How Kingdom Hearts showed us that Disney stores are to be avoided
Kingdom Hearts (2002)
Kingdom Hearts (2002)
It’s probably something that’s no big deal for proper countries out there, but it was only in recent years that Ireland saw the arrival of an honest to God, fully fledged Disney shop. And not only that, she’s set up camp on Dublin’s main shopping street as well, where rents are through the roof. But then, Walt’s crew aren’t exactly short of a few quid, are they?
But then, where could they possibly go wrong? The reverence that Disney works are held in, coupled with some top-notch advertising and more than a few heavy-handed, Simpsons-blue-haired-lawyers, means that it’s almost become a hate crime to say anything negative about Disney.
If I were to say that Aladdin is a little bit racist, that the Hunchback of Notre Dame takes terrible liberties to tell a mediocre story, and that there’s no way that a yummy piece of crumpet like Belle would have gone for a rotten old hairy beast, I’d be finished with all the right faces and places. I’d have to go off and fob my controversial opinions off on my new buddies at the leper colony instead.
But even they will have heard of my anti-Disney railing, and they’d close ranks. They’ll say I wasn’t to be trusted. I’d quickly be relegated to the bottom feeder pile. After all, these people may be luckless lepers, but there’s still a hierarchy. Someone has to be the top dog and someone, conversely, has to be the gimp. And there’s nowt surer than the fact that slagging off The Lion King would mean I’d easily fall into that latter category.
But not even I’m cynical enough to hate Disney. They should be applauded, really, because they’ve done the bizzo for kids time and time again. So when this new Disney shop opened, I was very pleasantly surprised and contented; you have to understand that in Ireland, anything that’s in anyway chic or specialist is immediately frowned upon and viewed suspiciously.
But the store, unsurprisingly, has been a continual, huge success. I can see why; it seems a whole generation of us, who grew up through the Disney Renaissance of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, have come of age. And more crucially, we have enough disposable cash to throw down on Finding Nemo plushies – and these days, Star Wars merchandise.
In 2002, sure, Disney was popular. But films like Hercules, Tarzan and The Lion King weren’t old enough to be fully fledged classics yet. Despite this, news that Squaresoft and Disney would be teaming up to do a Final Fantasy/Disney crossover was met with... discontent.
Yes, it could never work, and it was a terrible whoring out on both sides - that was the genuine consensus at the time. But then the collaboration was released to fanfare and big sales, paving the way for quite a few sequels now, if you can attempt to understand them.
Us gamers, of course, were fickle enough to do a convenient turnabout and demand even more Final Fantasy and Disney characters in the subsequent games. And from there developed the convoluted, yet unmistakably unique Action RPG series Kingdom Hearts, that has sold over 35 million units thus far.
There’s no ambiguity in which franchise rules the roost in the original Kingdom Hearts for PS2 – it’s definitely Disney. Your two permanent party members are Donald Duck and Goofy for a start, and all of the locations you follow are taken from a litany of Disney films throughout the years.
But there’s a problem here: yes, there may be a wide variety of locales, corresponding to classic oeuvres like Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin and Hercules. But the game designers seemingly decided that bringing in some good voice actors and rendering the characters well was enough – next to no thought was actually given into how to make each world immersive, interesting and expansive.
So when you arrive at Agrabah and see Princess Jasmine hiding out from that busy mug Jafar, you think that things are really gonna step up a gear. It’s almost like things are going to be a callback to the nifty SNES and Mega Drive Aladdin games, which were choc-full of memorable levels in the desert.
But then you start to play through Aladdin’s chapter of Kingdom Hearts and realise that something has gone very wrong: for about one third of the whole game, you’re spamming the attack button towards mostly bland, shadowy enemies that simply spawn out of nowhere.
Another third of the game has you moving between two sub-areas out of maybe six per Disney world, hoping to find the way forward. And the final third is actually finding the few lines of story-based dialogue, voice-acted or not, that finally let you proceed onto the next part of the story.
This progression, when it mercifully comes, inevitably sends you darting around each of the aforementioned six sub-areas once more. And this is terribly boring. All you and your divvy friends are trying to do is find even a trace of a clue towards the whereabouts of Mickey Mouse, or special keyholes, or whatever it is that drives the plot.
You just want to find the place where you can actually battle real enemies, see the old Disney characters back in action, and generally take a wonderfully whimsical trip down Disney memory lane. But the actual gameplay on each Disney inspired game world is so shabbily uninspired that you’re really left despairing at what could have been.
There’s further cause for despair still, though, when we get onto the wonderfully named Gummi Ship sections. To fly your characters to different worlds and get behind the scenes of different Disney movies, you’ve got to to suffer a very ill-advised minigame that has you embarrass yourself in a quaint looking, polygonal little ship.
I’ve got to say, and anyone will tell you that I’m not given to needless overreaction, but the first time around, I genuinely could not believe what I was seeing – I swear I had to burst out laughing at the Gummi Ship section, as I marvelled at just how bad it all was.
Those on my Christmas card list know that Action RPGs are among my favourite genre of games. So looking at Kingdom Hearts from the outside, a role-playing adventure with most of the right Final Fantasy characters, plus voice-acting from Donald and Goody’s voice actors and James Woods as Hades, it should have been one of the all-time greats.
Well, there must be something I’m missing. Kingdom Hearts’ reviews were always strong, and it’s spawned a number of sequels. Many of these sequels change things about somewhat, I’m reliably informed, and fill the time with convoluted cowpat stories, each more improbably and poorly linked together than the last.
Not that story has any real bearing on my own ability to enjoy the game. I reckon I got the gist of Kingdom Hearts 1 anyway: boy likes girl, other boy likes girl, they all get washed away, Maleficent isn’t happy and enlists Disney villains of varying competence levels to sort some stuff out while our first boy brings in a permanently incandescent duck and a mentally bewildered dog as backup.
Is that wrong? Hey, it sounds like a top notch premise for a game. Pity the Disney locales are severely cramped, not aided by the most irascible, temperamental camera there is. Cameras were a big old recurring problem in games around the time this title was released, it’s true. But your options of Auto or Manual camera only seem to give you two real choices, asking if you just want occasional buggery from the established camera, or whether you’d prefer to make yourself fully blind to all threats instead - pick your poison.
They could have done better with the music as well, considering the stuff that's surely all available to them with Disney fully on board. Where’s the classic singalong tunes? Why isn't Aladdin showing me the world? Not even an instrumental version? Instead, you get some pretty non-offensive noise in quite a few cases.
And you're not always so lucky. Put it this way - I’ll consider myself to really have the luck of the Irish if I never have to hear Traverse Town playing again. Bad memories of staggering through the first town, the hub of the game, trying to find the one corner of its many screens that would advance the plot that little bit further. Among all this, you can either engage a limitless supply of shadow enemies, or just run away as your companions are left to face the music. Would you be bothered?
The battle system itself is not exactly a thinking man’s effort, either. Your character, Sora, wields a keyblade (to elaborate, this is a blade shaped like a key, and it opens doors too). Mash the attack button to defeat foes, and... that’s moreorless it, occasionally stopping to heal.
I’ll say this for the game, its little nods and references are certainly impressive. But they would have to be, wouldn't they, when the developers in charge of the itty bitty details were stuck working alongside Disney. After all, to Disney's eternal credit, they do maintain laser-sharp levels of product quality and control – and so would be the case here, until the many flaws inherent in the game on the part of the Squaresoft programmers let it all down.
It’s an interesting love letter to both Disney and Final Fantasy. And I know the series has its own very die-hard legion of fans, who’ll hate me for this treacherous piece. But it has to be said, and I want to be the brave man who’ll stand in front of the onrushing tanks and say it: this game is Simply Not Very Good At All.
So much so, that it’s like a lot of the elements of pop culture that frighten me today – you ask yourself “how did this ever become popular?” Like Abe Simpson said, things can all start to look a little bit weird and scary. Well, in times of great uncertainty, doubt and fear and loathing like that, you almost feel grateful to be able to seek sanctuary in a Disney shop, where everything is familiar, there’s no tricks – and there's not a single sighting of a Gummi Ship.
9 May 2023