Color me impressed.

Kingdom Hearts is the impossible game. I’ve been looking back on how the hell something like this came into existence for years and still fail to come up with a proper answer. If Square Enix tried to go through Disney to get something like this made today, Disney wouldn’t even do them the courtesy of laughing at them. Square would just be completely ignored. 2002 Square though? Those guys were kings of the ring. People thought they were the BEST storytellers, the BEST game designers. Nothing could possibly go wrong when it came to a crossover between the biggest name in animation and the biggest name in video game RPGs.

And honestly? Not that much went wrong here. Yeah, I went into this fully aware of the series’ reputation. “It’s convoluted,” they said. “It’s cringe,” they said. Yeah, those things are kind of true, but this first game isn’t dragged down much by some earnest silliness. I’m sure a lot of people decry that this isn’t a more explicit crossover of IPs, as the Disney worlds and characters are isolated from each other and the FF characters are full-on reinterpretations that play pretty small roles, but the presence of the original characters competently stands in for how you might imagine something more explicitly Japanese colliding with western products would go. Having a new character act as the lead allows both newcomers to and fans of one or both of the IPs involved to have some kind of anchor. While the worlds you visit generally retread the content of their film counterparts, they were also an opportunity to see a different angle of each setting and respective principal character, something a kid who knows those stories would probably be wowed by compared to a normal video game adaptation.

Among KH’s many surprises was its combat. Something that was called “mashy” even close to its original release date. While that can be true, and you can have a good enough time just running up against a wall until it breaks, I found the combat’s quirks fun to master. Your basic three hit combo can have its level of commitment reduced by timing swings correctly. Your air combos are faster and can be sped up even further by canceling them with short hops. You have a quick select menu for spells that adds a layer of decision-making to major encounters. You have a spell that grants greater protection from damage but costs more than a normal healing spell. Get caught in the wrong string of attacks and you’ll be reeling over having picked the wrong defensive spell between the two. Your weapon of choice has different passive abilities like a higher critical hit rate or more slots for MP, and comes in a variety of lengths that act as compensation for or counter to their other qualities. So you now have to make a choice over how much keeping a little bit of space between you and a boss means to you.

A bit less intuitive are your party members. By default, Donald and Goofy are programmed to commit suicide in front of you. I understand that classic cartoons are very different from what we expect from our modern, sanitized lives, but watching beloved single father Goofy Goof repeatedly set himself aflame as Bill Farmer screamed in anguish was a little much for me. You will have to set Donald to favor defensive actions to make sure your party is of any use to you.

Outside of wanting to forget Donald's attempts at "help" as readily as Disney wants to forget Song of the South, this simple combat system gives you a surprising amount of control over the flow of fights, and you can make conscious optimizations to reward yourself with more expedient encounters. This includes some added replayability with what kind of build you select at the start, favoring attack, defense, or magic while limiting one of those traits in turn. Beginners are told to pick the shield and discard the staff, while players going for pure speed grab the staff and discard the shield. You can have a pretty distinct experience based on your play style despite seeming fairly limited to start with. I don’t think a game that wasn’t confident in its combat would give me the option to completely disable gaining exp. While I think that is an addition rom the Final Mix version that I played, it’s still a pretty incredible testament to how far this game lept from the turn-based games that inspired it. I don’t think there would be a game that really captured the ideas around Final Fantasy’s active time battle system in a fully real-time format until FF7R, but KH was a strong early outing.

Kingdom Hearts was apparently out to prove it really was an RPG, because unlike most action games, it leads with its weaker material and ends much stronger. A straightforward tutorial is followed up with a leisurely stroll around an island doing some fetch quests. This would be mostly inoffensive, if not for one brief attempt at a “race” that clued me into how odd some of the platforming was going to feel. Sora lands like a rock, so jumping from platform to platform felt far from fluid. This sequence and the optional fight with your friend/rival Riku is meant to be revisited and trivialized on subsequent playthroughs of the game, but I know with certainty I would neve get these right, especially after getting used to my other abilities gained down the road.

Trouble in paradise arises as the island is enveloped in darkness, Sora’s oneitis is whisked away, and Riku is absorbed into a Lovecraftian ether assuring us that he’s just going to ask some perfectly reasonable questions about the history of central banking. The slow pace of the game continues as we are made to walk around Traverse Town. Combat encounters are not going to feel very exciting here. I feel like the game waiting to give you a dodge roll was a mistake. Even when you aren’t getting much use out of it, it can add a bit of dynamism to the flow of each fight. This is where I first picked up on how the game spares me the horror of having to deal with enemies respawning every time I reenter a room. It takes a couple of reentries before they rear their heads again, and they can often be ignored once you know where to go.

So you link up with Donald and Goofy, deciding to need it rather than keep it. You blitz on over to Wonderland, and this first Disney world does a solid job translating the film’s content into a video game setting. It only takes two-ish locales from Alice in Wonderland, the room with the potions and the queen’s garden, but a decent amount of variety is pulled from them. Negotiating with flowers is thankfully straightforward as they will just tell you what they want, so no guesswork is needed. This is one of the better examples of back-and-forth tasks the game is going to burden you with. It’s a short checklist of things that tend to open up a little more of the area as you go. We are not at the worst of this yet. The boss fight here can sadly take a while if you’re a bit sheepish over your capabilities or did not spec into magic. However if you’re willing to just dive in on this lanky fella then it’ll be over quickly.

Your next options are the jungle and the colosseum. The colosseum can come off as a fat load of nothing to those just trying to get through the game normally, but it’s the source of a substantial amount of optional content and some of the game’s best boss fights. If you do not make an attempt at Sephiroth, you will have sorely missed out. Interesting to note that this is actually the first time a character like him or Cloud would even be shown in a real-time format, so it’s no wonder these depictions had such a huge impact on their later incarnations. Though I wouldn’t be a real FF fan if I did not take a moment to seethe over “emo Cloud” being such a cool guy when his original depiction was much more of a dweeby weirdo getting made fun of for trying way too hard to act cool.

The jungle kind of sucks. I have trouble finding much defense for how much needless backtracking there is in this one just to activate cutscenes. In fact it’s often a bit unclear that’s what you need to be doing so you could waste even more time unnecessarily. I have seen some pretty neat optimized routing for this section but it’s sadly not quite enough to salvage it for me. I do get to take a moment to look at Jane, the best Disney girl, so it was kind of worth it in the end. I also got to beat up a leopard, which is something I always wanted to do in real life. Also, did you know that leopards only have a lifespan of 10-12 years? If a leopard killed Tarzan’s parents twenty years ago, then who the fuck did Tarzan kill in the movie?

As another aside, Tarzan claims that the boss here is “ooh ah ooh ah Not-Clayton” but what did he mean by this exactly? Is it a heartless posing as Clayton? Is he merely referencing that Clayton is not alone and is accompanied by a giant chameleon? Is it physically Clayton but possessed or enhanced by the power of darkness in some way? My friend Mike (whom I have blocked on twitter) insists that it is literally not Clayton. I think the following cutscene where the chameleon falls on Clayton implies that it was the real Clayton. If he was possessed, then we have just killed a man who was mostly innocent in this version of the story and even the actions of his own agency could have been manipulated by the heartless. Even Kerchek gets to live here. Clayton was tragically cast as the villain of this story because a higher power deemed it so. In another life, we could have been friends.

Revisiting Traverse Town demands a fair amount of busy work, but you do get to open up an optional minigame world to communist China and climb trees with Xi Jinping and friends. You also get to run into Riku again. It seems that, since we last saw him, Riku has been doing a lot of reading and insists that we should read the passages from Deuteronomy that he texted us earlier. He’s also believing every word from someone who has literal devil horns adorned to her head. I am a huge Sleeping Beauty fan, so getting to see Maleficent be so involved in the greater scope of the game is fun for me, especially since many of the other Disney characters seem more confined to their own worlds.

Agrabah is another generally well designed world. The combat here implements a bit of platforming so you think more about your positioning and try not to fall from your advantageous spot. You also have a nice variety of areas within the streets, outside the Cave of Wonders, the upper level of the cave, the lower level, and the treasure trove. The only thing that’s really missing is the palace interior. You also have to get a truncated version of the film’s character arc for Aladdin, rushing us to his third wish to free Genie. So Al wastes his first two wishes with shit we could have accomplished easily. This is one of those retreads that I accept as a necessary concession. It’s not just the film’s plot, but if you stray too far and have us dealing with like, animated series Aladdin, people who aren’t me wouldn’t be that interested

Jafar’s boss fight is a bit of a dud. The preceding sorcerer Jafar fight isn’t bad, but genie Jafar has the worst aim of all time and you’re mostly waiting for Iago to pass by so you can eviscerate Gilbert Gottfried.

Monstro is one of those worlds I had heard was infamous, only to find it totally inoffensive. It’s a small maze. What was so objectionable about this? Is it just one of those things people blow up because they got lost as kids? Why don’t I hear that about the following world? The fucking water one. Anyway, Riku is here again and this time he’s going on about how his ideology is totally predicated on economic reform only. Pinnochio is here, btw. He and Gepetto have been swallowed up here. Pinnochio is then swallowed up by a big heartless and you have to save him. Now, from my understanding, KH fans like some guy called “Chibi” really enjoy this kind of thing. I am personally not a huge fan of witnessing double-vore, but we end up leaving Gepetto and Pinnochio in this place to supposedly digest for all eternity anyway. Mission accomplished, boys. We entered the belly of the beast and took responsibility for our capital B Being, cleaning our room and slaying the dragon, bucko. (Note: We really will be slaying a dragon later)

The next world is Atlantica. Thankfully this is KH1 so dad is yet to walk in on us having a dance party with Princess Ariel the pretty mermaid. First and foremost, this world is a better example of the abridged/altered plots of the movies. Atlantica wisely ignores the movie’s plot of Ariel wanting to walk on land so she can get laid. However it successfully honors the spirit of the film with its cliff notes still focusing on the conflict between the free-spirited Ariel and her overbearing father, which leads to a deal with Ursula. Maybe praise for such sparse storytelling is unnecessary, but when you have to do something like this eight times per game you should give credit where it’s due.

I’m not really sure how much of Atlantica’s issues are its own versus mine. There are literal arrows pointing me in the right direction for the Final Mix version of this game, and I still managed to get lost trying to find my way back to Ariel’s hideout so I can progress the story. I don’t know how people feel about the swimming here, but it seems deliberately designed to not be as frustrating as underwater segments of the previous era. You move quickly and combat moves about as fluidly as it does on land. Still, the world is a little too large and there are too many enemies to fight per room in order to progress with a shy dolphin to the next area. Twice. I still found this meandering more engaging than the jungle, and I thought it ended pretty strong with both Ursula boss fights. I hear the second one, against giant Ursula, is infamous online for being incredibly frustrating. I’m assuming this must be referencing the original release which has a less free camera, because I found this to be a fun challenge among the required boss fights of the game. There’s plenty of healthy telegraphing of attacks, and conditioning that teaches you to not be greedy with openings. Ariel is also one of the more useful guest party members. I’m sure many peculiar folks online were saddened to find out she did not whip out her feet in this version of the tale, but she can absolutely throw hands.

Halloweentown is here. It is in this game. I liked it. I certainly didn’t dislike it. It’s like if the jungle section was less of a slog. A lot of quick back-and-forth running around to trigger cutscenes before you open up another small area. The combat here against the trash mobs can actually get a little dicey, with these guys who leap down and slash to deal huge damage. So the game is officially not pulling punches at this point. You also have another gimmicky boss fight waiting for you at the end of this segment. While the flow here is notably more in the game’s corner than your own, you still have a lot of control over how quickly this fight concludes. Again, whatever distaste I saw for this online prior to playing for the first time seems to be a projection of childhood frustrations. There’s also an additional fight against a house because the developers really wanted you to appreciate the exterior of this environment and not just run by all the enemies. Fair.

I don’t know if making Neverland the final world in a game about coming of age and loss of innocence was intentional, but I like to pretend it was. Of course, Neverland being last in line here means that apparently Captain fucking Hook has a higher in-universe power level than the likes of Jafar, Ursula, Oogie Boogie, (possibly) Hades, and Not-Clayton. He truly has climbed the competency hierarchy and channeled his inner chaos. Neverland is a fairly brief and confined world, and I can imagine it might’ve been frustrating with the original release’s camera, but it works fine in Final Mix. You are even granted the ability to fly freely here, something the swimming section preps you for. The movement feels very natural even if you only have access to a downgraded version of it outside of this world. Hook’s fight, like several others, is fairly accommodating in granting you extra enemies to beat up on in order to restore your magic. Pan is another one of the more fun guest party members with the ability to freeze enemies in place the way Bobby Driscol wishes he could have frozen time before getting blacklisted. There’s also a pretty neat optional gimmick fight here with a super boss that demands hyper awareness of a ticking clock that will kill your party one by one. It’s a great use of an iconic setpiece from Disney’s catalog.

You get a pocket Tinker Bell here. I have no comment. I just want you to know that you will have Tinker Bell available to summon and there is nothing else to think about in regards to Tinker Bell but she is literally right there in your pocket like seriously imagine though.

Hollow Bastion is where the game goes from pretty good to outright excellent for a while. Your movement is all freed up now, so traversal through the area is about as smooth as it’s going to get. The rooms here vary in size to let you judge the space between you and enemies in a variety of ways. The enemy types are split between bulkier damage dealers and flying enemies, both of which force you to reposition constantly. Beast is here as the only guest party member to not be present in their own world. While I was deprived of a Gaston boss fight, I could still breathe a sigh of relief as the game reassured me that the entire country of France had been obliterated by the Heartless.
The string of boss fights here are all high quality. Dragon Maleficent is a great example of how broken Tinker Bell is, but can be defeated without assistance once you understand that the massive tail whip attack is actually telegraphed. It’s just tough to see because it’s a giant dragon that takes up 75% of the screen. Riku is fully possessed here after going on a rant about how Bob Chapek “cucked out and deserved what he got” without any elaboration. The fight is a 1v1 that puts your understanding of the mechanics to the test. You can either totally crush it or struggle for longer than necessary. The original release is notorious for an unskippable cutscene preceding this fairly tough fight. Although this boss only took me a couple of tries, an unskippable cutscene probably would have made this totally intolerable and borderline drop-worthy as an adult. As a kid in 2002 with much fewer games to play, it would have been incredibly frustrating but probably something I would have stomached.

So Riku is then transformed into a chiseled greek god by the powers of evil and we bail on the Hollow Bastion. After a brief reprieve we dive right back in and head to the endgame so we can take on Ron DarknesSantis and stop him from taking over Disney World. Some of the newer enemies here are a real challenge to get through, but they also outstay their welcome after a while. They have a tendency to shield themselves or outright disappear, so you have to constantly shift focus to new targets and come back to finish off the previous enemy later. It starts out pretty interesting but becomes tiring after a while. The Chernobog reveal completely blew my socks off as I had no idea it was in this game, it helps that the fight itself was pretty damn good. The following room is a seemingly endless gauntlet of enemies that would have utterly destroyed my will to continue had I died in there, on account of the aforementioned defensive enemies, but thankfully I got through it on the first try. Apparently you can also just summon Simba to clear each wave near-instantly. So fuck me.

All that’s left of the game are a couple of fights with Ansem. It’s a pretty strong finish but the second phase is what really feels like the final boss in terms of difficulty. Some might hate the borderline un-reactable attack that virtually incapacitates you and drains your resources to stay alive while it’s active, but I think this lends the encounter a distinct sense of danger not present anywhere else in the game’s required fights. If everyone had something like this, then I’d hate it. As a single endgame boss fight, I love it. A final boss with a few things that are oppressive or unfair makes it more satisfying when you realize they can be beaten. The boss is also very generous with checkpoints and does not force you to redo any phases.

Ansem ends up turning into a giant flesh monster devil god with a sexy Billy Zane proxy attached to it, and watching Donald Duck and Goofy go toe-to-toe with this kind of thing is the stuff not even my dreams could have come up with. I’m sure this bizarre juxtaposition will not become a trend with the series going forward.

Idk the ending is nonsense. Kingdom Hearts is light but also we still have to close that door and Riku has to be on the other side of it rather than just pushing it with you and Michael Mouse is here and we’re gonna explain why he’s shirtless later thank you Nomura very cool.

So suffice to say I was actually pretty pleased with this one. While familiarity with the IPs will certainly enhance enjoyment, and I wouldn’t really recommend the game to someone who hasn’t seen or played any of the source material, it’s shocking to think the aesthetics and gameplay might be enough to carry this experience. If you’re used to more modern games deftly blending snappier combat and customization then you might not click with it, but it’s not hard to imagine why this game is a favorite of so many people who played it near release. Not just because of its recognizable foundations, but because it takes those things and earnestly crafts something totally new and novel with them.

Try not to take its storytelling all that seriously and lecture people over how this ridiculous concept is, in fact, ridiculous to watch unfold. There’s value in the absurd, and not just in an ironic sense. If a group of people made an enjoyable piece of entertainment out of an utterly insane idea with bizarrely broad, abstract, and robotic storytelling that it confidently seems to think is none of those things, then that is absolutely worth giving some thought to, even with a few laughs at its expense.