Kingdom Hearts: a love story

Back in the sixth grade, I was in the habit of creating artistic masterpieces for my school binders. They were relatively simple projects — a sheet of computer paper enameled with dozens of Google images around my name in cursive, which I would slide in between the binder and its protective plastic covering. Nevertheless, they attracted both the attention and, presumably, envy of my schoolmates.

My favorite was a sheet for my band class that I had peppered with images from my favorite video game, Square Enix’s “Kingdom Hearts.” I toted it underneath my arm in the hallways and on field trips: anywhere where it would get a bit of publicity.
Once, when I was sitting alone on the school bus admiring my handiwork, another young boy sat next to me and pointed to my pictures.

“Are those from ‘Kingdom Hearts?’” I nodded, and we started to chat and continued to chat for the next eight years. It’d be no stretch to say that young boy was my first and certainly still is my best friend and the basis of that near-decade-long friendship came from “Kingdom Hearts.” 

The game, a hybrid of characters from “Final Fantasy” and Disney, came out in 2002, though it has since become a franchise with a manga series, action figures and a multi-platform bevy of sequels, prequels and who only knows what else.

But I don’t care so much for the franchise it spawned than for that first, glorious
experience.

There was something special about it — some chord it struck whose resonance still resounds much stronger than that of other childhood memories, such as of watching “Pokémon” or playing “Yu-Gi-Oh!” When compared to my days of playing “Kingdom Hearts” or of listening to its beautiful but utterly incomprehensible theme song “Simple and Clean” by Japanese pop star Utada Hikaru, Pokémon seems outlandishly, stupidly childish.

I’ve outgrown that, I think with a smirk when I hear Pikachu references.

Not so with “Kingdom Hearts.” The game holds on to my memories with a dogmatic resilience, driving me to tears, even now, as I remember the days I spent playing as the free-spirited hero, Sora, gallivanting with sidekicks Donald and Goofy, pining away for my dainty, fire-red-headed BFF Kairi (also, my first real crush).

The source of these palpable memories may be due in part to the “Kingdom Hearts” community, which included most of my friends back in middle school. We were all fanatics: we all could sing “Simple and Clean” in pitch, we all had our own strategies for defeating certain baddies and we all had and still have certain scenes and lines of dialogue emblazoned in our memories. With middle school being one of the first places where friendships started to stick, it’d be no wonder that the source of so much of that friendship should continue to hold.

Or perhaps it’s the game itself and the way that it perfectly crossed the childhood sentiment of Disney with the much more mature, Steampunk swashbucklers of “Final Fantasy.” Kids like me caught in the years when childhood began to erode away to the teenage years could take solace in “Kingdom Hearts,” where the two stages coalesced. We didn’t have to settle for campy G-rated flicks, nor did we have to take the maturity that games like “Halo” were offering. We had Sora and Kairi. We had our Keyblade. It’s everything we could have wanted.

Today, just one day after my own birthday, “Kingdom Hearts” will turn 11 years old. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve been growing up like this these past 10 years, inseparable save for a single day. Like the shadow of my childhood, incredibly near yet impossibly far, “Kingdom Hearts” continues to tag behind me: an echo of bygone days, a remembrance of things past but not forgotten, spent but never wasted.