What if another company besides Disney made their own Kingdom Hearts-style game?

[Master Exin]

I don't know if this is right enough a place for such a thread. If so or not, feel free to let me know.
Anyway, I thought I'd make this because of a hypothetical thought I've had for quite a while. What if another major company, beside from Disney, would've at some point made a similar game in style to Kingdom Hearts? Bringing together various owned stories, brands, IPs, franchises, etc, into a premise similar to KH.

• Paramount:
  • Mission Impossible
  • Nickelodeon
    • Avatar: The Last Airbender/Legend of Korra
    • Barnyard
    • CatDog
    • Dora the Explorer
    • Fairly Odd Parents
    • Hey Arnold
    • Invader Zim
    • Jimmy Neutron
    • My Life as a Teenage Robot
    • Rugrats
    • SpongeBob Squarepants
    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • South Park
  • Star Trek
  • Top Gun
  • Transformers

• Sony:
  • Ghostbusters
  • Goosebumps
  • Jumanji
  • Karate Kid
  • Frazy Kat
  • Scrappy
  • Sony Pictures Animation
    • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    • Hotel Transylvania
    • Mitchells vs. the Machines
    • Open Season
    • Surf's Up
  • Stuart Little

• Universal:
  • An American Tail
  • Andy Panda
  • Back to the Future
  • Balto
  • Casper
  • Curious George
  • Fast and the Furious
  • Felix the Cat
  • Illumination Entertainment
    • Despicable Me
    • Secret Life of Pets
    • Sing
  • Land Before Time
  • Universal Monsters
    • Creature from the Black Lagoon
    • Dracula
    • Frankenstein
    • The Invisible Man
    • The Mummy
  • We're Back! A Dinosaur Story
  • Woody Woodpecker

• Warner Bros:
  • Cartoon Network
    • Dexter's Lab
    • Ed, Edd, & Eddy
    • Johnny Bravo
    • PowerPuff Girls
    • Samurai Jack
  • DC Comics
  • Hanna-Barbera
    • Flintstones
    • Jetsons
    • Scooby-Doo
    • Tom & Jerry
    • Top Cat
    • Wacky Races
  • Iron Giant
  • Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies
  • MonsterVerse
    • Godzilla
    • King Kong
  • Osmosis Jones
  • Quest for Camelot
  • RWBY
  • Smallfoot

 

[MATGSY]

I feel like few other companies besides Disney could pull off something in the vein of KH tbh. The many fantasy/epic themed Disney movies complemented the RPG genre fairly well & many other companies' catalogs don't quite hit the same mark.

 

[Master Exin]

I feel like few other companies besides Disney could pull off something in the vein of KH tbh. The many fantasy/epic themed Disney movies complemented the RPG genre fairly well & many other companies' catalogs don't quite hit the same mark.

Maybe so. They don’t even have to necessarily be strictly RPG anyway.

 

[MATGSY]

Well looks like WB got their Sora:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1690064736203800577

 

[Deleted member 282472]

Probably Nintendo as they have a large library of iconic characters and worlds that you could travel through.

Kingdom Hearts x Super Mario by CamiloArts1 on DeviantArt

www.deviantart.com

 

[Chromatic]

The artistic style would definitely be more up in the air with the examples in the OP. The Disney material used for the games is all kind of similar enough that all of the properties could be graphically rendered pretty much the same way, and not have any jarring juxtapositions; Pirates of the Caribbean was visually weird because SDG all stuck out against the more live-action aspiring style used for that world; I'm pretty sure there was still enough going for Peter Pan to give that the spotlight of a maritime world. They were having the other Disney villains from KH1 coming back for a round 2 vengeance Boogaloo, so bringing back Captain Hook would've fit quite well in KH2.

I'm just not sure the other companies have quite the same depth to pull from without the game suffering from a visual whiplash as it shifts through various, dissimilar art styles.

On top of that there's the suspension of disbelief that all of those films/shows could exist within the same universe.

Something could probably be made banking on Looney Tunes, but it definitely wouldn't be the same.

Similarly so with the Universal Monsters.

It's just hard to see any of the aforementioned companies being able to pull together enough of their libraries to make a game that is both visually and thematically cohesive.

 

[Idreamaboutcats]

Did this thread just get necro'ed? Eh, whatever. Since it's up again, might as well put my two cents in to avoid going mad from the news drought.

MATGSY is right; even if, say, Comcast or Warner Bros., which are also multi-billion mass media entertainment conglomerates, there are specific elements that only Disney can provide, ones that are complementary to every trope of a generic jRPG checklist. Namely, fantasy. Since its inception, Disney has been all about fantasy, "when you wish upon a star", "faith, trust, and pixie dust", etc. Most of Disney's stories capitalized and are adapted from fairy tales, which is the essence of all fantasy, very often the earliest stories a person would hear in their entire life. Sometimes I even make believe that Kingdom Hearts might be Disney's answer to the "Golden Key", a very elusive, challenging, and vague, as well as being the final, fairytale.

If you combine fairytales and jRPG tropes, that's a very potent combination.

 

[Chie]

Studio Trigger did.