Battery Backed Memories: Kingdom Hearts

Hi, my name’s Jakob. I’m the latest addition to the Random Havok team. I play video games and tabletop games, I make things, and I'm also a dad. Battery Backed Memories will be a semi-regular, somewhat self-indulgent column about the games that are most special to me, and the ways in which they've impacted my life, for better or worse. My hope is that some of my experiences relate to yours and we can share a warm, fuzzy moment together reminiscing. Also, please be aware that since the stories will focus on older games, spoiler alerts are in effect.

There is a long list of video games that occupy special places in my life. They're my milestones; markers along the road between my childhood and (so-called) adulthood. They share space with memories of personal triumphs and failures, family road trips, graduations, old friends. These are the types of memories we hold close and use as a yardstick against which to quantify life experience. When I reflect on the memory of playing a particular game, I’m also reflecting on what I was feeling or thinking at the time. I can become my 4-year-old self again, sitting in my cousin's basement, booting up the Legend of Zelda NES cartridge (which I chose solely on the basis of the gold color) and hearing the theme music for the first time. I get to re-experience all the wonder and curiosity and uncertainty that came with youth, and then see the effect that those feelings had on me as I grew up. For me, playing video games has way more intrinsic value now than simply the fun or the challenge of gameplay. The games become part of a living scrapbook. When I want to take a trip back to another time in my life, all I have to do is put a disc in a drive, or a cartridge in a slot, or a token in a machine.

Kingdom Hearts

Sometimes it's hard to feel nostalgic about a game or a franchise that's still present, that's still being re-created, marketed, and sold by a publisher with a new sub-title and a fresh coat of paint. Nintendo likes to remind us constantly that Mario and his gang are still around, and sometimes the memories of my early adventures with him get muddled up in the maelstrom of spin-offs. The games from my past that still stand out despite sequels and sub-titles and mobile tie-ins are among my most revered. Kingdom Hearts is a great example. I know what you may be thinking: Kingdom Hearts does to Disney and Square characters exactly what Nintendo does to Mario. That is 100% true. It's a shameless nostalgia-fest designed to appeal to a huge demographic.But that was part of my original motivation for playing it. It was a safe choice. I love Square-Enix games and I love Disney cartoons, so there was no doubt that I'd be able to find something about it that I loved. There was a surprise twist, though. While the appeal to nostalgia got me to buy the game, what sucked me in was the universe and the narrative that Squeenix built around those pre-existing characters, as well as the new characters with whom I explored that universe. 

Kairi, Sora, and Riku on Destiny Island

Sora, Kairi, and Riku felt very familiar to 16-year-old me. They were kids, desperately curious about the world, and trying to figure out their place in it. All this despite being isolated from, and ignorant of, the universe beyond their island. When we first meet them, they're in the process of building a raft with the naive aspiration to start an adventure away from home. Sora's journey becomes a story of self-discovery. He experiences darkness and emptiness for the very first time when the Heartless appear on Destiny Island. He's torn away from his home and his friends, and forced to find his way in a wholly unfamiliar place. He's required to put his life in the hands of complete strangers. He has an immense responsibility thrust upon him when he discovers that he is the sole wielder of the only weapon capable of defeating all the evil in the universe. It’s pretty heavy. And to a teenager who is getting his first job, earning his driver's license, and having to open up pathways to new and sometimes scary parts of life, it's a very real allegory. That's the age when those responsibilities feel the heaviest, and the unknowns are the most frightening. There's some comfort in relating your own struggles to someone else's, even if he is a video game character.

The message of Kingdom Hearts is that none of the difficult stuff in life is possible without friends, and that the connections we make with other people shape our world. It manifests in the gameplay style; Sora's friends are indispensable assets in battle, and they're always present in the story. It's appropriate then, that this was the first game playthrough I shared with my best friend at the time - the girl who would later become my wife. We experienced the story together and grew closer in the process. Since then we've traversed the Sinnoh and Unova regions, raided Azeroth and the Outland, explored Faerûn, and shared more than a few adventures in the real world, too. I can confidently say that we couldn't have accomplished any of the difficult stuff without each others support.

I recently received a copy of Kingdom Hearts 2 as a gift. It was a much welcomed surprise distraction during a busy week. The PS2 was pulled out of storage and plugged into the TV before the plastic was even off the case. My wife and I have been spending most of our free time playing it again together, reminiscing. However, it isn't the game itself that brings us back into Sora's world again (though Kingdom Hearts 2 is a great title and a worthy sequel). It's the comfort of visiting an old vacation spot together, and reliving a moment from our past. It's the thrill of attempting a challenge that maybe we overlooked or couldn't accomplish the first time through. And when it gets to be too difficult or too frustrating, we always know that we can hand off the controls.