by Brent Peters
A Chain of Memories
The year is 2006. A ten-year-old walks into the local video rental shop. Not only is the kid’s town slow to accept new technology, but most of the inhabitants consider things like Pokémon and Psychology to be Satanic. The kid doesn’t know the word yet, but he’s looking for escapism. He sifts through the titles of games, trying to find box art that won’t inspire a sermon. One cover stands out. On it, Disney icons stand beside some unknown characters with huge eyes and impractically pointy hair.
Mickey’s smug little grin ensures that it’ll get the parental pass. So, the kid goes home, seals himself in the corner of the living room with an old TV, and boots up what he would later realize is Kingdom Hearts II.
Without context, the kid fell into the one of the most criticized game intros of all time. Hour after hour passed of menial tasks and melodramatic speeches about friendship. But, interspliced with all this tedium, there was an intrigue. Flashbacks showed cosmic travel, Disney cameos, and grand battles. A white colossus dragged him into an ethereal realm and battled him on a stain glass pillar. A giant key appeared in his hand. The kid had no idea what was happening, but this stood out from everything else he’d experienced. He kept playing.
The boy wasn’t alone in his confusion. Roxas, the main character (or so it appeared), seemed just as lost as the player. All Roxas wants to do is enjoy the end of summer. He wants to spend time with his friends, but bizarre events keep occurring. He becomes distressed and disoriented. Our supposed hero loses money that had been entrusted to him. He forgets promises and appointments. His friends grow distant from him. The strange events make him question not only how much he matters to his loved ones, but if he matters at all.
Things only get stranger from here.
My Sanctuary
I love the first few Kingdom Hearts games. I have spent hundreds of hours in these worlds. Repeated play has ingrained every plot point, secret, and strategy into my mind. Certain tracks from the OST still incite an emotional reaction. On replaying Kingdom Hearts II this year, I still knew how to change the settings to fit my specific playstyle, navigating menus to turn off some of the game’s suggested loadouts. I found hidden items and slew optional bosses by instinct.
Despite knowing this game front to back, replaying it brought a new experience. So, as I played, I got to thinking. It’d be near impossible for someone to have the same experience with Kingdom Hearts that I and many other fans had a decade ago. For one, the countless spin-offs, prequels, and long-awaited sequels are now available. It’s no longer a question of trying any one game, but whether or not you want to try the series.
More important than this, though, is the fact that I have changed. The expat playing this game in 2020 is practically a different person from that bored kid of years passed. Kingdom Hearts fans tend to have this in common: we got invested in the series young. Your experience with the series evolves as you grow older. Re-evaluating this game through a more mature (or at last more articulate) lens is part of the experience. Through all this, one thing remains constant: I adore these games.
In my replay, nearly every level brought a direct hit of serotonin. The music cues, the battles, the gloriously stupid dialogue, all of these things brought me home. Replaying Kingdom Hearts II felt like getting a hug from an old friend. I love this game with all my heart.
Behind a Locked Door
Please don’t play it.
Kingdom Hearts occupies perhaps the strangest place in gaming’s hall of fame. We have amazing fighting mechanics, buried under hours of cutscenes. We have themes of existentialism and the pursuit of identity, mixed with Donald Duck trying to tickle a computer. I don’t think I am capable of explaining just how strange Kingdom Hearts is in a broader context.
If you think to yourself, ‘whatever, I’ll play the games and not read into it’, you will miss a critical part of the Kingdom Hearts experience. People have made doctoral-length essays and documentary-length videos on this series. Some fans venerate each pixel and button prompt with a near religious devotion. Others seek to perform an autopsy on a game series that refuses to die. Meanwhile, a huge number of casual fans exist, who hardly play any video games besides Kingdom Hearts.
I don’t know how this works. The cultural impact of Kingdom Hearts is as strange and impenetrable as the game’s own plot. Tim Rogers made a great video on the subject. If you have any interest whatsoever in the franchise, I recommend you watch it.
As for me, I no longer care if the game is good or not. You won’t find any pretense of objectivity here. Instead, I want to try to explore and explain why this series is near and dear to my heart.
The Price of Admission
Kingdom Hearts’ story is bonkers. I’ve been banging my head against the keyboard for weeks trying to talk about the games without mentioning the plot. Unfortunately, the increasingly strange narrative forms the cornerstone of the series. In order to give context for anything else I want to say here, I need to turn some attention to the bloated, tangled mess of a story, and try to explain it. For my purposes, I’ll try to give only the initial premise of the story. We only need the details which provide the overarching motives and themes. No full synopsis here. Okay? Let’s go.
The first Kingdom Hearts opens with Sora, the protagonist of the series. He’s a pointy-haired, large-shoed boy who lives on a picturesque tropical island. Like many people, Sora has wanderlust. He wants to build a raft with his friends Kairi and Riku (we’ll get to them later) so they can explore beyond their home. On the scheduled day of their departure, a strange rift opens in the fabric of reality, swallowing their world into Darkness. In the chaos, the three friends get scattered across the multiverse. Sora learns that the thing which swallowed his world threatens to do so to all others. Luckily, he has been chosen by a mysterious weapon called the Keyblade, which can “unlock” access between the worlds and “lock” the consuming Darkness out. Thus, Sora sets off on a quest to find his missing friends, accompanied by Donald Duck and Goofy, who share the goal of fighting the Darkness.
I’ll try to distill it down to one sentence: Sora fights monsters in Disney worlds while looking for friends. Through the vast majority of this bizarre odyssey, we can hang on to this underlying thread. Sora sees new places, searches for friends, and fights Darkness. He also stares into the abyss of existential dread and crises of identity, but that comes later.
On editing, it occurs to me how strange this might look to a non-fan. Why, they might ask, am I trying to analyze a game that clearly abandons logic? When so many things are thrown at the wall, isn’t it possible to extract just about anything, so long as you ignore huge chunks of it? More importantly, isn’t the whole thing just a load of utter nonsense?
To some extent, yes! Kingdom Hearts is nonsense! We get something deep from it, but we love and embrace the insanity, too.
The Nonsense is the Appeal
I guess now’s the point I need to address the Mouse in the room. There are things I’d rather talk about. For example, these games have inspired self-reflection, brought me a sense of meditative peace, and helped me come to terms with some personal fears. All of these points can be rebutted with, “okay, but why are there Disney characters?”
The actual answer is easy: the head of Square Enix (the company behind the Final Fantasy series) and the head of Japan’s Disney game division thought it’d be cool to work together. So, they did. It’s neat collab of teams who mutually respect each other.
Die hard fans will happily (or at least energetically) explain that certain Disney villains and heroines are necessary for the plot. They’ll also likely discuss how the balancing act between Disney and Final Fantasy creates a unique and compelling narrative. Both these points are true, but I find the real-world passion project more interesting.
Also, if you can’t get your head into the presence of Disney characters, you won’t adapt well when you get into the weirder points of the plot. If you’re trying to get over Mickey Mouse, how will you deal with the guy in the brown robe who’s actually a dude in a black robe except he’s not because he’s the villain before he was the villain sent from the future, maybe? The real question you should ask is how they got Christopher Lee and Leonard Nimoy in these games.
As much as I enjoy the fever dream story, I don’t think it’s the main appeal. Tetsuya Nomura, the creative lead on the series, has stated that this confusing nature is intentional. The stated goal was to leave room for speculation, because the imagination of the individual player will create something more compelling than the authors can ever craft. I shall withhold my personal opinion on the efficacy of this strategy over the course of a multi-decade series.
Thankfully, no matter how downright frustrating the story might be, it never stops being fun. Some of the purest enjoyment these games offer comes from the comedy.
Just Smile
Imagine this: you are Sora. You are the chosen one. You wield the only weapon which can save the multiverse. You are the slayer of monsters, the seeker of truth, and protector of the realms. Still you are kind. Random people are important too! You will happily put your quest on hold to give Aladdin relationship advice.
I’m not joking.
Sora repeatedly pauses his quest of preventing a devouring apocalypse to help with chores. I need to save the world! Oh, hey Ariel, you wanna play hooky? Sure, I can cover for you.
It makes me laugh every time. Just try to picture Jack Sparrow taking it perfectly in stride when a cartoon character summons a neon gecko. These encounters happen constantly, and I adore them.
No matter how silly their introduction, though, the enemies of this game look amazing. Each monster is visually striking and carefully fitted to the Disney world where you find them. The maps themselves are clever reworkings of Disney locales. Few players won’t get excited at the combat and exploration. The comedy, or frustration, comes with the unending, self-serious cutscenes. Our bouncy cartoon journey often halts so some funny-looking characters can take everything too seriously. The tonal clash is beautiful.
One moment exemplifies this better than any other. I’d bet some of you have seen it. I’ll link it here. It’s a spoiler, but I don’t care! Later events obfuscate the significance anyway. Don’t worry about it. This scene happens half-way through the game. It ushers in the third act. We’ve got a grand reveal, a mighty battle, one of the most iconic moments in games’ history! Dopamine surges through my veins just thinking about the ironic beauty of this mess. But I say too much, please, watch the clip.
Some people, I have learned from experience, see this, think it strange, and leave it at that. Others consider “they’ll pay for this!” to be on par with “to be or not to be?”. Still others, self included, see this and think: I need this in my life, give me more, om nom. Seriously, though, if you enjoy absurd humour, you will love these games. If you don’t like the nonsensical, steer clear.
Before we move on, I want to stress that I’m not saying these games are ‘so bad they’re good’. Instead, I find something inherently engaging in the way these games battle against themselves. Relentlessly cheery does not often mix well with existential crises. Some may consider this a flaw, but I find endless joy in picking it apart.
That said, I love Kingdom Hearts for a lot more than the comedy. The game provides a fantasy that I don’t think I’ve been able to explain until recently.
The Familiar Unknown
You ever feel like getting away? Maybe you’ve had a specific destination in mind, or there’s something you want to cross off the bucket list. Personally, much of my desire for travel is in effort to avoid staying in any one place too long.
This brings us back to our pointy-haired beach boy. In the first game, Sora’s ultimate desire is “to see other worlds”. Along with frequent kidnapping victim Kairi and moody heartthrob Riku, he wants to explore places unknown. As a kid, this made me immediately relate to him. We don’t just want to see cool places. Getting away from the current place is an explicit part of the initial goal.
With this, I had my escapist fantasy. I left the borders of my home to explore brave new worlds. Except, the worlds weren’t new to me. These were Disney locations. Sora saw the new and exciting, places where even the fundamentals of physics might differ. I saw people and places I already knew. This was the closest I’d ever get to interacting with these characters. Yes, the monsters were unique, and everything added to the grander plot of Kingdom Hearts, but nothing ever seemed unknown. I got to escape my home without ever leaving the comfort of familiarity.
I can’t think of another series that achieved this type of fantasy. Modern isekai often tries, putting their readers/viewers in generic fantasy settings which are likely to be familiar to them, but Kingdom Hearts takes that one step further. Not only am I being a badass saving the world, but I’m saving worlds I already know. Tarzan respects me because I defeated that leopard. Jack Skellington likes my style and calls me a friend. I am the saviour of worlds I already love.
If you really get into the series, you’ll be a hero. As cute as the monster designs may be, the difficulty is often brutal. As you gain new abilities and hone your combat skills, you’ll dodge within inches of fangs, climb the scales of behemoths to find their weak points, and fight one-man wars. The challenge keeps it rewarding. When you hear the discount impression voice acting in the end-of-level cutscenes, you will feel like a badass, because only your skill could have defeated Captain Hook.
In each of those scenes, without fail, you’ll hear a similar sentiment from the characters: “come back any time. You’re our friend.”
Despite only spending a couple hours in each world, the inhabitants accept Sora. They offer unconditional friendship. This aspect, I believe, is where my younger self most found comfort. I get to hop from world to world without losing friends? These people will just wait for me? Great! I can visit if I feel like it, but I’m gonna keep moving, never stopping, never ceasing to find somewhere new. I can see them again whenever I feel like it, with no repercussion for failing to keep in touch.
Now, with an ocean and a Pandemic between myself and home, this fantasy holds a bittersweet appeal. It’s a mindful indulgence. As someone who’s “moved out” more times than many, I can promise that you lose track of people the more you move. Nobody keeps a devoted friendship on the backburner, ready to spring back just in case you decide to call.
That’s not how it works. Life moves on. People go on to their own worlds. You lose track of friends, even family. The idea these games gave me, this too-good-to-be-true promise, is a comforting dream.
But that’s just the Disney worlds. Kingdom Hearts reaches its greatest heights in its original moments.
You are (not) a Nobody
Lore time (don’t worry, I’ll be brief): the main recurring villains of the series are Organization XIII. This shadowy group consists of Nobodies, which are the soulless husks of people who’ve lost their hearts to corruption. In other words, they are people without emotions or personalities who want to regain those things.
They are empty shells in search of a soul.
That may still sound silly, it’s certainly presented as such, but it’s always stayed with me. Anyone who’s played the game knows that this description of them is, in fact, a lie. They have distinct personalities, preferences, and idiosyncrasies. Part of this disparity is explained in one of the more chilling moments of the second game. Sora loses patience with one of the members of the Organization. This guy fights with a guitar made of water, which he uses to create clones of himself while he makes bad music puns. Our hero snaps at one too many bad jokes and declares, “You have no heart!” Sora accuses the villain of only pretending to have emotions. In response, the other character drops into a cold, rigid posture. He points at Sora and speaks one word: “Traitor”.
This scene tells us that the Organization members act out their personality. They play out the attitudes and mannerisms of someone they don’t believe they are. Whether it be some vague affinity, or memories of their past selves, each member of the Organization plays the role of the person they wish they were. There’s something heartbreaking in that. Because of this, the villains are the most compelling characters of the second game, at least to me.
Sure, the big bad wants to create a moon of hearts so he can open a gate to… do things. The underlying goal of the larger group, however, is just to feel something, to experience true kinship, share a real laugh, make a genuine smirk or grimace.
If that didn’t create enough of a tragic subtext, these characters have genuine emotions. We see them act in passion and develop feelings. They don’t realize it, but their goal is partially attained. They are real human beings, so to speak, yet they’ve gone so far believing themselves to be empty that they don’t recognize their own humanity. This setup continues to horrify me. Kingdom Hearts plays out my greatest fear, hiding it under a thin blanket of bright colours and cartoon references.
For those of you who think I’m reading too much into this, I present to you the character Axel. He’s a fan favourite for a reason. Not only is he an objectively beautiful man, but he can also flawlessly switch between pure cinnamon roll and Hellfire-wielding arbiter of vengeance. He shows rage, joy, sorrow, heartache, and a crippling confusion at how to deal with all these feelings. When we first meet him in-game, he’s clearly a tormented man, trying to sort out duty, identity, personal desire, and ego. His arc, over the course of his relatively brief screen time in Kingdom Hearts II, still makes me tear up.
For love of this character, I did something I never I’ve never done since. I watched all the cutscenes for a game I never played. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, which surprisingly doesn’t have the strangest title in the series, made me cry. Most of this prequel’s runtime spotlights a tender friendship among three people, including Axel. They hang out, eat ice cream, and support each other. Yet, they come to question the ambitions of the Organization. Given their odd status as Nobodies, the existence of their conflicted feelings causes distress. The confusion builds as events beyond their control play out. Soon, irreversible choices must be made. Axel’s simple, desperate desire to understand his feelings and protect his friends resonate with me. He’s not some Shounen protagonist using the power of Friendship. He doesn’t even know what he is. All he can do is struggle for the chance to have one more day to try to figure it out.
This tender exploration of friendship is something I think isn’t explored enough in media. The main characters of Kingdom Hearts love their friends. The non-sexual, aromantic bonds these characters have with each other is portrayed brilliantly, showing a devotion and care that made me weep on multiple occasions. Sora’s supposed romance with Kairi barely gets attention. Yet, when Sora finally, finally finds Riku in Kingdom Hearts II, he nearly collapses with tears of joy. “I looked everywhere for you”.
That line gets me every time. Then again, maybe I’m biased. The first few times I played through this game, I didn’t feel much in general.
In Search of a Heart
Despite the cartoony style and overall goofiness of the series, Kingdom Hearts’ tone is often bittersweet. You spend your time pursuing friends who are always beyond reach. The villains are smarter than you. Their vast, ludicrous plan isn’t something you can outwit, or even comprehend. Even when you find Riku and Kairi, you never get to stay with them for long. If you want to protect them, it will require sacrifice.
Admittedly, part of this can be boiled down to the need for more entries in the series. If pursuing friends is the main driving force of the games, something needs to constantly stand between the friends. It works to keep the sequel train a-chugging. Still, it works thematically. No matter how many friends and comrades Sora makes along the way, he will never forget those nearest to his heart. Whatever it takes, he will search for them. Despite having a grand duty to protect all the worlds, his ultimate desire is to find his One True Bro Riku.
Whenever this goal seems attainable, something pulls you back. Sora can smile through everything, but he never gets the thing he wants most. Sora doesn’t get to set out on a raft with his friends. In becoming a hero, he becomes a wanderer, forever moving from world to world, lacking the option to return to his true home. Sora’s story in those first two games is a tale of desperation, hope, betrayal, loss, rash decisions, honest mistakes, and redemption, played out on a cosmic scale.
Plus, there’s Roxas. Remember him? The guy we play as for almost six hours in Kingdom Hearts II? He ends up getting a pretty damn compelling arc, too, even if it’s buried under soliloquies and spin-offs. In my latest replay, I finally appreciated his journey from sadboy to madboy to gladboy.
Trying to keep spoilers to a minimum, Roxas has a lot to be angry about in that second game. Imagine something for yourself. What if you discovered that, not only are you a side character, but you’re less than an NPC. I mean, you are a shadow of someone else. You’re nothing more than the copy of the blank side of something else.
These stories, woven with everything discussed here, continue to resonate with me. I’ve returned to these games at just about every point in my life. No matter how much changes, I still relate to those struggles. What if you are nothing? On bad days, you don’t worry about feeling bad, you don’t feel anything. If you do feel something, it’s a strange, alien sensation. The person you want to be seems like a guise you need to work to maintain. What if there’s nothing but that bleak, empty Darkness? Who the hell am I? Am I really a person, or am I just projecting my desired personality onto a blank mannequin?
If I reach out to others, am I seeking contact, or am I merely introducing a void into their lives?What does a person do if they know they’re going to mess up? Kingdom Hearts, at least to me, has a response.
Use the Keyblade
As a kid, one moment in the second game stood out to me more than most. At the start of the third act, it’s revealed that many of your efforts are part of the Organization’s plan. To simplify things: every time you defeat one of the crazy monsters, you help the Organization. Your greatest efforts, the very acts which make you feel most powerful, contribute to that same Darkness which first consumed your home. This realization leaves Sora breaking down. “What can I do if I can’t use the Keyblade?”
All you can do is swing your silly sword. Even that may only hasten destruction. What, then, can you do?
The answer: keep swinging.
Sora’s companions, acquaintances, and even his enemies inspire him. There’s no way to simply “fix” the world. Hell, even as he tries to battle the onslaught of Darkness, he makes a small contribution to the enemy. Yet, Sora decides to hang on. He tries to learn, to rely on allies to make up for his weaknesses, to focus on what few advantages he has. His ultimate goal, to help and protect his friends, has not changed. His duty remains.
Let’s recontextualize. What does a person do when they realize that their own behaviour may be self-destructive, or at the least, unhelpful? You address the issues and focus on the problem. Do what you can, use what resources you have, and ask friends to help with the things you cannot accomplish.
In Sora’s case, he brings the fight directly to the Organization. The second half of the game sees you confronting the malice behind everything. You force the members of the Organization to confront their hypocrisy. You attack that Darkness from the roots. This is, of course, silly as all hell. The climax of this second game involves blond Christopher Lee blowing up a heart-shaped moon, because he joined Mickey Mouse in a floating castle that doesn’t technically exist. I may be projecting more onto the series than the designers intended, but still, a few weeks ago, when I beat that final boss again, I ended up on the edge of my seat. I felt personally invested not in beating the game, but in defeating Xemnas.
Dearly Beloved
There’s a Goomba Stomp article which, I think, does a great job describing why that final boss fight thrills fans. It strips Kingdom Hearts down to only its original elements. Donald and Goofy get separated. Only Sora and Riku stand against the big bad. You struggle through a four-stage battle which sees you chopping buildings in half, dodging lightsabers, and deflecting a hellfire of lasers. But, how does it end? You and Riku fight in a blank white space. Xemnas, the villain, charges at you. His attacks fill the screen. You dodge within inches of the encroaching Darkness, beating it back with every chance you get.
In the end, when you defeat the enemy, the pacing slows. Our exhausted duo nearly collapses. Sora manages to keep a tired smile. They support each other as they stumble off the battlefield, finally catching up after all those years separated.
This moment is the real catharsis for me. The final cutscene, with all the friends joined together, looking out at the literal dawn of a new day, simply provides a book end. The real conclusion lies in Sora and Riku sitting down, catching their breath, and saying the things they wish they’d said all those years prior. Sure, we saved the universe, but in the end, we just have a quiet moment with a friend. After all the madness, the battles, the magic, and everything else, our reward is a shared peace.
I love this scene a lot more now than I did as a teenager. Back then, I didn’t understand it. Why is my reward for defeating the evil this tired conversation on a twilit beach? Now, I see it differently. This isn’t your reward for saving the world or defeating the evil. You get a moment of peace because you withstood the Darkness.
It will never go away. As the sequels, prequels, and spin-offs teach us, the Darkness only takes on new forms. The more you fight it, the more bitterly you struggle against the amorphous entity, the more you lose track of the light. Still, maybe you can withstand it. Maybe you can hang on long enough to strike through the root of that strangling force. That’s all you need to do, hang on. Some days, you battle against seemingly impossible odds. Sometimes, your efforts seem futile. Maybe you push people away, or others push you away. Maybe you feel that part of you is corrupted. Whatever the case, you are not a nobody.
If you hang on long enough, if you can keep yourself afloat and help others simply stay up, you will make it. Whatever form that Darkness might take tomorrow, you can have one beautiful moment where the noise dies. The world can fade away for a few minutes. The doubts and fears might vanish briefly. For a moment, all that exists is you and your favourite person. For a while, you’re not alone.
I Guess I Have One Advantage
I love Kingdom Hearts. Few things have inspired, humoured, or moved me as consistently as this series. I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life playing these games, and I’m certain that hundreds more will follow. On one hand, this makes the series difficult to recommend. My bias is inherent to my love of the games.
That being said, I hope this might help you understand why these games are so important to people. The comedy helps us through a bad day. The combat helps us unwind. The fantasy brings comfort. Hell, maybe it even helps us work through some of our darker issues in a safe environment.
That’s the advantage of being a Kingdom Hearts fan, I guess. If you can look passed the countless flaws and oddities which turn people away, and with good reason, you might find something special. It addresses several needs and comforts at once, in a difficult to describe package.
It’s not for everyone. I think most criticisms of the game are valid. People should not try to force others to get into it. I’m sure there are a lot of fans who enjoy this series for different reasons, too. Maybe I’m just an overthinker trying to turn everything into a mental health allegory.
Whatever the case, no matter how long this series goes on, or how ludicrous future installments may become, those early games will be near and dear to my heart. Kingdom Hearts fulfills its own fantasy. No matter where I am in my life, I can always drop to spend time with Sora, Donald, and Goofy. Here, in some small capacity, I can defeat the Darkness and rediscover the Light.
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