Kingdom Hearts Retrospective: Kingdom Hearts Final Mix

 

In 2006, Square-Enix announced the Fabula Nova Crystallis project. It was intended to include three different Final Fantasy XIII games, although not in the same manner that they eventually did release three Final Fantasy XIII games. They eventually removed the Final Fantasy XIII branding from the other two games they had originally announced, Agito XIII and Versus XIII and renamed them Type-0 and XV.

In 2013, the E3 trailer for the newly renamed Final Fantasy XV called it “A World of the VERSUS Epic”, thus hinting that they intended for the former Final Fantasy Versus XIII to become its own brand within the Final Fantasy series, much like Fabula Nova Crystallis was originally meant to be.

Meanwhile, back in 2006, before the release of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII a year later, it was stated that the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII could potentially remain active until 2017, the twentieth anniversary of the original game. However, once Crisis Core was complete in time for the tenth anniversary in 2007, no new games were announced or made, and in fact, the remake of the original game was finally announced in 2015, although due to when development began, it missed out on a twentieth anniversary release. There has yet to be an official release date announced.

By contrast, Kingdom Hearts began development in 2000, was released in 2002, and although Tetsuya Nomura was hopeful that fans would want a sequel and the game had even ended in such a way that a sequel was inevitable, there’s no indication that the game had originally been announced as a part of a series. Instead of selling itself based on the notion that there would eventually be close to a dozen games to enjoy, each Kingdom Hearts game remains content being a game first rather than a vehicle to sell the player a new franchise.

In fact, right out of the starting gate, Kingdom Hearts already feels familiar. Like it’s not actually the first game in the series, even though it is the first game in the series. The design of Kingdom Hearts deliberately evokes familiar settings in that the majority of the worlds are Disney worlds. Of the ones that aren’t, the Destiny Islands are evocative of the tropical settings in previous games like Arni in Chrono Cross and Kilika from Final Fantasy X and unfortunately it doesn’t last long because it also falls into the “destroyed hometown” trope about an hour into the game. Traverse Town might be a bit more advanced than most starting towns, what with having electricity and a mail service which I’m not supposed to really talk about for a good while yet, but I can at least mention it by pointing out the postcard mailing minigame so there you go and I think I lost my train of thought. The point is, the somewhat modern stylings of Traverse Town still somehow feel comfortingly familiar in a video game genre that typically does not advance beyond the steampunk setting of Final Fantasy VI and prefers their protagonists to come from a simple rural town like Chester and Cress living in Toltus in Tales of Phantasia or Randi from Secret of Mana who lives in Potos Village. Sora doesn’t look at the street lamps in Traverse Town with a sense of wonder and awe, so it’s like the game is subtly suggesting that he’s already familiar with the modern concepts he’s going to end up being confronted with later on in the game and then again in later games in the series.

The Destiny Islands aren’t so advanced that there are computers, though. We’ll figure that out in Kingdom Hearts II, but for the most part, Sora would not feel so out of place if he found himself in the American Midwest in the early 1900s helping Tramp and Lady out, or in London approximately fifty years later to stop Cruella de Vil’s plan to skin a bunch of dalmatian puppies.

And speaking of the puppies, the sheer volume of Disney nostalgia present in the game factors into the sense of familiarity. Each world between Traverse Town and Hollow Bastion (which itself evokes images of all the dark and foreboding castles in Disney films like Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast) are smaller versions of the vast worlds of their respective Disney films. From Agrabah (Aladdin) and the Olympus Coliseum (Hercules) to the Deep Jungle (Tarzan) and Atlantica (The Little Mermaid), many Disney classics are honoured by Kingdom Hearts. Even movies like Bambi, Dumbo and The Lion King, although the worlds aren’t visited, are honoured by having their main characters help in battle in the form of summons. The dalmatian puppies I mentioned earlier are part of a mini-game to collect them all, and beloved characters such as Chip and Dale, Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, and Mickey’s dog Pluto show up in the game.

Kingdom Hearts probably started the whole Final Fantasy nostalgia craze that has gripped the company since. Several Final Fantasy characters from the seventh and eighth games in the series make appearances to drive the plot forward, and later games would include characters from the sixth, ninth and tenth games. Moogles originally only appeared in the game to operate the synthesis shops but some games in the series make them the sole shopkeepers in all the worlds.

These aren’t the same versions of the characters you know and love from the previous games, though. These are new versions with different origins. Instead of being raised as a SeeD in order to destroy a sorceress in the future, Squall goes by the name Leon for some edgelordy reason and it turns out that he originated in a destroyed world. While I had assumed after playing the original version of this game over a decade and a half ago that all the Final Fantasy worlds were destroyed by darkness somehow despite being populated by RPG heroes who could banish the darkness and kill gods after about 30-50 hours of solid effort and training, it later turned out that the ones living in Twilight Town had all come from one single, original world created for the series that was bereft of any Final Fantasy baggage that would otherwise have clung to the characters.

This is the trend that would continue nearly every other time the company wanted to make a Final Fantasy mass cross-over story, like Dissidia: Final Fantasy and World of Final Fantasy. From what I’ve come to understand, the Dissidia versions of the characters were originally hinted at being the same versions of the characters from each game, and in fact, the ending of the first Dissidia deliberately references the opening of the original Final Fantasy, which would suggest that the next thing Warrior of Light did after the credits rolled in Dissidia was to show up at Cornelia Castle and volunteer to save the world. In contrast, World of Final Fantasy features different versions of the characters in a world where bits and pieces of each Final Fantasy game exists in the same setting but with an entirely different conflict to worry about. So the version of Lightning from World of Final Fantasy is not the same Lightning from the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, and if she were to appear in Kingdom Hearts, that would be another distinct version of Lightning. (That said, I think the Lightning that appeared in Final Fantasy XIV in a special cross-over event was meant to be the same Lightning from XIII.)

But enough with the information dump about characters, let’s talk about the design of the game. Kingdom Hearts might as well be a Final Fantasy gaiden, for even the gameplay feels familiar. The first thing the player sees when they gain control of Sora is that he has a menu on the bottom left of the screen that’s set up pretty much like a Final Fantasy menu, with the option to attack, use items, use magic (although not until he meets Donald), and so on. Someone playing Kingdom Hearts for the first time but who is already familiar with Final Fantasy won’t need to figure out what each magic spell does, they’re nearly all identical to how Final Fantasy magic works. Fire is fire and is the opposite of Blizzard, which is ice, and so on. Items are copied directly from a Final Fantasy game and do pretty much what you’d expect them to do. Potion restores HP, Hi-Potion restores more HP, Ether restores MP, Elixir restores all the HP and MP of a character, and so on. The reason Kingdom Hearts is so easy to pick up and play for most players is that it’s deliberately designed to be a Final Fantasy action game in all but name, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t originally pitched as such. In fact, those who were mad at Square for making Final Fantasy XI an MMO could easily have thought of Kingdom Hearts as the true Final Fantasy XI, as long as they didn’t mind that it’s a Disney cross-over.

If there’s one thing that becomes readily apparent upon playing any of the versions of Kingdom Hearts that has been released (the original on PS2 and the ports of Final Mix on PS3 and PS4), it’s that this is unabashedly an early PS2-era game, especially when comparing it to something like Final Fantasy XV. Up to and including Dream Drop Distance – which is all I’ve played of this series as of the day this has been posted – the series utilizes a design aesthetic of a more animation-friendly nature, the kind that can easily be rendered using what can be considered today to be lower-end, easier to acquire technology. From the enemy design, the relatively smaller levels of the first six games (some of the levels in Dream Drop Distance are quite big in comparison and I expect them to be bigger in Kingdom Hearts III as well) and even the GUI, the design of Kingdom Hearts is simple and clean (ugh, I deeply apologize for that) and fully embraces the cartoony aspect of Disney that a lot of people associated the company with back in 2002 and still mostly do.

Thing is, Disney is actually rather notorious for getting dark at times. Using only examples that existed in 2002, Walt Disney Animation Studios (the “Disney Animated Canon” consists entirely of only this one studio’s animated films no matter how many other animated films the company has released in theatres and direct to video) is responsible for movies like The Black Cauldron and scenes like “Poor Unfortunate Souls” in The Little Mermaid, the elephant graveyard and the death of Mufasa in The Lion King, the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” segment of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and even “Night on Bald Mountain” in Fantasia. However, Disney also makes it a point to market scenes like “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King” and “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King and “Why Should I Worry” from Oliver & Company, and let’s be honest, what would you rather remember? Simba having fun with his new friends or Simba pleading with an unconscious Mufasa to get up so they can go home, then desperately calling for help and hearing only his own depressing echo in response?

Level design in Kingdom Hearts is small and compact compared to the sprawling worlds of today, presumably because of the PS2’s hardware not being as advanced as the PS3 and PS4 that the Final Mix remaster exists on. As a result, load times are miniscule. The transition between zones is almost instant, a feat that you can’t really claim for Final Fantasy XV. If you wondered why there were exceptionally long tunnels in specific parts of the map of Eos, this is likely why. The next part of the world needs to be loaded in. In comparison, setting foot inside the castle in Hollow Bastion and then immediately exiting out would not inconvenience the player at all.

That seems to be the best way to describe the gameplay to someone who played Final Fantasy XV and who wants to know what the Kingdom Hearts HD collections are like. Kingdom Hearts wants to keep the controller in your hands as often as possible but Final Fantasy XV‘s long loading times and even longer transit times to do side quests has the exact opposite effect.

As an experiment, I went into Monstro in Kingdom Hearts and ran around for a half an hour, then I played a half an hour of Final Fantasy XV. Loading times in Monstro were damn near instant, and I was transitioning between zones very often. Loading times in Final Fantasy XV (which were few and far between, admittedly, but that was because even simple quests require a relatively substantial time investment to complete) were sometimes as high as a full minute. It may seem unfair to compare a game with relatively small zones like Kingdom Hearts to an open world game like Final Fantasy XV which was built so that you could theoretically see the entire world in one go, but that’s the thing. Final Fantasy XV represents a trend that no one really wants, that of games that look so photo-realistic that we’re constantly stuck waiting for it all to load, where developers spent so long making it look pretty that they’re absolutely barren when it comes to the actual content of the world, versus games that still look gorgeous after 17 years and which are absolutely content rich. You could go several minutes without enemy encounters in Final Fantasy XV but there are always more Heartless spawning in Kingdom Hearts.

Upon booting up Kingdom Hearts for the first time, Dearly Beloved starts to play. It’s a tune that would be remixed and reused in every other Kingdom Hearts game for the opening menu and is basically Yoko Shimomura’s crystal theme. It’s an apt description, considering she’s scored every single Kingdom Hearts game to date, being to Kingdom Hearts what Nobuo Uematsu was to Final Fantasy. Some games are no doubt easier to score (Coded, 358/2 Days and Chain of Memories, for example, could recycle most of the songs from the first game), but everything new in the series is always her work. Although it wouldn’t be evident in the first game, certain characters and worlds have their own leitmotif that persists from game to game. For example, when Hollow Bastion is restored to its former glory after the first game, a new variant on its theme tune is used that incorporates the original, dark composition into a brighter, more radiant variant.

However, I need to talk about the theme song to the game. The more I listen to Simple and Clean, the less I feel that I really get the song. The lyrics make little sense to me and sound like someone over in Japan tried to write a Disney End Credits Song without fully understanding the language they were writing in, or maybe it was a Disney song written by predictive text. Whatever the case, whoever wrote it might need to take a few English lessons. Who wrote it, anyway?

…huh. Well, apologies to Utada Hikaru, she’s a really talented song writer but it’s not that good a song. The lyrics don’t make much sense when comparing it to the plot of the game and they end up becoming non-sequitor when the theme song is recycled in most of the handheld games. What the song has to do with Birth By Sleep is anyone’s guess.

While I’m on the subject of problems I have with the game, some of the areas are clearly not designed with video game cameras in mind. Thing is, most developers were beginning to experiment with full 3-D environments back at the turn of the millennium, especially with the additional power the PS2 brought with it as compared to the original PlayStation, so it’s possible that the Kingdom Hearts development team didn’t realize how bad it would be to try to operate the game’s camera in a really tight, enclosed space like the area behind the waterfall in the Deep Jungle or pretty much the near entirety of the pirate ship in Neverland. Jumping very precisely to find treasure chests is such a pain in both of those areas, especially with a camera that’s uncomfortable pointing in specific directions due to obstacles being in the way, so it’ll instead swing wildly from one side to the other, messing up jumping in the Deep Jungle and making it hard to climb one specific ladder in Neverland. The HD version of the Final Mix must be a straight, upscaled port because it retains this issue with no effort made to fix it.

Bosses are a mixed bag as well. During the first phase of the Ursula fight, I felt like I was still wrestling with the swimming controls. In the time since Kingdom Hearts was first released, developers working for Square-Enix have come up with better ways to navigate 3-D environments. The Final Fantasy XIV team perfected it, so if ever I find myself returning to Atlantica in the future, I should hope that the Kingdom Hearts team borrows Final Fantasy XIV‘s flight and swimming controls.

That’s not the only boss that was giving me issues. There’s a boss in Wonderland that is absolutely awful and requires a lot of jumping, mostly to get onto the table in order to actually hit it more than once or twice at a time. But then, that’s basically the game’s biggest downside, it feels like the team that built the game had a lot of learning to do and used this game to do it. Boss fights aren’t the most well designed bosses in video game history but some of them aren’t half bad and the final boss is an amazing experience that I don’t think the series has quite replicated since, although Sora’s final boss in Chain of Memories comes close, as well as the final boss of 358/2 Days. In general, boss fights in this first game could’ve been a bit better designed.

Also, having to gather up all the Munny you earn in battle kind of sucks until Treasure Magnet is unlocked. Just saying.

The Gummi Ship has been criticized by many and for good reason. It feels like this is another area where the team was learning and trying to get a feel for what the PlayStation 2 could do. In order to unlock more worlds, Sora, Donald and Goofy must fly a ship between worlds and shoot down enemies sort of Starfox style. Enemies come in waves with several seconds between each wave. Once one wave ends, the game will load up the next one. It’s a slow section of gameplay and after doing each mission once, it can be skipped entirely. I know I skipped them whenever I could. The ship can also be customized but the controls are too complicated for me so I didn’t bother. Blueprints for other gummi ships can be unlocked through both story progression and finding them during gummi missions but a lot of these blueprints for some reason are not allowed to be used in actual gummi missions. There’s no point to having them other than to have them, so I’m never excited whenever another one’s unlocked because chances are, I can’t use them anyway.

But you know what? At the end of the day, Kingdom Hearts is still a good game. I will admit that, when comparing it to later games in the series, the original game is a bit unrefined, but that’s not a bad thing. For example, the story is probably the most straightforward that the series has ever been. The basic gist of it is that one by one, worlds are disappearing into darkness and a boy on one of those worlds is granted the power to do something about it. He finds himself suddenly able to use a special weapon known as a keyblade and with it and the help of Disney characters Donald and Goofy, he can protect all the worlds that remain. The keyblade can unlock all doors and can also lock worlds away from the darkness so that they will not disappear. While this is happening, an alliance of Disney villains led by Maleficent plot to take over the worlds, but one by one they fall to Sora and his keyblade. It later turns out that there’s a bigger bad running things behind the scenes, one new and original to the series.

This game was made long before any of the complications, like “Ansem the Wise” or “Nobodies” or “the Keyblade war” were added to the series canon, so one can be forgiven if they play this game and think “Wow, this isn’t as complicated as people have claimed it to be.” Believe me, after this game, you’ll be in for a rather bumpy ride.