IN THE MIDST OF LIFE, WE ARE IN DEATH
What a bummer. Knowing how strongly Kingdom Hearts resonates with so many people, I almost dread writing this. Few things feel worse than raining on someone else’s deeply held admiration. Still, here it is: replaying Kingdom Hearts for the first time in roughly fifteen years, I’m no longer a fan.
That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten why it mattered. The music, voice acting, and visuals created memories that have lingered with me ever since. Certain story moments — which I won’t spoil — still work, still hit emotionally. If those moments remain sacred to you, feel free to stop reading now.
For me, though, they no longer sustain the experience. In a game this long, the truly heartfelt moments are too rare and too back-loaded. Reaching them meant enduring hours of frustration — awkward level design, unreliable camera work, and control decisions that constantly pulled me out of the fantasy. Revisiting the game, my feelings no longer align; they collide.
On paper, Kingdom Hearts tells a beautifully simple story. Like the original Star Wars trilogy, it builds universal appeal from an elemental metaphor: light versus darkness. Light represents connection and shared strength; darkness promises power through isolation. It’s a strong thematic backbone, and one that fits Disney’s iconography surprisingly well.
You play as Sora, a boy torn from his idyllic island home and thrown into a multiverse of worlds consumed by darkness. Armed with the Keyblade, he travels between these worlds alongside Donald Duck and Goofy, searching for his lost friends and confronting the Heartless — manifestations of corrupted hearts. Each world tells a small, self-contained story, all echoing the same cyclical struggle.
Narratively, this structure works. The Disney material doesn’t feel like cynical brand mash-up; it supports the themes of innocence, loss, and maturation. Over time, the tone shifts from playful wonder to melodrama in classic Square fashion. The ending still lands with surprising emotional force — a reminder that Square, at the time, were masters of earnest excess.
There’s also more depth to the RPG systems than first impressions suggest. Companion AI can be finely tuned, equipment choices meaningfully affect difficulty, and small statistical adjustments can dramatically change encounters. In theory, it’s a flexible and accommodating system.
And yet — playing it is another story.
Kingdom Hearts was Square’s first fully 3D action RPG, inspired by Super Mario 64. Unfortunately, it often feels like a studio learning 3D design in public. Camera control, platforming, and spatial readability frequently work against the player rather than with them.
Nearly every world has something that grates:
-
Platforming sections demand precision the controls weren’t built to deliver.
-
The camera routinely obscures exits or critical paths.
-
Progression is sometimes locked behind party configurations the game never properly explains.
-
Worst of all, the game frequently fails to communicate objectives at all.
Early sections, especially Traverse Town, devolve into aimless wandering while waiting for invisible triggers to fire. Deep Jungle is infamous for forcing the player to retrace the same long, tedious routes repeatedly, with no narrative or mechanical justification.
Combat fares no better. Battles unfold in real time, but rely on a menu-driven command system lifted from Final Fantasy. Managing it requires diverting your attention away from the action to navigate menus that cannot pause the game. Faced with that friction, I found myself ignoring most of the system’s depth — spamming basic attacks and using only shortcut-assigned spells.
It works, but it’s dull. More importantly, it undermines the very complexity the game wants to offer.
This leaves me in a strange position. I admire Kingdom Hearts deeply as an idea. Its aesthetic cohesion, musical identity (Yoko Shimomura’s score remains extraordinary), and thematic ambition are undeniable. At its best, the game briefly lifts a corner of some unseen veil — hinting at a kind of magic that video games rarely achieve.
But those moments are fleeting, and almost always confined to cutscenes where I relinquish control entirely.
That’s the heartbreak of Kingdom Hearts for me: the sense that the true magic exists just out of reach. Playing it feels like reenacting something greater rather than inhabiting it. I catch glimpses, but I’m never given the tools to fully step through.
Maybe that’s age talking. Maybe the darkness finally won. Or maybe Kingdom Hearts is one of those works that only functions when memory fills in the gaps mechanics leave behind.
Either way, replaying it left me with a strange melancholy — not because the magic is gone, but because I can still sense it, just beyond my grasp
Comments
Post a Comment