Ever since I was around 14 or so, I’ve made irregular pilgrimages to one of Scotland’s lesser known Lochs. As a large body of water that stretches into the horizon, it is one of the very few features of the surrounding landscape that’s remained untouched since I was born.

I used to live a short distance from it, but these days getting there is a whole journey. In college it took me a full forty minutes to simply get there, and now as a much older adult the entire return trip is around five hours. Where I was once simply passed by some buildings and later a nearby village, I now pass by three entire towns, a significant stretch of wilderness, an old forest trail, and an unmaintained stretch of road which alarmingly doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
I like to make the journey on foot, personally. Despite possessing a not-insignificant case of thalassophobia, reaching the loch after two and a half hours brings a sense of relief after what is always going to be a backbreaking trip.

Why do I make this journey, you ask?

I feel that as we get older, we stop being “bigger versions of ourselves” entirely and start being humanoid matryoshka dolls. While at first we iterate on ourselves, eventually the iterations increase so much that the self we used to be becomes an entirely different, distant person. In time, we lose that older self even if we retain some memories, ideas or feelings.
I like to journey to that loch, and a specific rocky outcrop on its north side, because it’s perhaps the only place on Earth where I have a direct link to my younger selves. The one thing all incarnations of the Mira project have in common is that they’ve sat or been sat on that outcrop, starting as early as one year old, and acknowledging this is humbling.

Let’s snap back a bit though, 2012. Sitting in Maths besides this then-infinitely annoying fuck we’ll call Jason for privacy’s sake - and also because I know he’s the kind of guy that would use Backloggd. Sorry if you see this lad, I still have your copy of Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.

Jason was… The picture most people conjure in their mind when they hear “ned” (or “chav” if you want a more familiar term); he had the “hawhawhaw” laugh, styled himself as a hardman, didn’t dress particularly well, seemed to abhor anything that seemed earnest or intellectual, primarily spoke through his nostrils, and was so dense that I had to explain what organs were to him two years later.

And in 2012, he turns to me and says: “Here, ye like games don’t ye? Git that Kingdom Hearts when it comes oot.”

He whips out his phone, the ugliest Blackberry I’d ever seen, and shows me a grainy bitcrushed trailer for the then-new Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix.

This dumbfounded me, because even on that tiny-ass screen I could tell that this was not a game I would ever associate with him. He goes on to tell me that he played it as a wean and loved it, prompting a further conversation about games that led to a friendship which surprised me - a then-isolated nerd who was overeducated and undermedicated for everything academia asked of her.

Per his recommendation, I picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 the following year and… Didn’t really get it. I enjoyed the combat, though the music was phenomenal, and the story was neat, but I felt like I was missing something. It compelled me, yes, but the source of that was lost on me. I never had the chance to discuss it with Jason, for despite our unlikely friendship we ultimately moved in different teenage social circles and, once classes started being sorted by performance, he and I never saw one another in class either.

2013 was 11 years ago, so there’s been some time to reflect.

Recently, the KH games came to Steam and, rather hilariously, Square Enix ignored the prior Epic Games Store release to pretend that this was the first time KH had ever touched PC. They even got Utada Hikaru to rerecord Simple & Clean. Hilarious!

I’ve been watching people play KH1 again - not playing it myself, for I don’t really have the energy to tackle a long game so soon after Library of Ruina - and it’s got me noticing a lot of stuff that my younger self fundamentally couldn’t get.

What strikes Adult Mira about KH1 is how it feels… Adolescent. Not in the sense that it’s childish or cringe or whatever disingenuous cynics often call it, but… Man I’m struggling to word this one.

[Insert me closing this doc for like three days and reopening it.]

I remember something that would irregularly happen in High School, and unlike many of my anecdotes I don’t think these are Scotland-specific.

Every now and then, in the very early days, someone would show up to P.E wearing a Disney shirt or whatever, or they’d have a Disney backpack/notepad/whatever. The crueller ones would laugh, while even the nicer ones would side-eye the victim and awkwardly chuckle at their friends.

You might’ve heard someone say “your body undergoes changes through puberty/as you grow up”, and in a way I find this sentiment to be a kindness. It carefully omits the actually harrowing, less obvious parts of adolescence. Namely, the death of youth.
I know the term “irony poisoning” is considered to be an internet thing, but frankly I see it manifest even in fully offline people and it seems to naturally occur in the process of going from a child to a citizen of the world. Joy and earnestness are taboo, and cynicism is expected. Nobody should ever be joyful or love “bad”/”childish” things seriously, and if they do it must be a joke - told by them or at their expense, it matters not. Stuff like that. You must laugh at the awkward undiagnosed autistic girl in your class with the Cinderella backpack. She’s a kid, and you’re not kids anymore. Laugh.

This continues into adulthood. How many people have you seen dunk on ‘cringe fanfiction’, ‘bad art’, or anything else where passion clearly outstreps base level technical talent?

You might wonder what the fuck this has to do with Kingdom Hearts, and I would tell you that I kinda see the game as an analogue for that unavoidable death of youth.

Ignore the fantastical elements for a moment, and the opening hours are of three teenagers longing to find out what exists beyond the horizon of their small corner of existence, only to find out the hard way that it’s so vast as to be deeply and spiritually underwhelming. And, unfortunately for them, they’re now a part of this world. Their forced and unwanted understanding of the world around them drives wedges between them, and through this division, one of them comes into contact with an adult who no longer views them as a child but as a tool to be cultivated and used for their own games.

SImilarly, the Disney elements feel like an attempt to broach that specific brand of teenage existentialism using iconography that’s both universal to the player (unless they somehow avoided the most enduring plague of the modern age: The Walt Disney Company) and relatable to the subject of being an adolescent. Despite the relatively peppy and almost twee trappings of each ~world~, each mini arc Kingdom Hearts doesn’t exactly feel triumphant. Riku always ends up seeming further and further away from Sora, something which only gets worse as the credits roll gets closer and closer. Likewise, the Disney elements start seeming less and less magical, ultimately ending up with the iconic Princesses being used as fuel to further someone’s goals.
I know that Kairi being one of the seven Princesses might seem like the writers trying to build a connection between the Disney stuff and the OC stuff, but c’mon. Surely you must’ve known someone that, as a kid, wanted to be a Disney Princess. It’s all too fitting that such a desire is distorted for Ansem to open his gate to hell.
In particular, my adult self has always been struck by that reference to the stars disappearing out of the sky in this game. The sky sure did seem brighter when we were younger.

As a branch of all of this, it’s easy to see the Heartless as a manifestation of the particularly caustic cynicism and joylessness that awaits children once their childhood begins to evaporate. They are no longer vessels for curiosity or play, they are now cogs, bolts and conveyors in a machine whose operation they have no say in or influence over. The Heartless are a corruptive force that sap everything from the various worlds, in this case Disney ones, which slots in so perfectly as an analogue to that nasty disdain for anything childish that so many people pick up unconsciously and utterly refuse to either interrogate or dispense with.

Jason and I didn’t talk much after High School, even after fate had us in the same college class for a single lesson of the week, but he did tell me something once while we were out on a smoke break that had a lasting impact.

When my teens arrived, I threw all of my stuffed animals in a trash bag and let them fester in the bottom of my closet. Among them was a Winnie the Pooh plush that I’d had since I was literally three years old. I was a big girl then, no time for stuffies. But yet I did yearn for them - in part because I just slept better while holding something, and pillows weren’t a good substitute.
Years later, while in college, Jason - now having reformed himself as a much less ~neddy~ soul who found his passion and the ability to dress well in wargames - offhandedly mentioned that he’d slept with his stuffed bear for years. He showed me a picture, and it was a ratty old thing, but clearly well loved. I didn’t immediately change my tone regarding stuffed animals, I even laughed it off, but the subsequent year was hellish. After that, I was all too eager to crack open that trash bag and free them.

You see the same sort of attitude with Kingdom Hearts itself, really. I’ve noticed that so-called ex-fans of it often point to it as a cringe teenage hyperfixation, while also talking about it with the same fondness most people reserve for significant others or childhood friends they hold some affection for. You ever see a straight dude who’s clearly a hyper-repressed gay man talk about his ‘best friend’? Kinda like that.
KH is, to lots of people, ‘cringe’. It is naked in its sincerity and Nomura makes no attempt to hide that it’s his pinboard passion project where 90% of additions are justified with “I wanted to” and the other 10% are “Square Enix asked me to”. As with everything so unabashedly sincere, those who wear cynicism like a second skin or overly irony-poisoned nerds who still make Sonichu jokes in 2024 often dismiss it. Indeed, much like stuffed animals, so many people seem to think themselves above a game where a twink can stunlock Sephiroth with moves that’d make Vergil look amateurish.
Look, I’ll be honest, even I take potshots at KH sometimes. Not the first game, as you’ve noticed, but subsequent entries do leave a lot to be desired. Where I - and I suspect many other KH fans - differ is that most of my potshots stem from KH losing a lot of the ironclad consistency, relatively self-contained writing and airtight pacing of the first game.

I think it’s really telling that Ansem’s insistence he can “unlock people’s hearts” only leads to them becoming absolute monsters. I wonder if there’s anything to examine there. Riku, tragically, loses this fight to Ansem and becomes yet another pawn for him, while Sora’s unwillingness to entirely sever the ties that bind him to what came before is what allows him to stay free. I hesitate to even jokingly call it ‘corny’, it’s just a very upfront admission that you’ll lose your soul if you can’t keep a hold of any whimsy or an ability to engage in play.

“Mira, where does the Final Fantasy stuff slot in?”

It’s cool as fuck, next question.

Despite seeming simple and clean on the surface, Kingdom Hearts is a series I don’t think one can truly critique, praise or even react to without inadvertently revealing something about themselves that - presumably - they’d want to keep hidden. It’s one of those games where I can often tell how cynical someone is by how willing they are to dismiss everything about it off the cuff. It’s why I just opened with the personal anecdote - I hate subtext, it’s for cowards and subs.

That all said, I do find it somewhat sad that despite this game being aimed at children and teens, neither of them are particularly well equipped to explain why it might be resonant or even resonate with it in the first place. Indeed, I myself didn’t get it all the way back in 2013. They’ll find it fun, sure, but some things you only understand with time I guess.

I feel like, more than anything, the part of Kingdom Hearts that embodies all of this is the very first song you hear on the menu: Dearly Beloved. It’s hardly heroic, not even cool or foreboding. No, it’s a piece that feels sad? It somehow manages to capture that really specific feeling of seeing a normally-populated city at night for the first time and realizing that, without people occupying that space, it’s just concrete, power lines, glass and in Glasgow’s case also a sizable amount of potholes.

To end off… I silently weep for people who think they’re too old for Kingdom Hearts, or indeed for anything like it. Not because I look down on them, but because I feel losing the part of you that can enjoy things like this, stuffed animals, and goofy (hyuk) apparel must be miserable. That first death, right there in the soul, is always a harbinger of worse things to come.

But hey, it’s never too late to claw it back. You, too, can play Kingdom Hearts or spend £1000~ on stuffed rabbits.