A Legend Retold: Final Fantasy 3’s influence on the Kingdom Hearts series

The main characters of Final Fantasy Three are the Onion Knights, a group of Orphans desiring adventure who are chosen by the crystals to leave their secluded home and restore light to the world and combat the overwhelming tide of darkness. The main character of Kingdom Hearts is Sora, a happy go lucky young man desiring adventure who is chosen by the Keyblade to leave his secluded home in order to combat the tide of darkness by finding the Light.

One thing you cannot say about the original Final Fantasy Three is that it had strong main characters. The Onion Knights are mere cyphers, placeholders for the names the players grant them. All you can reliably say about them is that they are quite young children- though of no specific age- chosen by the crystals to be warriors of Light, and that they have a positive impact on the people whose towns they visit.

Sora, by comparison, is a rather well fleshed out character. A child, roughly the same as as the Onion Knights, who looks up to his best friend Riku, and has a crush on his other good friend Kairi. Sora is a an optimistic, headstrong, slightly cocky and very outspoke character. Like the Onion Knights, he too has a positive impact on those people he meets in his travels. Unlike the static Onions Knights, he changes and grows throughout his tale, both literally, during a year long break between his first and second games, and as a character.

In this way, Final Fantasy Three borrows back from Kingdom Hearts. In the years since Sora’s story was released, Final Fantasy Three has seen its main characters reimagined twice.

Once was for the Remake for the DS which turned the faceless Onion Knights into Luneth, Arc, Refia, and Ingus, and the other was Dissidia, which gave us the still nameless but fully characterized Onion Knight. While Luneth and Dissidia’s Onion Knight are not the same character, both have adopted different mannerisms from Sora’s portrayals in Kingdom Hearts.

Luneth shares the same basic characteristics as the original Onion Knights and Sora, especially their confidence and cutting to the point of the matter, but he also has several of Sora’s mannerisms, though limited by the super deformed art style. Luneth’s posture and the poses he takes when in conversation resemble those of Sora.

Dissidia’s Onion Knight takes this comparison further, with the Onion Knight’s youthful energy, mannerisms, and even his moves in battle being greatly influenced by Kingdom Hearts and Sora. Like Sora, the Onion Knight’s play style emphasizes quick strikes, suddenly shifting position on ground or air and attacking from a new direction, and for a tendency to cause both his opponent and himself to rise slightly during attacks.

Onion Knight also casts magic from the tip of his sword like Sora and other Wielders of the Keyblade. Whether it was intentional or not originally, Square Enix does seem to be recognizing and celebrating the similarities between their main characters, and possibly all the other elements as well.

X. It’s all about the X.

It started with Xande (or Zande if you prefer). He was pissed off that he wasn’t granted immortality by his teacher like his fellow students Unei and Doga were, so he tried to manipulate the darkness into freezing time so he could live Forever. The Cloud of Darkness behind him manipulated him into serving its own goals of destroying everything, and could only be defeated by the combined strength of the Light and Dark warriors.

Xehanort is quite similar, finding a growing dissatisfaction with the ideologies of his fellow keyblade masters, seeking to manipulate both light and dark so he can create a new world, crafted to his liking.

Xemnas is essentially the same person as Xehanort, and thus the equivalent to Xande, but he also serves double duty, fulfilling the same purpose as the Cloud of Darkness, the terribly powerful, dispassionate entity desiring the destruction of everything that requires the powers of both light and dark to defeat.

Minor Kingdom hearts villians and characters also serve similar narrative roles to Final Fantasy 3 characters, oftentimes in repeated roles.

Maleficent, like Hein, is a powerful magician who is aware of the plans of the villians but is working towards their own end.

Xehanort’s Heartless serves a second role, like that off the Kraken, in which he ‘kills’ a good friend of the hero best friend, and leads to their slumber and awakening in a drastically changed place, marking the transition between two phases of the game.

Xaldin, one of Orginization XIII, is a masterful Aerial warrior like Garuda, the enemy who manipulated the King of Saronia into doing his bidding. Xaldin does much the same manipulation with Beast in Kingdom Hearts 2.

On a more positive note, Eraqus, Yen Sid, and DiZ serve similar roles to that of Doga and Unei, former fellows of Xehanort/ Xande who now oppose him for the good of the world, though their similarities would seem to extend only as far as that.