This game served as my introduction to aerial combat games, and in all likelihood, fighter jets themselves. As such, it’s no surprise that I hold this game in fairly high regard.

I never played through the campaign when I was younger, as most of my time was spent either watching my dad play through it or playing against him in VS mode. He’s never alluded to this, but I suspect that me beating him consistently in VS mode is what made him realize that he was past his gaming prime (that, and me hogging the PS2).

Anyways, I wanted to see if the game was as cool as I remembered it, so I decided to play through the campaign. I was pleased to discover that the game is still in fact, very cool, for the following reasons:
-The menu music and the banger of a soundtrack in general.
-The voice acting and sound effects (shoutout to whoever voiced AWACS).
-The variety of jets and weapons at your disposal (A-10 supremacy).
-The ability of the game to tell a compelling story without traditional cutscenes.

In short, it was a worthwhile trip down memory lane.

Ever since I was around 14 or so, I’ve made irregular pilgrimages to one of Scotland’s lesser known Lochs. As a large body of water that stretches into the horizon, it is one of the very few features of the surrounding landscape that’s remained untouched since I was born.

I used to live a short distance from it, but these days getting there is a whole journey. In college it took me a full forty minutes to simply get there, and now as a much older adult the entire return trip is around five hours. Where I was once simply passed by some buildings and later a nearby village, I now pass by three entire towns, a significant stretch of wilderness, an old forest trail, and an unmaintained stretch of road which alarmingly doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
I like to make the journey on foot, personally. Despite possessing a not-insignificant case of thalassophobia, reaching the loch after two and a half hours brings a sense of relief after what is always going to be a backbreaking trip.

Why do I make this journey, you ask?

I feel that as we get older, we stop being “bigger versions of ourselves” entirely and start being humanoid matryoshka dolls. While at first we iterate on ourselves, eventually the iterations increase so much that the self we used to be becomes an entirely different, distant person. In time, we lose that older self even if we retain some memories, ideas or feelings.
I like to journey to that loch, and a specific rocky outcrop on its north side, because it’s perhaps the only place on Earth where I have a direct link to my younger selves. The one thing all incarnations of the Mira project have in common is that they’ve sat or been sat on that outcrop, starting as early as one year old, and acknowledging this is humbling.

Let’s snap back a bit though, 2012. Sitting in Maths besides this then-infinitely annoying fuck we’ll call Jason for privacy’s sake - and also because I know he’s the kind of guy that would use Backloggd. Sorry if you see this lad, I still have your copy of Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.

Jason was… The picture most people conjure in their mind when they hear “ned” (or “chav” if you want a more familiar term); he had the “hawhawhaw” laugh, styled himself as a hardman, didn’t dress particularly well, seemed to abhor anything that seemed earnest or intellectual, primarily spoke through his nostrils, and was so dense that I had to explain what organs were to him two years later.

And in 2012, he turns to me and says: “Here, ye like games don’t ye? Git that Kingdom Hearts when it comes oot.”

He whips out his phone, the ugliest Blackberry I’d ever seen, and shows me a grainy bitcrushed trailer for the then-new Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix.

This dumbfounded me, because even on that tiny-ass screen I could tell that this was not a game I would ever associate with him. He goes on to tell me that he played it as a wean and loved it, prompting a further conversation about games that led to a friendship which surprised me - a then-isolated nerd who was overeducated and undermedicated for everything academia asked of her.

Per his recommendation, I picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 the following year and… Didn’t really get it. I enjoyed the combat, though the music was phenomenal, and the story was neat, but I felt like I was missing something. It compelled me, yes, but the source of that was lost on me. I never had the chance to discuss it with Jason, for despite our unlikely friendship we ultimately moved in different teenage social circles and, once classes started being sorted by performance, he and I never saw one another in class either.

2013 was 11 years ago, so there’s been some time to reflect.

Recently, the KH games came to Steam and, rather hilariously, Square Enix ignored the prior Epic Games Store release to pretend that this was the first time KH had ever touched PC. They even got Utada Hikaru to rerecord Simple & Clean. Hilarious!

I’ve been watching people play KH1 again - not playing it myself, for I don’t really have the energy to tackle a long game so soon after Library of Ruina - and it’s got me noticing a lot of stuff that my younger self fundamentally couldn’t get.

What strikes Adult Mira about KH1 is how it feels… Adolescent. Not in the sense that it’s childish or cringe or whatever disingenuous cynics often call it, but… Man I’m struggling to word this one.

[Insert me closing this doc for like three days and reopening it.]

I remember something that would irregularly happen in High School, and unlike many of my anecdotes I don’t think these are Scotland-specific.

Every now and then, in the very early days, someone would show up to P.E wearing a Disney shirt or whatever, or they’d have a Disney backpack/notepad/whatever. The crueller ones would laugh, while even the nicer ones would side-eye the victim and awkwardly chuckle at their friends.

You might’ve heard someone say “your body undergoes changes through puberty/as you grow up”, and in a way I find this sentiment to be a kindness. It carefully omits the actually harrowing, less obvious parts of adolescence. Namely, the death of youth.
I know the term “irony poisoning” is considered to be an internet thing, but frankly I see it manifest even in fully offline people and it seems to naturally occur in the process of going from a child to a citizen of the world. Joy and earnestness are taboo, and cynicism is expected. Nobody should ever be joyful or love “bad”/”childish” things seriously, and if they do it must be a joke - told by them or at their expense, it matters not. Stuff like that. You must laugh at the awkward undiagnosed autistic girl in your class with the Cinderella backpack. She’s a kid, and you’re not kids anymore. Laugh.

This continues into adulthood. How many people have you seen dunk on ‘cringe fanfiction’, ‘bad art’, or anything else where passion clearly outstreps base level technical talent?

You might wonder what the fuck this has to do with Kingdom Hearts, and I would tell you that I kinda see the game as an analogue for that unavoidable death of youth.

Ignore the fantastical elements for a moment, and the opening hours are of three teenagers longing to find out what exists beyond the horizon of their small corner of existence, only to find out the hard way that it’s so vast as to be deeply and spiritually underwhelming. And, unfortunately for them, they’re now a part of this world. Their forced and unwanted understanding of the world around them drives wedges between them, and through this division, one of them comes into contact with an adult who no longer views them as a child but as a tool to be cultivated and used for their own games.

SImilarly, the Disney elements feel like an attempt to broach that specific brand of teenage existentialism using iconography that’s both universal to the player (unless they somehow avoided the most enduring plague of the modern age: The Walt Disney Company) and relatable to the subject of being an adolescent. Despite the relatively peppy and almost twee trappings of each ~world~, each mini arc Kingdom Hearts doesn’t exactly feel triumphant. Riku always ends up seeming further and further away from Sora, something which only gets worse as the credits roll gets closer and closer. Likewise, the Disney elements start seeming less and less magical, ultimately ending up with the iconic Princesses being used as fuel to further someone’s goals.
I know that Kairi being one of the seven Princesses might seem like the writers trying to build a connection between the Disney stuff and the OC stuff, but c’mon. Surely you must’ve known someone that, as a kid, wanted to be a Disney Princess. It’s all too fitting that such a desire is distorted for Ansem to open his gate to hell.
In particular, my adult self has always been struck by that reference to the stars disappearing out of the sky in this game. The sky sure did seem brighter when we were younger.

As a branch of all of this, it’s easy to see the Heartless as a manifestation of the particularly caustic cynicism and joylessness that awaits children once their childhood begins to evaporate. They are no longer vessels for curiosity or play, they are now cogs, bolts and conveyors in a machine whose operation they have no say in or influence over. The Heartless are a corruptive force that sap everything from the various worlds, in this case Disney ones, which slots in so perfectly as an analogue to that nasty disdain for anything childish that so many people pick up unconsciously and utterly refuse to either interrogate or dispense with.

Jason and I didn’t talk much after High School, even after fate had us in the same college class for a single lesson of the week, but he did tell me something once while we were out on a smoke break that had a lasting impact.

When my teens arrived, I threw all of my stuffed animals in a trash bag and let them fester in the bottom of my closet. Among them was a Winnie the Pooh plush that I’d had since I was literally three years old. I was a big girl then, no time for stuffies. But yet I did yearn for them - in part because I just slept better while holding something, and pillows weren’t a good substitute.
Years later, while in college, Jason - now having reformed himself as a much less ~neddy~ soul who found his passion and the ability to dress well in wargames - offhandedly mentioned that he’d slept with his stuffed bear for years. He showed me a picture, and it was a ratty old thing, but clearly well loved. I didn’t immediately change my tone regarding stuffed animals, I even laughed it off, but the subsequent year was hellish. After that, I was all too eager to crack open that trash bag and free them.

You see the same sort of attitude with Kingdom Hearts itself, really. I’ve noticed that so-called ex-fans of it often point to it as a cringe teenage hyperfixation, while also talking about it with the same fondness most people reserve for significant others or childhood friends they hold some affection for. You ever see a straight dude who’s clearly a hyper-repressed gay man talk about his ‘best friend’? Kinda like that.
KH is, to lots of people, ‘cringe’. It is naked in its sincerity and Nomura makes no attempt to hide that it’s his pinboard passion project where 90% of additions are justified with “I wanted to” and the other 10% are “Square Enix asked me to”. As with everything so unabashedly sincere, those who wear cynicism like a second skin or overly irony-poisoned nerds who still make Sonichu jokes in 2024 often dismiss it. Indeed, much like stuffed animals, so many people seem to think themselves above a game where a twink can stunlock Sephiroth with moves that’d make Vergil look amateurish.
Look, I’ll be honest, even I take potshots at KH sometimes. Not the first game, as you’ve noticed, but subsequent entries do leave a lot to be desired. Where I - and I suspect many other KH fans - differ is that most of my potshots stem from KH losing a lot of the ironclad consistency, relatively self-contained writing and airtight pacing of the first game.

I think it’s really telling that Ansem’s insistence he can “unlock people’s hearts” only leads to them becoming absolute monsters. I wonder if there’s anything to examine there. Riku, tragically, loses this fight to Ansem and becomes yet another pawn for him, while Sora’s unwillingness to entirely sever the ties that bind him to what came before is what allows him to stay free. I hesitate to even jokingly call it ‘corny’, it’s just a very upfront admission that you’ll lose your soul if you can’t keep a hold of any whimsy or an ability to engage in play.

“Mira, where does the Final Fantasy stuff slot in?”

It’s cool as fuck, next question.

Despite seeming simple and clean on the surface, Kingdom Hearts is a series I don’t think one can truly critique, praise or even react to without inadvertently revealing something about themselves that - presumably - they’d want to keep hidden. It’s one of those games where I can often tell how cynical someone is by how willing they are to dismiss everything about it off the cuff. It’s why I just opened with the personal anecdote - I hate subtext, it’s for cowards and subs.

That all said, I do find it somewhat sad that despite this game being aimed at children and teens, neither of them are particularly well equipped to explain why it might be resonant or even resonate with it in the first place. Indeed, I myself didn’t get it all the way back in 2013. They’ll find it fun, sure, but some things you only understand with time I guess.

I feel like, more than anything, the part of Kingdom Hearts that embodies all of this is the very first song you hear on the menu: Dearly Beloved. It’s hardly heroic, not even cool or foreboding. No, it’s a piece that feels sad? It somehow manages to capture that really specific feeling of seeing a normally-populated city at night for the first time and realizing that, without people occupying that space, it’s just concrete, power lines, glass and in Glasgow’s case also a sizable amount of potholes.

To end off… I silently weep for people who think they’re too old for Kingdom Hearts, or indeed for anything like it. Not because I look down on them, but because I feel losing the part of you that can enjoy things like this, stuffed animals, and goofy (hyuk) apparel must be miserable. That first death, right there in the soul, is always a harbinger of worse things to come.

But hey, it’s never too late to claw it back. You, too, can play Kingdom Hearts or spend £1000~ on stuffed rabbits.

this shit got known ape murderer clayton goin gunslinger with the dante jump, there's a guy fieri behemoth, everyone looks like they're in the middle of animorphing into bratz, and it's still one of the most holistically accomplished games square's ever made

and I don't wanna hear a bitch say they're too sophisticated for riku and the paopu fruit. I don't wanna hear you're too cool to tech the ice titan or fuck up james woods. when beast rolls up that's hype. when haley joel osment says "you're stupid" it channels the most authentic childhood frustration ever with the million dollar voice crack. I'm sorry I ever said anything about nomura's big dumb shoes. if that's what it takes to design something like this make em even bigger for all I care. make em fuckin huge. I'll visit the shoe world if I gotta

the entire postgame's an exercise in stretching and bending your toolkit into different shapes to respond to increasingly idiosyncratic scenarios. the list of strategies for sniperwilds and heated contention about which is optimal (I like firaga) would make your mind melt. it's got perfect pacing, striking presentation, a rock solid mechanical backbone, and the cutest halloween outfit. kingdom hearts kinda rules

you can hurl a big ass key at sephiroth, build your gummi ship all jacked up, slump cloud and squall simultaneously, and recant every bad thing you ever said about the combat after playing proud mode

if you set aside your terminal irony poisoning and/or castle wall cynicism for a sec you can even engage with its earnest exploration of (pre)teen emotionalism and use of familiar pop elements as archetypal shorthand to meet adolescence someplace known and understood and maybe come away with better grasp of its enduring resonance beyond the chimeric childhood vhs premise

who knows

I love the way exploration works here; the refusal to budge on fast travel save for diegetic ox carts, snatching back dark arisen's infinite ferrystone, and stretching the landmass both horizontally and (especially) vertically is wonderful. in many, many ways it's a bigger, slower, denser game, and they did it all while focusing on the most mundane environments devoid of giant theme park attractions bulging from every flat surface

likewise I love the idea of elaborating on the sense of traversal and moving toward a holistic spirit of adventure. deteriorating health ceilings aid attrition and help answer the inherent slime of menu heals, and having campfire rests operate as something of a risk/reward mechanism goes a long way toward giving each journey a greater heft and substance. even something as transparently gamey as designing the map as a network of funnels and chokepoints stippled with smaller threats and crosshatched with bigger ones was very clever; it's all just nouns crashing against nouns as they fire down chutes, but when coupled with the meaty physicality of the game's interactivity it goes a long way toward building up those Big Moments

but the consequence of trash mobs operating as speedbumps means moment-to-moment encounters operate more as filler than anything you could consider independently engaging scenarios. it also means that despite the map being several times larger than gransys it ends up feeling a lot more suffocating due to all the overlapping nouns slamming and interrupting each other without end. I just about luxuriated in the rare opportunities to enjoy brief spells of negative space; I savoured it like one of those FMV steaks. I'd kill for more moments like the arbor or the battleground where I was able to inhabit the world as a pilgrim or wanderer rather than serial wolf slaughterer or battahl sanitation expert, but they're very few and far between

there's no escaping the impenetrable walls of goblins, wolves, harpies, and saurians polluting every inch of the world. the already slender DD bestiary's been ported over nearly 1:1 with about as many additions as subtractions, and between the absurd density and massive landmass the variety ends up looking and feeling significantly worse than it did when it was first pilloried twelve years ago in a notoriously incomplete game

when the Big Moments do happen they're often spectacular, and it's easy to see why the chaotic intersection of AI, systems, and mechanics was prioritized so heavily and centered as the focal point of the entire experience. early on every bridge that breaks behind you, every ogre leaping from city walls, and every gryphon that crushes your ox cart feels huge and spellbinding; the game's at its best when all the moving parts align just right to achieve dynamic simulacrum, leveraging unpredictability to carry encounters well above their station

where that stuff loses me most is in the complete lack of friction. for a game with so many well considered means of drawing tension out of discovery it manages to render most of them meaningless when you're never being properly threatened enough to let them kick in. camping, eating, crafting, consumables, ambushes, and setpieces all take a significant blow from the chronic lack of bite, and it's frustrating to see so much potential go to waste when everything's already set up unbelievably well for success. even if you choose to go it alone, or do as I did and run with a party of two (ida + ozma: wily beastren + weakest creature), it only does so much when every corner of the map has CAPCOM Co., Ltd superpawns and npcs popping out of the ground to aid you unbidden and monsters are all mâché sculptures begging to be stunlocked. where's hard mode? why does it feel like everything DDDA did right got ignored? we just don't know

I'd have been happy if the game yanked a bit of control back with some kinda endgame/post-game dungeon, but there isn't one; there aren't really dungeons in general. in opting for quantity (50+!!) over quality we end up with none of them feeling particularly curated, and none of them having the scope or menace of the everfall, let alone bitterblack. no ur-dragon either, which is just baffling. the entire run from endgame to post-game is a gaping hole where something oughta be but certainly isn't

when I hit credits I felt almost confused, like I'd just been tricked into playing a remake or reboot of the original dragon's dogma that somehow had less material stretched even thinner. I enjoyed what I played for the most part, but the more thought I put into it the more it feels compromised and unfinished in all the exact ways itsuno promised over and over it wouldn't be this time around

there's a lot to love here: stuff like fucked up modular teeth, the sphinx, seeker coin platforming, pawn bullshitting, the dragonsplague, cyclops ragdolls, opaque sidequests, intentional tedium, and routinely bizarre interactions. much of what was good in the past remains good, and even bits that stumble backward generally land someplace close to decent regardless. some of the vocation/gear downgrades aren't to my liking, and there's an odd shallowness that hangs over the experience, but I think I liked it?

I just don't really get it

What an odd game. Between my poor performing computer, plastic like sheen on the world, and the seemingly conflicting design ideas, it's hard to make heads or tails of my experience other than to just shrug. Nothing coalesces here for me.

In the Austin Walker game corner of criticism, it seems like those people really like this as an adventure, but I'm not even getting that. I don't know how exactly to even counter this other than the fact that it did not feel like an adventure! You're tasked with walking around for mostly pointless reasons (who is the sovran actually? Where and what are the pieces that leads to his downfall? These are pointless questions because we know the answer.) On these walks you encounter bands of monsters, sometimes humans who fight you or are fighting the monsters. There are caves to find and some decent map design pointing you to say a cove or pointless treasure chest. I'm one of the last gamers who thinks i need to be rewarded with a good item or a cool moment for exploring a game space. I do think that this game largely fails in producing interesting play narratives as well as concrete moments. It's hard to get excited about a cave when the biggest question mark about them is whether goblins or human thieves are in this one. It's exciting when a werewolf thing and griffin interact, but a little less so the 5th time.

The combat is a good time. I really like the bow for being dynamic and completely viable. The thief is hilariously op and satisfying. It's got DMC built into it without getting graded. It's not hard, but the fun is in finding the proficiency.

I loved stumbling over a quest about the batthal queen being targeted for assassination. I initiated the quest, picked the incorrect target, and subsequently the queen actually dies! A few people mention this afterwards, and then I get back to my main journey. Feels pulled between these semi interesting systemic interactions and just cool combat. What about some fucked up economy shit where your buying and selling drives supply and demand and the value of gold? There's room to fully delve into the offline MMO of it all, with occasional pawns already walking about and people who can join your fight. But there should be more of that. Or give me something more linear, a full journey, with more environmental and enemy variety.

I liked this detail that I can't find anyone mention: when you kill a bigger enemy (ogre, cyclops, griffin, etc) you get this calming peaceful synth tone that plays for a few seconds. Like a funeral dirge for your downed opponent.

I think the unmoored world sounds cool. It's wild to put that hidden into your game with the 2 title drop and everything. It also sounds like I won't get anything more out of playing it than I did reading about it personally.

the way this leverages hyakkimaru hunting down 48 demons to recover his 48 body parts to slowly dole out more and more features is so system shock coded. it's soo good. killing a boss in the prologue and seeing the game transition from black&white to full colour cos you reclaimed your eye is absolute tip top stuff. being forced to amble as slowly as possible before you get your leg... yes... yes... I love this. this was made for me. I am the one person on earth who likes that you can't recover from knockdowns without an ear

I'm so on board with everything here that I don't care that the hitboxes largely range from active to lingering to humungous to vertically infinite. don't care that the maps are gigantic and full of nothing but enemies and swords like it's drakengard. you bet your ass I hunted down every last yokai to get my chakra and lymph nodes back even tho I still don't understand what half the stats do. I'm vibing man, who cares

it's cool that the common moral thruline across every story beat is that those who desire disproportionate wealth and power should probably be killed. also cool that one of the major metroidvania upgrades you get half way thru the game is controller vibration. sega was on some astral shit with this one; if someone told me modern camera controls were hidden behind an optional boss I'd nod like it was the most obvious thing I ever heard

as a reimagining of the manga it oscillates between playing stuff 1:1 and riffing on the source material in a way only a 2004 hack-n-slash called BLOOD WILL TELL ever could. the new twist reminds me of the scene in adaptation where the goofy nicolas cage twin describes his screenplay for a film called "The Three" about a killer, victim, and cop who all turn out to be the same person with multiple personality disorder. it's such a dumb ass Whoa Dude way of answering questions that don't matter, and it rules

sick ass game

Relentless and exhilarating rhythm horror game that feels like playing a heavy metal fantasy van decal come to life. The Lightning Bolt soundtrack is excellent and filled with hostile beauty, and the bug avatar feels like a perfect fit for the twitchy, primordial rhythm survival that essentially forces you to enter a subconscious non-verbal state to successfully progress. I adore this style of game and it's basically tailor made for me, but Thumper kind of fails to surprise or develop much after establishing its striking mission statement. I would have loved if the game had more memorable tonal shifts, but for what it is this is a very effective and conceptually tight sinister little thing.

70% quaint and heartfelt little magical girl story about female friendship and forgiveness with low stakes but endearing gameplay and some gorgeous serene visuals, 30% inexcusably perverse collection of creepshots of underage girls that literally made me feel sad and sick! I typically have a highish threshold for leery anime bs and sometimes even find it enjoyably goofy but this was on a really grotesque level that undermined all the thoughtful and empathetic character work the rest of the game attempted. With a few tweaks this so easily could have been a wonderful game for young girls to relate to but it can't stop itself from revealing who it's actually for with wet t-shirt panty shot bullshit every few minutes. Some of it is thankfully avoidable but a lot it is necessary to even progress. and yet.... i still think about this game and its unique aura (when at its best) all the goddamn time. So many component elements here still feel crisp and tender and striking, burgeoning with potential but too slipshod or lecherously self-sabotaging to actualize them beyond mere glimmers here and there. Not a problematic fave bc that implies more adoration than I truly feel, but certainly a problematic fascination??? legitimately excited for the sequel, despite myself. Seems like the yuri undertones might be more embodied and explored?? LOL setting myself up 4 heartbreak here arent i

petition to let Hayato Asano compose one of his breathtaking and emotional auroral EDM osts for something that doesn't relentlessly sexualize extremely young girls pls... 4 real one of my personal ost goats