Shit, I Might Actually Be A Kingdom Hearts Fan Now

I avoided playing Kingdom Hearts for years. I even start/stopped it a couple times, and certainly had fun talking about it with Rudie in an early episode of HP (Episode 11 – listen here if you dare) but I never could finish one of them dang games. So, it is with great…something…that I announce that I am going to finish those fucking games. The impetus for this is largely a lull in new releases (after Yakuza 6) and a friend who also wanted to do this, simply because we both like RPGs and we missed out on this, and the hype for the long awaited (14 years?!?) sequel is real as it looks like we might actually get it at some point in the not too distant future. To commemorate this, Ryan (the aforementioned friend) and I are recording a podcast about each game in the series as we play it, and I will post links and such to it as we get into more (once we have figured out where we are putting it online, for example), but I actually finished the first game, and shit, I think I am actually a Kingdom Hearts fan now.

As anyone who listened to that early episode of Rudie and I talking might remember, I am fascinated by trying to put together how this universe works as a whole. There are early fascinations, like how the fuck a Disney/Sqaure crossover game ever came to be. Internet Rumor is that some higher ups at Square were wanting to make a 3d platformer, but realized the only character that could beat Mario in popularity would be one of Disney’s, a story that if true is hilarious because one of the straight up worst parts of the KH games is the jumping.

But more interesting than that, I want to figure out the whole mythological cosmology of Kingdom Hearts, because it feels like if nothing else, this could be some weird experience of 21st century Gnosticism, but somehow without a god being included in the universe itself, because there is no god in Kingdom Hearts, just people. These people might have hearts, they might not have hearts, and the demons of the universe are created by people not having hearts. And the demons sometimes might be people too. It’s weird.

What is even stranger is that it is actually fun. I didn’t see that coming.

So yeah, expect more updates here once this thing gets recorded. Expect Rudie to show up at some point to talk about it. Expect all sorts of silliness. Expect TRUE FRIENDSHIP and HEARTS and who even knows what else.