Twenty years ago on March 28th, 2002, Kingdom Hearts came out in Japan. On December 25th, 2003, I put the disk into my PlayStation 2 for the first time, wondering what I would discover about this strange little game that I had only picked up because I happened to catch the end commercial on television. 

If you know me, you know that I kind of like Kingdom Hearts. Just a tiny bit. I've probably brought it up as a joke, or as a thing that I will lovingly insult because, you have to admit, it's a silly as hell concept. The story is that a Squaresoft employee and a Disney employee happened to share an elevator and were like "What if we merged Final Fantasy and Mickey Mouse?"

But well. I love this silly little franchise. 

I wish I could truly pinpoint the moment when I realized that this game was going to be a major part of my DNA.  For more than 18 years, I have been making jokes about "Good MORNING your MAJESTY" from Donald's introduction in Kingdom Hearts. I wrote a paper in high school about the technical difficulties of the 1000 Heartless Battle in KH2 and how the director's team was so inspired by him, they were like "fuck it, we'll do it live!" I wrote a paper in COLLEGE about how friendships can keep you from falling in despair, looking at the story arc of Riku and Sora in KH1.

The Kingdom Hearts soundtrack was the first thing I ever saved up money to buy when I was 12. I learned to play Simple and Clean (Orchestra) on my clarinet. I've made lifelong friends because I happened to think Sora was cooler than Riku (even though everyone said ~Riku~ was cooler). There is a pretty damn permanent reminder about my love of Kingdom Hearts on my back. I can recite the entirety of the second Riku fight cutscene in KH1 from memory. And I'm barely scratching the surface.

At 12 years old, I was the perfect age for this game - young enough to think the Disney characters were still cool, but old enough that I didn't need my parents help to play it. And something about the first game was weirdly so grown up but also right on my level. The protagonist was 14 (which, at 12, was SO old), and he went through some incredibly different things (like his world blowing up), and his friends vanished, leaving him having to navigate alone through the world without them (which was something I related to when I moved  a few years later). But he did everything with a smile and a positive attitude, which is something I try to remind myself to this day.

Is this franchise ridiculous? Of course. There's no way you can have a small anime boy running along side Jeff Bridges and your franchise not look silly. There's a scene in the game titled Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Fragmented Passage (which was the 9th entry in the series, despite the name), where they had to explain why Mickey Mouse had a shirt in the prequel game Birth By Sleep but not in original game!! (It's very dumb, but essentially, Disney was worried that Kingdom Hearts would be too silly, and they didn't want to taint their iconic character by giving him a stupid little outfit, which he now has.)

Just a few things that make this game deserve the ridicule:

• Goofy's apparent death for a whole five minutes and then reappears like "haha! I'm all good!" and it's never mentioned again.
• Characters eat a metric fuck ton of Sea Salt Ice Cream because the director had it ONCE at Disney Sea and was like "this will become a plot point for multiple games."
• There are over 10 games in the series and if you don't play them all, Kingdom Hearts 3 doesn't fully make sense! That includes the mobile game.
• "Sora! It's Sephiroth!! -- Donald Duck

If I mentioned everything, this newsletter would be 800 years long. But I completely understand that this series is always made fun of, and often agree. Square Enix exploits this cash cow almost as much as the Final Fantasy VII franchise (when are y'all getting the FFVII Remake Part 2?). The characters are silly. The situations at times make no sense. At one point, there were at least EIGHT GAMING SYSTEMS you needed to buy if you wanted to play all the games at the time of their release!  It rarely makes sense plot wise (as BDG has attempted to analyze); the Disney Worlds have truly been detached from the actual meat and potatoes of the story; literally all the villains are Xehanort and half of the heroes are Sora; to nort is a verb that makes perfect sense to us.

And yet.

I'm not sure I can fully express just how much this series means to me. Simple and Clean makes nostalgic when I hear it. This series maybe silly, but it's filled with such joy and positivity. And hey, I got to smack the shit out of Disney Villains I hated when I was a kid, and now, I get to smack them in higher definition! 

When I restart the game, my cynicism disappears and I just am able to relish in the joy of the game. To be honest, I'm not sure who I would be if I had never played this series, especially since it led me to playing more video games, which got me into film, etc etc. 

So to end this long, rambling newsletter, if there's something that you've loved for years and haven't thought about it in a while, why not pick it up? Whether it's a game, a movie, an instrument - see if it brings you the joy that it did when you first picked it up.

This is very cheesy, but I also wanted to thank you all for reading this silly little newsletter. We're at the sixth month mark, and I truly didn't think I would make it past the second week. :) You're all great.

Onto links. And because it's my newsletter I'm going to keep them KH related

• A two minute video about why no one should play this game, staring with one of the game's best quotes "That was undeniable proof that we totally owned you lamers."
   
• There's a YouTuber who mainly does KH content which I find hilarious. Some are deep and introspective, such as the video he did discussing the importance of the Disney Worlds on the plot... and some are dumb, like what if the crocodile from Peter Pan ate Sora in KH1?
   
• There's a whole genre of people trying to understand these games, but I'll just send the "So This Is Basically" video and "A Good Enough Summary" because they make me laugh a lot.