A couple of posts back in Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts replay book club, I said that Kingdom Hearts was my first foray into Final Fantasy. I was young enough at the time that I didn’t even realize this series was meant to be a crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy until I opened up Jiminy Cricket’s journal and saw those characters listed as having originated from an RPG series I only really knew from the Final Fantasy X commercial that would play on the TV sometimes. Now that I’m an adult and have played a great deal of Final Fantasy games, it’s fascinating watching Kingdom Hearts’ opening hours with full knowledge of who these characters are as they interact with Donald, Goofy, and of course our hero Sora, who exists in between Disney’s light-hearted, family friendly vibes and Final Fantasy’s emotional highs and lows.
The opening segments set in Sora’s home on Destiny Islands and in Traverse Town, the place that has essentially become a safe haven for people whose worlds are disappearing, probably best reflect what Final Fantasy fans were hoping the series would be in terms of its crossover potential. Sora is a childhood friend of Tidus and Wakka from Final Fantasy X, as well as Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII, and they’re all aged down by at least half a decade, I’d estimate. They fight with playground-approved versions of their weapons from their original games, with Tidus wielding a bokken training sword instead of an actual blade and Selphie swinging around a jump rope in place of her usual nunchucks.
Broadly speaking, this trio doesn’t get a ton of screentime in Kingdom Hearts, but they don’t really read as direct adaptations of the Final Fantasy characters they’re based on. Obviously their backstories seem to be different, as there’s no mention of FFX’s world of Spira in Kingdom Hearts, and Wakka doesn’t spout bigoted nonsense to anyone who will listen, but seeing them here on Destiny Islands does give you the impression that Final Fantasy will at least hold equal footing alongside Disney, and that is further brought home when Sora ends up in Traverse Town.
Man, being in Traverse Town feels like getting hit in the face with a nostalgic blitzball. The music here blends a cheery, adventurous melody played on what sounds like an alto saxophone with something somber, as if to say yes, Sora is meeting new people and learning so much, but his young heart still aches to return home to Destiny Islands with his friends. But for now, he’s got new friends. The meetup with Donald and Goofy is genuinely funny in a way that makes me wonder if Disney was super hands-on with how Kingdom Hearts portrayed those two. The meeting that’s most interesting to me this time around, however, is the introduction of Squall (or Leon, as they call him in Kingdom Hearts) from FFVIII, alongside Yuffie and Aerith from FFVII.
Unlike Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie, these folks are mostly untouched from their original game versions. Yuffie somehow manages to still feel like herself, despite being swapped in for FFX’s Rikku during development. Cid Highwind, the world’s oldest 32-year-old, is also here, but he notably doesn’t have a voice actor this time around and is the only FF character to speak in text bubbles. But even in those unspoken pieces of dialogue, you get the sense that he’s still the grumpy old man we know and love, just without all the chain-smoking and swearing. This is a Disney game, after all.
Before I played any of the Final Fantasy games these guys came from, I didn’t think much of any of them, but now, I’m much more aware of how Square played pretty fast and loose across the series with these characters who are, ostensibly, from the same place. The Final Fantasy VII characters are all pretty consistent, but Selphie is a child compared to Leon, who seems about where we left him in Final Fantasy VIII. Don’t even get me started on the Final Fantasy X and X-2 characters or we’ll have to start diving into Kingdom Hearts II’s greatest sin, one that I still hold a grudge over to this day. If you were a Final Fantasy fan before you were a Kingdom Hearts player, I’d love to hear your initial reactions to some of the choices Square Enix made in how it portrayed Final Fantasy characters.
For now, as we move through these games, these early Final Fantasy introductions stick out to me because, as time has gone on, Final Fantasy has taken a major backseat in Kingdom Hearts’ crossover worlds, almost as if they were getting in the way of what Square Enix really wanted to do. To some extent, the Disney stuff has also felt less important in the long run, as Kingdom Hearts’ own storylines have come into their own, but never to the extent Final Fantasy has. Famously, Kingdom Hearts III’s base game didn’t feature any Final Fantasy characters, and it wasn’t until the Re:Mind DLC that we even saw some of the series regulars. There were so many new characters entering the Final Fantasy pantheon that I can’t believe Lightning or Noctis didn’t show up in Kingdom Hearts III. Kingdom Hearts IV is reportedly focusing on fewer worlds but with larger scale, so I wonder if we might see any of the more recent Final Fantasy heroes show up next year.
For now, let’s savor our time with the Final Fantasy characters when we get it.
Except for the fucking Gullwings.
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