Kingdom Hearts

aka: KH, Wangguo zhi Xin
Moby ID: 7341
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Description official descriptions

Sora's world is shattered when a violent storm hits his home, and he is separated from his two closest friends. The storm scatters the three to unknown worlds. At the same time, there is turmoil in the Disney Castle. King Mickey is missing, and Court Wizard Donald and Captain Goofy are out to find him. On their travels they meet Sora, on his own search for his lost friends. The three are told of ominous creatures called Heartless, being without hearts derived from an unknown dimension and are the ones responsible for the devastating storm.

The Disney villains, enticed by the power of darkness, manipulate the Darkness to help them gather the princesses of heart, who are needed to open a mysterious final door. Upon discovering the link between the Heartless, the storm, and the disappearance of King Mickey, Sora, Donald, and Goofy join forces and help familiar Disney heroes to save their worlds from the Heartless.

In Kingdom Hearts players step into the very large shoes of Sora, wielder of the keyblade. Sora can attack with the blade, and as he levels up he will gain more attacks that are automatically chained together. Sora can learn magic and put healing items into a quick menu, and both can only be used in real time. Donald and Goofy (as well as an additional character exclusive to each world/disney movie) will follow Sora. Their equipment and AI can be adjusted, but they can not be directly controlled. Defeated enemies will drop many kinds of items including synthesis materials. Sora can take these to the Synthesis shop in Twilight Town to turn them into usable items, accessories, and weapons.

Traveling between each world requires Sora's party to fly through space in a Gummi Ship. The Gummi Ship can be completely customized, from speed and armor to weapons and shape, out of parts picked up from destroyed Gummi Ships, found in worlds, or bought from a store. Larger, more complex ships can be built as the game progresses, and plans can be found from destroyed enemies or from an NPC that will automatically build a Gummi Ship of specific specifications.

Spellings

  • キングダムハーツ - Japanese spelling
  • 王国之心 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 王國之心 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

555 People (485 developers, 70 thanks) · View all

Theme Song (Simple and Clean)
Cast (Japanese)
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 40 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 145 ratings with 14 reviews)

It's all about the adventure!

The Good
Visiting Disney Worlds and interacting with the characters who live there is very entertaining.

The real-time combat is a lot of fun and often very challenging.

Visuals are nice and colorful. Enough variation to keep you interested.

The bits of Final Fantasy spread throughout the game are fun to keep an eye out for.

Lots of exploration to be done and secrets to be found.

The Bad
The exposition and overarching story can be embarrassingly poor at times.

Flying to each level is very repetitive and dull.

I recommend grinding as much as you can, or else you will get really stuck on some parts.

The pacing could really have been better.

The Bottom Line
In Kingdom Hearts the player takes on the role of Sora, a young boy who spends his days playing on an island with his friends Riku and Kairi. They do typical kid stuff, like play-fighting and racing, but their true wish is to build a raft and explore what lies beyond the horizon. This wish is partly granted when the island is attacked by shadows and Sora is teleported to a city he has never seen. As it turns out, an evil force known as "The Heartless" has been invading worlds and making them vanish, just like what happened to Sora's island. Furthermore, a mystical weapon known as the "The keyblade" has chosen Sora as its master and thus he teams up with Donald and Goofy to try and stop the world-vanishing shenanigans of The Heartless and their masters.

As everybody probably knows by know, these worlds are all themed after famous Disney movies, with the exclusion of some later stages and Traverse Town, which serves as a shopping district. These worlds are the game's biggest selling points, as they have the player meddle in the affairs of well-known Disney characters and thus become part of their stories. It's very entertaining to do stuff like training with Hercules or proving Alice's innocence before the unfair rule of the Queen of Hearts. The progression of each stage is also designed to give the game an adventurous and varied feel, often relying on having the player explore areas in order to progress.

There is an overarching plot where famous Disney villains, acting in service of Maleficant, are trying to capture the princesses. This may seem like juvenile villainy, but instead of locking them up in a tower, they wish to use their hearths to open a way into a vaguely explained paradise that is said to grant wishes. This overall plot is alright for the most part, but it gets very cheesy in later stages, when words like "heart(s)" and "destiny" become more common than commas. Most people also played this game at a young age and, like me at the time, didn't really give two fucks about all that shit. Since this game is a cross-over between Disney and Squaresoft, I naturally expected some Final Fantasy influences, but please keep that stuff limited to side-plots, will ya?

Gameplay is also somewhat of a mixed bag. It's really fun and challenging when you're fighting bosses, but when casually exploring levels or grinding, you start to notice how unpolished it is. Sora can attack enemies with his keyblade by hammering the X-button, but the trick is that, in true Final Fantasy fashion, you have to select your spells, items and abilities from a menu. Since the game is real-time, this means that you have to stop attacking in order to navigate the menu via the arrows or right analog stick. If the right analog stick has to serve menu-duty, then that means camera controls are bound to the shoulder-buttons, leaving you at the mercy of an auto-target function with a serious grudge against crates and barrels.

That's not even the worst part; the AI for Goofy and Donald is very poor and usually only serves to get in the way. I've lost count of how many times Donald wasted all his mana casting the useless Gravira spell on every enemy on the field, or how often Goofy would die by pursuing a single flying enemy while ground-based Heartless pummeled him mercilessly. Even when taking matters in my own hand, I often noticed the two would cheekily knock an enemy out of my combo or block my view while playing charades with the White Mushroom enemy.

Furthermore, enemies are usually designed to be as obnoxious as possible. One very common trick a lot of them pull is vanishing whenever they want and reappearing somewhere else. This often comes with a brief moment of invincibility, which often caused me to swing at the air before taking an undodgable hit right into the face. Other filthy tricks include jumping around, flying too high for me to see or constantly creating distance while preparing charge-attacks. It's a shame, because the visual design on enemies is very creative and varied, with lots of cute creatures to face off against.

Visual design as a whole is a very strong point. The graphics look nice, characters are modeled very well, there is plenty of color and the level-design is, once again, very good. The music also brilliantly matches the style and feel of each world and it always changes into something more exciting when combat starts, which is a nice inclusion. Facial animations on side-characters is, perhaps, the only visual flaw I could point out.

Of all the Kingdom Hearts games out there nowadays, I think this one would be the best to start and stick with. It's the only title in the now long-running franchise which actually succeeded in marrying the two cooperating studios in a happy marriage, whereas later entries would reveal the dominating nature of Square (Enix). The story may sometimes be cheesy and the gameplay is not very refined, but fans of Disney will love it and the exploration-heavy stages are going to make a lot of veteran gamers very happy.

PlayStation 2 · by Asinine (957) · 2013

And to think, I thought it would be stupid......

The Good
At first, the idea of a disney game with a squaresoft type touch seemed incredibly stupid to me, but after I played this game, I figured out my mistakes.

The graphics are nothing to laugh at. This solid RPG offers enough eye candy to play for hours. I probably could play this game over and over. The characters look amazing, as does the hero. All objects and worlds are created excellently, and the game manages to have a great gfx touch along with a cartoony disney touch.

Playing the game is a breeze. While the camera can get disturbing sometimes, this can be easily overcome using the lock on feature. The game was fast, and barely had any slowing down on my system.

The sound and music is also okay.

The Bad
The only thing I despised about this game was the key thing that you had to use for a weapon. I hated it, but since its a disney game, and they couldn't go off with machine guns, Ill let it pass.

The Bottom Line
I give this game a complete <<<<< 5 out of 5 >>>>>

PlayStation 2 · by ThE oNe (180) · 2002

An epic crossover

The Good
Kingdom Hearts was one of the first "epic" games I ever got to play. It's high production values, interesting (if confusing) storyline, and gameplay really stood out to me. As one of the first PS2 games I ever got, it was the first game I played on the system that strongly convinced me that upgrading from the PS1 to the 2 was the correct decision.

I was, and will always be, a fan of Disney. I loved most of their movies, and would spend hours as a kid watching the shorts with Mickey and his friends, including my favorite, Donald Duck. When I saw there was a game that allowed you to fight with and against many of the iconic Disney characters, I was skeptical, but I went ahead and bought it anyway. What followed was one of the strongest memories I had for the PS2.

The storyline involved an anime-ish character named Sora travelling through different worlds with Goofy and Donald in an attempt to find his own friends and return back to his own world. Incidentally, Goofy and Donald are looking to find Mickey, who oddly enough is never seen for the entirety of the game. Weird, huh?

Each world played out like a mini story in and of themselves. Some of the worlds, such as Traverse Town, were created exclusively for the purposes of the game, but most were based on Disney films. The stories in each world loosely followed the plots of the films they were based on, and allowed the player to interact with the various characters they had only previously seen on film. One world, Atlantica, based on " The Little Mermaid" has Sora transformed into a human-dolphin hybrid, which offered an interesting twist on the gameplay by forcing the player to swim around instead of jump on platforms.

The gameplay plays out like an action platform game with RPG elements. Yes, most of the time you will be mindlessly mashing the X button, but the addition of magic and items, along with the verticality of the levels, makes for an interesting and fun style of gameplay. In addition, there are also on-rails shooting levels in the style of "Starfox" or "Iridion 3D" where the goal is to shoot your way to the end while avoiding obstacles. The game gives you the option of building something called a "Gummi Ship" by using a needlessly complicated interface to do so. Thankfully, you will only need to play through the shooting sections once for each new world that you come across, as purchasing a key part for the Gummi Ship will allow you to warp across worlds you've already been to.

The graphics are outstanding. The characters resemble their animated counterparts so closely that somethime's you'll swear you are watching a Disney animated movie instead of a game cutscene. The framerate stays pretty consistent throughout, and the battle sequences and backgrounds offer plenty of eyecandy to gawk at. Simply put, one of the best looking games on the system.

The sound is great too. You'll hear classic Disney tunes as well as fully orchestrated original music, which complements the familiar stuff well. There's even a pop song with lyrics sung by Japanese singer Utada Hikaru, that's quite difficult to get out of your head. Sometimes the music can be a little "MIDI"-ish in some spots, but overall, it's quite well done.

As a story driven game, the voice acting here also deserves mention. The voices for the Disney characters sound exactly like their original voices. I bet more than a few of them ARE the original voices. As for the non-Disney ones, they picked a surprisingly recognizable cast there as well. Haley Joel Osmont voices the main character Sora, while Hayden Panetierre voices Kairi, and David Gallagher voices Riku. Other popular voices, such as Mandy Moore, Christy Carlson Romano, and Lance Bass, also put in appearances as characters from the developer's other key series, Final Fantasy, that were thrown into the mix as well. Their harsher, Teen-rated edges have been toned down slightly for this particular release, however.

The Bad
While the graphics are stunning, there was one major problem I had with them, one that's bitterly ironic given the theme of the game: They're too dark! There were at least a couple of instances where I literally couldn't see anything BUT Sora and lost my way as a result of the visuals being too dark. I was stuck for at least a couple days on the storm sequence because I couldn't see where I was supposed to go very clearly. That was especially painful because I would have to play from the very beginning of the game due to the lack of save points until past the storm. Getting to Merlin's house was pure torture because I couldn't see the rocks that you were supposed to jump on to get there. Brightening the tv did help, but I wish the developers brightened the darker areas of this game up a little more so that such adjustments wouldn't be necessary.

The cutscenes were not skippable. Although it makes sense as a more story-driven game to force the player to watch the cutscenes, some of them were very long and led to difficult boss fights thereafter, especially near the end of the game. I nearly gave up fighting Riku in Hollow Bastion because the cutscene before hand was about five minutes long and I would keep dying soon after. This would thankfully be rectified in the second game.

Finally, my biggest complaint for the game: It's too hard. it took me five years to beat this game because I gave up at a certain, overly frustrating boss fight near the end of the game. Only after having a friend finish it for me was I able to continue and defeat the final boss. Just about every boss in this game was hard in some way, so only dedicated gamers need apply. Casual fans of Disney and videogames will absolutely struggle to get through this one.

The Bottom Line
This is, to me, the best game in the Kingdom Hearts series to date. Subsequent games would tone down the difficulty of gameplay while ramping up the difficulty of following their storylines. Some of them, like the disappointing "Chain of Memories", would even change the gameplay entirely. But this is the one to play, if you must play any KH game at all. It is an epic, visually stunning journey, through a surprising universe you thought you would never see, and most ages can come along for the ride, which is always a plus in my book. A real PS2 gem.

PlayStation 2 · by krisko6 (814) · 2011

[ View all 14 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Kingdom Hearts appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Characters

Aside from Disney characters that are not surprise to encounter, you will also encounter several other characters from SquareSoft other games, such as Squall (main protagonist from Final Fantasy VIII), Selphie (a party character from Final Fantasy VIII), Tidus (main protagonist from Final Fantasy X), Wakka (party character from Final Fantasy X), Aerith (from Final Fantasy VII), Cloud (main protagonist of Final Fantasy VII), Sephiroth (nemesis in Final Fantasy VII), and other.

Contest

The secret boss Kurt Zisa in the US version is named after the winner of a contest held by Squaresoft to promote the game.

Theme song

The theme song, Simple and Clean (English) and Hikari meaning "light" (Japanese version), is written and performed by Japan's pop artist Utada Hikaru. After the release of the game's original Japanese version, Hikari was released separately and, according to IGN, sold about 860.000 copies.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2002 – Best Use of License of the Year (PS2)

Information also contributed by monkeyislandgirl and Sciere

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by vism.

Additional contributors: MAT, Unicorn Lynx, Apogee IV, Guy Chapman, monkeyislandgirl, Solid Flamingo, DreinIX, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added October 2, 2002. Last modified January 16, 2024.