Going Back To Kingdom Hearts’ Tarzan Level Is About To Make Me Crash Out

All right, we’re one month into Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts replay, and that means it’s time for our one-month check-in! For years I’ve heard people say that the first Kingdom Hearts has aged poorly and you should just skip it. “Nonsense,” I thought. There wasn’t a chance in hell that I would skip the original adventures of Sora, Donald, and Goofy. That game is so special to me, surely my love for some of its iconic moments would give me the nudge I needed to overcome Square Enix’s nearly 25-year-old jank and awkwardness, right? I’m not so sure anymore, folks. Admittedly, I’ve been having trouble getting through Kingdom Hearts due to various unrelated circumstances (I moved apartments this month and also BioWare was shut down so I’ve been very busy in my daily duties here at Kotaku), but also, every time I’ve opened the game I’ve been met with some crazy flimsiness that I guess I just didn’t know enough at the time to recognize as the serious flaws they are. Kingdom Hearts wants to be a lot of things, and it’s certainly pretty ambitious for a 2002 PS2 game. But Square wasn’t one to play it safe, so that would’ve been par for the course. It’s an action game, an RPG, a space flight combat sim, and, perhaps most regrettably, a platformer. Sora’s notoriously floaty jump has been the bane of my existence in this replay. Trying to get this boy’s big-ass shoes to land where I want them to has been particularly difficult in its finicky recreations of Disney worlds, and nothing quite captures that like the Tarzan world called Deep Jungle. Sora and friends move through this world by jumping, swinging, and even grinding on the jungle’s various plants and platforms. In many platformers, the challenges are made less frustrating by the fact that you’re offered an immediate redo when you fall from your intended path. Deep Jungle, however, has layers to its map such that, if you fall from one, you’ll go down to the other, which means that every time you fall from a vine or miss a landing, you’re falling down to another level, and getting back up to where you were is tedious as all shit. Here’s a clip from friend of the site Jesse Vitelli that illustrates it all pretty well. In general, movement has been one of my biggest issues with this game during my replay. Like yeah, it’s dated, but the PS2 era had a lot of really tight and snappy action games. In Kingdom Hearts, however, Sora’s floatiness makes any jump feel like a risk, which frustrated me to the degree that at one point I had to put my Switch 2 down and go play Overwatch to be mad at something else. On a more positive side, what has stuck out to me in these early worlds is just how much Square Enix was clearly allowed to play with the Disney source material in cool ways, even though they definitely feel smaller than I remembered them being. Wonderland is dramatically smaller than I recalled, which isn’t too much of a bummer because it doesn’t move me as much as the other two early Disney worlds. Despite my grievances with the running and jumping of it all, Deep Jungle, with its portrayal of Tarzan villain Clayton as basically Just a Guy controlling Heartless is one of the earliest moments of Square Enix’s dark fantasy perfectly blending into a Disney world when one might think them entirely incongruous. © Square Enix The standout in this early batch of Disney worlds, however, is far and away the Olympus Coliseum. What it lacks in scope, it makes up for in being one of the most intriguing marriages of Disney and Final Fantasy that Square pulls off early on. Though there are literally only three “rooms” in this world, Square does a lot with the Hercules setting with very little. What could easily have been just a glorified stage for challenges and boss fights instead sets up some of the most intriguing crossovers in the game. Cloud Strife, the brooding hero of Final Fantasy VII, is also here to take part in Phil’s games, specifically to kill Hercules on behalf of Hades. As a result, you have to fight him, and he is one of the toughest fights in the game thus far. His bandaged Buster Sword, swift strikes, and superior mobility had me on my toes the entire time. Donald and Goofy were practically dead weight as they were quickly taken out, but I finally beat him with no potions left in my pocket. The fight against Cerberus was definitely more predictable, but it lived up to Cloud’s. Overall, Kingdom Hearts has been more fun to dissect than to actually replay, which is in keeping with what I’ve heard people say who’d gone back to it more recently than I had. By god, I hope the earnestness can carry me through because this clunky-ass shit is grating. But enough about me, let’s check in with y’all! From what [the developers have] said recently, this is kind of the case, that [early Final Fantasy cameos in the series] were pretty much placeholders or something to that effect. I do think it’s a bit overstated how much of a crossover it is between Disney and FF when in reality it’s Disney through an SE lens with some FF cameos (even since the first game, there hasn’t been a single FF world and Disney characters vastly outnumbered FF characters)… BUT FF (or other SE cameos like TWEWY) have been fun and I miss them. They don’t need to be as central as the Traverse Town gang in KHI but they could still make a cameo. — Enfy, on the nature of Final Fantasy cameos in Kingdom Hearts. But they were more than a cameo. I understand they didn’t directly affect the story, but they did help to give that game its uniqueness and added the fantasy feeling of the game. Once they took out the Sephiroth fight in part 3 and just made it into Disney advertising, that’s when I quit. […] Tell me a single original boss fight in KH3 that was better than fighting Sephiroth. We need Final Fantasy back in the series. — shin dean, advocating for a return to Final Fantasy characters Hey now. The Gullwings are great. — Amethyst, regarding the Final Fantasy X-2 characters as they appear in Kingdom Hearts II. This will likely be its own blog when we get to Kingdom Hearts II, but I genuinely couldn’t stand what they did to Yuna, Rikku, and Paine in that game by turning them into tiny pixies instead of letting them appear alongside the other Final Fantasy characters. Yuna, in particular, is my favorite character in all of Final Fantasy so that stung. But I won’t go too deep into that here. We’re not even at that game yet! — KS The segments just took too long, in my opinion. If Kingdom Hearts were made today, I can almost guarantee there’d be an option to skip the Gummi Ship sections entirely. They’d be relegated to more of an optional side thing that you aren’t forced to do. — StealthMantis on Kingdom Hearts’ Gummi Ship segments Why is everyone building their gummi ship to look symmetrical? I’m proud that I made my ship look like hieroglyphs on acid. — shin dean on custom Gummi Ship designs In college I visited a friend whose roommate was playing the first game and was on a ship level – that ship was my intro to kingdom hearts and probably why I’ve never played a single game in the series thus far! — Jeffrey Gilbert on the Gummi Ship segments My enjoyment of these segments went up when I realised that I could just make a giant ship with a colossal HP pool and just Kool-Aid Man through it all. — Joesph Lillo on Gummi Ship segments I spent hours building Gummi ships bc I enjoyed the builder. I tested most of those ships. The actual on-rails stuff was fine but I can see how it would be an annoyance to anyone that it doesn’t vibe with. — Steve Jones on Gummi Ship building Back in the day I really enjoyed building Gummi ships. In my recent playthrough I kind of just couldn’t be bothered to do anything with building ships other than slapping whatever weapons and engines were strongest on there and yeah it’s definitely very boring. The only real value is the lego spaceship building. I know I’m getting ahead of myself but every aspect of it was an improvement in 2. Better building, more vibrant and dynamic levels, and even more skippable than the original if you weren’t a fan. In the 3rd game, ship design was arguably even better, but I felt like the open world didn’t have anywhere near the personality of the routes in 2 (and then was a big slog if you didn’t want to bother). In my recent playthrough of 1 I was reminded of the ability of the ships to transform and it’s a shame it never came back because that was the game that needed it least. — Envy on Gummi Ship segments They were also pointless in the fact that I believe you can just hold X to shoot straight and never actually have to move or aim, and you’ll get through the levels to the next world just fine, with enough health to survive. — Bobman32x on Gummi Ship segments I liked it. I built all sorts of ships. It was fun for me. Kinda wish I was smarter and transferred that fondness to real-world aircraft building. — Jason Douglas on Gummi Ships Yes. It’s dumb, mindless, and one of the biggest eyesores on the system. — Batista Thumbs Up on Gummi Ship Follow along with Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts replay: Kingdom Hearts: October-December 2026 Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories: January 2027 Kingdom Hearts II: February-April 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 A watch through of the unplayable mobile games Kingdom Hearts Union χ Dark Road: August 2027 Kingdom Hearts III and the Re:Mind DLC: August-October 2027 Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory: November 2027 Kingdom Hearts IV: Late 2027