“I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately… Like, is any of this for real, or not?”

It is this line that starts off the first game of Disney and Square Enix hit game series, “Kingdom Hearts”.


In the game, you play as Sora (Haley Joel Osment), a 14-year-old boy. The story begins on Destiny Islands as Sora begins to experience strange dreams and feelings. You soon meet his two best friends, Riku (David Gallagher) and Kairi (Hayden Pannetiere). A storm blows through Destiny Islands and Sora finds himself in Traverse Town, an unfamiliar world to him. He meets up with Donald Duck (Tony Anselmo) and Goofy Goof (Bill Farmer) and the threesome venture through worlds in search of Riku, Kairi, and King Mickey (Wayne Allwine).

Like in most video games, there are enemies. In this case, we have little creatures called Heartless—well, not all of them are little. Also, we have Maleficent (Susan Blakeslee), who controls the Heartless, and Ansem (Billy Zane), who we soon learn has a secret (I am anti-spoiler…to an extent). But, how do our heroic threesome attack and destroy the Heartless? With Sora’s Keyblade, of course! He received it when the storm came, just before Sora was blown off the island.

Here are some minor details about this game (not gameplay). The man behind the game is Tetsuya Nomura, who is a great man from Japan. Most of the musical score is done by Yoko Shimumora. Utada Hikaru sings the opening and closing theme, “Simple and Clean” (“Hikari” in Japanese.) The game was released on March 28, 2002 in Japan and on September 27, 2002 in North America. This game is for the Play Station 2 platform only.

In my opinion… this game is amazing. Though the graphics are slightly below par (though we must forgive them, this was 2002 for goodness sake), the catchy storyline, lovable characters, and memorable worlds make up for it! Plus, it was a beautiful start to a so-far very successful game series. Obviously, my favorite character is Sora. My favorite world in this game is probably Destiny Islands (by “this game” I mean in the series… it changes depending on which game from the series I’m talking about.), even though you only play on it for a short time at the very beginning. I would recommend this game to everyone because I love it so much!

“I’ll come back to you… I promise!”

“I know you will!”

These words, this short conversation…ends the game. How? Guess you’ll have to play the game to find out!