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6. No. Kingdom Hearts is not beautiful.
. . . Okay, so it is, a little bit. It's not "so" beautiful, though.
People have accused me, saying, "You don't like Disney!"
This is as far from the truth as it is a lie. Aladdin is one of my favorite movies of all time. Although I have issues with the Genie's impersonation of Arsenio Hall (which I believe rips all "timeless" quality out of the picture), the movie was mostly solid, and fun, and something of a just-what-the-doctor-ordered for the girl-centric romance-heavy Disney films of earlier years -- which I still enjoyed, yes, despite The Little Mermaid's strongly conformist messages.
Much as I love Al, the Agrabah level was one heartbreak after another. I felt like I was contained in a series of rooms wallpapered with an Arabian Nights motif.
Stepping out of Agrabah's front gate results in a fade-out, fade-in, cut scene of Sora, Aladdin, and Goofy/Donald on a flying carpet, zipping across the desert. Two seconds later, we fade-out, fade-in, and there we are, in a big, blue patch of desert. Step out of this patch of desert, and we get the magic carpet treatment back to the city gates.
The city is empty. There's seriously not a living thing that isn't black and dwarf-like and stabbing at your clown-shoes.
Yeah, the "rooms" look nice. Still, are they rendered with such a high polygon count as to make NPCs impossible to incorporate? Must the screen fade out as I approach each corridor, just so the game can load the next area?
After you beat the fluidly rendered boss in the beautifully lit Cave of Wonders, a sole shopkeeper -- who sells no wares -- pops up in the town. He looks suspiciously like the Unnamed Wandering Resident of Traverse Town. He explains to you: it used to be lively here, before the shadows came. Now, everyone's in hiding.
And what about the tournament at the Olympus Coliseum? Where are the people? Surely a tournament should bring out the people?
Something about fighting in a perfectly rendered 3D cartoon coliseum in front of an audience of zero made me grit my teeth.
One of my friends said: "Kingdom Hearts really evokes that Disney 2D feel, in 3D!"
I say: “‘2D feel' my ass."
One thing's for sure: that two-dimensional look, combined with the two-dimensional story, combined with the fact that we're fighting a tournament without spectators: it all gives us the vague feeling that we've woken up in a cryogenic freezing pod in the Magic Kingdom as the only survivor of a centuries-long nuclear war.
Sora and friends apparently have families and a city on Destiny Island -- not one molecule of which we ever get to see.
Sure, as kids, we all fantasize about being locked in a toy store overnight; while this never happened to me, I can tell you with inferred confidence that it would, most likely, suck. Even at age twenty-three, I'd probably find myself curled up and crying for my mommy in a stack of teddy bears before the clock struck midnight.
To put it bluntly: this is not my idea of a good time.
Children fantasize about having Disneyworld all to themselves, much as they can sit for hours watching the same scratchy VHS tape of Beauty and the Beast simply because their mothers tell them it's their favorite movie.
"I'm gonna put on Beauty and the Beast and then go down into the basement with the heater repairman; you kids keep quiet, alright? I know it's your favorite movie."
That copy of Kingdom Hearts, all wrapped-up in foil-stamped packaging on your local videogame store shelf -- it's Beauty and the Beast, and Squaresoft is your mommy, going down into the basement with the heater repairman to help him move the ping-pong table.
You don't want to disappoint your mommy, do you?
And that's how Squaresoft plans to put two of this game into every household in the free world.
[Next: forever alone in nuclear disneyworld]
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