My PS1 collection was crammed with Disney tie-in games. Hercules, Tarzan, and A Bug's Life were an essential part of my library. They weren't great games, but they arrived before the sharp decline of movie tie-ins and managed to be pretty serviceable. Later on, Disney games included the likes of Bolt and Up, the latter being "the worst game to speedrun ever". The problem is that games take much longer to develop these days, so tie-in games need a far earlier advance warning if they're going to be up to scratch by the time the movie hits cinemas. Eventually, the declining quality and increasing difficulty led to tie-ins becoming a thing of the past, and now Disney doesn't seem to know how to make a video game.
There are a variety of things to consider here. Firstly, tie-ins are now linked to properties rather than specific movies - Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, is clearly riffing off the MCU but tells an entirely different story. Also, even when tie-ins were bad, some fought against the current - I will defend Brave's honour until my very last breath. Or at least until I finish this article, anyway. Finally though, there is a very large elephant in the room - Disney has been continuously making Kingdom Hearts games in that time, and has just launched a new title, Twisted Wonderland. Here’s the issue though: these are both terrible Disney games.
Kingdom Hearts fans, I don’t want to get into a fight with you again. I’ve already written about my disappointment with the series, and while I understand that it means a lot to many of you, it’s not a Disney game. It might be fun as what it is, but that’s not Mickey Mouse. That’s not Donald Duck. That’s not Toy Story, or Winnie the Pooh, or any of them.
I have seen every Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios movie, and trust me when I say that’s not a brag. I like Disney. Hell, I love Disney, as much as it’s possible to love a soulless capitalist corporation that will never love you back. Kingdom Hearts isn’t trying to be Disney, not really. It’s a completely unrelated JRPG except sometimes Buzz Lightyear pops out. Now, Disney has a new game: Twisted Wonderland. Much like Kingdom Hearts, it’s not really a Disney game.
Twisted Wonderland is made by Disney, but it contains zero Disney characters. Instead, it’s a bunch of boarding school boys who are dressed as Disney characters, because that’s almost as good, right? It’s like the scene in Hercules where Phil wears the Scar rug as a cloak - except every character is wearing a skin of some kind, with none of the soul beneath it.
Twisted Wonderland is a gacha game that riffs on the Disney iconography, but I’m not even sure it does that well. If it let me try my gacha RNG luck at getting Elsa, only to come up short with Henry J. Waternoose III, I’d be all for it. Or at the very least, I’d be way more inclined to defend it. Instead it’s just weird schoolboys kind of dressed up as them. And why there are no female characters when the Disney Princess franchise is more marketable than basically every movie Disney owns, I can’t even begin to guess.
Just… make a good Disney game. It could be one that, like Guardians, riffs off the movies but tells a fresh story, or a more collaborative IP fest where series are mixed and matched. You’d think an open platformer would be a good fit, but much like Marvel or Star Wars (two things Disney owns, remember), Disney has enough original characters and storytelling potential for a variety of genres. Kingdom Hearts has proved a JRPG could work, it just completely forgot to use Disney in any meaningful way. If a new game can actually use the Disney magic, we’ll finally have a replacement for the PS1 Tarzan game.