I really love Kingdom Hearts. I’ve bought all the merchandise I could get my hands on, I’ve played through all the games multiple times in multiple languages, I’ve written college essays about my undying love for the series; hell, I modified my PS2 just so I could import Final Mixes and play them. But as much as I love my weird little Disney Square mash-up series, I can’t help but think that there are some other companies that could have made even better crossovers than the House of Mouse with Cloud’s Empire. This is a two part “what if” series just thinking about the potential for Kingdom Hearts where you change the companies involved. First up: Disney.

What if you replace Disney with:

Weekly Shonen Jump

Shonen Jump is more or less the Marvel or DC of Japan, except instead of spandex and superpowers, you get over-the-top battles with energy blasts, transformations, and full on hot blood. Everyone knows a series that has been in Weekly Shonen Jump even if they don’t know that they do. WSJ series include the ever popular Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, Yu-Gi-Oh, and One Piece which could serve to draw in the mainstream audience, plus it could give some attention to series that people might not know so much about. On top of all that, it would be pretty cool if instead of Final Fantasy characters, they were to integrate characters from GanGan Comics like Soul Eater, Black God and Enchanter. And maybe, just maybe, someone could force Tite Kubo into finally finishing Zombiepowder.

Hasbro

As the popularity of the Battleship film, G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra, and the Transformers trilogy have shown, there is an audience for adapting properties from old eighties toys and board games. While the actual quality of said adaptations is questionable at best, the draw of having Hasbro’s line up is undeniable. Furthermore, Hasbro owns companies like Wizards of the Coast and Milton Bradley which opens up opportunities to introduce some brand new concepts into Kingdom Hearts, like adding a mystery theater type whodunnit based off Clue or introducing summons based on Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. And of course, there’s the elephant in the room called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic…

Nickelodeon

I could talk about Doug, Rugrats,The Ren and Stimpy Show, and Spongebob Squarepants and how cool having all of those shows in Kingdom Hearts would be, but I honestly don’t care about all that. Yes, Spongebob could make a nice replacement for Atlantica. Yes, Reptar would make a great summon. But honestly, the only thing I want to see is a Kingdom Hearts version of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. I just recently made my way through the series (now available on Netflix) and I was completely blow away with how well the world was built. I honestly wish Disney would just effing buy Nickelodeon so I could get an Avatar world in Kingdom Hearts. It may very well be the only chance to have an Avatar video game that’s actually any good.

Gainax

If you were ask an anime fan to randomly name an anime, there’s a pretty good chance that the anime they name would be one made by Gainax. As cool as it is seeing worlds like The Little Mermaid’s Atlantica and the Enchanted Dominion from Sleeping Beauty in Kingdom Hearts, what’s really exciting is when they deviate and go to that quirky place where movies like Tron, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Lilo & Stitch live. Gainax has that same quirkiness in spades. They have a diverse library including titles such as FLCL, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, any one of which is at least as offbeat as anything in Kingdom Hearts series thus far. I have no issues with Snow White or any of her dwarves, but it would be so much better teaming up with Panty and Stocking to beat down Scanty and Kneesocks.

Studio Ghibli

If there’s one area I think the Kingdom Hearts series fall short in, it’s the storytelling. Don’t get me wrong; I love the crazy convoluted mess that is the nature of relations between heart, bodies and souls, enemies that aren’t actually evil, and the whole of chaos wrought by one man’s ambition. No, what I think is the weak point is the forced insertion of the Disney stories into the plot. Kingdom Hearts II had a rather awkward way of dealing with the Disney plots: on the first visit to any given world you play through the movie plot and on the second visit you get into the Kingdom Hearts specific plot. While they fixed this with better integration in Birth by Sleep, I can’t help but think that having a better base of films to draw on would have made things less awkward. Studio Ghibli is probably the most critically acclaimed anime studio in the world and their movies are more or less always fantastic. I’m actually holding out hope that the current publishing deal that Disney has with them eventually result in them being bought out, much like what happened with Pixar.

Part 2 coming soon!