Utada Hikaru's theme song and the visuals + music of the Dive to the Heart tutorial were what hooked me, as well as some brief footage I saw of my older brother's friend playing around in the Cave of Wonder. I didn't really have enough information to grasp the deal with the giant key and the Disney stuff, and I don't think I really fully understood what FF was (although both KH1 and FFX would go on to become the definitive games of that era for me) but the way everything was framed and paced just exuded a certain entrancing, magical quality, borrowing from the best aesthetics of both of its composite aspects to mold something exquisitely unexpected. The commercials for the game hadn't really impressed me (though in retrospect they're cool and nostalgic), but seeing it in action I felt like it just got me: the part that appreciated the baroque mood and classic stylization of early/Renaissance Disney without finding much in the sugary, trite themes underlying the facade, and the part that wanted to see more weird and adventurous shit like Nightmare Before Christmas take over the world-- that movie was perfect for KH1, because I feel like creatively, they're cut from the same cloth. Designed for kids, highly merchandisable, yet qualified in its obvious marketability by this incessant pursuit of some purpose beyond that-- even just an intellectual one, a thought experiment. KH1 always seemed to ask the question, "What if...?"
Like, what if we made a Disney game for preteens, but the first ten to twenty minutes are constructed around an utterly abstract, reflexive dreamscape montage of increasingly dismal depths culminating in pure and unmitigated nightmare fuel.
What if we told a typical story pretty much everyone knows using some of the most globally recognizable animated IPs in existence, but then we also spun it into an existential Bildungsroman in which myth and magic are at center stage, and the ensemble has to orient itself around these esoteric spiritual edicts that are never fully explained to the audience, and that's just how it is: Ariel's princey bf be damned.
What if the story didn't even really have an ending, and people were left to wonder whether the game was meant to be happy or sad or stir something else in them entirely. And we just left all these 10 to 12 year olds to figure that out and draw their own conclusions.
Like, it's always pretty damn rare to find pop media that's capable of restructuring and extending its audience's concept of what a story is supposed to be doing for them; most Disney movies themselves are either overtly moralizing or function as clever (and not-so-clever) diversions that deliberately avoid offering complexities in premise or motif in order to ensure a simple and unconcerning resolution at the other end. Somehow, though, KH, at least for a time, felt salient in a way that it probably never had a right to: that first game in particular had a finger on the pulse of something that was shifting in youth culture, I think-- that idea that a broad, global appeal could maybe go both ways, and that people had really started to listen more to each other and were actively interested in voices outside of their immediate cultural ecosystem. I guess, for me, it bridged a gap and offered me something that felt at once familiar and comfortingly, thrillingly unknown. It seemed (and I think it still is) kind of genuinely iconic: not in a grandiose sense, but in the way it made itself unmistakable, maybe by tapping into that aging aspect of its target youth demographic; by taking us nerdy preteens seriously in our efforts to extricate ourselves from the safe formulaism of the Disney marketing cycle by pushing right up against it and doing...kind of whatever the heck it wanted. But tactfully.
I wish the franchise still felt this relevant. It's just too far down its own trope hole at this point, and it seems like there's a culture of media creation in general now (thx Marvel) that's approaching deliberateness in how slack, indulgent and dull it is. And KH, maybe because Nomura is too hyperaware of current trends, has kind of gotten gobbled up in that mentality: fixate people on the least interesting aspects of what gets a movie/video game made ($$$, franchise potential) and ignore the fact of the matter which is that these concepts are dramatically nonsensical recirculations of the same limp, discourse deadening anti-thesis statements dressed up with a skin-deep idea of diversity (or not) of whatever sort is presently palatable to a public that has to, for reason of maximizing the return on every investment, be whipped up into a mass fervor around these cultural touchstones every six months or so, like clockwork. The concern is always squarely targeted on breaking the next corporate induced, records-centered ceiling: not breaking ground on a narrative or thematic or even, increasingly, technological basis. Maybe KH isn't that far gone, yet (KH3 being the first actually contemporary release of the series in a decade or more, really) but it's got that fragile feeling to it, like if someone were to actually point at the central conceit and say, "What is this still doing here," it would collapse into a rubble pile of Funko Pops and halfway fulfilled Star Wars homages.