Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPG’s) have long been
a point of much frustration, anxiety, and sadness for me, a genre which I felt
unable to meaningfully parse. In my younger days as a child, I found them
simply boring, yet was never able to understand why; I always felt that there
was some key ingredient I was missing, as my monthly Nintendo Power
subscription often reassured me that games like Chrono Trigger, Secrets of
Mana, Final Fantasy, and Skies of Arcadia were “true” classics. I
read in GamePro and on IGN of the “greatest games of all time”
like Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears, Suikoden, Earthbound. I
gathered tales of hours lost, classes skipped, life opportunities missed, all in
drawn-out anticipation of meeting Sephiroth in battle, of saving the world from
Gyorg, of travelling through time with Crono and crew. Sure, I loved Pokémon as much as the next elementary
school student, battling and trading our beloved creatures together on the
playground and in cramped bedrooms after school, but that was purely tradition
of bygone years.
Yet as my love of games proved to persevere, so too
did my disdain for JRPG’s. In 2006, with the release of Kingdom Hearts II, I had finally found a JRPG that sucked me in
when I bought it on a whim. What perplexed me was that, finally, there came
along a JRPG that instantly fired all synapses for me. I cared not that I
hadn’t played the original; in fact, that actually contributed to my taking a
liking to Kingdom Hearts II. From the
moment you begin the game, and the animation set to Hikaru Utada singing her
song, “Sanctuary” plays, my young mind is filled with intrigue. When the
introductory cutscenes featuring mysterious robed figures finishes, and the
controls are handed to I, the player, I’m instantly confused by the protagonist
I’m at the reigns of, that of Roxas.
While Kingdom
Hearts II has a bit of a slow start, it does a good job of quickly
introducing the player to its mechanics, by way of having the player attempt to
keep a beach ball in the air with a stick, instead of with a Keyblade to the
Heartless. It’s an attempt at world-building, and a cute one that I appreciate
to this day, at that. But more importantly, what the game is doing is
communicating to the player the general flow and style of the gameplay. It is
saying that this Final Fantasy and Disney
aesthetic fusion hosts an action game, not the turn-based systems dictating
much of Square-Enix’s past efforts.