Kingdom Hearts ain't so Dumb | Beyond Pictures

when talking about kingdom hearts it's common practice to point out one of two things how it's entirely incomprehensible and how you spend it staple to goofy breaking news kh is whack okay there's no getting around what it is an insane premise that preys on the basic and terrible instincts of teenagers who think cartoons going damn is high art but i don't think enough is said seriously said for how quite a lot of it is well uh it's good like annoyingly competent where it counts and this is said without the aid of gin today i'm mostly talking about the way the kingdom hearts franchise a crossover featuring two of modern media's biggest brands has been crafted what separates it from the various other more obvious possibilities they could have gone with and in some cases have already tried yeah calling it nonsense isn't totally off base but the fact of the matter is the series now spans entire console generations is beloved by adults as much as kids has concerts and tv shows and action figures made of it goofy my boy could this success only be because it's bottom denominator trash saying why not and indulging in our desire to see things we like mash together or is it that this in spite of everything and i do mean everything works that it blends the aspects we like about the output of both companies and end up saying something meaningful about our relationship to them well yeah that's the video bro i've been incredibly guilty of apologizing to friends for liking this or pointing and laughing at how it's too bizarre to take seriously yet the older i get the more i recognize the stuff it gets right and how invested i still am with what ludicrous place it wants to take me to next i think we've memed it up enough i like kingdom hearts because when taking everything into account it's actually very smart in how it's put together it really ain't so dumb but also yes i love it because i spend it staple to goofy petition to get max into kingdom hearts bash of the ass 56 over 29 carry the five you cowards oh and uh heads up full series spoilers we've much to discuss [Music] [Applause] so [Music] disney and square are national institutions the history of what they created is incredibly important to the modern identity of their respective countries media and with a fair bit of overlap both making large-scale works harkening back to general fantasy fairytale imagery albeit in completely different time frames and mediums it's very likely that disney's innovations and already global presence in some tangential way led to square's existence though naturally there was no expectation for them to acknowledge each other on either side of the pond in the 90s disney had just come out of a downturn with their renaissance a series of movies that were considered as good as the hits of their heyday around the same time someone else was making a huge splash [Music] final fantasy 7 did phenomenally well outside of japan and to cut a long story short it banged this was the first time a lot of westerners had ever experienced an unabashed jrpg and the secret of its western success probably owed a little to its occasionally unintentional resemblance to western media it was the blockbuster video game the scope and scale of a regular final fantasy now sporting the trimmings of what looked to us like hollywood changed everything square's global identity went from being a hobbyist niche to a worldwide success and that pushed them to keep making games that raised that bar disney had also gotten into the video game business on the cheap d o g dog good job on that one they licensed many of their brands to external developers often though not always to create promotional tie-ins to the movies and shows they were releasing for a while these were very successful and gave us a lot of decent games some maybe more than decent some may be based but as time went on and the act of making sellable games on a deadline became more complicated and expensive disney pulled back on the quality and size of the products debating whether or not this was an industry worth investing in at all this is where the oft told story comes in about executives from both companies meeting in an elevator and walking away agreeing to collaborate and the marriage makes complete sense from the crossroads they were at both had been using fantasy fiction to push technological development were considered global heavyweights in terms of their back catalogue were gunning for the same broad success nintendo was enjoying and had exactly what each other needed to make it happen seriously combine those powers and the clout is maximum square offered disney the production value and know-how in the medium they lacked and disney offered its branding and showbiz assets one of the selling points in the west was the fact the project would feature then rising star haley joel osmond and while these days he puts people in mind of kurt russell by way of the build-a-bear workshop back in the day plus other high-budget boasts being made it was a sign they weren't kidding around however what we got this time wouldn't be an adaptation of a licensed property as game director tatsuya nomura would pitch something way more ambitious in kingdom hearts you play as sora a kid enjoying summer with his friends he dreams about someday going off on adventures beyond his island home a wish that proves to be a monkey's paw when mysterious creatures appear and scatter him and his pals to the farthest reaches of reality discovering people and places based on various disney movies as we roll into the sequels and prequels we follow both his journey and the journeys of other characters connected to him mostly to explain why any of this is happening but striving towards the same goal stop the bad guys find your friends and go back home yes there's a lot of extra plot mechanics on top of that as the story goes on but they don't disrupt the major motivations it's something a child can understand on their own level which is how disney has always told stories you see i feel the greatest strength of the series philosophy right off the bat is that it's built on a zeitgeist rather than a brand it would have been very easy to go with the original pitch control mickey mouse as he rides bahamut into the sun but disney's insistence that he not be the star of the project and nomura's desire to tell an original story using several disney brands led to an interesting compromise the games are after all an excuse to run around inside of your favorite disney movies but they've housed that within a narrative that best represents their collective appeal even the curveball stuff large cartoony proportions primary color schemes obvious personalities humor high adventure heightened emotions very heightened emotions real push-pull stuff that aims not for your head but for your heart there it is wrapped up in a style of gameplay that blends simple immediate action with more intricate nuances that once mastered things get fest the plot features the usual archetypes things we recognize from conventional disney stories only now apply to icons that represent their audience the kids who grew up on those movies who are now playing video games like final fantasy and there's certainly overlaps with the elements commonly found in the ff franchise that are ripe for a disney decor it's as if the disney brand itself manifested as a jrpg a broader style that encompasses the offshoot stories we associate with it even the name was decided on because nomura wanted to connect it to a disney theme park a kingdom where you could go to the worlds you loved as a kid kingdom hearts is a series that like the title is often more representative than it is literal it doesn't matter if you don't always understand the exact plots as long as the framing has something to say this is a thing my pal charlie got closer to than anyone else in his excellent video on why kingdom hearts 2's opening hours were so good hmm where could sora be he explained that he felt the moments of bumbling around as some random kid doing chores wondering where sora is and then realizing the entire tutorial has been set in a fake holding area represented our own experience as kids at the time it contextualizes the weight and the anticipation for the sequel kingdom hearts 2 within the game itself essentially making you wait for the game to be finished built and be put together within the opening as sora is being constructed throughout this prologue i i think it's pretty clever the real takeaway for me is that kh knows what it is a vehicle for the baggage we carry for both brands and as the years add on for the franchise 2 itself becoming nostalgic in capturing what makes both square and disney so influential it's become a series about the nature of childhood fantasies and i think you'll begin to notice how everything colors the series as such with what i feel is at its foundation some deceptively solid creative syntax yeah i bet you didn't think that'd be said here while often treated as a bunch of random nonsense kingdom hearts brings its seemingly unconnected ideas together in a vibrant style that makes a big picture point worth considering about our pasts our constant fears for the future oh i missed those good old days what i wouldn't give to go back in time about the doors we just can't keep closed worth a clap emoji and maybe a small one one of the important things kingdom hearts gets right is in its casting how it utilizes the properties at its disposal in a very disney way the disney mascots have always been treated less as fictional characters and more as actors appearing in a variety of fictional roles taking on new identities that didn't rely on any deep lore sorry i'm keeping those words away from steamboat willie it's a tradition even extending to the theme parks where you're not there to be a disney character but to hang out with the disney characters as if they're real celebrities the casting in kh likewise feels close to how we see the characters in reality translating their statuses into basic fantasy roles not too dissimilar from what final fantasy 9 was doing come to think of it the original final fantasies had types of classes you could assign to your playable characters and ff9 featured characters with personalities and roles based on the classes and cliches of games past knights and thieves and mages and you same philosophy is true in kh mickey gets to be the king minnie the queen donald and goofy his court knight and mage everyone's in a role where you're going yeah okay that checks out i don't think anyone looks at mickey and goes hey he's not a king and that's not canon for precisely this reason and also because despite what they're made to do and say it's in ways that are totally in character doesn't ruin them the same way it doesn't ruin goofy to experience empty nest syndrome or the death of his innocence the core personalities are consistent with what we've grown up with and you can accept them here and then as characters you meet and greet or working out of an ajax delivery van or making sick eurobeats [Music] this stuff applies to everyone involved in the plot the various wizards and fairies the disney villains scheming together you're watching characters from many properties get involved at whatever level is appropriate to them like yeah of course maleficent is going to be the queen of all bad guys she was designed in response to many of the villains before her and would influence many of those who followed and here much like in the parks she takes the initial role as chief villain alongside my other favorite neighbor somebody put seamen in our tailpipes as a cat of many faces over the years it only makes sense that ptax has a go-between for maleficent and the other baddies essentially creating a fun race between himself and the ajax trio brings a lot of trademark disney humor to the situation the same way donald and goofy do by nature of you know being pete i suppose the only let's down is that by the time he shows up the disney villains have disbanded so his place amongst them seems more like a crack dealer than a front man but they more than make up for this by having his involvement in the story relate to his past as a git i'm a i'm a bit of a pete fan so this is a big deal for me that's the kind of shorthand kingdom hearts is generally very good at for more than the disney guys the final fantasy characters included equally feel well cast in the games they properly show up in anyway and sometimes our knowledge of their adventures is even played with to throw us for a loop recognizing them isn't vital to understanding the storyline though they're simply along for the ride making great adverts for their respective games to anyone coming in purely as a disney fan and finding out their history after the fact only benefits the subtext they bring like using a mix of final fantasy characters from different games working together as a resistance gang it gives you a sense of many destroyed worlds united against one threat sure most of them are from ff7 which had a big resistance plot line anyway but one of them was originally meant to be this last from another game entirely which you know i feel only strengthens the point i think my favorite use of reference is vivi in ff9 he discovered he was a weapon of war and went into a full-blown existential crisis not knowing if he really existed the opening chapter of kh2 deals with the idea of a place that isn't real with a character we don't know who isn't sure who he is and vivi who shows up in that level is revealed to be a sleeper agent for the villains a fake person designed to keep tabs on our hero and a big sign that something about this isn't correct another square property gets in on this action the 3ds title dreamdrop distance had you playing as protagonist sora and riku in parallel realities forced to switch between them every so often they are guided through this gimmick by characters from the game the world ends with you a title that debuted on the ds and featured a battle system playing as two separate characters in two versions of the same space at the same time what a cowinky dink the one snafu is the complete lack of final fantasy staple gilgamesh as a secret boss as one of the few final fantasy characters who's the same guy in most of the games travelling between dimensions he's already a perfect fit shove a bunch of keyblades in his hands and put him in meet the robinson's world or whatever here context is king dumb hearts but it's not a get out of jail free card for the way some of it's executed if not uh massacred more often than not the worlds you visit in the kingdom hearts universe are simply levels based on the movies telling their stories beat for beat and every now and then we have an awkward cutback and oh look it's donald the dialogue even when translated is pretty terrible and that's probably the thing people rightly mock when getting at the series accept the power you're given find the hearts joined to yours searching for a way to conquer the darkness within me promise me mickey ain't sephiroth the one who's supposed to be the dark part of cloud's heart kyrie kyrie's inside me you'll watch a cool scene or moment from a film you liked with all the painting and emotions stripped out and replaced with floor wax constantly cutting back to reaction shots of our heroes jammed into the story ah love a dreadful born i may still have a lot to learn about love but i know what it means to share my heart with others sort of yanks you out of the moment it's a bit patronizing electronics for dogs and that's an electric drill yet this isn't always the case if i win uh i'm captain and if you win i get to share the pow poo with kyrie huh deal the winner gets to share a pow-poo with kyrie wait a minute kingdom hearts does in fact have its more subdued moments because for all the words there's a fair bit left unsaid telling you everything you need to know [Music] the appeal to emotion is a factor both companies sit on something kids are of course going to respond to more strongly but even when some of it feels trite i find a bunch of moments are genuinely well observed for all of the happy haha fun kingdom hearts captures it also gets this confused upsetting feel down the kind of abstracted sadness close to what you might get as a kid helped along by the absolutely wonderful soundtrack by yoko shimamura who capitalizes on the franchise's earnest qualities by punching way above its weight [Music] maybe the rambling dialogue is like from a kid's perspective i don't know i i have too few brains to make this reach work so i'm not gonna maybe the series does take itself all too seriously for the actual weight of its prose but this is a major benefit to carrying this crazy idea through with conviction helping that previously mentioned consistency with the characters it's handling watching people react to each other the ways we've always wanted them to and you know if you don't take it seriously i've found it's even funnier that they're playing it so by the book rather than constantly winking at the audience the comedy isn't oh my god what are they doing it's oh my god of course they do that like the peak of the series the best punchline is a moment that disney has never done and might never do but you know i feel like if it did happen this is exactly how it would go down this is not happening it can't be happening it can't they'll pay for this [Music] in terms of plotting it's most successful when it makes the worlds or history relevant to the original story finding how to justify a cool choice of disney movie within this narrative instead of repeating the film's one kh-1 tried hard to get this in where possible after sora donald and goofy meet for the first time the tarzan world becomes a way to split them up and get them fighting testing their limits and then putting them back to work as a team while traveling to another level you find yourself intercepted by monstro the whale from pinocchio having to traverse the inside of his stomach as its own labyrinthian stage in the mysterious final world hollow bastion where it transpires the disney princesses have been taken to by maleficent we discovered that the beast is also here having ripped through reality to save princess belle proving he is still the chad prince even if he uh can't read okay as good as those bits are though the sequel puts this to greater effect with the worlds and characters of those standalone movies getting more involved with the action i guess partly because you're revisiting so many as a kid i knew tron was going to be in kh2 and i was still taken aback by how it was made into a program within the game's universe a manifestation of the defense mechanisms in the hub world rather than another random planet you can travel to putting aside my opinion of the films selected specifically three is interestingly enough the one that's both the best and worst at this repeating many of the movies almost one to one to show us how far technology's come along for square but also presenting worlds with entirely new stories following on after the movies or even having events of the movie play out in the background and letting that context fuel the intrigue for some pretty intense encounters the toy story world is like the apex of what the kingdom hearts worlds can be hell even the thing would buzz struggling with his mortality i think they did a marginally better job here than in toy story 4. see even woody knows it's kino movie pics can also be used to flavour the franchise's universe when visiting mickey mouse's castle designed after the ones in the parks we travel to the distant past which is interpreted as an homage to the black and white shorts of the 1920s in all its rubbery glory the prequel birth by sleep also set in the past kicks off with three worlds based on tentpole princess movies their pastoral landscapes perfect fits for a story evoking the feeling of the kh universe at a better point in time dream drop distance set in a dreamscape picks oddball choices like prankster's paradise and fantasia chain of memories an experiment testing the series scope uses world's past and hints at what's to come set in a confusing castle of no particular layout 385 by two days is is really bad i've got nothing nice to say that flavoring applies even to the original settings they've designed created on disney fight guidelines and centering the game's individual identities if they put you in mind of disneyland it's no accident disneyland content abounds in subtleties that become more overt as the games go on and finally makes it into three as a mechanic that never gets any less fun feels like they wanted something like this from the start it's not only making a system and slapping disney motifs on top it's seeing how to best translate them into fun gameplay functions and no-brainers like final fantasy summons becoming disney characters are great opportunities to make the most of the catalogue even your transport the gummy ship is sort of like the final fantasy airship and it's this friendly primary color piece that starts out as baby's first star fox and then becomes a sick roller coaster ride yeah picking up my tickets for aladdin it was a bit disappointing and free i just wanted to float that out there that kind of detail is a big part of selling this as more than surface level advertising it's those little physical details that only fans of those movies would pay any attention to the very idea of using effects and props from those movies the eye for recreating certain spaces accurately as mentioned this can go to obnoxious levels of cinematic recreation but sometimes you take a movie you've always loved and find a really cool game mechanics been made out of it as a huge pirates fan i was flawed to discover that in three yes i could go on a mini pirate adventure sailing across islands and fighting ships the stuff i had to go to sly 3 to play because even the official pirates games wouldn't let me do it i don't see why they didn't try it before it's just good business what other game is going to let me fight the titans in a massive grudge match or tangle with jafar above agrobar that anyone was even willing to say yes let's use direct-to-video content where possible like that one musketeer movie or let you fight lucifer the cat the possibilities realized in this series for such niche desires scratches a very particular obsessive compulsive itch deep in my spine that i could never confess to anyone outside of a video essay because well why would you naturally these worlds have to be populated by more than the disney badens and the original enemies they've created play within the same design rules the heartless the uh wait a sec the darkness of an individual's heart brought to life that's deep or maybe one of the best video game villain forces ever you get what these mindless drones are about every time you see him in the dictionary under evil minion at this point they again encapsulate the design philosophies of both companies which they can then stretch up and down into a variety of different forms that take on the look of whatever movie world you're in always a treat to see how they've chosen to interpret their surroundings incidentally i quite like the one exception that uses a final fantasy design as a basis i think this would have been a great way to get more ff nodes into the franchise but doesn't seem to be on the menu anymore the sequel's villains build on the heartless appeal adding a level of complexity to their designs that reflects the evolving story when a person's uh here we go again when a person's heart becomes a heartless the shell left behind becomes an unfeeling creature called a nobody that's d unlike heartless they're pretending to be something they're not human hidden inside of suits designed to mimic living creatures though you can spot the classic heartless traits underneath and their movement is always led by specific parts of their bodies like a corpse being pulled on a string it's a great uncanny effect reflecting the dishonest nature of these guys and feeling absolutely right as villain 2 in the grand scheme of things i do feel like we begin to stretch the point once we get to the unversed of the dream eaters and the spin-off titles i mean you know i'll give it to the dream eaters who play both enemies and assist characters because we're in a dream they're animal themed so you have a neutral basis for designing both soft dream versions and sharp nightmare terrors and the unversed or a good representation of uh well their primordial emotions of i've made a mistake that's awful and then there's the organization a gang of very human-looking nobodies apparently to do with their original personalities being so strong i guess all right got it memorized got it memorized got it memorized no i've come to accept them thanks to the more recent twists confirming them as really obvious bad guys tricky people in black robes it doesn't need to get much deeper than that i mean my main issue with not liking these guys back in the day is that they were a bit too anime and i i'm not funnily enough a big fan of anime even though i like jrpgs because i'm a massive hypocrite and you know these these guys were really trying to be hip with their two cool for school faces and endless meaningless pros a puppet a puppet what does that mean exactly a puppet is a puppet an outfit begging to be mass produced on the convention circuit which for me it all kind of shunned everything i liked about the hardcore fantasy vibes kh1 was rockin granted as the years have gone by they've grown on me as well as a fact klimps introduced me to that's they were embodiments of character classes in the ff series like 9 again i can't believe i didn't see it before each of their play styles were based around classic rpg jobs or classes demix for example is a dancer sykes is a berserker zoldin is a dragoon luxord a gambler zigbar sniper i could go on and on still i was never much of a fan until one twist a lot of people laughed at i'm already half xehanort made me love them okay okay so it turns out the big final boss baddies of the other games in control of all these minions are alternative versions of the same guy master xehanort and in dream drop distance a totally not retroactively decided on bomb was dropped that he designed the organization to create 13 empty vessels he could possess allowing him to live multiple lives and begin a war that would give him almighty power there's always the possibility i've got some of the details wrong so uh you know just just write me a comment uh calling me a stinko we call this is honestly the best outcome possible i love it on the one hand it becomes a great way to celebrate the entire series each vessel now a major villain from one of the games popping up on your travels to build to the eventual big bash but the idea that the real villain is a creepy old bald guy possessing younger hosts is the most fairytale thing i could have hoped for the twist had me get totally on board with his reveal so many games in and it's paid off in an amazing showdown i cannot stress how wonderfully this was executed kingdom hearts has always been about kids against adults and master xehanort really pushes the spectrum to either end old father time against young peppy chucklebums in a no-holds-barred boss rush whittling his kin down to the best of the best the versions of him you fought at the end of the major games it's there to help the message how great that 13 versions of him will never be able to stack up to a bunch of individual personalities that's a layer i didn't think i'd find i think it feeds into a thread that's been rumbling around the kh storyline since day one and the way it's been paid off really lined up with what my view of the story has always been about mostly concerning sora and riku there is one advantage to being me something you can never imitate really what's that having you for a friend then i guess i'm okay the way i am i've got something you could never imitate too while things around them be popping off riku and sora storylines remain the most compelling throughline for the series main thesis i wish i had more to say about kairi but i guess not riku is an obvious archetype the rival pal he's more confident more mature and more smolderingly angsty the one a lot of fans gravitate towards because he's more traditionally cool as anime standards go anyway however while the story states that he is in fact supposed to be the chosen one it doesn't treat him as being a misunderstood badass pretty much the opposite which leads to an impressive level of growth we can look at riku getting possessed by xehanort to become the first game's main villain ansem as convoluted law but it's actually a great bit of symbolism riku thought the world was more complex than sora did and wanted to leave his childhood to experience new emotions and ideas he was desperate to grow up the problem is it's done too fast and too recklessly and that leads to him being manipulated by creepy adults who ultimately steal his childhood while he sees the error of his ways and redeems himself his punishment is to be trapped in the body of an adult a thematically perfect consequence this makes it even more powerful when his friends accept him regardless of his mistakes and he's able to reclaim some of his youth and join them in the home stretch of the journey riku doesn't make excuses for what happened we see him put in the effort to fix this both in chain of memories and dream drop distance with the latter game spending a great deal more time with him to not only rescue sora from certain doom but to surpass him as a warrior he only gets this far because he recognizes who gave him a second chance the same person who's nothing but happy for his friend's success thing is while his maturity allows him to deal with darker subjects and get into the realms where all the monsters live his cynicism holds him back and prevents him from being able to save the world himself a problem demonstrated with other playable characters in the series in the prequel birth by sleep terror venn and aqua are warrior knights in training who begin as obvious archetypes but eventually get corrupted by master xehanort's influence much like riku basically showing how the kingdom hearts universe got so screwed up in the first place aqua barely manages to escape and ends up in a realm of darkness searching for a way home this can be played through in a short teaser game released as an example of what kh3 was going to be like and if you accept it as the official start of kh3 it becomes representative of its audience stumbling about in the darkness and wondering if this bloody game was ever going to come out now near the start of kh3 itself riku and mickey the only ones able to move through this kind of darkness yeah i know right are searching for her in their effort to bring all the old heroes back for the final showdown and we get to play as riku and discover he's already a level 50 powerhouse many hours later when we return to see where they're at they've discovered aqua who has been turned to xehanort's point of view and we can't beat her in combat riku is too close to what she is to be able to get an edge in the battle that's fine though because we've spent the time between those moments levelling sora up to the same stats and tap in to help even the odds now that sora is around the other character's personal confusion and despair gets rebalanced to the point where aqua is able to transform the mysterious castle oblivion into its true form her old home [Music] wow simply put this is about showing us why sora matters how his simple nature and optimism is what's going to save the world well worlds sure he's not the smartest or the most observant fella he's a naive happy little kid and while that's might great on some people it would miss the point he's an ambassador for the franchise designed to fit within all worlds though yes it'll never not be jarring to see him standing next to a bunch of toontown folk but you can see how he's been created within the disney ideal confessed by the devs to being based on mickey mouse because as mentioned they weren't allowed to use him as a lead this helps him visually mesh better with donald goofy and the different lands they visit outside of taking on new looks as a trick-or-treater or lion or as a fish pete more than that though he's an ambassador for our relationship with those movies either for the target audience of kids who just want to play or for the aging audience the people who want to reconnect to the child within it's practically the disneyland motto disneyland is your land here age relives fond memories of the past and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future sora is surrounded by a lot of people with fancy words who make him doubt his simple point of view and more often than not he doesn't get a happy ending yet this hasn't stopped him from doing what feels right and taking full measures to save lives and that's the lifeblood of this series it's what's inspired so many people to join in extending from the friends he's made over the course of the games to the thousands of players who've helped him get this far culminating in the best use of a browser-based collaborative game as a piece of narrative catharsis i've ever seen holy balls everyone lends him the extra strength after his spectacular efforts to bring them back to the fold with kh3's ending about finding that commonality with him when he's the one struggling in fact the entire game is framed around finding common ground with sora throughout we get these flashbacks of xehanort's childhood where he too was a cheeky young kid looking forward to the future it transpires his belief is that moving on getting old it only leads to corruption and chaos feeling life would be better if we had the ability to go back and start over his plan now to return to where reality began for him and end it there his own destiny island it's quite evocative and there's all the signs this is unstable we see his older selves regretting this struggle and defeat while his younger self scoffs at our efforts and urges the old man's folly an accentuation of the real problem here and i haven't even gotten to heal this only gives power to those who lived once before and not to the ever-evolving next generation who bring new hope to humanity and why sora the guy who effectively represents what xehanort once was has to stop him there is one sky one destiny [Music] their final battle is as big as you'd imagine crazy stuff time and space remix of the previous airnauts themes which just so happened to be an extension of the opening stage from the first game bringing the pain you've been put through full circle it's abitual of fates everything it needed to be but what really makes it sing was the decision not to end it as a solo fight they kept it disney [Music] yeah after all that donald and goofy are still with you and rightfully so they're the past we recognize the ageless principles that still bring us joy and laughter the things sora most believes in and here they are saying hey we got you back you don't have to regress to have us around in your life we can move forward together it's time to leave the theme park guys it's time to go home over time i think kingdom hearts has become an incredibly easy target like i said it's not always the most elegantly put together experience there's a lot of problems i have with it and the very premise itself is you know it's not going to be a timeless work of great fiction it's an adolescent fantasy that's in way over its head but the value i see in it isn't verbal the smartest thing the series does lies in its feeling in how it presents its audience's own inner conflict to their faces letting us have a lot of nostalgic fun but going out of its way to tinge that with a melancholic sense of unfulfillment that the kids are always happy and the adults are always sad in having that conversation you have to accept both its utter ridiculousness the realities that make it so right to mock and earnestly embrace its right to exist anyway to accept that balance of wow i guess we're saying it the darkness and the light who let me do this i wouldn't want this to be a widely accepted brand i i kind of feel like it needs to remain this journey of their internal personal growth to elicit that feeling is to be creatively in tune with the reality of their properties of disney and square's impact on our childhoods and not wanting to leave it but knowing it has to come to an end this keeps happening it's purple feeling the game credit to charlie again for hitting on that particular sentence i'd have stolen the points without saying anything but i don't know he's pretty jacked and that's the key here make your own jokes please to khs enduring strength as something people get kind of misty-eyed over more than they ever planned to the effort has been made to construct a playground where we can live out the fantasy of our past using the details that matter most and making us ask why we feel about this the way we do and that's far from silly that's rather intelligent the specifics of this talk about light and darkness are less important than the fact it's about light and darkness a child's view of a world where growing up is a scary concept and on the journey to adulthood our mind can become clouded with the kinds of problems that make us greedy and selfish and strangely accented r.i.p mr nimoy power or it can be incredibly confusing and upsetting to go through something we can't articulate at that age and maybe shouldn't try yet if we stay connected to the optimism of youth maintain a true balance between the light and the dark we can turn this experience into something constructive for everyone else to hold on to make it to the other side and unlock our full potential yeah i guess that works [Music] thank you for watching everyone once again my patrons are to thank for the content still making its way out to you their support has made the immediate production of these videos so much more manageable and many have now seen a full cycle of promises come to fruition so that's cool extra thanks to my buddies klemps and gaming brit for the points i used in the video links to their respective videos are of course in the description i'll be back very soon with different projects so in the meantime do take a look at everything else we have to offer some real interesting stuff not to do with video games oh no this is how you don't maintain an 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Keywords: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts review, Kingdom Hearts analysis, Kingdom Hearts aint so dumb, Kingdom Hearts crazy, Kingdom Hearts insane, Disney, Disney Kingdom Hearts, Disney video games, Disney games, Square enix, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Disney, Kingdom Hearts B Mask, Kingdom Hearts dumb

Id: G77PUtILxck

Length: 38min 2sec (2282 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020