In a piece for Kotaku’s Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, a writer revisiting the original Kingdom Hearts argues that its opening is still one of the franchise’s most striking sequences — even though it quietly establishes stakes few players understood as children.
Plying the game on PS2, they describe their effort as part of the goal in putting together Guiding Key, a project aimed at examining how memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover have distorted what the series actually is, and where the studio decided it would become a decades-long epic rather than an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds.
Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean”, protagonist Sora falls into an abyss and lands on a giant stained-glass platform bearing Snow White’s likeness. This is the Dive to the Heart, described as a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart. The princesses depicted across these pillars span multiple Disney films, though Sora won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours in-game.
The writer notes that characters appearing during Dives to the Heart throughout the series imply their hearts are “sealed,” suggesting the dream isn’t random — even as players control a child experiencing a frightening dream with no way yet to intervene beyond hoping they can grow strong enough to fix what has happened.
Square Enix uses this space to tutorialize everything from wielding weapons against creatures called Heartless to saving your game, but the writer argues the most notable aspect of the original tutorial is what it omits. Early on, players choose between a sword, staff, and shield before being forced to give up one of the remaining two tools. The game doesn’t explain that this choice affects Sora’s baseline stats for the entire game and the order in which he learns skills — essentially determining an unnamed specialization.
A somber choir arrangement plays throughout much of this section, which the writer recalls feeling foreboding and evoking a sense of preemptive grief upon replaying as an adult. Even when players briefly enter a facsimile of Destiny Islands, Sora’s childhood home, three Final Fantasy characters pose existential questions about what matters to him, what he fears, and what he hopes for — with the writer noting that Sora is just 14 years old.
The fear of whatever lies beyond the nightmare manifests as Darkside, a giant Heartless described as one of the most iconic bosses in the series. Though not particularly challenging, its enormous form proves more frightening than earlier encounters; even after defeat, it swallows Sora whole “in a shroud of darkness.”
The writer concludes that this tutorial sets the stage for what Sora’s journey will entail across 20-plus years — noting that princesses who mean nothing to him now will prove “much more than a passing invention of his subconscious” by its end, and that Kingdom Hearts always had more behind the scenes than anyone could have predicted.
The closer you get to the light, the longer your shadow becomes.
— But don’t be afraid
You hold the mightiest weapon of all.
So don’t forget:
You are the one who will open the door.
Kotaku’s Guiding Key replay runs through late 2027, covering Kingdom Hearts III and its Re:Mind DLC in August-October 2027 before concluding with Kingdom Hearts IV in late 2027.
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