Kingdom Hearts Retrospective: Kingdom Hearts V Cast

After the success of Kingdom Hearts, both Square-Enix and Disney Interactive likely wanted to cash in on the lucrative new franchise that had dropped into their laps. Square-Enix’s next entry in the series was Chain of Memories and although it was originally intended to be optional just in case players didn’t have Game Boy Advances, it picked up right where the first game left off and has since become accepted canon, likely thanks to either the PlayStation 2 version that was released a few years after Kingdom Hearts II, or the rather poor attempt to summarize the plot of the game in Kingdom Hearts II‘s opening movie.

Disney Interactive came up with their own follow-up to the first game independent of Square-Enix and released it a month prior to Chain of Memories in Japan and several months after in North America. Technically speaking, this makes it the second game in the Kingdom Hearts series, although due to how it was developed and what the game’s plot entails, it’s decidedly non-canon and has never been remade for PlayStation 2 players or included on any of the re-releases on the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4.

The game gets its name from the type of platform it was released on, Verizon’s V Cast service. As far as I can tell, the game’s original title was just Kingdom Hearts, but fans needed a way to refer to the game without confusing it with the first game in the series.

The plot of Kingdom Hearts V Cast sounds like the type of lame fan fiction that a kid probably wrote. Its quality is rather uncomfortably close to the fan fiction I used to write based on The Pretender. Basically, Sora, Goofy and Donald put the Gummi Ship on auto-pilot (I wouldn’t recommend that, knowing the dangers that exist between the worlds thanks to all those damn Gummi Missions I did) and decide to grab some sleep (I wouldn’t recommend that either, for the same reason as before). Naturally, an enemy comes along and the next thing Sora knows, he’s on a deserted island and his friends are missing. Sora has to make his way through several worlds in his search for Donald and Goofy, half of which return from the first game.

Both V Cast and Chain of Memories seem to have been developed based around the idea of “Kingdom Hearts but on a handheld device.” The difference comes in how the two games execute this idea. Chain of Memories is deliberately designed to move the story forward and V Cast is deliberately designed to ignore the story completely. Owing to the limited capabilities of both Verizon cell phones and the Game Boy Advance, neither game plays quite like the original game, but whereas Chain of Memories sacrifices the battle system entirely in favour of one built around the real time use of card decks, V Cast sacrifices much of the original controls to somehow try to make fighting feel as close to the original game as possible. As a result, Sora moves around like Resident Evil characters or like Aya Brea from Parasite Eve 2, but the battle system remains intact enough to give Sora stuff like his spells to work with, as well as his trademark keyblade.

Of course, by now the V Cast service is gone and so the game is no longer available for purchase. It’s for the best, anyway. There are only four known levels, which means my claim above of half the worlds Sora visits being from the first game? Yeah, Sora only revisits Agrabah and Wonderland. He does not make a return trip to Atlantica, Halloween Town, not even the series staple Olympus Coliseum shows up in this game. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Hercules does not appear in two of the three worst games in the series and only shows up in passing in the third of those three games. He is in every single other game in the series, but he somehow manages to sneak his way out of the three bad ones.

There isn’t really a lot to say about this game, unfortunately, but I could make fun of the fan fiction aspects some more. The starting world is known as Swordman Island, which is the kind of thing you might name the starting island if you were just trying to come up with random nonsense in a failed attempt to make your original world fit into the Kingdom Hearts universe. At the very least, something like Kismet Island would’ve been a little bit better but it would also have been uncomfortably close to the original Destiny Islands and probably also would’ve contained an original Gary Stu character that the author was going to set up to be Sora in all but name, complete with series staple anime hair, and a heart that was linked up with Sora’s in such a way that Gary can probably sense Sora’s presence or something.

To get off of Swordman Island, Sora must… drum roll… collect items to build a raft with. That’s the best that they could come up with for the first level, basically just a Destiny Islands redo but minus any of the characters. Instead, a parrot offers Sora encouragement, then never shows up in the series again.

The fight with Jafar in Agrabah in this game is of his cobra form from right before he wished in the movie to become an all-powerful genie. Thinking back on the first game now that I’ve written that sentence, it really doesn’t make sense that we were able to fight Jafar as a genie then, since as soon as he wished to be one in the movie, the lamp sucked him in and he was trapped. The worst of it is, I want to rant more about Aladdin and how the movie was incorporated into these games, but for now I’m going to wait. I’ll get more into why visiting Aladdin‘s world was the stupidest idea in my Coded retrospective review, along with why the main characters were utter dumbapples during their stay in Agrabah.

Anyway, the fact that Sora encounters Jafar as a cobra in V Cast hints that maybe this game takes place before the characters actually go to Agrabah in the original game. It would explain why they made the rookie mistake of putting the Gummi Ship on auto pilot and letting any old monster on the ship in the first place. But that said, it’s probably more likely that no one who worked on this game really understood the method to Tetsuya Nomura’s madness regarding how the original game went about incorporating the various Disney films into its narrative. It might’ve made more sense to fight Jafar as a snake, then have him follow the movie’s plot closely and wish himself into servitude to the lamp, but it felt far more dangerous to actually fight a literal god approximately halfway through the game, and utterly rewarding once he was defeated. As a cobra, he doesn’t feel as dangerous. Not unless he has Kaa’s eyes and as far as I know, he can only hypnotize other people if he uses his staff.

A level like Maleficent’s Fortress only really happens if the developers don’t understand the lore behind Hollow Bastion. They also jumped the gun by a number of years; granted, no one knew at the time that Birth By Sleep was going to incorporate Maleficent’s actual castle in the game, but no one knew about the Remans in Star Trek until the tenth movie, so any novel focusing on developing the Romulans prior to that movie would suddenly have a lot of gaping holes in it. It’s still good enough as a final level and does try to bring with it the menace that Hollow Bastion did but it’s… well, a hollow replacement.

The bottom line is that Kingdom Hearts V Cast is not that great a game, and keep in mind that I’m saying this without having played it. For all I know, it might be great. Disney tried, but it doesn’t look like they tried very hard. This game reminds me a lot of the direct to video movie The Lion King II. It’s a weak follow-up that’s inferior to the original and it falls apart under even a little scrutiny, yet it can be a guilty pleasure to some. I’m sure it helped tide players over during the wait for Kingdom Hearts II, but it’s probably for the best that the game no longer really exists outside of a bunch of assets that can be looked at by interested parties who have the right software.

If anyone’s interested, the Panic Bros released a video just a few days ago discussing the game and showing gameplay of it. I promise I’m not Rickrolling you.