Well, I had to replay it three times to get the pesky platinum trophy, so I feel I can say this with certainty: everything bad that happens in the story of the first Kingdom Hearts is the fault of Donald Duck.
Why? Because when Riku and Sora are reunited, Sora asks him to take Riku into their gummi ship. For no reason other than that he’s a goddurn stubborn nitwit (that IS what he called Daffy in Roger Rabbit, right?), Donald Duck flat-out refuses. When Riku slinks away and Sora doesn’t flat-out abandon his new friends, Maleficent is able to use this apparent betrayal as the leverage she needs to start manipulating her new protégé. If Riku had gone with Sora and co, it would have been far harder for the incompetent baddies to kidnap the princesses, Ansem wouldn’t have had his access to the world and any alternate plans could have been easily foiled by Riku and Sora together. So…well, yes, it’s mostly Riku’s fault for being a sensitive little priss who has such a hissy fit over not getting his way that he ends up doing the bidding of evil-doers, but without Donald acting the way he did, none of what happened would have happened – at least not in a way so difficult to stop. That darn duck.
Anyway, yes, I was very happy that Square decided that to mark 10 years since the release of the original game, they would re-release these HD remixes. I have the original Final Mix – and the second game’s – but never got around to playing in Japanese, and now I don’t have to!
It’s true that this is quite a lazy port, despite the protestations from Square that they had to rebuild a lot from scratch and used models from the other games. There have been pretty comprehensive lists of the things that they should have done – put the more complicated, far better-looking hi-res models into all cutscenes rather than keeping the original game’s usage of the in-game model when they could get away with it, chiefly. But also they should've added a theatre mode to watch all the extra-good-looking cutscenes – including good ole Another side, another story, the lovely CG animation they made as a fun contrast to the colourful game and then had to painfully spend 3 more games trying to force into the actual story.
Yes, it’s a story that gets incredibly convoluted, so it’s quite nice to go back for a refresher. Even leaving aside the things we know from future games – that there have been countless keyblade masters, many hundreds of them at once; that within Sora’s heart there’s already the fragment of Ventus’, stuck in there fast enough that it didn’t show when Kairi’s heart came out along with the six other fragments apparently in Riku’s keyblade; that Ansem isn’t Ansem after all – it’s worth recapping what actually goes on in this game, before things get really convoluted. And also to remember some of the things that have never really been resolved – what do Sora and Riku’s parents think about their absence of a year or longer? What exactly is Kairi’s background in Hollow Bastion? What exactly were Maleficent and ‘Ansem’ planning to do with their power from Kingdom Hearts, given that it would essentially rip apart everything else in existence? Given what happened when the Door to Darkness was actually opened, was there any point at all to Sora’s quest? Since the same result would have come about given the true nature of Kingdom Hearts…
Beyond the untangling of the of the overcomplicated plot, though, this is a simple story of a sweet young boy named Sora – somewhat jarringly little in this game compared with his KH2 incarnation – who when his world comes to an end is chosen by a mysterious ‘keyblade’ to seal locks through which monsters come, and to defeat the evil masterminds behind the plot. Usually by hitting them a lot. The real hook was that his adventures brought him into contact with not only Disney characters, but also characters from Square’s Final Fantasy series. The choices are somewhat limited – the Disney films are mostly old-classic or renaissance, emblematic or from way back at the start of Disney’s feature film production, and except with Vivi in Kingdom Hearts 2, the only FF characters we get are ones Nomura designed, limiting us to VII, VIII and X, which is a real shame. I’d love to see more obscure Disney and a much wider Final Fantasy net. I’d be thrilled to see Sora fight with Taran, and hey, in a future KH we could see Hope tagging along with a bossy Larsa, hooking up with Bartz and the Dissidia Onion Knight to take on a rampaging Kefka. But I suspect these things are all a pipe dream.
Yet I will continue to suck up anything Squeenix gives me under this banner, because the games are not only fun, but challenging. Honour binds me to get the challenge trophies on Proud Mode rather than beginner, and I wouldn’t rest until I got 100 hits on the Pink Agaricus despite now having to get Donald and Goofy stuck somewhere. Plus I saw things I’d never seen in the original to get this platinum – largely because I’d never otherwise bother with Gummi missions and completing Synthesis. And hey – I’d until this run-through never even noticed Gepetto opens a workshop in Traverse Town .
Nostalgia, affection for the characters and a fun world made this a game I was very happy to replay in HD.
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