Classic video games: Kingdom Hearts

The OG collab

May 10, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where played: Most recently on Playstation IV

Minor spoilers ahead.

Playing these classic video games Kingdom Hearts I and II was one of my seminal and defining childhood gaming moments. I am so glad I got to play it at a young age. I grew up loving both the Disney movies and the Final Fantasy games, so to be able to enter a world, no…worlds! where there was so much exploring to do in places that fed your imagination so richly as a child was an incredible experience for me.

During the pandemic, in my thirties, and in anticipation of Kingdom Hearts III, I played through Kingdom Hearts I and II again and they have held up surprisingly well. I do hope that they will remaster them soon. If you could bottle up nostalgia and put it in a game, for me, it would hundred percent be Kingdom Hearts I and II.

Considering the technology we had at the time (the year was 2002-2005), it is amazing to think back now how fantastically those old games had been rendered, and how they were able to stay true to the animations of both Final Fantasy and the beloved Disney classics. Kingdom Hearts I and II have, for example, a fully-rendered Halloween Town, from The Night Before Christmas, complete with Jack Skellington to help you on your adventure! You could play through Alice’s wonderland and jump up and down mushrooms to fight the bad guys and look for treasure! You could fight in an Arena in Hercules’ ancient Greece! You had to wander through the Beast’s (from Beauty and the Beast) haunted palace and help the Beast fight the evil within! At one point, you even had a bit of an open world moment where you could explore under the sea with Ariel and Flounder and swim through an ocean and discover its secrets! Merlin (from The Sword in The Stone!) and the Fairy Godmother (from Cinderella) would show up on your quests to guide you through as the wise old sages! This was the stuff of magic back in the day… a truly inspired and no-holds barred use of Disney’s beloved IP through a collaboration with another vastly different but equally loved Japanese IP.

Reflecting back, I think Kingdom Hearts I and II were some of the first almost open world games, not in the sense of being like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, or Zelda, where you could fully explore a world and seek quests not related to your main quest timeline, really, but more in spirit, in generating the sense of having worlds that would be a joy to explore again and again, and hiding lore and treasure that you needed to level up or complete other quests in order to come back to.

One thing I remember most distinctly about the old Kingdom Hearts games, was playing your usual adventure and encountering a random loose page on your travels. Few “what’s this?” moments in my lifetime of gaming reward you with such a memorable answer. The loose pages later turn out to be the pages of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh book, which, with every found page, you could enter and explore the Hundred Acre Woods as a new world, and encounter its denizens (Rabbit, Eeyore, all the usual suspects) and play in silly Pooh-type adventures. It seems like such a small thing really, but the animations of entering the book and finding yourself exploring the hand-drawn forests of the Hundred Acre wood were so pleasurable and really gave the sense that you had fallen straight into the middle of a beloved childhood Disney film, again increased the sense that you were playing through the nostalgia of your sitting at your mother’s lap while she read you a picture book, and made it such an engrossing part of the game. This was… is… pure video game magic.

And don’t get me wrong, playing Kingdom Hearts III about four or five years ago was great fun as well. Again, pure nostalgia hits different, I’m a great fan of the Toy Story series and so I absolutely loved being able to play as a little toy in the oversized toy store and the Toy Story world. And though I don’t consider them Disney Golden Age movies, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Rapunzel’s world from the movie Tangled and exploring the icy wonderland that is the movie Frozen. I am really looking forward to the day that my kids are old enough to play Kingdom Hearts III, as they love all these movies.

But… as enjoyable as exploring these worlds was, I can no longer ignore the fact that the main Kingdom Hearts storyline makes absolutely no sense. The story has completely lost me, and I can no longer for the life of me recall any part of the main plot. And I think.., the first two games at least tried to make sense? Or I could cobble together some sense out of them. But KHIII sort of feels like the writers knew that this IP would sell no matter what and just slapped together some sort of feeble basis for one to self-indulgently explore the bastions of one’s childhood imagination.

And yes, this happiness is just so unique and feels so good that I played KHIII despite the problems with the main storyline… But. A part of me can’t help but feel… doesn’t this franchise that carries the name of two legendary franchises deserve something better than to have its IP milked for all its worth? It is this complete disregard for the storyline that prevents the Kingdom Hearts franchise from being truly great, I think, along the ranks of The Witcher 3, God of War, The Legend of Zelda, Game of The Year material, that level of greatness. So it is just a damn shame, is what it is.

I hear talk that there is a Kingdom Hearts IV in the works, and I will undoubtedly pick it up and be eager to do so, because for me no other video game bottles up your childhood into quite such a neat little package… but… because of my mixed experience with KHIII… I will do so with no small trepidation on what the developers have decided to do now with the series… which again, I think should not be the case for an IP that has carries the combined weight of decades of creative genius from two opposite ends of the globe. I think people are going to expect that KHIII will do justice to these bones and be something that not just makes sense (which really? Is that all we should want at this point?) but be truly spectacular.