// KOTAKU — GAMING
Kingdom Hearts’ Opening Is Still Incredible
Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to interrogate how much the memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series have distorted what it actually is. That means seeing just where it is in this 25-year-long journey that Square Enix decided Kingdom Hearts was going to be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds, and was instead going to become a decades-long epic. And now that I’ve started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to call out something that was disorienting and even perhaps frightening to me as a child: the tutorial.
Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean,” Sora, our plucky protagonist, falls into an abyss, landing on a giant stained-glass platform adorned with Snow White’s likeness. At this point, Sora hasn’t met her, and won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours, but he and his allies would return to places that looked like this many times throughout the series. This is the Dive to the Heart, which is essentially a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart. The princesses shown on these pillars span multiple Disney films, and even now, Kingdom Hearts is spinning its intricate web in the ones it chooses to show the player as they explore this area. Why does Sora see these specific princesses?
The times we enter a Dive to the Heart across the Kingdom Hearts series seem to confirm that these characters’ appearances aren’t picked at random, as it implies that their hearts are sealed in some way. But we’re just playing a kid having a terrifying dream. What are we supposed to do about that? Nothing right now, but if we can get stronger, maybe we can fix whatever’s happened here.
Sora’s dream in this space is ominous and otherworldly, and as a disembodied voice guides him through it, they speak to him as if he has a great journey ahead, and the stakes seem rather high. It’s here that Square Enix meticulously tutorializes everything from how to swing a weapon at the menacing but also kind of adorable blobs called Heartless to how to save your game, but the most interesting thing about Kingdom Hearts’ original tutorial is what it doesn’t tell you.
As a kid, I didn’t understand the choices it was asking me to make, and some of them I only actually learned the consequences of while doing research for this post. At the very beginning, the player is asked to choose between a sword, staff, and shield. After they’ve chosen, they’re forced to give up one of the two remaining tools. Kingdom Hearts doesn’t tell you what this means, but under the hood, this affects Sora’s baseline stats for the whole game, as well as the order in which he learns skills throughout. It is, essentially, determining a specialization without a name. Compared to the friends he fights alongside, Sora is a pretty well-rounded jack of all trades, and can still reasonably take on pretty much any challenge in Kingdom Hearts regardless of your choice here, but what I was most struck by was not just the abstract way the game presents this role-playing element to you, but the foreboding sense of dread and preemptive grief I felt playing through it now.
Throughout most of this section, an incredibly somber choir arrangement plays in the background. When I was a kid playing the game on my PS2, I thought I had rented a Disney game that was going to simply let me run around the movies my family had grown up watching. Right at the outset, I felt like the game was preparing me for something much, much darker.
Even in the brief section where you leave the Dive to the Heart and enter a facsimile of Destiny Islands, Sora’s childhood home, this terrifying score plays while three Final Fantasy characters ask you existential questions about what matters to you, what you fear, and what you hope for your life. My guys, Sora is 14 years old, do you think he’s ever thought about