"Kingdom Hearts 2"

Kingdom Hearts 2 has to be the goofiest slice of steampunk kiddie meta mysticism to ever sell a million copies of itself in less than a month. If you've heard the setup, then you're already confused. Disney characters – that's icons Donald, Goofy, Mickey, and Pluto, mixing it up with the casts and visual aesthetics of random movies from the back catalogue like The Lion King to The Nightmare Before Christmas and Cinderella and shit-you-not Tron – walk around with characters from the Final Fantasy games - the hallmark fantasy cycle of the videogame era, a series that began with 2-D graphics and now creates three new dimensions every sequel. Every Final Fantasy game follows a different cast of characters on a different world, but they all encompass the same strange assortment of moods - epic cheese, adolescent picaresque, romantic sacrifice, Emersonian environmentalism, high-tech magic, characters who look like three misshapen legos enacting Freudian psychodramas using swords that fire energy bullets. None of those moods has anything to do with Disney, unless your whole experience of Disney was watching The Black Cauldron and Treasure Planet on repeat on acid.

For a number of reasons, though, the original Kingdom Hearts was a mind-warping slice of fun and bittersweet sorrow. You played as Sora, a kid so bland Haley Joel Osmont voiced him, yet so secretly awesome that his pubescent potential galpal was voiced by a way-pre-fame Hayden Panettiere. At the beginning of the game, you were living on a quiet, bright, shiny island. You played a few minigames to learn the basic controls - a common start tactic for RPGs. You ran around the island and met a few other kids - recognizable from Final Fantasy IX or X, (not to me, though - ceding four months of my freshman high school life to VII was enough for me.)

Your island had a beach, and a lush hillside, and a tree house, and only the barest hint of life - no parents, not even any sign of civilization. There was an obstacle course, and a palm tree, from which you could pick fruit. There was some indication that there was more to the world than just this island, but not much - and so, here at the beginning of the game, you had the impression that you had just awoken from a dream of your real life (or perhaps, just been freshly born) and lived here on this children's paradise your whole existence.

If you walked around long enough, you found a cave hidden behind a waterfall, and if you followed that cave back to its end, you found a few strange chalk drawings on the wall, and since this was a video game, you knew that they were important. There was also a door, and since this was a video game, you knew that eventually it would open.

After a short time, night falls, and strange black creatures attack, kidnapping your friends, tearing open the sky, not so much destroying your island as vacuuming it into nothingness. The door opens, and you follow it through, and that's the end of the prologue. The time you spent on this island was maybe about 1 half percent of the total gameplay - the vast majority of both iterations of Kingdom Hearts is spent running around levels modeled after old Disney movies. But the thrust of both games is about getting back to this tiny island, and about finding your friends to bring them with you. There's certain qualities of Campbell's Hero's Journey, and The Wizard of Oz, and of road movies and coming-of-age novels, not to mention other recursive mega-metamixes like Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Zelazny's A Night in Lonesome October.

Half the charm of Kingdom Hearts comes from the Disney characters. The characters from Final Fantasy are another story. From Cloud Strike to Squall Lionhart to Yuna the heterochromatic summoner, the FF characters you see in KH are little more than waxwork imitations of their original personae - they stop in for a cutesy dialogue, make a veiled allusion to the game they originally came from, and, if you're lucky, fight you for a couple seconds, but when you compare their minute game time here to the literal hundreds of game hours and storylines you find in an FF game, their appearances are kind of sad. At best, these cameos play like Falstaff's hello-I'm-dead scene in Henry V; at worst, they come off like characters on a TV show that stopped being good three seasons ago, like Grey's Anatomy or Nip/Tuck.

But the Disney characters. Oddly, it's not jarring at all to see Donald and Goofy battling Scar alongside Simba, or swimming through the water with Ariel, or riding a magic carpet with Aladdin. This may be because, via Disneyland and Disney on Ice and every Disney special since ever, we're used to thinking of every Disney character as co-existing along the same time-space continuum. It may also be because Disney plots tend toward the simple and uncomplicated, so it's not jarring at all that every "level" of the game basically re-enacts a whole Disney movie in about half an hour or less.

The other half of the charm of Kingdom Hearts requires a bit of explanation, and may not be charming at all. For a game which features a skateboarding mini-game and a tiny talking anthropomorphized duck wearing a wizard's outfit, the plotline for the Kingdom Hearts duology is surprisingly brainfucked. By which I mean, characters regularly turn into other characters, and in so doing, they create still more characters, and the reasons for these metamorphoses would be only a little bit convoluted if all the transmogrified people didn't keep imitating still other people and occasionally falling in love with other's people's alter egos. Whole universes are being created and destroyed at various parts of the game, often right in front of your eyes. And, while you fly from world to world in KH2, you slowly see a massive world beneath your universe grow brighter in the space-temporal mist.

There is also incredibly oversized machinery with higher functions so world-bending they may as well be demi-gods and emotional abstractions; strange men in black cowls whose goals and methods and powers are shrouded in mystery (they function kind of like the Others on Lost, except with more telekinesis and the ability to fire different-colored energy out of their hands); and wormholes, and doorways through time. Throughout the game, you're picking up pages from the journal of a mad scientist, but you pick them up out of order, so a Memento-like game of puzzle-narrative ensues. (You're also picking up lost Dalmatians - guess how many?)

Lost is similarly confusing, but that TV show, like most great hyper-complex genre fiction out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson, usually manages to refocus the sci-fi histrionics through understandable emotional turmoil. Desmond's brain is skipping through time due to the radiation poisoning he suffered when the hatch's electromagnetic radiation matrix imploded upon the island's centrifugal centripetal whatever, but that just means he needs to find the love of his life. Kingdom Hearts focuses on Sora's search for his two friends, one of them the aforementioned Panettiere-voiced girl name Kairi, the other a dark-grinning silver-banged weirdo named Riku. (Sora means "Sky," Kairi means "Sea," and Riku means "Land." GET IT?)

But, like all relationships in Square games, Sora's friendship with both people regularly skips between obsession and utter disinterest. By which I mean, he spends two games (probably a hundred hours, if you're a player player) chasing these people, but when he finds them, they don't seem to be particularly friendly. Him and Kairi seem to be in love, but they're too young in 1 and awkwardly teenaged in 2 to do anything about it. In fact, in both games, Kairi the girl is found first, but with Riku the guy still missing, Sora becomes even more fervent in his search. It's not so much gay as it is Gatsby - Sora's whole purpose for being is to recreate the happy island life from the prologue of 1, and he's not satisfied until he knows that nothing will ever happen to disturb that life again.

I realize I'm generously/confusingly flipping back and forth between pronouns here - are "you" Sora, or is "he" you, or are "you" and "me" both "him" when we play the game? I'm doing this half out of laziness and half with purpose, because a running undercurrent in both games - it seems unintentional, and may just be due to bad translating - is a constant confusion over identity. At the beginning of "Kingdom Hearts 2, there's a lengthy prologue section, which serves a similar purpose to the island in the first game, except that it's longer, more involved, relocated to a multi-tiered urban cityscape, and makes you play as a character named Roxas who almost looks like Sora, who has dreams of a boy named Sora, and who, after a couple hours of gametime, goes to a mansion in the woods and appears to transmogrify INTO Sora. This aspect of the game is incredibly confusing and totally unremarked upon in the advertising. It's even more confusing when Sora spends the rest of the game trying to figure out who the hell is this Roxas kid who keeps appearing to him in nightmares.

So, when the game begins, you're playing as a character who thinks he's the character that you thought you were going to be, and then he becomes that character but the character spends the rest of the story trying to figure out who the character he isn't is. This is why video games are perpetually two steps away from discovering their inner Bergman and Beckett and Borges and Burroughs.