First off, let me clear up any confusion form the title, I liked Kingdom Hearts, it was an awesome game, this is not about hating Kingdom Hearts, it's about loving it, but also taking a step back, looking at it objectively and admitting that this should've been pure garbage but they made it good in spite of the fact that it could have sucked. It is literally greater than the sum of it's parts: You have a good beginning for a Final Fantasy game, a good ending to go with it, and in between, the plot is padded with Disney movies. Not counting the Heartless, there are only four original characters in the original game around which the entire game revolves and the rest is just Disney and recycled Final Fantasy. If you knew nothing else about the game besides these basic elements, would you actually believe this was a good game or would you think it was a cheap gimmick to market two successful franchises and crossover the fanbase? When I saw the first screen grabs I thought for sure this would be doomed. I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong.
Let's start at the beginning, three of the original characters are introduced, Sora, Riku and Kairi. They live on Destiny Island, a paradise very reminiscent of Besaid Island in Final Fantasy X. If you don't get the reference right away, don't worry it will be shoved down your throat by Tidus and Wakka as well as the whole flood followed by a monster swallowing your homeworld and leaving you alone in a new world theme that is soon to follow. FFX was the last game Square had made before KH so that was their paragon at the time. Anyway, Sora is the typical anime/video game kid hero who is completely average in every way and shows no particualr special potential to be a hero or anything for that matter. Of course, his best friend and rival Riku does seem to show some potential, and that brings out a spark in Sora. Then there's Kairi who is the typical anime/video game girl who loves the hero but never says anything because she just so happy the way things are. Riku isn't as oblivious as Sora and wants to prove himself to Kairi, who of course won't be swayed because she is inexplicably in love with a guy who just thinks they are three friends hanging out and doesn't realize what the other two are up to. After the exposition explains the three characters well enough, the darkness swallows the island, Sora looks for his friends but he can onl find Riku who embraces the darkness and ecourages Sora to join him.
Next thing Sora knows he's in Traverse Town and he's holding on to a key large enough to be wielded as a sword. As he looks around this new town for his friends but only finds shadowy monsters and as he's fighting them off, Donald Duck and Goofy show up for the assist. This is where Disney takes over the controls for a while. What concerned me was thinking the kid was going to be starstruck by Disney characters, but instead, Sora is focused on finding Riku and Kairi, and Donald and Goofy are just a wizard and a knight who happen to also be an anthropomorphic duck and dog who join him because their King told them to stay with the wielder of the Keyblade. The brilliant thing that made Kingdom Hearts work is that while the player may be familiar with everything that is happening, Sora is not, he is part of the story, and every character has their role to play. To the player it is a tour of Disney, to Sora it's just an adventure that happens to go through a vast world he knows as little about as any other world Square could have thrown him in. Even the King that Donald and Goofy are looking for, throughout the game is kept a mystery, never referred to by name, but we know the Queen is Minnie Mouse and we've seen the restof the royal court, so we know it's Mickey, but they never reveal the name and only give us a silhouette until the very end when Mickey finally reveals himself. It's ridiculous because we know damn well who he is but they actually play it off as a secret, becuase despite the fact that Sora is a kid, he's a kid from world that doesn't have Mickey Mouse cartoons. They do the opposite of breaking the fourth wall, they keep it fully intact as Sora interacts with all of these characters as if they are just fellow travelers in this crazy mixed up world. Even the Heartless are an impressive element; mechanically they are just random encounters that fill the gaps between the sparse scripted battles with actual Disney villains, but why they even exist proves to be the reason the entire game's story is even happening at all. While most of the game is simply playing through Disney movies by the book, we eventually discover the truth behind what's happening when the party is swallowed by Monstro the whale between worlds and we catch up with Riku and Kairi...well, mostly Riku. Kairi is catatonic and Riku thinks he can fix her with the help of Maleficent-yes, that Maleficent, from Sleeping Beauty. If the movie didn't make you realize how bad this fairy/witch/queen can be, this game kicks her up big time. The Heartless the shadow monsters that hound you throughout the game are what happens when you remove someone's heart and leave behind the shadow. They seek to devour other hearts and create more Heartless and eventually devour the heart of the world, which can only be locked away from the Heartless by the Keyblade, which is incidentally also the only way to unlock a Heartless, meaning that while Sora can dispatch them easily enough with his Keyblade, they are an unstoppable menace to everyone else. Maleficent is trying to control these creepy little things and has taken Riku as her apprentice and he is on the verge of becoming Heartless too, except that he is accepting the darkness in such a way that he may not have a heart to remove anyway. Then they depart and our heroes go after them, leading us through the other half of the Disney worlds the game offers.
Finally, Sora, Donald, and Goofy end up in Hollow Bastion, the world where the Final Fantasy characters the party met in Traverse Town originally came from, and is also the source of the Heartless because of the King of this world, Ansem. Ansem is the fourth and final original character for the first Kingdom Hearts game. He was the King of the world once known as the Radiant Garden, but he became fascinated with darkness and sought to find it within a person's heart and his experiments yielded the Heartless which have torn apart the boundaries separating the worlds. Ansem now seeks the beginning and ending of all wordls, Kingdom Hearts, and believes the Heartless are the key. Meanhile Maleficent seems to have an alternative method for the same ends using seven princesses. The first six are quite obviously Disney princesses, including Aurora from Maleficent's Sleeping Beauty home world that we never see, Alice who was taken from Wonderland early on in the game, Jasmine who was taken from Agrabah midway, and Belle who's Beast helps Sora for most of Hollow Bastion trying tio find his love. The surprise is that the seventh princess is none other than Kairi herself, finally tying the group to the whole crazy mess. Things take a turn for the wierd as Sora has to turn the Keyblade on himself and become a Hearless himself to save Kairi, which works, but you actually have to play as a Heartless Shadow for a while and you can't fight, fortunately, the Heartless mean no harm to one of their own and since nobody has the Keybalde, anybody can hurt you, so it's just a matter fo finding your way back to the party and hope they can fix you. Kairi restoes Sora and gives him a starfruit to remind him of Destiny Island and it allows him to upgrade the Keyblade to Oathkeeper. It's actually among the last of the Keyblade upgrades, but it's the only one you actually get to see in the cutscenes, which makes it special in my opinion. Finally you go to the last stage for the final battle with Ansem, which plays out like...pretty much every final boss in every RPG, or at least all the Final Fantasy series. The ending is epic but it also leaves a cliffhanger that leads into the sequel, Kingdom Hearts II.
Since the original, the Kingdom Hearts franchise has grown and Square has become more comfortable making their own story out of it, subsequent games include more original characters and push the limits of the story farther. What makes it succeed most though is that they don't just keep adding more Disney to hide a lack of plot, they continue to develop the plot and make us more intereste in the original characters, and everybody else compliments them rather than distracting from them. Maleficent comes back as a royal badass, Final Fantasy characters go to war, the Heartless and those who would dare to call themselves their masters drag all into their conflict without distinction. Ultimately Kingdom Hearts is a seamless masterpiece sewn from seemingly random parts that somehow manage to fit together perfectly in the grand scheme of things.
Now, if only Square could put this back into their independent projects...
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