A genre of manga now being seen on bookstore shelves, becoming more popular and surprisingly enough, well drawn for the speed at which they are produced, is the video game-based manga. One of these series, based on the Kingdom Hearts series of video games, has always caught this editor's eye, until one was picked up for evaluation, and a yea or nay on whether video game-based manga is worth a place on the shelves next to Immortal Rain and Sailor Moon, or should be clearanced out with old copies of Gundam Wing.

The first thing that one will notice about the Kingdom Hearts series is that the manga breaks down the story that can take up to a hundred hours to finish into four volumes. For this reader, that is about three hours of reading time, and so on the time required to get the entire story, the manga gets an A+. Yet, this might be bad, considering that there is something to be said to involving ones self in the story, in having to work to learn more. The joy of playing is also lost, and it comes down, eventually to whether you enjoy reading or playing games more.

If there is anything that catches my first in a manga, it is most definitely the artwork, and the artwork of the Kingdom Hearts manga series is certainly not sub-par. While I have seen better, from Clamp studios and the like, Kingdom Hearts does an excellent job of capturing not only the classic look of the Disney characters, but the more contemporary style of the original characters and the unique style of the Square Enix Final Fantasy characters. There is also the mixture of the mediums when you see slightly larger eyes and softer features blended into the styles that anyone who has played the games will recognize immediately.

The plot of the series takes the entire game, and condenses it into a four volume set. Basically, it's the story of Kingdom Hearts without all the random battles, boss battles, leveling up, collecting of treasures, searching for hidden items, and obsessive playing until the characters have reached the highest level possible. Yet you are still introduced to Sora, Riku, and Kairi, not to mention Donald, Goofy, and King Mickey. Each world, Disney, Final Fantasy, or specially created are visited as they are in the game, but instead of spending hours in each one, you may only spend fifteen minutes before departing that world forever. This leaves little room to really get some character development, or to enjoy the beautiful backgrounds that the main characters find themselves in.

While much of the dialogue is taken from the game, there is more added, simply because there is a lot of space to fill when all of the battle scenes are taken out. Characters succeed with miniscule amounts of effort on the part of the reader, so something else engaging had to be added. For what it is, the dialogue is less cheesy than one would expect something to be based off a video game to be, but perhaps that's just decades of bad video game-based movies making this editor biased. The point though does get across that Sora is good, the Heartless are bad, and the world needs to be saved.

In the end, it isn't the story or the art that makes the Kingdom Hearts manga series appealing. It is more the idea that one can read a good story and not have to go through all the game play to get it. Those who have heard how good Kingdom Hearts is, yet do not have access to a Playstation 2, or just do not like to play video games, can get what they want from this manga series, but those of us who have played the game and enjoy it will feel that video game-based manga series are nothing but a bandaid over the yearning to play the game again, reconnect with the characters, and once again revel in success and sympathize with defeat.