Kingdom Hearts

The Manga adaptation of a wonderful Video Game falls short for what it could have become. The thing is, the Manga really isn't sure what it is or what it wants to be. Though the overall storyline for all the games are not entirely fluid, withing each game however they are. From Birth By Sleep to Dream Drop Distance the story line is convoluted; but the story line just looking at Kingdom Hearts I and Kingdom Hearts II or any other honestly knows exactly what is trying to convey.

The only thing I think that made this falter honestly was the fact that Kingdom Hearts is meant to be a game, and by ripping the RPG aspect of it to only view a jumbled up storyline doesn't do it much justice.

However the art style is fun at times and some jokes they make are quite enjoyable. Regardless it is not a bad read but it is not one I would recommend to a die hard fan of Kingdom Hearts.

Ah yes, Kingdom Hearts, one of my favorite games made into a manga. Okay, lets get started shall we?

Story: The story was the same with Sora getting a keyblade blah blah he fights heartless blah blah. The only problem I have with the story is that it was very fast paced, which took away the excitement for me. But, I'll give it a 8/10.

Art: The art was fairly good, it really showed the light in people hearts, (just a little Kingdom Hearts joke). But, the art had a childish look to it. So, I'll just give it a 9/10.

Character: The characters were just like in the game, so it's safe to say that I give it a 10/10.

Overall: Reading this really made me think back to when I played the game. I'll give it a 9/10. Just look into your heart, and read this manga, (another joke).

IMO this is a horrid manga UNLESS you've played the game... Which is like one of the best Ive ever played. All the Kingdom Hearts Manga are simply shorter versions of the games drawn and directed in as a shonen type manga... I love kingdom hearts and some of the characters, so its fun or funny to watch them do things that you'd never see in the game. It also gives good insight to their personal personality. Also serves as a good reminder of how the story went when playing the new game.
(My ratings are based off if you played and liked the game)

If you do not know by now, Kingdom Hearts is a manga that was created based on the game. As a huge Kingdom Hearts fan, the game being my favorite, I have to point out that the manga is completely terrible compared to the game. The art work, though done by Tetsuya Nomura, seems to have been drawn very lazily compared to the animations and game play presented in the game. The story essentially sticks to its original gaming routes and the characters are pretty fair. However, reading this manga is just not very enjoyable if you've already played the game. The manga is especially missing the whole concept of game-play. For example, in a boss fight, Sora would simply be whacking his Keyblade around in random directions at his enemies, whereas in the game you would need certain strategies and skills to beat your enemies. Also, this manga is read from left to right so when you read you often get confused and tend to read from right to left making things weird for yourself. Overall, your better off buying the Kingdom Hearts games to truly experience what Kingdom hearts has to offer. Game: 10/10
Manga: 5/10
Don't be mistaken SQUARE ENIX games especially this one are the greatest. But when it comes to manga, your better off watching/reading: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Pandora Hearts, 666 Satan, Kuroshitsuji, etc.

Kingdom Hearts is a true emotional game, but as a manga it lacks the experience that the game represents.

It's the first Kingdom Hearts game but in manga form, it's surprisingly good and will bring you those nostalgic feels to any KH fans (You know what I mean ;D). For people new to the series, don't read this! Play the game first because the game is a much better experience all together. Though in the manga their is different dialogue much is very similar, such as Sora's personality being spot on. If you're a fan who wants to experience the storyline without watching a play-through or play-through yourself then this is your best bet my friend.

I started reading this manga because I, like many other fans, am (im)patiently waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3. As a Kingdom Hearts fanatic, I really wanted to like this manga... but I couldn't get into it. I have completed it, but nothing really came out of it for me.

If you've been living under a rock for 15 years, Kingdom Hearts is a Square Enix game with RPG elements about a boy whose island is invaded by heartless. It's also a crossover between Final Fantasy (and as of KH3D, The World Ends With You) and Disney.

STORY: 10- Outstanding. The same as the original Kingdom Hearts 1's story, which is quite amazing.

ART: 7- Good. The art has a consistent style and doesn't change much, but it tries to fit too many events on each page.

CHARACTER: 5- Mediocre. This is part of where the manga falls short. In KH1, the characters were more lively and had more personality. Of course, they weren't perfect characters, as there are minor flaws with their development. However, in the manga, they don't have development at all.

ENJOYMENT: 3- Poor. This is probably the biggest reason why the manga stinks. Everything worked so much better in the game. Kingdom Hearts had amazing music and beautiful worlds and cutscenes, which the manga couldn't pull off.

Overall, the manga didn't have much potential anyway. However, I think that the rest of the KH mangas will be better than this one (or at least I am hoping.)

"Alright, Our next project is the Kingdom Hearts manga, now most of you should be familiar with this great game. Now how do we proceed? What parts of Kindgom Hearts made it such a great game? I have some ideas as to how we proceed.
1. For the story: We use the beginning and ending videos from each world and pretend like there's a coherant plot going when really all we're doing is rushing a plot that really shouldn't be rushed.
2. The videogame has alot of action and RPG elements in it. Let's keep the ridiculous spells like "Freeze" and "Cure" and make them say it but eliminate Sora using the Keyblade for anything other than locking a keyhole."
3. Let's use a RIDICULOUS amount of chibis, like if we have less than 10 per chapter the chapter will have to be completely redrawn.
4. Let's eliminate the single most fun world: Halloween Town, so that we can focus on other exciting worlds like.......WONDERLAND!"

That was, in my mind at least, how things went down. They probably have better reasons, such as they would need Tim Burton's permission for using Halloween Town, and they wanted to tone down the violence for a more kid-friendly audience. But there is a point to where kiddifying something robs it of all value.

Story: If you watch the beginning and end of the cutscenes of the world you'll understand EVERYTHING that goes on in this manga. To me there was nothing in here that I couldn't see or extrapolate from a cutscene, except for a couple bits that were put in for failed humor. The Fourth Wall is broken once...and it's horribly done. I was disapointed with the story, they chose to make this 4 volumes worth, but in total it's about 500-600 pages long. They don't spend alot of time on each world, which is a real gip. If they had fleshed out the storyline, made it 5 proper volumes with 1000 pages...then things would be ALOT different.

Art: Chibis......INCREDIBLY annoying Chibis are EVERYWHERE. I have nothing against that form of expression but the sheer amount of them and the other childish forms of expression in this manga are really annoying. They eliminate all depth from the manga, and scenes where feeling can be shared and character developed they choose to use for a chibi shot. The backrounds in most cases are ok. There was never a single time the art struck me as great, it was just "ok." The adaption of Disney characters is quite astonishingly good. Some feel alot like disney characters, but most of the princesses feel incredibly comfortable in their manga role. I for one found Malificent to be quite hot....in a creepy way.

Character: There is no character development in this manga. In the game, most of the character development is DURING the action of the worlds or between them, and since the story essentially takes the beginning and end of each world it skips out on any development that could take place.

Enjoyment: I was so disappointed by this manga...but then again I was expecting something great...this is Kingdom Hearts after all. The format is also flipped...so it read Left to Right instead of the more amazing way of Right to Left. It came in a box-set though...so at least that made me a little happy.

I'm a huge fan of Kingdom Hearts, as many of you who will be reading this review (i presume). I read the manga for some time and at that moment i thought: "I should write a review on this!" ... but i never had the courage; until now. I made it short, so here it goes:

Kingdom Hearts, the manga, is a disappointment to all hardcore and "softcore" fans of the series. The story is confusing and hard to follow. The dialog fails and the art is not that astonishing.

Like in the game, you follow the story and adventures of Sora, a young boy that holds an incredible power and his two companions Donald and Goofy.With his keyblade, Sora and co. travel from world to world killing heartless and closing "doors".
The story is much the same as that from the game, disregarding just some places such as the Halloween Town, preferring others that can be seen as less interesting (like the "little mermaid")

As for the structure and overall story, i have a great critic i would like to present to you. And this is: the development of the story.
While reading the book, you'll find yourself jumping from world to world, from scene to scene, never really understanding what's going on.The story simply develops never explaining what really is happening, leaving you to discover it for yourself.If you played the game, you will not have many problems knowing whats happening, but if you never played game or even heard of it you'll have a though time following the story.

Besides this major fluke, the dialogs (Tokyopop version) are very poor, leaving few interest in keep reading the book to the end. Regarding the art, there are some cute images but in general they're not surprising.


As for my conclusion:
If you're a hardcore fan of the series, and you played all the games, you'll enjoy reading the book. You'll definitely rouse some great memories, you'll remember some exciting parts of the game and maybe, you will even have your own time of nostalgia. But if you never played the game and you just picked this manga randomly, or you just heard of it from a friend, or any other reason; read it at you own risk.

First I'd like to say, I only gave story an 8 because it's the same story as the game series which is amazing. As for the rest, my upcoming critiques apply to pretty much all of the Kingdom Hearts manga adaptations and I will be using this review for all of them. The art isn't that bad, I just wish that Tetsuya Nomura himself could've done it. His concept art for all of his games is so beautiful, and it would make my life if he did the artwork for a manga. Nomura would've made the manga an overall 9 for me. It's my favorite game series and the way Shiro Amano compresses epic battles such as the fight between Axel and Roxas in Kingdom Hearts 2 to around 5 pages is just disgraceful to the series. As is the way he writes lines for Sora and others that they never said, creating corny garbage. In Chain of Memories Sora walks up to the door to face Marluxia, upon reaching it he says, "Open Sesame!" if that is not the corniest line in KH history I don't know what is... Shiro Amano also fails to implement Sora's most powerful skills and abilities such as Ars Arcanum, Sonic Blade, and Ragnarok. He doesn't even really need to give a detailed explanation or anything. Sora develops these powers by fighting with the Keyblade until it evolves further and further giving him more and more strengths. The amount of power Amano gives the Keyblade underpowers it far too much. The only reason I keep reading the Kingdom Hearts manga series is because I am such a big fan, I just hope they will make a few of the fights as epic as they are in the games and maybe give Sora some of the awesome power he obtains throughout the story. I mean, he even removed drive forms from the movie!! Sora roughly possesses half of his true power in this crap excuse for a series. Amano's failure to accurately show the character development, the greatness of battles, strength of the characters, and the emotion of the characters is a detriment that truly undermines the series. In short, Kingdom Hearts deserves a better manga.

Well being a extreme Kingdom Hearts fan of course I had to read the manga. For those of you who don't know Kingdom Hearts is a manga based on the Video game so of course I'm going to compare it to the game. It's starts off in Destiny Islands where Sora, Riku and Kairi are attempting to escape their island by building a raft. Of course the night before they leave there's a big storm, (who didn't see that coming?) and next thing you know everyone's seperated and Sora has a giant key which can some how defeat the shadowy bug like Heartless.
I thought the manga did a good job of covering what happens in the game, of course its not as fun as acutally beating up the Heartless yourself but thats kinda of hard to do when your reading a book. I thought the story was a little too rushed and there wasn't as much character developement as in the game, but once again I can't help but love the combination of Final Fantasy and Disney. I think this manga is good if you like either or the two or you like the game. I think if you don't know anything about Kingdom Hearts you might get a little confused, but I can't tell you for sure as I already knew all of the story when I read this. If you're a die hard fan you might be a little disappointed but they can't do everything exactly like they did in the game so just enjoy what you've got!

the manga is based off a popular ps2 game of the same name that involves characters from both disney and final fantasy games, using original characters for the MC. the manga itself is more loosely based though as only taking key parts of the game and turning it into manga, so you're not really getting the full story, just the really important stuff. its basically "kingdom hearts in a nutshell" in a manga. its only really enjoyable if you already played the game. its easy to find copies online so if you're a KH fan then go ahead and buy, but if you're not familiar with the series itself its best to stay put

Kingdom Hearts the Manga is Based on Kingdom Hearts 1 for PlayStation 2. The series is my most favourite video game ever, this manga started in October 2003 and ended in January 2005, and it's 4 volumes long. But unlike other mangas, it reads like a normal comic, left to right instead of right to left, which is so very very sad. Just so you know, the other Kingdom Hearts manga's based on the other games read right to left, only this one is different.

Story 10-10
There are some things left out, that was in the games and not in the manga, but the story's the same, it's about Sora, Riku and Kairi, who live on Destiny Islands. They build a raft but Heartless come, they are creatures that go after the darkness in people's hearts, Sora gets a magical weapon called a Keyblade, that can open any door. Sora fights the Heartless, then he gets away. Meanwhile Donald Duck and Goofy go on a mission to find the Key Blade wielder, together Sora, Donald and Goofy go to different Disney worlds to battle the Heartless, what's sad is some things are left out, but it's still the exact same as the game. [color=green]The ending is very rewarding and offers a sweet moment between the characters.[/color]

Characters 10-10
Donald Duck and Goofy are so very funny, I love them. The manga has the Little Mermade, Pinocchio, Hercules, Alice in wonderland, Squall Leon Heart, Sid, Aerith, Aladdin, Yuffie, and lots more. Sora is so very nice, Kairi is sweet and I so love her. [color=green]She is kind and adorable.[/color] Riku is my most favourite character, I so love Riku, he's so very cool. [color=green]He is neither good nor bad, but rather in between: you can like him as a hero or a villain.[/color] This is Disney mixed with Final Fantasy, of course it's going to be amazing.It's great to see all these famous characters we love gathered together in a single story. The only bad thing is, Mickey Mouse is only on here in the very end, it's so not fair, the main character of Disney does not appear until the end. I won't say what happens, but it does make sense, it would have been confusing if Mickey appeared before, but he is only at the end of Kingdom Hearts , but Donald Duck and Goofy are so here all the time, I love it.

Art 9-10
The art looks so very good, the drawings look good, if you like the games then I promise the art is true to the games.

Enjoyment 10-10
The only regrettable thing is Mickey Mouse only at the end and some things left out that were in the video game, otherwise it's perfect.

Final Score 10-10

Good points: the characters were as lovable as the game, Sora felt like Sora if that makes sense to you, and if you're not looking for a master piece but some Kingdom Hearts nostalgia, this is it right here. the art works is okay, and there are a lot of chibis. It was cool seeing different aspects of the characters personalities as they talked though (though mickey was as mysterious as ever)

bad points: its pretty much one big book of cut scenes, not much action besides the finishing move, all the big fights are skipped, and while the characters are lovable, they don't show any development, or if they do, its in a way that if you never played the game, you wonder how the character became so strong without any of the fighting.

Kingdom Hearts has always been my favorite game on the Playstation. As a real KH-fan who loves to read, I couldn't miss out on the manga of this brilliant piece of art.

However, when I began to read the first volume, the story was very rushed and herky-jerky. I was glad to have played the game, because otherwise I would've dropped the manga after the first volume. This would've really been a shame, because the story gets a whole lot better when you continue on volume 2 and it continues to stay this way.
What first would be a 10-panel page, is in the continuation of the volumes a 7-panel page with a lot more depth to the story, the art: all of it.

The strong thing about this manga is that it has a lot of serious moments in it, but also a lot of hilarious moments. The real highlights are the hilarious moments because it fits tremendously in the story. The game didn't have so much of this, which brings a new flavour to the manga.

No worries if you haven't played the game, because the manga just adapts the original story.
If you have played the game and want to read the manga, you should definitely read it. You'll re-experience the whole feeling you had from playnig the game! Also you probably did forget some little things because the game is more than 10 years old. When reading this manga, you'll have some moments when you are like: oh yeah, that was how it was going!

While I have played all of the original games of this franchise, I did not think that the manga version was adequate. There were many plot holes and things left out of the manga that were in the game. The art was decent, but inconsistent and I found the representation of Sora's character to be a far cry from his original and superior version in the game. It was good to read for killing time, but not much else. The main thing that bugs me about the manga version is the disappointment of playing the games and then expecting a good corresponding manga. It seemed that each world was covered far too quickly in comparison to the game. Each character was poorly represented and the few jokes that were in the manga, were poor. Overall 6/10

*This review is more geared towards those already acquainted with the story of Kingdom Hearts*

Sometimes, an adaptation can stick closely to the source material and still end up pretty mediocre. The Kingdom Hearts novels unfortunately is one of those adaptations as their author, Tomoco Kanemaki, doesn't seem to be very good at her craft. As she weaves the tale together with flat writing and uninspired wording, she essentially creates one long Wikipedia synopsis. As a result, she turns Sora’s tale into a dull affair and the spirit of the series is lost in the monotony. It became clearer to me when I discovered that Kanemaki worked as a scenario writer for one of the games; she didn’t see this as her novel debut but as another day on the job.

Still, it is commendable that Kanemaki stuck closely to the original story, even if the transition of the aspects left them shallow in comparison. The themes of light vs darkness and friendship are intact and the little details towards level progression and enemy types are neat touches and may even evoke fond memories of the game. This transition is less forgiving with the characters however, who are more hollow in comparison. The events don’t stray too far from the original either, but simply taking the plot without the gameplay (a difficulty of adapting) causes the developments to be too closely linked together, something that Kanemaki doesn’t skilfully mend. As a result this leads to a very fast pace which encompasses the entire story and when it mixes in with the bland writing, the novels are simply at their worst.

Where the game aspects are concerned, the novels become a bit too faithful to the original. Kanemaki seemed to think it would be a good idea to include the random enemy encounters of the game, presumably to drive home the point that the world is in danger. Well, not only did reusing dialogue and describing rather uneventful battles overkill this already tedious idea but these moments are incredibly overused, repeatedly breaking up the story for valueless diversions. Without being interesting, or well written, these moments don’t add much to the story and instead drag it out. Alternatively, this can be seen as Kanemaki’s answer to slow down the pacing, but alas that’s like using a leech as a band-aid. In addition, some of the game’s scenarios don’t translate very well to prose (Wonderland’s evidence quest for instance). Even with a good writer these events probably wouldn’t be very interesting, so with Kanemaki behind them, the enjoyment level is turned down to mind-numbingly boring. She just doesn’t seem to be aware of what is exciting to read and what isn’t; what should be adapted and what shouldn’t (or altered at least), she just simply retells.

Like the manga adaptation, not all of the Disney worlds make it into the novels. It’s not that I expected the novels to be better with them but the three worlds that were omitted hurt the story in their exclusion. This is because Halloween Town, Atlantica & Olympus Coliseum (eek no Cloud!) all contain a Disney villain and cutting them out takes away half of the story’s antagonists. In turn, this makes the story feel stripped, gives the present antagonists a much weaker presence and doesn’t make them feel like a very convincing threat to Sora (and of course the continuity problems this will cause). Surprisingly bringing the best component to the novels is illustrator Shiro Amano, who also handles the manga adaptations. His illustrations are numerous and his colour works look great. As a minor complaint however, some illustrations originally drawn in color have been printed in greyscale, giving them a blurred and muddy look, though this is not too overbearing.

If you were wondering how the novel adaptation of Kingdom Hearts fared against the manga counterpart, they’re almost equal in enjoyment. While the manga is adapted by someone who seems more suited to adapting Katamari Damacy, the novels are written by an author who isn’t really skilled at writing. The novels are a more faithful take and could be seen as the better adaptation but even with the good it does, the omnipresent weak writing is always there to suck out the enjoyment. It’s too big of a detractor to make one want to read the novels as well as the many more she has written.

Kingdom Hearts could’ve been good as novel with a more capable writer behind it but with what’s here it feels like a lazy cash-in. There’s just no style in the writing and she doesn’t even try. That’s not to say that the novels are bad. The story is (nearly) the same as the original game but it’s really just a bland retelling without adding anything of value. There’s no additional insight in these novels and it’s absolutely missing the rich writing needed to make the characters and world come to life. Kanemaki is too weak an author to be capable of bringing that out and it’s rather disappointing to know that she handles all of the Kingdom Hearts novels (I hope she improves at least). To those who want to get into the series or are returning fans, just stick with the games or watch a playthrough. However, if you’re really dying to read the novels, just read a synopsis, the experience will be similar.