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In the year of our lord 2026, I am experiencing Kingdom Hearts for the first time.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

I knew there would be Disney characters, but I was surprised how many Final Fantasy characters are here too! I thought Tidus and friends being kids on the island was just a weird cameo, but it just became increasingly absurd. Once Yuffie and “Leon” showed up, I just decided to close my eyes and never think about how these appearances would make sense within each character's original lore. I don’t mind their presence in the game, but it does make me realize how aesthetically and tonally opposed Disney and Final Fantasy are. No matter what criticisms I have of the game, the weird dissonance between the two properties will always be enjoyable to me.
Despite the mismatch between Final Fantasy and Disney, I do think Sora, Kairi, and Riku are a good balance between those two worlds. It seems like Nomura’s design solution for combining those aesthetics was to give everyone big shoes, which I always love. I was also surprised how good the voice acting was! It makes sense Disney wouldn’t slack in that regard, but all the Square Enix characters sound good as well.

STORY

The story in Kingdom Hearts is fine, nothing particularly life changing. It’s very shōnen, which I say in a negative way. From the opening cutscene with Riku reaching out to Sora I knew I was in for some SasuNaru type shit. This mostly turned out to be true. there’s implied to be some type of love triangle with Kairi, but way more time is spent on Riku and Sora’s relationship.

Regardless of my criticisms, Kingdom Hearts has the advantage over most shōnen stories because Goofy and Donald are here. Overall the story is just pretty straight forward, the series is infamous for having incomprehensible lore though so I’m curious how things will escalate in the next games.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is also fine, I can deal with it. When it comes to real-time combat in games, I want to deal with as few menus as possible. Kingdom Hearts isn’t the WORST about this, but even with quick commands I still found myself struggling at times. This is mostly personal preference, but I like action combat to be a lot more fast-paced and easier to chain together combos with multiple enemies. At first I thought maybe this was a technical limitation? but then I remembered Devil May Cry came out in 2001. I’m not going to fault the game for going a different direction though. Kingdom Hearts tries to bring in more RPG elements like having a party and a MP gauge but personally, these elements didn’t add much to the game for me. 

Besides the combat, there really isn’t much else to do besides collecting items and doing some standard platforming sections. I guess there’s also the Gummi ship, but honestly I skipped over the flying sections whenever possible. I did build a really stupid looking ship at the end though, so that was fun. Oh yeah, I guess there were also the Pooh mini games too. Really hated those.

LOVED

• Donald and Goofy are very cute!
• I especially loved Donald's lines, like when says “for Daisy!” when you win in the tournament :)
• Squall Leonhart is one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters so I was really happy he got to have a supporting role here, even if he’s basically a different character. Leon telling you to rescue the puppies was very cute…
• I love the 3D models for the dalmatian puppies, they look very floppy and stupid the way puppies should
• I’m usually not one to care about finding collectible items but if the “item” is a little creature that needs help then I feel a moral obligation to rescue them all 
• The Halloween level was of course my favorite, I like that the crew gets a costume for no real reason. My theory is that Nomura just thought it would look cool (it does)

HATED

• I really would have liked a map or something for each world, I had to look up a guide multiple times because I wasn’t exploring the areas in the right order somehow
• This game doesn’t escape the video game curse of having a horrible underwater level, I like Goofy as a sea turtle though
• The first phase of Ursula’s boss battle was especially frustrating to me, sometimes casting a spell in the cauldron would make her explode and sometimes she’d just spin seemingly forever? and all that while Ariel and Donald would be spending all their MP fighting those damn fish over and over
• The pirate ship was also pretty rough. Not as bad as Atlantica, but the camera really seemed to struggle with the small spaces. Also I really hate Peter Pan so I didn’t like seeing him
• The game felt a little longer than it needed to be, I thought the final fight with Riku would have been the end of things but then there’s another level which is mostly just the replaying bits of old levels.
• I know the final boss in JRPG games tend to have a lot of phases, but the last fight really brought out some gamer rage I have not experienced in a long time. After already going through so many back-to-back enemy hoards right before, having to fly around those stupid lasers only to go in and fight more enemy hoards felt like an endless punishment

Overall when I think about my experience it's kind of negative, yet I'm still really looking forward to playing Kingdom Hearts 2.
Before I get to that though, it seems like in order to understand the context of whatever happens in the next game I'll need to watch 3 hours of Sora, Donald, and Goofy walking through empty rooms trying to remember stuff. There's some scheming goths too I think.