A Shattered Memory That's Like a Far-off Dream? Something Like That…

I got home from finishing my bachelor's in something barely usable, and like those who’ve trudged this storied road, I have found myself back in my childhood bedroom in my hometown. And if that wasn’t cliche enough, I have thoughts about it... Thoughts, I’m going to post on Substack… It is fitting that I indulge in this particular brand of derivativeness (or, I suppose, perceived derivativeness) given the game I’m using to cope with my current position. Kingdom Hearts is a walking corpse in a trench coat, and I say that lovingly. Its donor cadavers consist of half-baked excerpts of Disney movies, awkward cameos of Final Fantasy characters, and a morality conflict so simultaneously black and white and esoteric it's barely legible. But it's like really good. Or at least I think it is? Kingdom Hearts is a franchise that

exists for me largely outside of the games.

I remember very vividly a day at the public library when I was no older than 7, stumbling upon the opening cinematic for Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. I watched it repeatedly for the remainder of the hour allotted; it was synapse-altering in its surrealness to me. But I never actually wanted to play the game. Never appeared on any Christmas or birthday list. I didn’t play a Kingdom Hearts game until I was about 14, and it was Kingdom Hearts: Re: Coded for the DS, which, for those unfamiliar, is ostensibly a retelling of the first game through the lens of playing through Mickey Mouse's digital journal entries (yeah idunno dawgg). It's a game where you are meant to question the validity of experience. The character you play as is digital both in and out of the universe. The protagonist, re-coded Sora, is half-remembered, a being whose existence is defined by the players' retroactive meddling. It is intensely interesting conceptually, but a slog to play through. It utilizes a lot of previous story beats and content, but even as someone who was experiencing this content as new, I remember finding it boring. And so my love of the series stems from my retroactive consumption of the series via video essays and loose cutscene clips online. It is then strange that I find myself gravitating towards it now.

I came into the possession of “The greatest hits” edition of Kingdom Hearts One earlier this year at a community exchange box (in return, I left my copy of Parable of Sower I had bought in an anxious fit at a Barnes and Noble for fear I’d look weird for not buying something). Lacking a PlayStation 2 to play it on, it sat unceremoniously in a storage container until I got home. I make artwork using hair, monitors, and screens, and my mother, not really knowing what I do with them, but wanting to support me left an old CRT in my room. And so it felt kismet to dust off my old PlayStation 2 and play Kingdom Hearts on a CRT. It seemed like a canonical setup, the only “proper way” to use either device. So I bought a shitty third party controller and waiting on its arrival I fantasized about an imagined nostalgia and cool guy points I’d get for playing this “retro” game on vintage hardware.

Serendipitously, the night before the controller was scheduled to arrive, my phone died like died died. No longer could I make an IG post that emulated those Pinterest boards where there's a CRT ambiently playing the opening cutscene of an obscure game. Without that validation, I didn’t even really want to play the game. When I finally got around to it, I had to delete saved data to make room for it, and it was there, looking through the games I played as a child, that I realized how much stock I had put into reliving this imagined childhood. Re: coding the fabric of my youth. And just like the Re: coded Sora are my manufactured experiences are made less valid due to context. Am I disingenuous for wanting to erase Ford vs Chevy from my system memory, a game I genuinely played to make room for a game I wish I did? I want so desperately to be someone who likes things in a “genuine way”. To love a game because I played it, to love a show because I finished it. Authenticity via completion.

These ponderings didn’t take me very far. I deleted that Ford vs Chevy file and played Kingdom Hearts for an hour (found the controls insufferable) and haven’t touched it since. I think I’m going to force myself to play it partially out of some sort of self-destructive tendency to do things I don’t enjoy until I convince myself, but because, as a child, I believed that manufactured version of Sora in re: coded was real. And so I will honor that contrived derivative indulgent part of myself that might need to construct a false childhood to not be swallowed by the remnants of the real one that currently surrounds me.