Before We Begin
I’ve already said a lot about my rocky start with this game, so I’ll skip going over that again. Long story short, it wasn’t my favorite game in the series by any means. Still, with the benefit of knowing the massive improvements the series makes by the end, I’ve been wanting to replay this one just to see if the distaste was more in my head than anything.
Also, I won’t lie – Halloweentown is much better in this game than in the second, and I love a Nightmare Before Christmas.
Day One
As expected, it’s really not as bad as I remembered it being. I think I just didn’t know what to expect from the series the first time around, so it took me a game to adjust to it.
Some things are already throwing me. I forgot that the first time we heard “Simple and Clean” was as a dance remix. I’m glad they toned it down later because it grew on me way more than I thought it would. By the time I got to Dream Drop Distance, hearing it as an orchestral theme in the intro made me really happy.
The enemy count isn’t as egregious as I thought it was, and the combat is unpolished but not completely lacking. The camera is pretty bad, but not enough that it breaks the game. I also didn’t think about how much I liked the road trip aspect of the original – it’s a much simpler story, but it’s been a long time since the series was just three friends on an adventure of discovery. I’m excited for Kingdom Hearts III to finally reunite us with a CPU-controlled Donald and Goofy, because the series post-Birth by Sleep feels pretty lonely by comparison.
Sora also has a mom, apparently. Totally forgot about that. I can’t help but wonder if he’s had time to check in with her at any point, because if not…damn. It’s been a while.
Day Two
Yeah, I was definitely too hard on this game the first time around. Whether it was the learning curve or the simple fact that I had no idea what the series would become, something kept me from enjoying the first game to its fullest extent. Going back to this one is much easier than I anticipated, and I can happily say that I now really like all but one of the series’ entries that I’ve played.
I’m leaving off on the very beginning of Agrabah, having plowed through Wonderland, Olympus Coliseum, Deep Jungle, and the return to Traverse Town. I have to say, I feel like Wonderland gets a bad rap. A lot of people cite this as the worst non-underwater world in the game, but I really don’t see the issue. It’s a restrictive world, but to some extent all of them are. The boss isn’t super interesting but it’s not awful, and the shrinking/growing and general weirdness of the level is kind of fun.
Speaking of that boss, it killed me at least four times when I first played the game. It was really cathartic to completely flatten him on the first go this time. Maybe beating the second real boss in the whole game isn’t something to brag about, but it’s been pretty well established at this point how bad I am at video games, so I’ll take this win.
One final note: the secret cabal of Disney villains is the exact kind of cheesy ridiculousness that I love in this series. Picking them off one by one is even better. Their interactions are fun, and Maleficent as the leader is just awesome. I really need to do that Sleeping Beauty entry once and for all.
Day Three
I’ve finished Agrabah, Monstro, and Atlantica and am leaving off on the entrance to Halloweentown (my favorite world in this game and a strong contender for my favorite in the series).
I’m playing in order of enemy difficulty, so the worlds are coming in the order that the Kingdom Hearts wiki lists them, and I forgot that Halloweentown comes so late in the game. I’m more than okay with this – if I need to grind before Hollow Bastion I’d much rather it be here than in a place like Atlantica. Considering the fact that AnsemNort gave me such a hard time on my first playthrough, I might do just that.
I also didn’t think about the fact that (again if you’re playing in order of enemy difficulty) the game hits you with a double whammy of Monstro and Atlantica, two worlds that are notoriously reviled among series fans. Monstro, like Wonderland, is in my opinion not as bad as some people make it out to be. Visually, it’s pretty drab, with muted polka dots against a brownish purple base making up the majority of the level’s backdrop. However, most of its bad reputation comes from being confusing, which I don’t really believe it is to any significant extent. Yes, it’s difficult to find your way through the level if you’re only memorizing door numbers or you aren’t careful where you step, but the correct path through the infamous maze is actually sort of intuitive. Every door that you need to enter is likely the first one your attention is drawn to in each room, and no correct door is on a level below the one you enter the room through (unless you have no other choice). If you stick to upward movement and don’t stray too far from the path you’re already on (while fighting Heartless, for instance), you can make short work of Monstro without any memorization at all.
Atlantica, on the other hand, deserves its critics. The world removes your ability to dodge and block in the name of adding vertical movement, which it never uses all that well thanks to some impressively bland level design. Every room in Atlantica is more or less a wide, open bowl with a few pillars popping up from the ground. There isn’t much to explore and there aren’t many secrets to find due to its limitations, which makes the whole world feel like the developers tried their best but couldn’t figure out how to give it that extra something that it needed. Both incarnations of Ursula are also endlessly annoying bosses, and her second incarnation is just a worse version of the Chernabog fight from later on. There’s not much that redeems Atlantica.
Halloweentown and Neverland are my last two Disney worlds before Hollow Bastion, and I’d like to reiterate how surprised I am at how much I’m enjoying this. It’s not the ugly pulling of teeth that I worried it might be, although I am itching to play the sequel. If I have one complaint thus far, it’s that the overall story has gotten a little bit lost in the last few levels, but that’s understandable. The series has always had a hard time making the individual worlds’ stories meaningful to the greater whole, and the story was already so thin in this first entry that there’s not much they could have changed about it.
Day Four
I’m ridiculously proud of the fact that I just beat Kingdom Hearts without dying once. It was on easy mode, but hey.
Halloweentown is, again, my favorite world in the game. The Tim Burton aesthetic and some notes of “This is Halloween” as the soundtrack never fails to put me in the Halloween mood (which just happens to be my favorite of all moods). The characters are dressed in Halloween costumes, which is a creative way to align them with the world without going full Atlantica. Oogie Boogie is also a great villain, and the second half of his boss battle is one of my favorites in the series. There’s nothing quite like scaling a living house.
Neverland is fine. I’m not a big fan of Peter Pan or the world and characters he brings with him, but it could be worse. If nothing else, a flying pirate battle is a neat way to close out the Disney-specific worlds.
One thing I did this time around that I didn’t do the first time is collect all the torn pages for Hundred Acre Woods. I actually like this world a lot; I originally just wasn’t feeling like doing anything extra since I couldn’t get into the game at all. Appreciating things a lot more now, I decided it was worth the time to look up a wiki and really finish the game out. I used to love Winnie the Pooh as a kid, and the writing in Hundred Acre Woods was surprisingly true to the characters I knew and loved back then. It was a nice calm before the storm of the finale.
Hollow Bastion is pretty cool. Here and there you get a couple of ultra-obnoxious invisible enemies, but other than that it has some really good atmosphere. There’s the climax of the story with the Riku fight and the princesses getting their hearts back. Plus you finally get Maleficent in dragon form. Maleficent is so cool. She’s been less prevalent ever since Kingdom Hearts II, but I’m hoping she has a big role in the upcoming game.
Speaking of things that are cool, boss battles are not. I know that the Kingdom Hearts series is famous for its boss battles, and I agree that many of them are actually really good. However, I dread the final bosses 100% of the time. TerraNort is awful. Young Xehanort is awful. The dragon thing at the end of II is less awful, but still not great. And then you have the first game’s monstrosity of a fight, consisting of AnsemNort, Darkside, a resurgence of AnsemNort, and the World of Chaos, which itself has five stages – AnsemNort’s body, the artillery, the head, the main core, and AnsemNort’s body again, with three lights-out battles against some annoyingly well-camouflaged Heartless sprinkled in between. If you want, you can even add Chernabog, a battle with a giant horned creature, and a survival round onto that list, as they all take place directly before reaching the final save point. There’s no reason for any of this. It feels like the developers all had competing ideas for what the last fight should be and, instead of settling on one, crammed them together into a gauntlet of misery. It’s insanity in the purest form.
Simple and Clean is such a good song. I didn’t think so at first, but at this point I can’t fight the urge to sing along with it. Ditto the main theme that plays over the menus.
Conclusion
I had so much more fun with this game than I expected to. I figured it would be cool to return to the series’ first entry, but I’ve now reevaluated the entire stance I originally took on it. It’s dated and at times frustrating, but still highly polished for what it was trying to do.
The only real problem I still have is the worlds the game uses. Aside from Halloweentown, Traverse Town, and Hundred Acre Wood, I still didn’t fall in love with any of them, the majority were just okay, and some I just don’t like at all. I wish Neverland and Olympus Coliseum would quit returning to the games because the more I have to play through them, the more I have to think about the fact that I don’t care about them nearly as much as the series wants me to.
For fun, I think I’m going to include my rankings of each game’s worlds in the game rankings. Every world in every game is so different that it would be a shame to lump them all together. Next up is Re:Chain of Memories, and like I said before, I’m not expecting to play through most of it. We’ll see how things go.
The Rankings
- Kingdom Hearts
- Halloweentown
- Traverse Town
- Hundred Acre Wood
- The End of the World
- Hollow Bastion
- Agrabah
- Deep Jungle
- Wonderland
- Monstro
- Neverland
- Olympus Coliseum
- Destiny Islands
- Atlantica
Mister Binger 