Kingdom Hearts made crossovers cool — cursing us all, and itself too

polygon.com:

It’s 2022, and crossovers are everywhere. From Fortniteto Space Jam 2, media corporations have learned to play nice with one another in the name of epic money-making. It helps that a few of those corporations now own all of the other ones — and there is no media company more notorious for that accomplishment than Disney, the proud owner of Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and more. Perhaps that’s why the announcement of Kingdom Hearts 4, and the rumor that Star Wars characters could show up in the game, feels bittersweet.

It doesn’t help that Kingdom Hearts 3 did not exactly recapture the magic. Maybe it was because Sora and his friends sailed into the uncanny valley during the Pirates of the Caribbean section; maybe it’s because Elsa performed “Let It Go” in its entirety rather than cutting out a chorus or two and letting us be on our way. Or maybe it was because the landscape of pop culture has changed so much since the first Kingdom Hearts game came out back in 2002. These days, Sora has a much bigger villain to fight: the exhaustion that people everywhere have begun to feel towards crossover events in general and those from Disney in particular.

It didn’t used to be this way. Back in 2002, Kingdom Hearts was a revelation — a never-before-seen example of corporate collaboration across movies and video games. In a talk at DICE 2010, Disney exec Steve Wadsworth and his colleague Graham Hopper looked back on Kingdom Hearts’ legacy, with Hopper noting it was “so radical” for Disney and Square Enix to mash up their characters that many staffers worried internally that the result would be “an abomination.” Why would Disney have agreed to something like this, they wondered? Cloud Strife and Donald Duck, in