Kingdom Hearts II, v.1

By Shiro Amano
Released in the U.S. by TokyoPop



Slugline: Isn’t this supposed to have Disney characters? Or, you know, real characters rather than ciphers?

I understand that the Kingdom Hearts franchise has its fans and I don’t want to knock them, but I hope the video games are a lot better than the manga, since I understand that the videogames came first. This first volume of the new series doesn’t tell you what is going on, implies that nothing you see is real, and has discontinuities in storytelling that I hope are part of the plot -- but I have no idea of whether this is true or not. It is just all over the place, I have no idea what is going on with the characters, and except for a single panel there are no Disney characters that I recognize.

If you are going to have the main character driven by a mystery about what he is, you need to have some kind of payoff along the way rather than stringing things along hoping people will stick with you. That is what happened with the X-Files and after a while people stopped giving them the rope to hang themselves because there were never even any minor payoffs along the way to the big one. Maybe if I was willing to read every single Kingdom Hearts manga before this one, and the background for the videogame, I could appreciate what they were doing here, but if so, they should have labeled this part 7 of 20 or something along those lines, rather than #1.



Kingdom Heart II, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.


- Ferdinand