds himself (without explanation) the wielder of the powerful Keyblade, the only weapon capable of stopping an endless army of monsters known as Heartless. After some confusing adventures focusing on his relationship with two friends who receive no character development, Sora joins Donald Duck and Goofy, who are searching for the missing Mickey Mouse. Their dimension-hopping journey takes them through a variety of worlds based on Disney films and through endless battles with the Heartless and their Disney villain overlords, whose goals and motivations remain vague.
The convoluted plot is unintelligible and never receives enough elaboration to become coherent. The numerous action sequences, often featuring indecipherable pictures, only add to the confusion. Many of the events seem to have no internal logic. For example, in the Hercules subplot, we see the villain, Hades, lean on a sink to look at himself in the mirror. The sink cracks, and, somehow, Hades is either washed down a drain, flushed down a toilet, or maybe sucked into a space-time vortex. The only explanation for this odd chain of events is that Hercules had scrubbed the toilets earlier in the day. This, unfortunately, is characteristic of most of the manga's plot elements.
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