Kingdom Hearts X Novel Review: “A Complete Narrative Mess”

While the Kingdom Hearts franchise is widely known for its collection of best-selling video games, its line of novels is relatively obscure. This series of books was originally exclusive to Japan — but thanks to publisher Yen Press, English localizations have been released starting in 2015. The novels have aimed to show a more linear approach to the stories of these games and give perspectives to aspects that the original source did not cover. Author Tomoco Kanemaki has teamed up with manga artist Shiro Amano (who has worked on the manga adaptations of the games) to provide novels that… well, sometimes feel like half-decent novels.

The Kingdom Hearts X[chi] novelization is the first book chronologically in this long series of Kingdom Hearts novels. To put it bluntly — it would take a master author to be able to properly adapt the story of this mobile game, and unfortunately, Kanemaki is not that individual. I’d be remiss to say it's her fault whatsoever; the story of the source material can be a turn off to even the most veteran of Kingdom Hearts fans.

This book is split narratively in what makes for an often confusing style of reading. A majority of each chapter is devoted to telling the story of X[chi] in a second-person narrative (with Chirithy, a cat-like Dream Eater companion as the narrator speaking to you) while…