LogFAQs > #933611732

#91. Kingdom Hearts


Did you realize that this game is nearly 20 years old now? Thats wild to think about! Games that didnt come out before the very first Character Battle will soon be two decades old. Just as a comparison point, games that were 20 years old at the time of the first Character Battle in 2002 included Pitfall, Q*Bert (both of which had characters represented, who were blown out and never seen again), and the infamous E.T. game. Anyway, enough of things that make me feel old. The point is that Kingdom Hearts is a thing we accept as normal now because its been around for nearly two decades, but when the idea of a Final Fantasy/Disney crossover was first revealed, that was mind-blowing stuff, man. No one could have ever imagined something like that happening. Now we live in a world where Disney owns everything and crossovers are everyday occurrences, but that first image of Cloud looking like a vampire with a taped-up Buster Sword interacting with Donald friggin Duck and Goofy was almost impossible to process at the time.

Anyway, Kingdom Hearts probably interwove the Disney and Square stuff into the actual plot better than any other game in the series. In future games, it almost feels incidental to the plot because its expected to be there now as Kingdom Hearts veered into its ownunique storylines. Maleficent feels like a fearsome opponent here, while she almost becomes a joke villain no one really takes seriously in the rest of the series. They do a good job of adapting Disney villains into good boss fights, sometimes being combined with a big Heartless. Now I think some of the actual worlds arent super great, primarily Wonderland and Deep Jungle, but those are the first ones in the game so at least you get them out of the way early. Also, while Sora has never really been cool, I think hes hard to like for most of the game, especially as he and Donald bicker back and forth on a regular basis. I know a lot of people complain about the Gummi ship stuff, and while future games did improve upon it, I didnt really mind it. Its never been a draw of the series either way.

But Kingdom Hearts does a great job of building up toward the finale and then paying it off in a big way when you get to Hollow Bastion. Its still one of the highlights of the series for me. The atmosphere, the music, the design, the gauntlet of boss fights, everything, its all so good. It always feels like the climax of the game whenever I play it even though I know theres still one more world to go afterwards and youve only just been introduced to the main villain. Speaking of Ansem, I think Kingdom Hearts also does a really good job through the Ansem Reports of gradually revealing that Ansem isnt actually a good guy (as the initial reports suggest), but hes the bad guy behind everything and the biggest threat. Later games would provide some context to all of that, but it was still a pretty cool way to handle a villain reveal. Overall, Kingdom Hearts is a game that incorporates a lot of different elements and somehow made it work to an extent that the series endures to this day.

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