Yeah, so this topic has been done a lot and I've said this before, but the key element of world crossover/integration which I think gets overlooked, but helps explain where and why KH3 (and other games, but we hate KH3 most) failed at it, is that it has to be about more than just the face value narrative getting sketched over Disney movie digests. @2 quid is good touched on this already, but the most important aspect to consider (from a writing standpoint) when considering the Disney and FF elements of the series is not the logistics of how they function mechanically as checkpoints for plot delivery-- rather, that is something that ought to organically follow from positioning the Disney worlds and FF characters as signposts indicating the workings of a larger, lived-in universe that exists outside of our protagonists' visits and dealings with them, and the best way to do that is to tie them to the material as thematic relays that offer the audience subtextual reasons to invest in the story.
Consider that in KH1, visiting Deep Jungle advances almost nothing on a narrative scale at first glance: none of the main villains are met or disposed of, the PoH subplot is not touched upon, Sora doesn't learn anything new about where his friends are, and yet that world displays some of the strongest self-contained writing within the entire series because it's utilized to do the vastly more important work of introducing and refining essential character dynamics which guide our understanding of the main actors driving the drama (thus giving weight to the progression of their motives and behaviors and helping them feel alive) while simultaneously functioning as a thematic point of juncture for the story up to that point, both alluding to and grounding the mysticism (and mythology) of the series which was still a totally open book. This was done by presenting Deep Jungle as a narrative tangent, isolated from the steady march of the main plot, so that these developments had room to breathe and be processed, while maintaining a fastidious sense of its universality to the larger world of Kingdom Hearts by embedding ideas and concepts which would resonate through every other world and provide significant payoff long after the closing of that chapter. Through simple gestures-- a vision of Kairi, a castle in a slidereel, a word we can't decipher-- Sora's comprehension of how the universe he lives in is structured and how he's going to navigate it (and the importance of having people he can trust beside him on that journey) are continually challenged and reshaped, as they will be throughout the entire game, and ours is along with it.
The main FF characters of KH1 and 2 are positioned similarly: allowing for the fact that they carry a good deal of direct narrative impact, they are nevertheless even more valuable as part of the thematic, universal design of the games they appear in. In KH1 and 2, Sora is lost and out of his element: he is actively searching for "home," which is represented through the people he has lost and who he misses-- what Sora discovers over the course of KH1, and what is driven (no pun intended) home for him in KH2, is that by gaining new friends and forging new connections, he can create a spiritual safety net that makes him whole even when he is separated from the people who complete his sense of self. Of course he has this kind of relationship with Donald and Goofy, but this is even more poignantly described in his dynamic with Leon, Yuffie, Aerith and Cid (and Merlin) because he doesn't spend entire journeys with them, and yet they are always (until KH3 but we hate KH3) there when he finds himself in a place in which he is seeking direction. They're the home away from home that, from his very first steps into a big new universe in KH1, act as a launching pad from which he can risk reaching out the world. They're a North Star which Sora can always sail in towards, a center within the vastness of his various adventures, even as they are participants in that vast mythos themselves, reconfigured in their relationships and personalities to make the KHverse feel as if it's occupied by people who are part of the history and experience of it. Obviously not all FF characters can have this kind of bearing on the material, but Cloud and Auron are great examples of how to write them to scale, by making them symbolic of something with relevance for our main protagonists and the setting they occupy.
All of this comes down to layering the narrative so that it feels like more than 13 bad guys in trench coats and trite plot resolutions that are better conveyed through expositional intermissions than emotional consummations. In order to do that, it has to be clear what the intent driving the plot is and how the choices of integration exemplify that. In other words, the worlds and the characters have to be written for the story that is being told, and this is where KH3 (and other games, but we hate KH3) consistently struggles. It's entirely bogged down by face value, surface narrative stuff, all the time: the characters behave as if there's nothing to discover through their active participation and thus they don't engage with the worlds they visit as experiential capsules delivering lived lessons, provided by places and characters who embody diverse understandings and perspectives that they do not have, which work to shape how they comprehend and interact with the wider universe. Thus the worlds do not feel like a part of that wider universe, at least not in any substantial way. The central theme of interconnection ("one sky, one destiny") becomes a trivial callback, a motto more than a mantra, and there's a collapse in the relationship between who gains and who loses, and why, at each stage in the plot's progression. World events are not tethered to a broader story, waypoints mapping out its final destination, but to single narrative punctuation marks. "And then this happened." Or occasionally, "And then this happened!" But none of it changes the track the characters pursue, how they (or we) conceive of potential future outcomes, or, indeed, what actually ends up happening.
To this point probably the biggest mistakes that were made with KH3 were cutting out the FF characters and selling Sora's (and everyone else's) past Disney connections short. KH3 was meant to be culminatory, so for the Disney worlds and intermediary moments to underscore the theme of "resolution" that kept getting brought up, they needed to provide reminiscence and fresh insight on where Sora et al have been, in order to contextualize what it means for them to move forward, or move on. The only world that acts in this spirit is Winnie the Pooh, but that goes nowhere outside of possibly providing a hamfisted bit of "foreshadowing" that isn't even clearly perceptible as such. What endangers the crossover concept of KH moving forward is not just absurd corporate branding limitations but an apparent lack of vision for how to create immersion and interaction that is more than skin deep. It's not necessary to have Aladdin and Hercules fight side by side in order for them to feel like they exist in the same canon and are impacted by the same events, in fact I think it could be really hackneyed to go that route: part of what has made past KH games great is that sense of restraint in maintaining an artful kind of distinction between these pockets of the universe in order to better define them so that when Auron crosses blades with Sora and Cerberus it feels like a real moment, rather than a gimmicky run-of-the-mill collab. What does matter is that the experiences of the protagonists, and the audience through them, is personalized to the worlds they visit and the characters they meet, and that they carry whatever they find there with them in some form or another through to the end of each game. Forget the immediate Disney trappings of the franchise: every Disney character, and every Disney world, should feel like a KH original in style, tone and direction-- and vice versa, every original KH element should feel as though it could organically blend into the Disney canon. That's the only way it works, and it's a difficult balance to strike, but what won't get the games there is spectacle and lazy hype baiting. That only has diminishing returns, and KH3 diminished them to dust.
Consider that in KH1, visiting Deep Jungle advances almost nothing on a narrative scale at first glance: none of the main villains are met or disposed of, the PoH subplot is not touched upon, Sora doesn't learn anything new about where his friends are, and yet that world displays some of the strongest self-contained writing within the entire series because it's utilized to do the vastly more important work of introducing and refining essential character dynamics which guide our understanding of the main actors driving the drama (thus giving weight to the progression of their motives and behaviors and helping them feel alive) while simultaneously functioning as a thematic point of juncture for the story up to that point, both alluding to and grounding the mysticism (and mythology) of the series which was still a totally open book. This was done by presenting Deep Jungle as a narrative tangent, isolated from the steady march of the main plot, so that these developments had room to breathe and be processed, while maintaining a fastidious sense of its universality to the larger world of Kingdom Hearts by embedding ideas and concepts which would resonate through every other world and provide significant payoff long after the closing of that chapter. Through simple gestures-- a vision of Kairi, a castle in a slidereel, a word we can't decipher-- Sora's comprehension of how the universe he lives in is structured and how he's going to navigate it (and the importance of having people he can trust beside him on that journey) are continually challenged and reshaped, as they will be throughout the entire game, and ours is along with it.
The main FF characters of KH1 and 2 are positioned similarly: allowing for the fact that they carry a good deal of direct narrative impact, they are nevertheless even more valuable as part of the thematic, universal design of the games they appear in. In KH1 and 2, Sora is lost and out of his element: he is actively searching for "home," which is represented through the people he has lost and who he misses-- what Sora discovers over the course of KH1, and what is driven (no pun intended) home for him in KH2, is that by gaining new friends and forging new connections, he can create a spiritual safety net that makes him whole even when he is separated from the people who complete his sense of self. Of course he has this kind of relationship with Donald and Goofy, but this is even more poignantly described in his dynamic with Leon, Yuffie, Aerith and Cid (and Merlin) because he doesn't spend entire journeys with them, and yet they are always (until KH3 but we hate KH3) there when he finds himself in a place in which he is seeking direction. They're the home away from home that, from his very first steps into a big new universe in KH1, act as a launching pad from which he can risk reaching out the world. They're a North Star which Sora can always sail in towards, a center within the vastness of his various adventures, even as they are participants in that vast mythos themselves, reconfigured in their relationships and personalities to make the KHverse feel as if it's occupied by people who are part of the history and experience of it. Obviously not all FF characters can have this kind of bearing on the material, but Cloud and Auron are great examples of how to write them to scale, by making them symbolic of something with relevance for our main protagonists and the setting they occupy.
All of this comes down to layering the narrative so that it feels like more than 13 bad guys in trench coats and trite plot resolutions that are better conveyed through expositional intermissions than emotional consummations. In order to do that, it has to be clear what the intent driving the plot is and how the choices of integration exemplify that. In other words, the worlds and the characters have to be written for the story that is being told, and this is where KH3 (and other games, but we hate KH3) consistently struggles. It's entirely bogged down by face value, surface narrative stuff, all the time: the characters behave as if there's nothing to discover through their active participation and thus they don't engage with the worlds they visit as experiential capsules delivering lived lessons, provided by places and characters who embody diverse understandings and perspectives that they do not have, which work to shape how they comprehend and interact with the wider universe. Thus the worlds do not feel like a part of that wider universe, at least not in any substantial way. The central theme of interconnection ("one sky, one destiny") becomes a trivial callback, a motto more than a mantra, and there's a collapse in the relationship between who gains and who loses, and why, at each stage in the plot's progression. World events are not tethered to a broader story, waypoints mapping out its final destination, but to single narrative punctuation marks. "And then this happened." Or occasionally, "And then this happened!" But none of it changes the track the characters pursue, how they (or we) conceive of potential future outcomes, or, indeed, what actually ends up happening.
To this point probably the biggest mistakes that were made with KH3 were cutting out the FF characters and selling Sora's (and everyone else's) past Disney connections short. KH3 was meant to be culminatory, so for the Disney worlds and intermediary moments to underscore the theme of "resolution" that kept getting brought up, they needed to provide reminiscence and fresh insight on where Sora et al have been, in order to contextualize what it means for them to move forward, or move on. The only world that acts in this spirit is Winnie the Pooh, but that goes nowhere outside of possibly providing a hamfisted bit of "foreshadowing" that isn't even clearly perceptible as such. What endangers the crossover concept of KH moving forward is not just absurd corporate branding limitations but an apparent lack of vision for how to create immersion and interaction that is more than skin deep. It's not necessary to have Aladdin and Hercules fight side by side in order for them to feel like they exist in the same canon and are impacted by the same events, in fact I think it could be really hackneyed to go that route: part of what has made past KH games great is that sense of restraint in maintaining an artful kind of distinction between these pockets of the universe in order to better define them so that when Auron crosses blades with Sora and Cerberus it feels like a real moment, rather than a gimmicky run-of-the-mill collab. What does matter is that the experiences of the protagonists, and the audience through them, is personalized to the worlds they visit and the characters they meet, and that they carry whatever they find there with them in some form or another through to the end of each game. Forget the immediate Disney trappings of the franchise: every Disney character, and every Disney world, should feel like a KH original in style, tone and direction-- and vice versa, every original KH element should feel as though it could organically blend into the Disney canon. That's the only way it works, and it's a difficult balance to strike, but what won't get the games there is spectacle and lazy hype baiting. That only has diminishing returns, and KH3 diminished them to dust.
