It started with an elevator. Like urban legends about ghosts on movie sets or actors improvising legendary lines from classic movies, a Disney executive and Square’s Shinji Hashimoto, who once worked in the same building, are said to have laid the foundation for Kingdom’s creation with a single elevator ride. Heart.

And like all good urban legends, some of the details are a bit too imaginative. “The conversation in the elevator was along the lines of, ‘It’d be nice if we could do something together someday,’ and it wasn’t a formal idea proposal,” explains game director Tetsuya Nomura. “It all started when [Shinji] Hashimoto and some people from Disney were talking about doing something together. Apparently, during one of their first conversations with Hashimoto, the idea of ​​making a Mickey Mouse role-playing game came up.” They

Well known among Final Fantasy fans for his distinctive character designs in Final Fantasy 7, 8, 10 and 13, Nomura arguably influenced an entire generation of developers in Japan and the US, but he relished the challenge of working with such a valuable intellectual property. “However, this was considered a fairly difficult job, and when I heard about it, I already had the basic idea for Kingdom Hearts, so I contacted them to ask if I could take on the project.”

In fact, Disney began approaching Square with the idea for Kingdom Hearts. A simple conversation in an elevator soon developed into an ambitious vision for Squaresoft’s next big project. The initial idea of ​​a Mickey Mouse RPG evolved into something more conceptual, connecting many Disney worlds (including some original works) through one overarching narrative.

Nomura received suggestions from other employees at Square, and his experience with Final Fantasy was incorporated into the structure of the game design. “At the time, my boss at the company advised me not to make the story itself too simple. The story development logic, with its many hints and mysteries, is typical of the Final Fantasy series, and I thought it would be a good structure for Kingdom Hearts as well.”

Between Worlds

In Kingdom Hearts, Sora, a young islander plagued by strange dreams about shadows, travels through Disneyland in search of his missing friend, meeting many famous characters from the film. Some of the settings were obvious choices, like Agrabah from Aladdin and Atlantica from The Little Mermaid, but there were also some beautiful and eclectic locations, like The Nightmare Before Christmas, that fit the game’s framework perfectly. Nomura had a philosophy about what environments should be considered.

“The most important condition when selecting worlds was that none of the worlds overlap in terms of feel or atmosphere, giving the game some variety,” says Nomura. “I’ve loved the worldview of The Nightmare Before Christmas (Halloween Town) since the first game.” I thought this would give the players a real challenge and surprise them by including it. I’m always thinking about doing surprises like that. ”

In fact, the sequel then added a beautiful Steamboat Willie level, a Tron scenario, and even a scenario based on Pirates of the Caribbean. What’s interesting about the use of worlds is that each world has a mini-plot that is faithful to the original. Sora, Donald Duck, and Goofy went on a journey to connect their respective lands with the hero’s mystical Keyblade, but it was essentially a sideshow to these well-made Disney Bos5000 episodes.

When I asked Nomura about the birth of the series’ protagonist, he said, “Sora is supposed to be a Disney-esque character.” “I was very conscious of this with his color, his character shape, and his happy, cheerful personality. With the Keyblade, I wanted him to have a weapon that wasn’t aggressive in theme, so I went with the idea of ​​a key that also ties into the story itself.”

Nomura did not feel he had to change his artistic style to make the character designs fit Disney. At the time, he said that Donald Duck and Tarzan were very different visually, despite being Disney characters, so it wasn’t that difficult to come up with consistency to find a visual language. “We didn’t have any particular problems. For example, in the underwater world, there are no characters swimming around in normal clothes. To change that, we just changed the costumes of the characters a little bit. It was just small adjustments and obvious things like that.”

However, given Disney’s restrictions on using assets, the bigger challenge was integrating Sora’s story into the Disney world. “Of course, there are restrictions because we are dealing with someone else’s intellectual property rights, but we had to do some work to make sure players didn’t feel restricted. But

Nomura is positive.” Talking about his experience collaborating with Disney, “Working with Disney allowed me to experience things that I wouldn’t be able to do in my normal job,” he says, citing voiceover work as an example. He doesn’t mention what they weren’t allowed to include in the game. “Of course, there were things that we weren’t allowed to do, but I can’t really talk about them.”

Interestingly, Donald Duck and Goofy have canes and shields, respectively, because Disney didn’t allow them to have swords or shields, or other violent weapons. Each property had a set of guidelines and they weren’t allowed to add anything that wasn’t already in the film, but after Disney saw the artist’s design of the aquatic version of Donald and Goofy, Nomura’s team was given permission to adapt the characters to their particular world, and the world of The Nightmare Before Christmas took the change into even more terrifying territory. Disney animators even met with the Squaresoft team to help them understand their process through what they called “chalk talks.”

The missing castle

Some members of the Squaresoft team spent months watching various Disney videos for research purposes, but the effort was worth it. Kingdom Hearts is a faithful work that perfectly translates the 2D style of each license into 3D, and the animation details help make this transition exciting for experienced moviegoers and fans. Kingdom Hearts was a great treat for anyone who grew up with a pile of discolored Disney VHS tapes under their TV.

In early videos of the game, it looked like one of the worlds opened up for exploration was a Disney castle level. We asked Nomura if this level, which appeared in Kingdom Hearts 2 or something, should be removed from the game. “Basically, we’ve been able to achieve everything we wanted to do from the beginning of the project,” Nomura said. “I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding, but the footage you’re talking about of Sora running around Disney Castle is simply early test footage, not an actual scene that was originally in the game and later cut.” It’s not like the game’s story arc is short on content, clocking in at around 50 hours long. As an action RPG, one of the first to gain mainstream appeal, there were plenty of reasons to revisit the world. With a gradually more complex combat system, Kingdom Hearts keeps giving players something new to work with. Aside from the camera being tricky, mapping spells to face buttons is a viable system, and the ability to change the behavior of party members, Donald, Goofy, and guest characters in each world, such as Beast, Ariel, and Peter Pan, gives you the best options for your strategy.

Having three characters in the game caused the team some logistical headaches. “Sora can move freely, but the others have to follow him everywhere. So the problem we had is a typical problem that you often have in this kind of game: Sora gets stuck on objects and can’t move with the player” up [and so on]. ”

Expanding the toybox

The trademark summons carried over from Final Fantasy allowed for even more original guest appearances, appearing in the form of Disney characters such as Genie from Aladdin, Mushu from Mulan, Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, and Nomura’s personal favorite, Simba from The Lion King. Final Fantasy characters, on the other hand, have been recurring throughout history. Nomura explains how this came about: “Basically, we needed to place NPC characters in a world with an original design that wasn’t Disney themed. If these characters had been original new characters, they wouldn’t have made much of an impression on the player, so we had Final Fantasy characters guest-star.”

Characters from Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 10 all appear in various capacities (see “That Old Gang of Mine”). This was a rather odd choice, considering that the grumpy River Phoenix-inspired Squall from Final Fantasy 8 lived in close proximity to the duck triplets Huey, Dewey, and Louie. However, fans of the series responded positively to this kind of contrast. Interestingly, the characters selected were only those designed by Nomura himself, excluding any characters from Final Fantasy 6 or earlier (though Kingdom Hearts 2 does expand the range a bit, as it includes a non-Nomura character, Vivi from Final Fantasy 9 ).

It is heavily revised by Nomura and, for the first time, set to music. Some of the casting choices were interesting, others controversial. David Boreanaz, known for his role as Angel in Buffy and its spin-offs, voiced the similarly-characterized Squall. Lance Bass of ‘N Sync played the role of Sephiroth (he replaced him in the sequels), singer Mandy Moore played Aerith, and American soap opera actor Steve Burton gave arguably his strongest work in his atmospheric portrayal of Cloud, which resulted in him reprising the role in the Final Fantasy 7 film Advent Children and the six subsequent games.

“I felt that having a bunch of new original characters would take time to gain recognition, so I wanted players to focus primarily on the main character, Sora,” Nomura explains. But in reality, setting high goals for the cast only helped achieve one of Kingdom Hearts’ overall goals: to tackle a variety of Disney licenses with the industry’s highest production values. In terms of voice acting, that trust also extended to James Woods, who reprises his role as Hades, Gilbert Gottfried, who played Iago from Aladdin, and The Simpsons’ Dan Castellaneta, who did a masterful imitation of Robin Williams’ Genie. Many of the original actors from the film returned to join the game’s huge cast.

It’s easy to be cynical about a product as ruthlessly commercial on the surface as Kingdom Hearts, but there was no small amount of memorable quirkiness in the design. Essentially a way to travel between worlds through enemy-filled tunnels, the Gummi Ships were essentially Lego spaceships that players could fully customize in terms of color and configuration.

Nomura explains its origins: “I personally love toy building blocks, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate that into the game. The guiding principle in the development of Final Fantasy is that it’s been said that Final Fantasy is like a toy box filled with all kinds of cool things, and that philosophy has been carried over to Kingdom Hearts. So we decided to use building blocks and also include shooter-style sections. This creativity was also extended to the design of the story through gameplay.” In one of the story’s most intelligent moments, Sora loses his Keyblade to his rival Riku, and Donald and Goofy also fall out of character and act like the despicable anthropomorphs they are. Instead, players team up with a fallen beast (a familiar face from Beauty and the Beast) and Sora is left with a wooden sword that can’t harm his enemies.

Lost to time

This removal of powers completely changed the dynamics of Kingdom Hearts, and according to Nomura, who remembers this decision fondly, it helped characterize the hero of the game as peaceful. “I wanted the player to realize that my character is not an all-powerful hero, but is actually just an ordinary boy,” he says. “This scene is included to make the player aware of the fact that Sora cannot fight without obtaining a special Keyblade and being supported by his companions, not only in the backstory but also in the actual game.”

Post-game content was also inspired – there is a boss battle with the Ice Titan in Hercules, as well as a rather nasty boss that awaits Sora when he goes to Big Ben in Neverland or the desert outside Agrabah, similar to Dark Aion in Final Fantasy 10. Return. But what is the best insert? Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 appears dramatically from the sky before the instrumental performance of One-Winged Angel, making for an incredibly difficult encounter. “I wanted a hidden boss that you can fight after clearing the main game, so I thought an unexpected character would be suitable, and I chose Sephiroth, who hasn’t appeared since the original FF7 and is very popular.

He’s well known to fans,” Nomura said when asked about one of the series’ most despicable antagonists. “Sephiroth is also recognized as a very strong enemy, so I thought he would fit that role very well.” Previously Squaresoft’s RPG. If you want to measure the success of the series more accurately, Kingdom Hearts 2 outsold Final Fantasy 12 in North America. This is why the third game in the series, announced by Square Enix at E3 in 2013, was announced seven years after the release of Kingdom Hearts 2. The second game was a very important one for the company.

With the re-release of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Remix in 2013, Nomura was hoping to gain new fans for Kingdom Hearts 3. “The Dark Seekers saga is going to come to an end in the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3, and this HD remake is being made with that in mind. Personally, I feel like it’s being made for the next new chapter, rather than reviving the old one… I want as many people as possible to play KH3, so I made 1.5 with that in mind.

There was no port. This was an easy task, as many of the PS2 assets were unfortunately hard to find. “It was hard, since the original data is no longer there, but I think it didn’t feel too difficult thanks to the hard work of the whole team. Even compared to the HD remakes of other titles, I really feel that the production team of Kingdom Hearts has put in a lot of effort.” A work of light and darkness, nostalgia for Disney’s strongest animated works, and beautiful, absurd fun for Square fans. A game whose life began in an elevator – a strange origin befitting such a strange and popular title.