The opening of Kingdom Hearts is still incredible

Sora's adventure begins with an ominous and terrifying nightmare

Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku's year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to examine how much the memes about Disney's seemingly complicated crossover series and Square Enix's Final Fantasy have distorted what it really is. This means that exactly where in this 25-year journey did Square Enix decide that Kingdom Hearts would be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney World and instead become a decades-long epic? And now that I've started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to address something that was confusing and maybe even scary to me as a kid: the tutorial.

Immediately following the stunning opening of Hikaru Otada's Simple and Clean, our dashing hero Sora falls into a chasm and lands on a giant stained glass platform decorated in the form of Snow White. At this point, Sora hasn't met him and won't for many hours, but he and his allies return to places similar to this many times throughout the series. This is Dive to the Heart, which is basically a physical space that symbolizes one's heart. The princesses featured on these pillars span several Disney movies, and even now, Kingdom Hearts spins its intricate web in the movies it chooses to show the player as they explore the area. Why do you see these particular princesses?

When we get into a Dive to the Heart in the Kingdom Hearts series, it seems to confirm that the appearance of these characters was not chosen at random, as it means that their hearts are sealed in some way. But we just play the role of a kid who has a terrible dream. What are we going to do about this? Nothing for now, but if we can get stronger, maybe we can fix whatever happened here.

Sora's dream is ominous and otherworldly in this space, and as a disembodied voice guides him through it, he is spoken to as if he has a great journey ahead of him and the stakes seem immense. Here, Square Enix carefully teaches everything from how to swing a gun at the menacing yet lovable Heartless bubbles to how to save your game, but the coolest thing about Kingdom Hearts' main tutorial is what it doesn't tell you.

As a child, I didn't understand the choices it asked of me, and some of them I only actually learned the consequences of while doing research for this post. At the very beginning, the player is asked to choose between a sword, a staff, and a shield. After choosing, they are forced to discard one of the two remaining tools. Kingdom Hearts doesn't tell you what this means, but under the hood, it affects Sora's base stats for the entire game, as well as the order in which skills are learned throughout the game. This is basically specifying a specialty without a name. Compared to the dudes he fights alongside, Sora is a complete jack of all trades, and he can still handle almost any challenge in Kingdom Hearts regardless of what you choose here, but what impressed me the most is not just how abstract the game gives you this role-playing element, but the sense of fear and sadness already in the game.

For most of this section, an incredibly sad arrangement of the chorus plays in the background. When I was a kid playing the game on my PS2, I thought I'd rented a Disney game that simply let me go through the movies my family grew up watching. Right from the start, I felt like the game was preparing me for something much, much darker.

Even during the brief segment where you drop Dive to heart and enter a visual of the Destiny Islands, Sora's childhood home, this haunting music plays as the three Final Fantasy characters ask you existential questions about what's important to you, what you fear, and what you hope for in life. My kids, Sora is 14, do you think she already thought of these things? Well, even if he hasn't, now he has to. Something is coming for him and he has to grow up now.

Anything truly beyond this nightmare, the fear of which manifests itself in a giant Heartless named Darkside, one of the series' most iconic bosses. It's not a challenging fight, but its giant form is definitely scarier than anything we've got. Previously seen in this nightmare, twirling your weapon of choice in your fist while bringing them onto the platform is nothing compared to the sheer acrobatics Sora will pull off in the future, but even when we defeat it, nothing we've learned so far can prevent us from being swallowed whole in the shroud of darkness.

Although what immediately follows is more in line with the childish whimsy I was expecting, this tutorial sets the stage for what Sora's journey will follow for the next 20+ years. The princesses he sees in this dream may mean nothing to him now, but when his journey is over, he realizes that they are much more than a passing invention of his subconscious. He is destined to face this darkness, even as it consumes him over and over again. Whether Square Enix knew what the darkness would look like at the time or not, Kingdom Hearts always had more going on behind the scenes than anyone could have predicted.

The closer you are to the light, the longer your shadow will be.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories: January 2027

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and Re:Coded: May 2027

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: June 2027

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance and A Fragmentary Passage: July 2027

Watch Kingdom Hearts Union χ Dark Road Unplayable Mobile Games: August 2027

Kingdom Hearts III and DLC Re:Mind: August to October 2027

The kingdom of the heart melody of memory: November 2027

What do I hope to learn about the series I love as I start watching All Of Kingdom Hearts again?

Guiding Key is a year-long Kingdom Hearts reboot, so what do we hope to learn along the way?

Let's play through Kingdom Hearts together (no, seriously)

Kingdom Hearts IV is about a year away, so what if we all played the series again?

A deleted Kingdom Hearts game returns (unofficially) with original story concepts

This should help players fill in some narrative gaps before Kingdom Hearts IV arrives

Kingdom Hearts Fortnite Knows Ball game trailer

I'm not immune to hype, especially if it gets wrapped up in Hikaru Utada's "Asylum."

Sora in Fortnite wants to know if you have any games on your phone

I wish I could save all the characters I love from crossovers

Tetsuya Nomura says that Kingdom Hearts 4 will have fewer worlds than the previous games because each of the previous games is more detailed.

A Famitsu interview reveals new information about Coco, Quadratum, and the story of the new game

Early reviews about you can see everything is stressing me out

Who was the hell in the movie Street Fighter like Kami?

How should video game ownership work in a fully digital future?

Castlevania's most iconic song should chain-whip me to death, not put me to sleep for a thousand years.