Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to interrogate how much the memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series have distorted what it actually is. That means seeing just where it is in this 25-year-long journey that Square Enix decided Kingdom Hearts was going to be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds, and was instead going to become a decades-long epic. And now that I’ve started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to call out something that was disorienting and even perhaps frightening to me as a child: the tutorial.

Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean,” Sora, our plucky protagonist, falls into an abyss, landing on a giant stained-glass platform adorned with Snow White’s likeness. At this point, Sora hasn’t met her, and won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours, but he and his allies would return to places that looked like this many times throughout the series. This is the Dive to the Heart, which is essentially a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart. The princesses shown on these pillars span multiple Disney films, and even now, Kingdom Hearts is spinning its intricate web in the ones it chooses to show the player as they explore this area. Why does Sora see these specific princesses?

The times we enter a Dive to the Heart across the Kingdom Hearts series seem to confirm that these characters’ appearances aren’t picked at random, as it implies that their hearts are sealed in some way.

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