Huh?

Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.

I hate Kingdom Hearts.

Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.

This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.

I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.

It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.

For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.

I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.

Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.

I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.

I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.

There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.

I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.