I don’t think Kingdom Hearts was made for folks like me, who’ve watched a lifetime of Disney films but barely played any of the Final Fantasy games. It feels much more like a Final Fantasy game dressed up in Disney drag than like an interactive Disney tale built around the Final Fantasy structure.
That’s understandable. Final Fantasy has home field advantage in this medium, and the game’s director, Tetsuya Nomura, rose to prominence while working on Square Enix’s series of games. It makes sense, then, to lean more into the strengths of the creators who know the medium and the Final Fantasy approach, than into the broader world of Disney where specialties lie elsewhere.
The catch is that if, like me, you cued up this game more for the exciting prospect of House of Mouse-style crossover adventures, rather than out of loyalty to the chocobo-populated escapades of various spiky-haired protagonists, then Kingdom Hearts often feels frustratingly miscalibrated: in its construction, its focus, and its overall project.
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Take the game’s level design. Most of Kingdom Hearts’s worlds seem like generic levels from any old video game, gussied up with a Disney paint job, rather than immersive settings that invoke the rich detail and broader character of their silver screen equivalents. Some allowances must be made for the limits of a game released in 2002. Even with that leeway, though, most of the “rooms” the game’s heroes rumble through seem interchangeable and paint-by-numbers, with roughly one space per world that feels distinctively plucked from the Disney movies invoked.
There are exceptions though. Halloween Town, for instance, scans remarkably like strolling right into The Nightmare Before Christmas. The level is on the smaller side but nevertheless manages to evoke the tone and aesthetic of its source material wonderfully. By the same token, flying around Big Ben with Peter Pan is a magical experience. And despite a pronounced flatness to everything, Wonderland at least strives to represent the topsy turvy feel of Alice’s adventures through the looking glass.
But whether you’re wandering around in Tarzan’s jungle, or floating through Ariel’s undersea kingdom, or traipsing through the belly of a whale to find Pinocchio, the overall experience mainly involves running through a series of nondescript, interchangeable rooms that could have come from anywhere.
"Ah yes, that classic Disney movie set in...uh...some sort of New Age skate park?"
That said, in the moments where Kingdom Hearts turns distinctively Disney, aiming for a faithful realization of the studio’s classics, it’s rousing and occasionally even moving. Flying with Aladdin to the Cave of Wonders is a thrill. Moseying about the Hundred Acre Wood with Winnie the Pooh is a treat. And my inner ten-year-old jumped for joy at the chance to join Jack Skellington and take down Oogie Boogie.
When the game focuses on those elements, the creators’ attention to detail shines through. Most of the original voice actors return to lend a sense of authenticity to the proceedings. (This includes Kathryn Beaumont, who reprises not one but two roles she originated fifty years earlier!). The character designs, while blockier and less fluid than their hand-drawn counterparts, show a noble effort to maintain fidelity and capture the spirit of the originals. And smaller touches, from memorable “summons”, to surprise allies, to scattered collectibles, keep the game full of little gifts and nostalgic treats for Disney fans.
But eventually, near the game’s midpoint, I realized that if Kingdom Hearts didn’t offer the chance to go to locales like Halloween Town and fight alongside favorites like Jack Skellington, and instead merely gave players the opportunity to visit “Spooky Town” and hang out with “Jim Pumpkinface”, I would probably have given up on it fairly quickly. There’s an undeniable thrill to playing through reimagined versions of these cinematic classics and fighting an all-star roster of famous villains. But the mechanics, pacing, and storytelling here are all rough enough to dissuade anyone less invested in the studio’s output from braving the game’s many faults.
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Those issues are likely much more forgivable for folks steeped in Final Fantasy’s usual tropes, both in terms of game design and plotting. For the uninitiated, though, Kingdom Hearts offers a byzantine array of menus and other hindrances that can make laying siege to a horde of evil monsters feel like navigating your way through some particularly cumbersome tax software. Certain elements of the game’s RPG setup are undoubtedly typical for the genre. But oftentimes this interface saps the game’s encounters of any fluidity or immersiveness, reducing epic battles to an unwieldy array of selection screens.
The same goes for the game’s controls. Kingdom Hearts deserves some leeway here, given how long it’s been since the original release. Still, I played the “Final Mix” version, which purportedly improved on many of the problems with the original’s control scheme. Given the wonky, less-than-intuitive efforts required to direct the player-character, that’s a damning indictment in and of itself.
"Finally, the game that makes Disney movies as fun and rewarding as parsing through actuarial tables!"
Even with that 2013 update and the greater processing power from a later console, tasks like locking onto opponents, jumping from place to place, and even just positioning the camera in the proper location becomes an endless struggle. Time marches on, and control schemes hopefully improve with it, but if the “Final Mix” raised the quality of the controls, I weep for those poor souls who played the original release back in 2002.
(As an aside, that sense of convolutedness that haunts most things related to Kingdom Hearts extends to its laundry list of different re-releases and updated versions from the past eighteen years. Should a newcomer go with original recipe Kingdom Hearts? 1.5? Final Mix? Remix? 1.5 + 2.5? Final Remix Chex Mix Extravaganza Extreme? Just figuring out which version to buy ends up as yet another thicket to hack and slash your way through, which feels true to the character of the franchise, if not necessarily a knock against the game itself.)
The same sort of problem afflicts the game’s pacing. Having not played many other Square Enix releases, it’s hard to know how much of Kingdom Hearts’s overextended nature is standard for the genre and how much of it is peculiar to this specific game. But so little of Kingdom Hearts consists of fresh encounters against evolving enemies who challenge the player in new and different ways. Instead, so much of it is repetitive fights with assorted reskins and mishmashed collections of the same baddies over and over again, with little, if anything, to distinguish them. The majority of these battles are all but required for the player to grind their way up to higher levels, and the clashes quickly start to seem like stuffing rather than meat.
"If you enjoyed fighting this guy once, why not fight him 479 more times?"
That extends to the climax of Kingdom Hearts, which not only goes on several extra hours past the game’s natural ending point but which also lacks any real substance in the intermission between the release’s odd pseudo-finale and the real one. Instead, Kingdom Hearts mandates a heap of backtracking and additional grinding, all necessary to obtain the tools needed to beat the game, without any sense of a new challenge. The journey to confront the actual final baddie is no better, forcing the player to revisit neutered versions of prior levels and thrash away at the usual crop of goons and henchmen before reaching the climax.
Even the last, overstuffed boss fight has more doses of busywork, misdirects, and minion fights before the deed is done. There’s just so much padding in Kingdom Hearts, especially in the endgame, that it leaves the player ready to simply get the last epic confrontation over with instead of it feeling like a satisfying, climactic challenge.
Still, plenty of video games, even widely-hailed ones, pad out their finales to ensure that the fans who dropped big bucks for a marquee release feel like they got their money’s worth in terms of playing time, even if those extra hours are just slightly different flavors of the same thing. What makes Kingdom Hearts more uniquely disappointing is how underwhelming and mystifying its original story, meant to bind each of these disparate characters and worlds together, turns out to be.
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In a vacuum, the game’s efforts toward originality is its most laudable quality. While Kingdom Hearts could easily just coast on the thrill of recognition from classic Disney movies or other Final Fantasy games, this release takes pains to introduce its own heroes, villains, and conflict, aspiring to be more than just a lazy mash-up. The attempt to do something original in a project that is, by its very nature, derivative is admirable.
The catch is that the story Nomura and his team come up with is a stupefying cocktail of the trite and the baffling, hobbling the entire effort. The core of the narrative is simple enough. Sora craves adventure and wants to rescue his friends. Donald and Goofy hope to find Mickey and avert some nebulous oncoming threat. To achieve both goals, this freshly-forged trio must beat the bad guys and protect various worlds and prevent the villains from collecting the assorted living macguffins, needed to access a realm that can confer phenomenal cosmic power. That’s a reasonably straightforward premise, familiar enough to anyone who’s watched a young fantasy adventure movie or played a game cut from the same cloth.
"Island after island of ugly, ugly children."
The problems come amid the tepid morals, characters, and overcomplications intended to dramatize those ideas. The game’s faltering attempt at establishing a mythos soon turns utterly baffling. Where did the Heartless come from? How were our heroes brought to this tangle of worlds? What are the two divided “realms” exactly? Why is one person or another the “Keyblade Master”? What specific power are the villains trying to obtain? What precisely is happening with Sora’s friends and/or Mickey? What, exactly, are the all-important “hearts” in this game? Which characters’ pasts are secretly connected and why? And so on and so on and so on.
Most of these questions are not terribly important to the basics of the game’s story, except for the fact that Kingdom Hearts treats them as though they are. It regularly offers cryptic hints and half-answers to prop up the mysteries at play but fails to provide satisfying or even comprehensible answers to any of them. The game spends so much time gesturing toward the vaguely-referenced, soon-to-be-revealed inner workings of its universe and the various forces at play, but never actually accounts for any of it, beyond a handful of platitudes and other opaque, inescapable mumbo jumbo.
The same goes for Kingdom Hearts’s dull as dishwater themes. The clunky dialogue presents such a shopworn take on the usual “light vs. dark” dichotomy that it would make a Star Wars fan blush. The corrupting influence of evil and the bolstering strength of goodness is, to be charitable, appropriate enough for the younger players drawn to the game’s cartoon bona fides. But the purple prose and ponderous, faux-poetic dialogue reveal Nomura and company fruitlessly grasping for profundity and falling far far short of it. And that’s before the proceedings devolve into the same hackneyed “power of friendship” tropes that, admittedly, plenty of Disney movies have invoked over the years.
The unshakeable bond of characters who've spent maybe ten minutes on screen together.
Regardless, such tired clichés and double-talk might have more meaning if the friendships in the game actually felt earned. The problem is that nobody in Kingdom Hearts acts or speaks like a human being. Instead, they also seem like weirdly sentimental robots, reacting to each new person or event with either undue enthusiasm or ho-hum acceptance. Emotional reactions occur at random, as characters fume, cheer, or take all the strangeness in stride, seemingly by fiat rather than as an authentic response to the situations they experience. Even after dozens of hours of play, I don’t really know who these characters are, what they want, or why they do the things they do, beyond the fact that Kingdom Hearts has simply announced it to the player.
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Maybe that’s more common and expected in the Final Fantasy series. While my personal experience with that franchise is limited, I know enough through cultural osmosis to recognize that there’s certain mechanics, story beats, and character traits that recur throughout the franchise.
The bewildering randomness of the lore and the character choices which seem arbitrary in Kingdom Hearts may be par for the course to fans of Nomura and his colleagues’ past work. If you’re already acclimated to their style — in game design, character development, and narrative construction — then the Final Fantasy-inspired elements that make up most of the game’s skeleton (Jack notwithstanding) may be easier to accept and enjoy.
But for those raised on Disney’s approach to storytelling — which, at its best, favored real character stakes and clear emotional trajectories rather than an overcomplicated mythos and underdeveloped relationships — Kingdom Hearts can’t help but feel like a disappointing head-scratcher lacking in the spirit of what it’s adapting.
The draw of the game, at least for Disney fans like me, was the chance to reconnect, in a different medium, to those engrossing stories and figures from our collective childhoods. Nomura and his team commendably aim to use that foundation to tell their own stories. But they fail to recapture the magic or the thrills that those borrowed pieces of the Disney pantheon represent, and they struggle to build a game that can delight, engage, or move the player, beyond Kingdom Hearts’s bits of pixie dust-sprinkled window dressing.
