10 Video Games You Constantly Have To Defend Hating

3. Kingdom Hearts

The Kingdom Hearts franchise is really a two-decade case study in the power of Disney branding, and how effectively it's papered over a series whose overarching story is a migraine-inducing mess.

Fans of the series will politely call Kingdom Hearts' spaghettified narrative "dreamlike," which is to say that it doesn't make a damn lick of sense.

While Square Enix's Final Fantasy games flirt with incoherence at the best of times, Kingdom Hearts goes all-in on a uniquely incomprehensible brand of non-logic quite like gaming hasn't seen prior or since.

It's probably a disservice to anime to call Kingdom Hearts the most anime-like of all major AAA video game franchises, because the storytelling and characterisation are so convoluted and poorly told as to be actively, genuinely boring.

That a series centered around visiting Disney-themed worlds can't even cobble together a basically engaging story is, frankly, stupefying.

It makes the fatal mistake of massively overcomplicating itself to the extent that only the most hardcore, over-invested fans can really make head or tail of it.

Without a flicker of emotional engagement beyond the dopamine hit that comes when the game tugs on the player's nostalgia receptors through all those Disney references, Kingdom Hearts is a soulless, empty vessel of a series.