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What if the entire story was planned from the beginning



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Jotari

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There doesn't seem to be a general Kingdom Hearts forum so I'll stick this one in here since this is where it would have the most effect on the series.

Anyway the story of Kingdom Hearts has evolved greatly with the release of new games. It's now a huge mass of complicated prophesies and heart manipulations. It clearly wasn't planned to spawn such a long reaching story when the first games were released. But what if everything was planned from the outset? If the elements of Days, Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance etc had already been conceived early on, how do you think this would effect the earlier games. Would there be plot points introduced earlier? Hints of the larger story from the start? How do you think it would look if characters like Xion and Terranort were part of the plan from day 1 instead of being reworked in to the story as things developed?
 

Alecs27

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Nope, the story isn't planned from the beginning, but I think that the KHIII ending will reflects KHI's in some way.
 

Jotari

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I'm not asking if the story was planned from the beginning, I'm asking what you think it would like if it was planned form the beginning.
 

Gram

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If it was planned from the start I'd imagine the story would be a whole lot smoother, less bloated and convoluted. Many of the mysteries and confusion stems from the fact it wasn't planned ahead and cause Nomura only has ideas for the next game when making the current. (but nothing definitive past ideas)

Another thing that lead to it's current outcome is the games not originally intended to happen such as Days or even CoM.
 

Jotari

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I wonder if the multiple people called Ansem would have remained or would they have been Xehanort's reports.
 

Sign

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This is more or less the general subsection, so you made the right choice!

I'm not sure if having the entire series planned all at once would make it any different. As time goes by, opinions will continue to develop and changes are prone to happen.
 

Sdog

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Im sure if everything was a day 1 plan everything would click together a lot more, as opposed to the shoulder shrug 'alright' we seem to have to go along with when it comes to some plot points. Perhaps even the infamous time-travel would've been a lot cooler of an element and not just last minute curve-ball. As you can tell I'm not a fan.

Hopefully characters like Xion still would've worked into the plot too, for her story was a touching one.
 

Shogo-Kun

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If everything was planned from the beginning, I'd imagine everything would be more cohesive and there would be far more structure in terms of plot. I am aware that there are two types of writers: Gardeners and Architects. However, Nomura and his team seem not to be very good gardeners. Maybe the story would have benefited from having some architects on board.
 

Zebedy

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I don't think it would be as good, to be honest. I know people want it to be less convoluted and all that. But that also kind of just betrays how writing works. Things develop. They change over time. New people bring new ideas to the table. If they had made a plan when KH1 came out, and they stuck to it, we would have missed out on so much. A lot of this series, especially with the handheld titles, are about experimenting. Things like KH3D which was made to celebrate the tenth anniversary, would have been wildly different (if it existed at all) had it been planned from the beginning. So much of that game owes the circumstances in which it was made -- the anniversary, the fact that it was the first game in like six years to actually advance the story past KH2, etc -- you could feel the excitement of the staff making that game in everything from the music to the story beats to the gameplay. A lot of that game is also owed to its hardware. If they had planned it out from the beginning (and stuck to that plan) KH3D would have been completely different. Obviously, the 3DS did not exist back then.

I don't know. I definitely wish the series was more consistent, and there was more thought put into how it all connects and more care was given and all of that. But I definitely wouldn't want the entire series to be planned from the beginning with no breathing room. It would have been a completely different series, and think, a bit lesser.
 

Nazo

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I'm almost positive it wasn't planned from the beginning. I know Nomura works in sections, meaning he had the ideas for CoM and KH2 while making KH. And then as KH2 was being worked on, he was planning BBS, and so forth.
 

Elysium

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If it had been planned from the beginning, I'm guessing we would've got KH3 years ago with almost none of the gotcha one-offs on every handheld system out there (except maybe BbS). I don't mind how the story has turned out, overall, but the fact the end of this saga still hasn't come out is pretty ludicrous, I'll just be honest. It's not like it was made up of 5 installments; we still haven't even got number 3 yet.

Also, maybe we'd have more consistency with their story ideas. Probably no Xion, Riku Replica, or Data Sora and Riku. I'm assuming they could've shown anything important from CoM in flashbacks throughout KH2, which probably would've helped that game, tbh. Maybe they could've introduce the time travel explanation in BbS and 3D wouldn't exist. A lineup of KH, KH2, BbS, and KH3 would be a lot nicer than KH, CoM, KH2, Days, BbS, Re:Coded, 3D, KH3.
 
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Zebedy

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If it had been planned from the beginning, I'm guessing we would've got KH3 years ago with almost none of the gotcha one-offs on every handheld system out there (except maybe BbS).
More likely we wouldn't have gotten KH3 early. We just wouldn't have gotten any games at all. The big stall in KH3 was because the KH Team wanted a break and wanted to work on an FF game. That likely would've happened even if it was all planned out. KH3 wasn't delayed because the story wasn't thought of from the beginning. It was put on hold because people are humans and want to try new things and take breaks, lol.
 

Elysium

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I've always found that reasoning very strange, and it doesn't seem wise from a business perspective. That's how popular franchises slowly fade away. But considering all their financial woes, I'm not surprised. At least the remixes seem like they're trying to fix the damage they've done.
 

Ruran

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I've always found that explanation very strange, and it doesn't seem wise from a business perspective. That's how popular franchises slowly fade away. But considering all their financial woes, I'm not surprised.

Square hasn't been making the wisest business decisions in a long time, but to be fair, the main KH team at the time went to work on FF "Versus", which took waaaayyy longer than expected. For better or for worse, they had another team put out the hand helds and Re:MIX's so the main teams eventually switched.
 

Master Sora

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If they wanted to take a break to make more Final Fantasy games then there would be no reason to develop Days, Coded, and Dream Drop Distance. Within that time frame I guess Nomura noticed some plot holes in the story so far and he was getting requests for more KH games on different consoles, so he decided to expand on it to make things a bit clearer. I think his main focus was getting birth by sleep out then right to KH3.
 

Samhain

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Let's see

KH1 Story was simple
KH COM - story was simple
KH2 the confusing issues begin. "That's not really Ansem. That's a guy who called himself Ansem. His real name is Xehanort, and what you fought in the first game was just his heartless" - WTF?!?!?!!?

The story got completely nuts with KH DDD. I was fine till then. But the time travel is dumb...the 13 Xehanort's is very creepy, but something new...but I don't like it

And then this scene was just the creepiest of all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIe6qn4JZrw

my actual reaction: what in the actual fk
 

Nazo

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Within that time frame I guess Nomura noticed some plot holes in the story so far and he was getting requests for more KH games on different consoles, so he decided to expand on it to make things a bit clearer.

I think the biggest problem, with the several year gap between the release of KH2 and Days, was that Nomura had no choice but to release the KH games for portable consoles. KH2 came out near the end of the PS2's life, so by the time 2009 rolled around and Square was ready to roll out Days, Coded, and BBS, they had nowhere to put it, except handhelds. BBS was originally a PS2 game, but PS2 was dead by 2010. And, like everyone at the time, Square was trying to get used to developing for PS3/360 which took forever (like FFXIII for example). And since they weren't made in HD or anything, they had no choice.
 

Goddard

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I think we would have a lot more references to what's happened in other games. The problem with the Kingdom Hearts series, barring the fact that the creator makes things up as he goes along, is that the games are spread out amongst so many systems and for most people, it's hard to keep up with the storyline. I don't blame people feeling confused when they first bought Kingdom Hearts II after playing the first installment and see all these Organization members that didn't make the final cut. Or how there's a character wearing all these bandages making small talk with Riku. When you play the games individually, the stories seem so self-contained and not a part of some larger, over-arching plot like they really are. This has been addressed somewhat in Dream Drop Distance but it doesn't remove the fact that the series gets more crazier by the installment and it's been going on since the portable side stories following the second main game.

I liked the story presented in the first game of how the antagonist was this wise philosopher-king who desired to learn more about the heart and was corrupted by the want to know, turning him to plunge his own world to darkness and create the Heartless, releasing them to the worlds. Having him revealed to be an apprentice who gone rogue was interesting and actually being named Xehanort while taking the name of his mentor was cool but everything else became meh.
 
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