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Friday, March 29, 2024

Playing 'Kingdom Hearts III' Feels Like Coming Home

It's impossible for me to tell you whether you're going to like Kingdom Hearts III. I also can't tell you whether it's good. What I can say, though, is that it means something to me.

I still remember beating the first Kingdom Hearts. I remember being sick, home from school, my body aching as my fingers slid over the controller. I remember white winter light peeling in through my bedroom window. I remember that, at the time, I didn't actually own the game. It was rented, and I would insist my mom or grandmother check it back out from the video store for me every week.

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Personal narratives about playing videogames are a little passé at this point, I know. So many people grew up playing videogames that almost everyone has a story like this. But Kingdom Hearts is a series that was there for me at the precise time I needed it, the exact presence I required in my life at that moment. Since age 11, the long, winding, bizarre Kingdom Hearts series has been with me. Playing the third numbered title, after all this time, isn't just playing another game. It’s a sort of homecoming.

For those who didn't spend their childhood with this series, a rough recap: Kingdom Hearts is primarily the story of Sora, an adventurous and happy young boy who teams up with Donald Duck and Goofy (yes, the Disney characters) to explore a universe full of isolated Disney-themed worlds in order to fight monsters and find their friends. It gets more complicated than that—indeed, over the course of nearly a dozen titles of various sizes since, it has gotten a lot, lot more complicated—but that's the core of it. Sora is just trying to help his friends in a vast, confusing world of anime villains, monsters born of pure darkness, and cartoon characters.

Something about it fascinated me on a deep, personal level. When I beat the original Kingdom Hearts, I wanted to know what happened to Sora next. I wanted to learn the fate of his brooding, long-haired rival/best friend, Riku. I was tantalized by the mysteries of the Keyblade, the magic sword/key hybrid that, yes, long-time Final Fantasy creative Tetsuya Nomura definitely came up with on his own.

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So I joined an online message board for hardcore fans. We crafted stupid theories. We bonded. A series about the power of friendship, filtered through the lens of Japanese role-playing-game eccentricity, became a pathway to real friendships. I grew up, and my relationship to Kingdom Hearts changed, matured, and gained nuance, but those friendships remained. They influenced my choice of college. They helped develop me into a full person. I don't speak to those people much anymore, but their presence in my life fundamentally changed it and improved it.

I can't possibly separate Kingdom Hearts from what Kingdom Hearts has meant to me. But I can tell you a few things about Kingdom Hearts III. I can tell you that it manages to complete the story started in that original game in 2001 with the sort of goofy, nerdy elegance that's come to define the series, weaving together nearly two decades of complicated, insular plot lines to create moments of sincere, heartfelt connection between its impossible characters and their Disney friends.

I can also tell you that it feels great to play, the simplistic button-mashing of the earlier titles replaced by a system that resembles previous ones but transcends them, with transforming Keyblades and special moves meant to imitate Disney theme park rides that can be optionally sprinkled into the combat, making the player a sort of symphony conductor of brightly colored chaos.

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/GWlKEM3m2EE&vl=en

And, like the other games, this one awkwardly mixes in levels that are recaps of Disney movies with an original plot that's like a Final Fantasy game if Final Fantasy was a series about the power of light and friendship. I can also report that, at one point, Elsa from Frozen sings "Let It Go" for its full runtime while Sora, Donald, and Goofy look on in awe, and I can tell you I laughed uncontrollably.

I can't tell you whether any of that will resonate with you. It might come off as unbearably twee, or naive, or confusing and poorly plotted. But for me, every moment, even the absolute dumbest, worked. It worked because of nostalgia, sure, and because of the sentimental connection I have with the series as a whole. I'm invested in these characters and the world they live in. But also because its thematic content, its ideas about friendship and hope and heroism, resonate. Kingdom Hearts III is a game about growing up, about facing tragedy and death and deciding, y’know what, screw that stuff, we have our friends and we're going to fight. It's willfully, thoughtlessly cheerful and straightforward, even in the bleakest circumstances. When I was a kid that seemed charming. Now, it seems vital, and playing Kingdom Hearts is an exercise in holding on to those optimistic parts of myself.

Sora is a hero who goes around talking about how his friends are his power, how together they can get through anything. I really, really want to believe him. Whether you like Kingdom Hearts III is largely going to be a matter of whether you want to believe him, too.

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