Oct 8, 2026 · 1 hr 26 min · 14 segments
Why does Kingdom Hearts open with an image of Snow White? Very grateful to the superb Ben Montoya for joining me on this first episode of the Heart 2 Heart Club. We discussed discovering these games…
I did want to take a second to back up even a little bit further beyond there just being a ton of Kingdom Hearts games.
Kingdom Hearts is an incredible pitch for a video game because you have basically an action-adventure RPG with a, like...
Final Fantasy anime-looking cast of characters going through fantastical, complex, sometimes extremely hard boss battles and, you know, interesting battle mechanics, like combat mechanics.
But then also every world and boss battle is like based around a Disney movie, like a licensed Disney movie.
So, you know, in the first one, it's like Tarzan and Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, like a bunch of like classics.
And then by the time you get to like the more recent ones, it's like Toy Story and like a bunch of Pixar stuff.
like crossed with like final fantasy rpg uh nostalgia and also combat that's like a slice between like you know a menu based like um rpg and then like a combat based rpg kind of thing
i'm just i'm just laughing at like the experience of like trying to pull up a spell that isn't in one of your hot uh bars being like one of the most like like uh controls are so stupid they're like they're wild um uh are you familiar with like the founding because like i did some digging into like the history of just how it got made
okay so i'll share what i've learned so far um which is um Starts with Squaresoft at the time, not before it became Square Enix merging with the Dragon Quest company.
Squaresoft just happened to be in the same corporate building in, I believe, Tokyo, Japan as Disney Japan.
And the people got to know each other just like literally like in the elevator.
And people have been quoted saying that after Mario 64 came out for the Nintendo 64 and kind of like, blew up what a 3D video game could be and was such a phenomenon with people.
The people at Squaresoft were really thinking about how could we ever make a game that was on that level of accessibility of having a character that is as globally beloved as Mario.
And apparently, independently, Disney came to them about making a Mickey Mouse RPG.
I did want to take a second to back up even a little bit further beyond there just being a ton of Kingdom Hearts games.
Kingdom Hearts is an incredible pitch for a video game because you have basically an action-adventure RPG with a, like...
Final Fantasy anime-looking cast of characters going through fantastical, complex, sometimes extremely hard boss battles and, you know, interesting battle mechanics, like combat mechanics.
But then also every world and boss battle is like based around a Disney movie, like a licensed Disney movie.
So, you know, in the first one, it's like Tarzan and Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, like a bunch of like classics.
And then by the time you get to like the more recent ones, it's like Toy Story and like a bunch of Pixar stuff.
like crossed with like final fantasy rpg uh nostalgia and also combat that's like a slice between like you know a menu based like um rpg and then like a combat based rpg kind of thing
i'm just i'm just laughing at like the experience of like trying to pull up a spell that isn't in one of your hot uh bars being like one of the most like like uh controls are so stupid they're like they're wild um uh are you familiar with like the founding because like i did some digging into like the history of just how it got made
okay so i'll share what i've learned so far um which is um Starts with Squaresoft at the time, not before it became Square Enix merging with the Dragon Quest company.
Squaresoft just happened to be in the same corporate building in, I believe, Tokyo, Japan as Disney Japan.
And the people got to know each other just like literally like in the elevator.
And people have been quoted saying that after Mario 64 came out for the Nintendo 64 and kind of like, blew up what a 3D video game could be and was such a phenomenon with people.
The people at Squaresoft were really thinking about how could we ever make a game that was on that level of accessibility of having a character that is as globally beloved as Mario.
And apparently, independently, Disney came to them about making a Mickey Mouse RPG.
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