K9wildlife

“let me keep you safe.”

This will be the first in a series of posts analyzing Sora and Kairi’s moments together during KH3. The Japanese version has so many lovely callbacks to previous Sora/Kairi moments and nicely evolves the themes present in them, so I wanted to take a closer look.

Here’s a general key for the kind of analysis I like to do:

JP: Official Japanese Dialogue

EN: Official English Dialogue

TR: My Translation

Notes: things I found interesting, grammatical points, extra thoughts, etc.

One last note before we begin: no media exists in a vacuum. Every work of art must be viewed through the cultural lens of the people who made it. Kingdom Hearts, for all its ties to Disney, is still very much a Japanese game, so it should be analyzed in light of that.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

i drew cookie run au destiny trio,,,

A commission for b0mbsaway on Deviantart

Okay, a few things before we begin.

Miyu Irino (Sora’s VA), Risa Uchida (Kairi’s VA), and Mamoru Miyano (R*ku’s VA) have known each other for years. In previous Ultimania interviews, they have mentioned that they even went to Disneyland together after the recording sessions for KH2 I believe it was. For each of the numbered titles they’ve had an interview like this together, and KH3 continues the tradition. The KH1 Ultimania has an interview of them when they were still teenagers to give you an idea of how long they’ve known each other. They’ve spent much more time together for KH-related stuff than the English VAs for the Destiny Trio have.

The whole tone of the interview is very relaxed and they all seem to be having fun and teasing each other a little even. You can tell they all get along really well, understand their characters well, and build off each other well. Irino and Miyano in particular were very supportive of Kairi and talked about how they’d like to play a KH game as her. Irino even suggested a Destiny Trio game, and Miyano suggested Kairi be in the middle with Sora and R*ku following her. 

With that in mind, let’s get started. Usual disclaimers apply about how my own Japanese ability and translation abilities are still a work in progress, etc. Feel free to compare it to the other translations floating around to get a fuller picture. I may update my translation if I notice mistakes or things that need to be changed for clarity. R*ku’s name is starred out and has an asterisk inserted in the Japanese version so this won’t show up in his tag.