First Frames - Kingdom Hearts 1

I’ve played a lot of difficult games.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Cuphead. I play most modern games on a harder difficulty, just to up the ante a bit. I’m even a lover of old, brutal games better fit to eat your quarters at an arcade, like Ghosts ‘n Goblins or Contra.

None compare to the Proud Mode of Kingdom Hearts 1.

Let’s rewind a few decades to the year 2000. As the story goes, a Disney exec and a higher-up from Square Enix ran into each other in an elevator and came up with an idea: take the beloved stable of Disney characters and make an epic, sprawling video game around them. The game was pitched, picked up, and Kingdom Hearts was born, officially releasing in March of 2002. The game itself centers around a young boy named Sora (voiced by The Sixth Sense’s Haley Joel Osmont) teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck to save the world from dark creatures called Heartless, led by Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent.

The game itself is insane. You travel between different Disney worlds like Neverland, Aladdin’s Agrabah, Hercules, and Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas (because why not!), saving each world from the Heartless and trying to find your best friend Riku, who has teamed up with Maleficent to take control of the darkness and the heart of the universe itself, Kingdom Hearts. See, every world has a heart, and when you lose your heart, it makes two things, a Heartless and a Nobody. You must lock up the heart of the world with your Keyblade, which chooses its wielder like a magic wand, and also every Final Fantasy character is there.

See what I mean?

Kingdom Hearts is like a so-bad-it’s-good soap opera. With each game, the plot gets more and more convoluted, until time travel, clones, and computer simulations abound. But even though it’s impossible to fully understand (one of the games is called Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth By Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, to give you an idea), the games are beloved cult classics, and the release of Kingdom Hearts 3 way back in 2019 was met with joy and fanfare.

I had never played any of them. I was familiar with the series, but I had never bothered touching them until I saw a complete packaging of every Kingdom Hearts game on sale. So, I finally sat down with one of my good friends, a Kingdom Hearts savant who couldn’t wait to watch me play. Thus, we began our journey into Kingdom Hearts 1.

For context, I didn’t play the original game. I played Final Mix, a remaster of the game with slight tweaks to quality-of-life. When you first boot up KH1: Final Mix, the game asks you what difficulty you’d like to play it on – Beginner, Normal, or Proud Mode. My friend advised me to steer clear of Proud Mode, but ironically, I was too proud. “I play games on Hard mode all the time! This’ll be no different!”, I explained, confidently making the worst decision of my life. I would come to eat those words.

Kingdom Hearts 1 begins with a very high-concept, FMV sequence where Sora falls through the ocean, then is the ocean, then you’re the ocean, that sort of thing. Then, we’re thrust into the main meat and potatoes of the game, which is a typical beat-em-up with straightforward controls like one attack button. This gave me false hope. After destroying a few little goblins on stained glass platforms depicting Disney princesses, as you do, we began our journey on Destiny Island (aptly named). We ran some fetch quests, met our best friends Kairi and Riku, and planned to leave the island and explore the world. Then hell broke loose, and the world was destroyed by darkness! Tragedy!

We awoke in a place called Traverse Town, met by Donald, Goofy, and Aerith of Final Fantasy 7 fame. The game explains that darkness is pouring from the heart of the worlds, and while King Mickey (because Disney couldn’t resist) is off trying to stop it, Sora has been chosen by the Keyblade to seal the darkness back into the heart of every world that is in danger. And these words like “Keyblade” and “darkness” are not metaphorical. Sora, voiced by Haley Joel Osmont, carries around a sword that’s also a key, fighting off creatures made of pure shadow and locking up the hearts of different Disney franchises.

From there, the game becomes more predictable: we travel to a Disney world, fight a classic villain and help the heroes, and seal away the darkness. But…this is Proud Mode. It’s not that simple.

Our first major obstacle comes with Tarzan, and the first boss fight against the villainous hunter Clayton. Clayton wields a shotgun and rides a chameleon, because of course he does. This boss in this video game for children took maybe 2 hours to finally beat. Pain, sweat, tears, and harried wiki guides consumed our waking moments, as Proud Mode reminded us that it’s called “Proud” mode. My hubris betrayed me. And it got worse.

Every boss from there on out was a messenger sent from Hell. Aladdin’s Jafar and the Cave of Wonders took a day in total to chew through. A plant monster in the belly of Pinnochio’s Monstro the Whale was an hour-long affair. Peter Pan’s Captain Hook threw hundreds of enemies at me while stabbing me to death with a pirate’s saber. It was untenable.

The difficulty of Proud Mode needs to be explained, though. It’s not that the enemies are smarter or quicker. They simply deal double damage. Very little balancing takes place in this regard, they just hit you for way harder. And without invincibility upon being hit, you can get combo’d to pieces if you look at a Heartless the wrong way. This is the crux of Proud Mode: playing extremely cautiously because one wrong move means the death of Sora. The bosses still have multiple health bars, so it takes the same amount of time to chew through their defenses, but you’re made of paper mâché. All in all, it took us 16 hours to get to the final section of the game – a game about Donald and Goofy flying a Gummi ship through outer space to meet Alice in Wonderland.

The final section of Kingdom Hearts takes place in an imposing castle called Hollow Bastion. There, through weeping and wailing, we finally confront Riku and Maleficent. We fight Riku, now possessed by a dark presence named Ansem…but not Ansem the Wise, a different character entirely (remember how convoluted it is?). Then, we fight Maleficent once as herself, then again in her classic dragon form. Fun fact: we couldn’t beat Draconic Maleficent. We just couldn’t. We stood out of the battle arena and let Donald and Goofy chew through her health, slowly but surely, until she was defeated an hour later. We had given up at this point.

Then, at the end of our road, we fight Riku once more, fully taken over by Evil Ansem. Here, Proud Mode decides to remind us why its called Proud Mode, and beats us to a pulp. It takes hours to put Riku in his place, through healing items (because Donald and Goofy can’t help you with this one!) and walkthrough explanations. But at the finish line we stood, having defeated…. nope, never mind, there’s more. There’s a place called The End of the World.

And there, at The End of the World, is where we bowed out. At 20 hours, we simply couldn’t beat the game on Proud Mode. We took to Google to figure out if we were just terrible at the game, and there learned that KH1: Final Mix on Proud Mode is infamous for being truly nightmarish. Grinding to level 80, doing every possible side quest, that sort of thing. We took a deep breath, put down our controller, and turned the game off. “No way,” we said. We were better.

A few months later, we returned to Kingdom Hearts 1, this time on Beginner mode. It took four hours (skipping cutscenes) to beat the game. Proud Mode was, quite literally, five times longer.

From the comfort of Beginner mode, we could truly appreciate the game. The art style was relatively timeless, even 20 years later, and gameplay was tight and fun without being weighed down by double damage. And the soundtrack is, hands down, one of the best I’ve ever listened to. It’s iconic, beautiful, and perfectly constructed for the game.

Kingdom Hearts was a rollercoaster of emotion from start to finish. It was a crucible, a trial by fire, that bonded me and my friend through the misery of being one-shot by Clayton’s gun. On its own it’s a brilliant game. Fun, crazy, and just difficult enough. On Proud Mode, I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. But it helped us make memories. And that’s what matters. Not how Kairi was actually Sora’s heart the entire time, which put her in a coma. Not how Ansem was actually not named Ansem, and was named Xehanort, and was the apprentice to the OTHER Ansem before becoming darkness incarnate. It’s the time we spent together.

But I’m never spending that time on the hardest difficulty again.