Trying to find original forum thoughts on kh1 from 2002 on google and can't find much. For anyone who played the game back then, what did you think of it?

Your thoughts on stuff like

• Riku being unbeatable on Destiny Islands and in Hollow Bastion
• not being able to skip cutscenes
• the emotional climax with Sora and Kairi saving each other in Hollow Bastion

stuff like that.

Oh and I don't mind if you didn't play back then specifically, I'd still like to hear about your thoughts.

A lot of it has to do with where you were in the world and what age group you fell under. I.E Disney had been a worldwide juggernaut for decades by the time KH1 released, but Squaresoft which hadn't yet become Square-Enix had barely made a dent outside of Japan. Most of the Final Fantasy games which were half of the appeal of the crossover aspect of the game didn't do big sales numbers outside of Japan.

Indeed if you were in a country where English is the primary language there was less of a 50/50 chance you were familiar with the characters who appear in KH1 from Final Fantasy and more so a 30/70 in favor that you had absolutely no idea who they were or knew one or two of them at best (in some cases by only appearance rather than anything else).

If you were a gamer you might know them from gaming magazines. If you were an especially avid one or specifically drawn in by JRPGs; that's when you would be in the camp that knew who all of them were.

Additionally for as popular, beloved, and iconic as the Disney characters at the forefront of KH were by then, Disney has never had a good reputation when it comes to games they had involvement in outside of KH and one or two standalone outliers. Having Disney characters in the game should very much have meant sales tanked rather than the game doing well.

So when you come across retrospectives on YouTube or Niconico saying KH being a success is a miracle it really is a more apt statement than it sounds. Of course there are a lot of sales that KH1 got and that the series as it continued still gets from parents who have long been conditioned into blind faith in Disney buying their children the games.

Moving into the game itself. If you were a little kid (say 5-8 years of age) you probably only experienced KH1 during its initial release as a result of your older sibling(s) playing it while you watched and maybe just maybe giving you a turn with the controller if they got tired of you pestering them for one. While for some kids that little the story will have gone right over their heads or been hard to follow; others will have been drawn in so strongly they would continue to follow the series when it began receiving sequels and plenty of them are probably still fans today. Regardless it would've been a normal part of the equation to have to sit through any of the cutscenes as it wasn't an industry norm for cutscenes to be skippable yet.

Squaresoft/Square-Enix during the PS1 and PS2 eras was one company famous for unskippable cutscenes because they used them as 60% of the appeal of their games. Even when their biggest competitors started to normalize the practice of providing the option to skip cutscenes Squaresoft/Square-Enix remained stubborn about it into the start of the PS3 era.

And even where they did decide to cave about it they usually kept the FMV cutscenes unskippable. There's also that one horrendous example of forcing you to experience cutscenes for the best possible outcome in that FFX-2 (originally launched on PS2 in 2003, well into a period where almost every noteworthy competitor for Square had started to include the option to skip cutscenes, in some cases even the FMV ones without any kind of penalty) requires you to sit through pretty much every line of dialogue for 100% story completion in a single playthrough.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to horribly make with this particular tangent is that unskippable cutscenes were just a thing that you either raged over and broke more than a few controllers because of, or you used the FMV ones as a bathroom/food break while any regular ones got mashed through if they were placed before a boss fight and you were on your umpteenth attempt to get past an especially difficult one.

If the game had new game plus you just mashed through regular cutscenes and did chores/took a bathroom or food break during the FMV ones and during the end credits scroll after your first playthrough.

Depending on how engaging you found the gameplay and platforming of KH1 you would finish the game or drop it. Common drop points being the worlds based off of Tarzan and The Little Mermaid, but some people regardless of if they were a tiny 5-8 year old or a mid-late teen (16-19 years of age) or fully fledged adults as young as 21 and as old as 60 have also dropped the game as early as when they got to Traverse Town for the first time because of a lack of a map or synopsis. Even when it comes to Destiny Islands some people just could not figure out how to progress. Those are things that were true way back when and are still true in present day.

If you were a teenager playing KH1 when it originally released you were of two camps. You either thought it was lame because of the Disney stuff and you were at the age where children begin to reject Disney or you used it as an excuse to continue to support Disney stuff since it had "mature" characters in it from that one Japanese game series (Final Fantasy), you'd seen picking up traction with other teens and that crossover aspect gave you the perfect excuse to insist that Disney was still acceptable even for teens to the teens who were trying to get you to leave it behind. On the other side of the camp you were an avid gamer playing whatever you wanted and cared little for the reputation of the game, in some cases you picked it up and committed to finishing it specifically because it was being trashed on by others.

Impersonal experiences (Hearsay/Memories) and Personal Thoughts/Reflections on Back then:

Riku being unbeatable on Destiny Islands and at Hollow Bastion: When people say F this fight it isn't for nothing. Back then you could regularly encounter children at playgrounds during recess or on weekends in the park bragging about getting past Riku in Hollow Bastion or successfully winning against him on Destiny Islands (in both the sparring match and the race for who gets to share the fruit with Kairi).

Strategies would be discussed in AIM/MSN chatrooms and on forums for websites that don't even exist anymore or purged the forum pages in question ages ago. But honestly KH1 has multiple bosses outside of Riku that were difficult AF for the original playerbase too. They're just not as meme-worthy today I guess. One of the reasons Atlantica is the way it is in KH2 is because of how much players hated combat in it in KH1 and the negative feedback was thankfully actually taken to heart.

The climax of the story/the story in general really: In present day most of the KH fanbase doesn't have many nice things to say about Kairi and that very much originated during KH1's vanilla release. But it wasn't such an egregious issue how she was handled back then.

She wasn't very interesting nor did she do much of anything but she served her role. There wasn't much to judge her for one way or the other. The lack of any substantial meaningful time with Kairi was what made it difficult to really call the climax in Hollow Bastion when she and Sora save one another "Emotional".

Even so the original version of this game released right after the Disney Renaissance entered its concluding years. More than enough of the players who were indoctrinated by Disney during the 1990s were still in the right headspace to fall hook line and sinker for the storyline's sequences in Hollow Bastion.

From people freaking out over Riku being possessed, crying at Sora's sacrifice, cheering at Kairi's hug changing him back in the lobby. It all got the intended reactions from certain players, while others just scoffed/shrugged/looked on in indifference. No-one ever said the writing in Kingdom Hearts is especially deep so, eh.

Now to be fair to Kairi, she's not the only character that was considered to be nothing special back then. Sora and Riku may have been hits with players who had been seduced into loving their archetypes through other media, but they were hardly universally beloved or hated characters either when you look at representative characters for the archetypes they filled within the game. Nowadays we see frequent talk online about why Disney doesn't use the KH original characters much in their theme parks and IMHO this is why.

As much as the first game was an unexpected critical and financial success the cast of characters made specifically for the game were not considered anything special by the broader general public. To put it in words that IMHO anyone should be able to understand: Sora, Riku, Kairi, and Ansem Seeker of Darkness didn't do for video games what the likes of the most famous characters from Star Wars did for movies.

And even if we narrow things down to RPGs both Japanese and non-Japanese these characters weren't revolutionizing gaming the way Donkey Kong, Mario, and Sonic once did and in some cases would continue to do. Kairi wasn't Barbie or a Charlie's Angel, that sort of effect. It was simply a game that did unexpectedly well and as such they decided to make more of them.

Further fairness to them when have we ever seen a RPG series that is strictly based in storytelling rather than gameplay where the same cast of characters gets reused outside of Legend of Zelda? Tales, Mana, Final Fantasy, etc etc. They all come with different casts of characters unless they're doing direct or near future sequels.

The ending: There was so much outcry for a sequel to Kingdom Hearts because of the way it ended. I do not have a single memory of anyone being satisfied with the way it ends. I am glad I live in a dimension/timeline where the game got not one but multiple sequels. Because of how far the character of Riku would come in particular.

One of my favorite memories from chatrooms and forums about KH1's ending is peoples reactions to Simple and Clean. There was one person who yelled in all caps about how unfitting the song was for the final scenes because its score sounds so uplifting. I think the person must've been a j-pop anti or something similar because they went off on a tangent about "anime BS." in the same forum for several pages.

Other Stuff: "I bought this because the cover is really eye-catching." - There were so, SO MANY people in the chatrooms and forums back then who said this. There was a neighbor of mine who had a twelve year old son who she got the game for and when she saw him fighting on Destiny Islands against the heartless on the night of fate she took the disc out and returned the game the next day. Ah the days when parents were so uppity about video game violence.

Extra Tidbit: It's not from the days of KH1's initial vanilla release, but from circa the original release of Birth By Sleep. This can probably still be found online if enough digging is done. Around this time there was an uptick in people posting online about discovering new scenes in KH1 if they did certain worlds in different orders than what the game wanted them done in. I thought it was cute how excited some people were at discovering the alternate scenes. Dunno if that was really worth mentioning or not, but thought I'd share anyway.

A Confession of Sorts: I'm sure I've mentioned it over the course of my posts on here but I've never played through KH1 from start to finish. I usually quit during the Tarzan world because of the way the camera interacts with the navigation through the world. But even when I've had the luxury of someone completing that world for me I always end up stopping at some point later.

Even with the collections I went straight to Re:CoM and KH2FM instead of bothering to ever play through KH1FM where control of the camera is a lot better. Gameplay wise I'm very familiar with the bosses of KH1 in its vanilla form due to being around to help out friends with their attempts to get past them.

Even today though, KH1 regardless of version is the KH game I'm the least familiar with as it pertains to the ins and outs of the game itself. GBA Chain of Memories, Days, Re:Coded they've all seen start to finish runs from me at some point in my life since they came out. KH1 if I ever did, I have no memory of it. I do however remember that the first time I ever got to see it through to the end was via a group effort between myself and three of my cousins. And as I already mentioned the ending was not satisfying. Thank you to all that is mighty that Chain of Memories and KH2 happened!

PS: An outsider's perspective on what reaction to KH1 might've been like from the Japan side. If you've ever seen compilation videos of Let's Players/Streamers reacting to the Final Fantasy characters in KH1 or to Sephiroth in KH2 on YouTube, I would hazard that is probably quite close to what Japan based players would've reacted like to said characters when KH1 and KH2 first came out, less so in present day where Square-Enix has severely damaged its relationship with its consumers more or less worldwide and Japan in contrast to external territories has had plenty of time to get over how "cool" and "awesome" and "amazing" the golden era Final Fantasy characters are. Suffice it to say the US, UK, and Canada, etc have way more appreciation for FF7R than Japan ever will because of how few people outside of Japan really got to experience the perceived greatness of the original FF7.

Edited May 6May 6 by FadedSparkle

Given the fact I was 8 years old at the time of KH1's release, I'll type what I can remember from back then:

- Being scared of Darkside 1
- Raging at Destiny Islands Riku
- Scared again of Darkside 2, asking my older cousin for help
- Getting lost in Traverse Town and whooped by Leon
- Actually beating Guard Armor without help
- Loving building gummi ships

Don't remember much after that though  

Edited April 27Apr 27 by Weedanort