Note: Please excuse the imbalance of quality for screenshots here; for whatever reason, viable screenshots of earlier PS2 game are especially hard to find.
Dear readers not familiar with
Kingdom Hearts, I implore you to look, just
look, at the cover above. Yes, that is Goofy and Donald Duck of Disney fame chilling in the moody, moonlit sky alongside three anime teenagers. Their normally-cheery faces are now solemn, decorated with such wistful melancholy that does away with their kid-friendly personas, evoking an aura of maturity never before displayed to the public eye.
Needless to say,
Kingdom Hearts was one of the most bizarre debuts of the PS2/GC/Xbox era, and yet somehow it ended up being one of the most beloved. A collaboration between Disney and famed RPG developer Squaresoft (now Square-Enix), the 2002 action-RPG's outlandish concept of pitting Disney icons and zipper-laden, key-wielding adolescents against Disney villains in command of heart-harvesting shadows--a tale bookended by Hikaru Utada pop songs, mind--is so uniquely ludicrous that it demands your attention. But why?
My theory? By framing itself as a "darker" take on Disney,
Kingdom Hearts ropes in the nostalgic RPG player who once associated with their films in early youth. I am no exception to this: the game was responsible for restarting my fervent following in Disney animation, the soundtrack never left my CD player and I clocked out the "Hours Played" stat in the course of a year. Since then, my association with
Kingdom Hearts has floundered over the years: it birthed as an obsession that required a near-intervention, followed by a burning hate that wanted nothing more to do with the series, and am now settled as a casual fan who partakes in it like the finest of junk food.
