#20. Kingdom Hearts
In honor of Bill Kaulitz (who looks, terrifyingly, like a tweenage Square Enix hero come to life – this is where Guitar Hero has brought us!), I’ve returned to one of my favorite games that shouldn’t work.
Someday I’ll have to look up what really happened, but the legend of Kingdom Hearts‘ genesis is that Square and Disney share an office building in Honolulu, and two executives came up with the idea during an elevator ride. Regardless of how the game actually got started, Kingdom Hearts is one of those titles that everyone I knew mocked incessantly in the months before release – and then played for hours and hours and hours. Apparently, Square and Disney have a lot in common.
Looking back on it, there are things I love about the design, and things I desperately, passionately loathe. In a way, Kingdom Hearts was the beginning of the end for me and Japanese RPGs: much as I love the sheer, balls-out bashiness of the gameplay, and as perversely satisfying it is for the Little Mermaid to be one of the best fighters in the game, Kingdom Hearts contains some of my all-time least favorite elements, the sorts of things that will make me pass over a game without a second thought today. This is the game that cemented my hatred of cryptic, pseudo-philosophical, “meaningful” plotlines and all the stilted adolescent dialogue* that comes with them: things like “The time when the door will open is both very near and far away,” or “Your shadow is longest when the light is brightest, so keep a strong heart,” or the general shallowness of the friendship-is-good, darkness-is-bad, memories-are-important story. It’s also difficult to forget, even just playing through the intro, that at its core Kingdom Hearts is about the burgeoning sexual tension between three awkwardly-dressed twelve year olds. This is not a story for adults.
But it is a game for adults. Taking just the mechanics (and ignoring the abysmal camera control and the lack of skippable cutscenes – this was ‘02, people), Kingdom Hearts is an excellent way to kill an afternoon. It’s fluff, but it’s nostalgic fluff, for both Disney and Square fans. In essence, it’s fan fiction come to life, but with all the balance, timing, structure, and production value of the best Final Fantasy titles. There’s joy in very simple things here – I had forgotten how much I like gathering physical experience points, or stringing weapon combos together, or even the lovely graphical representation of the “string of pearls” that serves as the map between Disney-themed worlds. For me, it’s a nice example of how great gameplay can transcend other flaws. And yes, there are people who think that the story in Kingdom Hearts is great literature with deep meanings that “speaks to them personally.” When they grow out of it, the game will still be there.
I have a student who recently wrote an essay on “embarrassing games” – titles like Pokemon or Princess Debut that are fun and challenging enough for serious gamers, but shameful to purchase because of the content. I had forgotten that Kingdom Hearts used to be one of those titles, back when all we had was the set-up. The franchise has become of Square-Enix’s most popular, and most successful, but there’s a little bit of shame there for me. I can play this game in my office, but I feel the need to apologize for it – that it’s technically quite good but not something to be taken seriously, not like a Portal or a Braid. It’s a guilty pleasure, and a conditional one. I can’t talk about the game to colleagues without making my disdain for the narrative abundantly clear. But I still play it. Maybe it’s not gameplay, but just fun that transcends all – however we choose to define “fun” this week.
*Don’t even get me started on Kingdom Hearts II. If I ever teach a course in painfully maudlin, overwrought, incoherent melodrama in interactive form, this one’s first on the list.
