Over the past couple of years I reviewed one series I’d played many times (the PS2 GTA games) and one I’d always wanted to play (Mass Effect Trilogy) so I thought I’d do the same again, and in this case Kingdom Hearts is the series I’ve never played before but it’s always been on my “I’d like to try that some day” list, especially as more and more people started ragging on its apparently convoluted storyline (I do love a good convoluted storyline…) So I saw a “Story So Far” collection of most of the games on PS4 for under a tenner and thought, why not? Sora in Smash only pushed the series back into the forefront of my mind anyway. So what did I think of the original game? I really enjoyed it, actually! Let’s take a deeper look from someone playing the 2002 RPG for the first time in 2023…
Background:
Humble Beginnings…
Kingdom Hearts, a collaboration between Square and Disney, was released exclusively on the PS2 in Japan on March 28th 2002, with the US version coming out September 17th that year and in PAL regions on November 15th. It was a big critical and commercial success, to be honest I only passed on it because I was 18 at the time and turned my nose up as Disney films and character being in it (I was a bit of knob in the my teens, sorry…) A special “Remix” version was released exclusively in Japan on December 26th 2002 but it never came to the west, at least not on the PS2 anyway!
Yes the game was given the HD makeover treatment and released as “Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix” on the PS3 on March 14th 2013 in Japan, and September 2013 everywhere else, and came with both “Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix” and its originally handheld exclusive follow up Chain of Memories’ HD port (“Re:Chain of Memories”). It was then bundled with a Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix and its extra games to create the “Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix”, which was released on the PS4 in March 2017 worldwide, then later ported to the XBOX One on February 18th 2020, PC March 30th 2021 and the Nintendo Switch (via Cloud Gaming *shudder*) on February 10th 2022. It was then later bundled with the “Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue” bundle of games to create “Kingdom Hearts: The Story So Far”, which is what I brought. THAT was then bundled with Kingdom Hearts III to form “Kingdom Hearts: All in One Package” which I was originally going to buy but its only available digitally in the UK for some reason, so never mind! Melody of Memory’s release means its not “All in One Package” any more anyway…
Gameplay:
A Boss Battle moments away from kicking off, allowing us a good look at the tidy HUD!
Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG, so instead of a flash and then taking on enemies in turn-based action you fight enemies yourself, with free movement and pressing buttons to attack, though a menu is still there to select magic, summons and items, so it’s still very Square-y. In fact it feels a lot closer to the Final Fantasy VII: Remake engine than I would’ve thought, given it came out nearly two decades prior, then again I’m only really now getting into RPGs not named “Final Fantasy” so maybe this is a common thing in other franchises! Anyway, you control Sora while Donald and Goofy (or one local character from the world you are currently in) are controlled by the A.I. and more often than not just act as shields to take hits and get K.O’d for you while you’re working out how best to actually win the battle. You level up via experience points gained at the end of each battle and not only gain more health / magic but also unlock AP (?) which you can use to unlock new abilities, including really obvious stuff like being able to see enemy health bars and such, as well as powerful multi-hit combos. Probably goes without saying but on that note you do have a health bar and a magic bar, one depletes the more you’re hit while the other the more you use magic, but luckily you can collect green (health) and blue (magic) orbs that drop out of enemies during combat to replenish them, as well as use healing spells and restorative items.
Some Boss battles require special actions via button prompts normally involving pressing Triangle, but otherwise they tend to just be damage sponges… The less said about facing the large Ursula boss the better, they could’ve at least given her more than three different dialogue lines to say! There was a unique thing (like unique even within Kingdom Hearts, apparently) at the start of the game where you pick between strength, magic and defence via a tutorial, picking one to specialise in and one to be poorer in, with the other being somewhere in the middle. It not only effects your base stats but also what order you unlock skills in, so it’s an interesting idea, especially for multiple play throughs. Admittedly since I was just playing through the regular difficulty I hear it didn’t make much difference what you chose, but it was still a neat little thing. I chose strength and disregarded magic, know that I normally go for the melee weapons in other similar titles, but given what some of the bosses were like I’d imagine on higher difficulties the ability to use powerful magic from a distance is a must…
Man oh man do I ever NOT want to see this again….
Outside the combat you travel around different worlds, doing core story missions and side quests while finding unlockables like “Trinity marks” that can only be activated by Sora, Donald and Goofy together (which kind of made me not want to use the unique Disney character on each stage…) coming in several different colours that unlock as you go. During gameplay you collect money, or sorry “Munny”, that will allow you to buy new weapons for our lead trio (though mostly Goofy and Donald as Sora’s Keyblades tend to unlock as you progress through the story) along with items and ship parts, I’ll get to that in a bit. You can also “Synthesize” new items by collecting rare materials that drop from enemies and giving them to Moogles, with for example Sora’s most powerful Keyblade being locked behind a hell of a material grind, to the point where I couldn’t be bothered. You can also collect new summons to use in battle, the 101 Dalmations act as simple collectables that reward you every 10 or so collected, and pages of a Winnie the Pooh book that grants a new mini-game location within the Thousand Acre Wood to play through. The worlds themselves are fine, they have a nice bright cartoony look and with one or two exceptions are well designed enough that I never got lost or frustrated (though Atlantica from the Little Mermaid was guilty of both…) and often feature some fun hidden areas and stuff to unlock and figure out.
How to you travel between the different Disney and KH original worlds, I hear you ask? Well, sadly, that’s by travelling in a “Gummi Ship”, which means playing a really dull on-rail shooter from the perspective of behind your ship, firing at a selection of squares and circles in a bare-looking environment. As a little unlockable mini game that maybe you have to play through once it would be fine but having to play it over-and-over as you travel between each world got old fast. Thankfully you eventually unlock a “Warp Drive” that allows you to teleport between already visited worlds, but you still have to travel to newly unlocked ones via the same barren and uninspired shooting levels. Cid from Final Fantasy VII will sell you ship parts and you can buy blueprints from Pinocchio’s Geppetto to make more powerful ships or even build your own but my God the UI for ship building was so fiddly and frustrating I didn’t bother, I just used the default ship and just held the fire button and dodged through each level. I hear Gummi Ship travel is still a thing in KH II and III but improved at least, though to be fair it would be hard to make it much worse.
This devil looking thing is actually just a regular enemy type. Looks cool as hell though, in a very stereotypical way!
Overall although you can tell some PS2 era limitations from time to time and some bosses and areas were a little bit closer to annoying than fun I really had a great time playing through it, more than I thought I would given once I got to a certain age I stopped watching Disney films (I know, again, teenage me was a bit of a knob…) but most of the Disney worlds featured here were from the 90s or earlier or I at least saw advertised all the time as a teen so I knew all of them enough to enjoy the crossover, and I really enjoyed the Final Fantasy characters getting a bit of a redesign and thrown into the story as well. Sora and his pals not so much, but I’ll get to that in the story section… Either way though I’m looking forward to riding the ups and downs of the franchise going forward thanks to this fun start.
Graphics and Sound:
Don’t know why Cloud’s Kingdom Hearts self has bandages around the Buster Sword, but hey-ho. Like the little cape!
Graphics are fine. They’re not upscaled PS2 models but something altogether closer to a PS3 level of cartoony graphics (apparently most of the original game’s assets were lost anyway…) whereas the levels themselves range from fun to look at to boring jungles and forests with understandably low detail, though at least the cartoon-style look to the game covers for that in most areas. Overall it’s nice to look at, but won’t blow you away, which for a 20 year old game is perfectly fine!
Sound on the other hand is quite the treat! The soundtrack is extremely well done, with great original pieces and some fitting remixes or riffs on Disney themes for the respective worlds (even if the Atlantica song repeated on a loop FAR too much… why is each of my complaints related to the underwater level? Talk about living up to the stereotype…) The voice cast is top tier as well, with many major names reprising their Disney roles. So it’s still a top package sound-wise even in 2023.
Story:
Awwww …. I mean, ugh really but…. awwww.
For all the talk of Kingdom Hearts being complex the first entry is actually pretty simple, I imagine it’s a Metal Gear-like case of prequeling and retconning in later games that “do the damage”, I guess I’ll see later! For now the game starts with Sora, who lives on the “Destiny Islands” with his best friend Riku and love interest Kairi. The three dream of leaving the Islands and exploring other worlds but before they get a chance to do that beings called Heartless appear and plunge the Islands into chaos, eventually destroying them outright leading to Sora, Riku and Kairi getting separated. Sora wakes up in a place called Traverse Town, where he soon meets Donald and Goofy, who are out searching for their King Mickey, who vanished from Disney Castle (I guess?) himself a short while ago, leaving them a note telling them to “find the Key”. This is a good coincidence because before his homeland fell Sora was suddenly given a mysterious “Keyblade” which he was able to use to combat the Heartless, meaning he’s the one they were looking for. They meet a group of survivors from other destroyed worlds (including Aerith and Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII and Squall from FF VIII, though he refers to himself as “Leon”) and Sora finds out that he, as the legendary Keyblade wielder, can “lock” world’s keyholes and keep them safe from “the Darkness”.
Sora, Donald and Goofy decide to travel across the different worlds of this bizarre fractured dimension and search for Mickey, Riku and Kairi, all the while locking their keyholes (why did that sound dirty?). They visit worlds based on Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hercules, Peter Pan and Pinocchio, plus many other Disney characters can be found in other locations dotted around the place. While this is all going on Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty tries to get all the Villains from the respective worlds to work together in order to unlock “Kingdom Hearts”, which seems to be some sort of dimension containing great evil power or something? Anyway, she also gets into the head of Riku, convincing him that Sora had abandoned him and considers him too weak to look after Kairi, whose unconscious body they found. This causes Riku to fall to the Darkside of the F- um, just the darkside and eventually even attack Sora with his own Keyblade, or the same Keyblade that transferred to him for a while, then went back. Before we get too spoilery I’ll also mention that the Hercules part of the story, which was basically a Tournament Arc to use Shonen story terms, featured Cloud from FF VII, and an optional boss encounter with Sephiroth, which were all great fun. Well, I couldn’t be bothered taking the time and effort to grind enough to defeat Sephiroth, but I did like his Kingdom Hearts redesign…
Spoilers (for a 20 year old game) from here until the next bolded sentence!
That’s …. um, quite the final form you’ve got there, Ansem…
Sora and co. go to a large castle known as “Hollow Bastion”, apparently part of the dimension the Final Fantasy characters came from, and confront Maleficent and defeat her but during the course of this an evil sorcerer called Ansem possesses Riku’s body and uses his own Keyblade to not only unleash Maleficent’s true power (before she gets defeated) but also reveals his blade can “free people’s hearts” and that he too is searching to unlock “Kingdom Hearts”. You actually read “Ansem’s reports” during the story, he apparently found out about the Heartless many years ago and studied them and their ways, perhaps was even responsible for giving them a way to these worlds in the first place (it’s one of those things where long time fans of the series reading this are probably smirking about how wrong I am…) Riku confronts and defeats Ansem-in-Riku’s-body and finds out Kairi’s heart is locked away with his own so he turns the Keyblade on himself and frees it, at the cost of turning himself into a heartless.
Kairi, Donald and Goofy begin to escape Hollow Bastion but on the way out Kairi recognises one of the Heartless as Sora, and upon hugging it somehow brings Sora back to life. Handy! They all escape but Ansem’s plans are already too far to be stopped by locking the realms alone so Sora, Donald and Goofy head off to a dark dimension to face off with Ansem himself, who now has a body of his own and looks like Sephiroth’s uncle with a tan. He’s eventually defeated, after a few different forms and phases, but he still opens Kingdom Hearts expecting to unleash the Darkness but is instead hit by pure light and destroyed in among the most cheesiest cutscenes I’ve ever seen (though I love Ansem’s voice so much, it was definitely so bad it was good!). Riku and King Mickey are somehow on the other side of the door to Kingdom Hearts and together with Sora, Donald and Goofy on the outside they close it shut. This not only puts a hold on the Heartless but also restores the worlds that were swallowed up, though as Kairi presumably heads back to Destiny Islands Sora, Donald and Goofy instead wake up in a large green field, Pluto the dog with a letter from the King signalling the start of a new adventure…
Spoilers (for a 20 year old game) End Here!
At its core it was a simple story of good vs. evil, the dark impulses in everyone’s hearts and not giving up hope and surrendering to them. Due to this Sora was extremely one-dimensional in his niceness, including a scene where declared his friends to be his source of power, literal “power of friendship” stuff. Thanks to the Disney aesthetic it felt very natural actually, to the point where I just went with the story knowing Sora wouldn’t be developing much beyond “being really nice” and enjoyed the message it was telling. Plus Ansem and his wordy anime villain monologues clashing against Sora’s naivety was a good laugh.
It’ll be fun to go back and read this recap when I’ve experienced the rest of the story to see how much changes via retcons over the series…
Thoughts Now:
Watching Aladdin in the cinema is one of my earliest film memories, fun to relive it in the game!
Getting started with Kingdom Hearts I knew I’d enjoy it as a little thing to play here and there in between new releases and other things but by the end of the game I was really into the bizarre mish-mash world and the simple but weirdly engaging good vs. evil story. The fact that the actual combat is, mostly, fun obviously helps as well, especially as it’ll no doubt improve over time. While I hear the next game, Chain of Memories, is widely considered among the worst in the series, I think I’ve enjoyed this game enough to weather it to see the later, more liked, entries…
Hogan Reviews 