Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts is an ambitious crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy that, much ironically, is at its best when it’s not covering either brand, but being its own weird thing.

The protagonist is a boy named Sora,  who lives on an island and dreams of traveling with his friends, Kairi and Riku, to discover new places. One day, they start to build a raft to go sailing, but before they can depart, their home is engulfed in shadows, and after a battle against a dangerous monster, Sora has his wish fulfilled, but not in the way he envisioned: the boy wakes up to find he’s alone in another world altogether, where he soon meets Donald and Goofy – who else, right –, who are looking for a key that is supposed to help their king, Mickey Mouse.

Kingdom Hearts begins by building an eerie, uncanny atmosphere that will become the hallmark of the series and be further bolstered by Yoko Shimomura’s brilliant, haunting score. The game opens by asking us some abstract, personal questions with no expressed purpose, and then it exposes our answer in a direct, but eerie manner (“You want friendship. You’re afraid of getting old,” the sentences appear on the screen with an ominous sound effect). Yes, you’re right in both accounts, Kingdom Hearts, but it’s creepy when you put it like that.

“You are the one who will open the door,” a voice says to Sora, coming out of nowhere, without explaining its purpose and intent. Everything in Kingdom Hearts’ first hours is so mysterious, so vague, that even Sora’s own home doesn’t feel like a proper place, having this dreamlike quality to it: it’s called Destiny Islands, and much like Neverland, we see only kids there – there is only one scene in which an adult’s voice can be heard, but the person, of course, remains off-camera. We’ll often see Sora talk about his friends, Kairi and Riku, but never once mention his parents. So, the fact that he’s traveling to other worlds and meeting Disney characters doesn’t feel far-fetched in the slightest, as the boy’s own home was already fantastical and strange enough to begin with.

Sora will make many more friends in his quest to find and save Kairi and Riku, but to say that Kingdom Hearts is primarily about friendship is to redefine the concept of euphemism: in Kingdom Hearts, the power of friendship has a heart, a voice, a social security number, and his name is Sora. “I don’t need a weapon. My friends are my power,” he states during a climactic scene. In the game, the power of friendship is not a cop-out, functioning as a cringy deus ex machina to save everyone. No. In Kingdom Hearts, the power of friendship is a matter of identity. It’s who Sora is and what he represents.

But the story also delves into the ambivalence of human nature, showing that a person’s heart can be home to both light and darkness alike, no matter who they are. This is why it’s great to have Sora’s longtime friend and rival, Riku, eventually become an antagonist. Both Sora and Riku share the same goal – to save Kairi – but they take opposite paths to reach it. While Riku becomes bitter and jealous of his friend and has his heart aligned with darkness in the process, Sora remains cheerful until the end and even smiles before making a huge personal sacrifice.

Sora, after all, refuses to use people to achieve his goals, choosing instead to find ways to assist them: for him, people are not tools; they’re clients. He’s there to serve them. If Sora is helping someone, Sora is happy. He’s that simple, and that’s precisely the character’s charm. Riku and Sora are both sides of the same coin, then, which doesn’t mean that Riku is evil – far from it –, it just means that he lets himself be persuaded by its alluring force. As the villain says, “I believe darkness sleeps in every heart, no matter how pure. Given the chance, the smallest drop can spread and swallow the heart.”

It’s also great that the big villain in the story is not a one-dimensional bad guy. His journals tell us that he was once a kind man who, precisely like Riku, allowed himself to be seduced by darkness. He even shared the same dreams as Sora and his friend, stating that he felt caged and needed to explore other places and meet new faces (“My people and I are all but prisoners of this tiny place,” he writes). Kingdom Hearts’ story shows that no one is born good or evil, but is led to a certain path by what happens to them and by the influence of those who remain by their side.

It’s easy, when writing about Kingdom Hearts, to forget about the elements that are drawn from Disney franchises and Final Fantasy. After all, what exactly do these IPs add to the game’s themes and discussions? In the game, Sora will travel with his friends to other worlds – the worlds of these IPs – and help the people there solve their problems, but the biggest drawback of the game’s narrative is precisely the fact that these stories, like Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Tarzan, are all self-contained and barely relate to Sora’s main quest.

He must find and seal a keyhole in every world while its respective movie villain tries to open it, and that’s it. If instead of meeting Tarzan and exploring his jungle, Sora had met the Guardians of the Galaxy and traveled through space, nothing in his character arc would have changed. This disconnection between the Disney stories and the main narrative leads to a sluggish pace, since most of the things that happen inside those worlds – like fighting Jafar, befriending Ariel, and helping Jack  – don’t really matter to the overarching story.

Collectively, of course, these stories form the whole of Sora’s journey, showing him getting stronger as he befriends and assists more people – he’s the power of friendship incarnate, after all – but, individually, they are irrelevant. It’s also a bit disappointing that, while Disney gets a bunch of worlds, Final Fantasy is relegated to just some glorified cameos.

The writing, however, can be praised for being faithful to the original material, even when it’s a difficult one, like Alice in Wonderland. Alice, for example, still plays with words here and there, and at one point she says, “I should like to keep my head. Why, if my head and body become separated, nothing I eat will ever reach my stomach.” However, the decision to put her world as the first one that Sora visits with Donald and Goofy is a bit questionable, as its design is purposefully confusing and disorienting.

The game also suffers from some clunky platforming, an unstable camera, and atrocious on-rails segments: Sora doesn’t automatically travel from world to world but, for some reason, flies to them in a ship made of blocks. These stages don’t take long to overstay their welcome, being visually dull and overly easy, since our customizable ship becomes virtually indestructible with just some additional weapons.

The main combat is in real-time, but Sora has only one action button, which can be used to select the attack, magic, and item options. However, because there are some button shortcuts to use magic, the battles can become very fast and dynamic. With a dodge roll and a button dedicated to skills, which are acquired by leveling up, some fights can get pretty intense, requiring constant movement and healing.

The level design is also simple, with a lot of rooms separated by loading screens. We’re encouraged to return to previous worlds to explore them again with the new skills acquired, but the rewards are not always worth it: most of the time, we will find only more parts to customize our ship, which means exploration in Kingdom Hearts is directly tied… to the game’s worst section.

Finally, it’s also annoying that one of the ways to get secret items is by using a skill called “trinity”, which requires Donald and Goofy to be in our party. But since most worlds have a special character, like Aladdin or Ariel as an optional party member, experimenting with them ends up being quite frustrating: as you can probably imagine, having to switch party members – which can only be done at a save spot – becomes tiresome after the seventh trinity mark.

Kingdom Hearts has its heart in the right place, but for it to grow and become truly special, the series must pay more attention to the individual stories it tells, making them more relevant to the overarching narrative, and correct some of its more eccentric design decisions.

December 12, 2024.