Kingdom Hearts Review

The premise reads like a licensing accident and the reason it survives is tone. Nobody involved plays it for laughs. Sora looking for his friends is treated with the same weight as any Square protagonist's quest, the Disney worlds are staged as real places with their own stakes, and the melancholy under Hollow Bastion is genuine. Utada Hikaru's theme sets that register in the first thirty seconds. The combat was ambitious for its year, a real time action system with magic, summons and party members, and it mostly holds up if you accept a camera that predates the second analogue stick becoming a solved problem.

The problems are famous. The Gummi ship sections are dull filler between worlds, the platforming in Atlantica and the Deep Jungle is imprecise, and the difficulty spikes around Riku and the Phantom without warning. The plot also begins the tangle that the series would eventually be buried under. As an original idea executed with total conviction it is hard to dislike.