Treasured Memories

Treasured Memories

Adapting Disney Stories into Kingdom Hearts

Written by Samuel Gronseth

Adaptation has always interested me. Many see it as artless, or an indication that new ideas are lacking, but I find the whole process fascinating, and uniquely creative. It’s not simply transplanting a story; it’s the creative process of adapting something into an entirely new form.

That form can be different in so many ways! Perhaps it’s a different medium, like making a video game based on a movie. Perhaps it’s a different time, like setting an old play in the modern day. Perhaps it’s a different culture or people group, like retelling an old story with people of color instead of the original white cast. All of these adaptations show classic stories in a new light, in the hands of new creators, and I think that’s fantastic.

It’s even said that every individual production of a Shakespeare play is its own unique vision of his work, and I love that idea. That so many people could have their hands on a classic story to bring out what they find exceptional about it, and apply their own creative energy and vision to it.

With video games, specifically, adaptation is a strange beast. Partly because the medium is still relatively young, still growing and evolving. But it also simply hasn’t done it much. For most of the medium’s history, true adaptation was exceptionally rare. Most video games that were based on anything were rushed-out tie-ins to popular movies; sure, The Lion King, on the Super Nintendo, was technically a movie-to-game adaptation, but it wasn’t concerned with adapting the story so much as using the environments, music, and visuals to create an enjoyable challenge.

What’s more, only so many stories outside of the video game medium translate well into traditional video game genres. The Lion King isn’t a movie about Simba trying not to fall into water, but that’s what the player spends most of the time doing in the game, because it’s a platformer. Even more action-oriented movies like The Incredibles or Revenge of the Sith have a lot more talking than they do fighting, and turning them into action games did not provide a very good opportunity for adapting the story in a meaningful way.

This approach didn’t change much over time, even as improving technology made it easier than ever to actually put effort into retelling the story of the source material. Play any game based on a movie on the PS2, and you’ll find the same thing; the games are clearly low-effort in the first place, and the story is communicated through the bare minimum of connective tissue, usually brief cutscenes that gloss over major events. They technically communicate the events of the story, at least in broad strokes, but they never even try to retell it in a compelling fashion (let alone one that utilizes the interactivity of the medium). It’s unsurprising that the movie tie-in genre pretty much died during the reign of the PS3 and Xbox 360, barely clinging to life on the Wii until they found new life in recent years on mobile platforms.

Low effort aside, these tie-ins were clearly intended to appeal to people who were already familiar with the story. They didn’t need to truly retell the story in interactive form, because the players already knew the story being told. Games weren’t commonly considered a form of storytelling art back then, either (less so than today, at any rate), so there was little perceived reason to focus on that element to begin with.

Eventually, this began to change. To some degree, at least. We got major games based on books, like The Witcher and Metro 2033. We even got a few interesting takes on older stories back on the PS2, like the Godfather games, or that Fellowship of the Ring game that got made right before the movies took over the followups. But for the most part, when existing stories were adapted into video games, it was a cynical attempt to cash in on the popularity of a work with little to no effort.

Kingdom Hearts 1 is, in some ways, an exception to this rule. And in some ways not. Because it’s a freakin’ weird game.

I say that lovingly, of course. The fact that someone at Square Enix pitched the idea for a Disney and Final Fantasy crossover and didn’t immediately get laughed out of the room astonishes me to this day. Kingdom Hearts 1 is a strange combination of seemingly incompatible things, and working Disney stories into an otherwise unrelated JRPG multiverse setting is possibly the strangest adaptation challenge I’ve ever heard of.

While the overall setting of the game is essentially an original creation, as a monarchy with Mickey on the throne and other Disney staples like Donald and Goofy being part of that world, most other Disney properties incorporated into Kingdom Hearts 1 are played more straight. In most cases, the player essentially plays through a condensed version of the original film, with the conspicuous addition of shadowy monsters to fight. Those retellings are what this article is concerned with.

So how were Disney’s stories adapted to work in Kingdom Hearts 1, and why was it done that way?

Kingdom Hearts 1 follows a very familiar structure in its story and gameplay progression; I like to call it the collection structure. After the conflict is introduced, the quest (which takes most of act two to complete) consists of collecting a certain number of items across a number of locations. Collecting these items allows the protagonist to move on to act three and challenge the antagonist in the final confrontation.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be collecting items, of course; one of the oldest vanguards of the collection structure, The Legend of Zelda, replaced the collection of items with the activation of the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, but the structure is the same. The point of the collection structure is that, from the moment the quest is revealed to the story’s climax, the player’s goal remains the same, and the story need not develop in any meaningful way until then.

This structure is popular in games because it gives the player something to do without needing to tell a particularly complex story. In early games like Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda, where there was little precedent or technological ability to tell complex stories, it made for an easy motivation for the player to go on their adventure and see it through to the end, without the need to continue telling the story beyond the first and final moments of the game.

The Disney stories in Kingdom Hearts 1 are adapted first and foremost not as stories, but as settings for a collection structure.

More sophisticated uses of this structure, however, often utilize each collection as an opportunity to tell their own stories that relate in minor ways to the overarching narrative. This is what we see in games like Ni No Kuni, the first Mass Effect, and the aforementioned Breath of the Wild. And it is in this framework that Kingdom Hearts 1 comfortably rests.

The Disney levels in Kingdom Hearts 1 are best understood not as adaptations of the stories into another form of story, but of the settings into video game levels. Rather than the ice level, the lava level, the underwater level, etc., Kingdom Hearts 1 uses the Tarzan level, the Aladdin level, the Little Mermaid level, etc.

That is to say, the Disney stories in Kingdom Hearts 1 are adapted first and foremost not as stories, but as settings for a collection structure.

By retelling Disney stories in each location, Kingdom Hearts 1 simulates narrative movement while effectively running in place; everything you do in Agrabah, Wonderland, or most other locations ultimately happens for no reason other than for Sora to find the next keyhole and (sometimes) for Maleficent to find the next princess. The segment doesn’t raise the stakes, change the goals, or otherwise change the story in any meaningful way; it just checks one more box so we can continue toward the eventual finale.

Each choice in the adaptation process is made for a reason, and understanding those reasons brings us closer to understanding the work. Recognizing the narrative purpose of the Disney stories as vignettes that lead to the next point in the collection (the keyhole), rather than moving the story forward in any complex or significant way, helps us to understand why most of them are essentially bare-bones retellings of their original stories. Ultimately, retelling Disney movies was never the goal, but appropriating the settings in a way that necessitates as little true narrative progression as possible.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Most notably, I think, its use of Winnie the Pooh, calling to the series’ nature as a storybook in a rather meta fashion. Its handling of Beauty and the Beast also deserves this disclaimer. But when Kingdom Hearts 1 opts to play a setting straight and retell the original Disney story, it tends to do it with little effort put into an effective retelling.

At this point, this article might be coming across as being rather negative toward the game, and that’s not entirely untrue. I do think this is a failing on the game’s part, or a missed opportunity at least, if one that’s improved over the course of the series. But that’s not to say Kingdom Hearts 1 is a complete failure on this front, either. These stories are still here for a reason.

Kingdom Hearts 1 is, itself, a fairy tale. A fairy tale comprised of countless other fairy tales thrown in a blender and whipped into an earnestly cheesy and pure-hearted garble, but still a fairy tale. It relies on, and uses its story to affirm, a degree of childlike wonder. And it takes a particular type of cold-hearted person to deny that Disney’s legacy embodies that wonder in a stunningly effective and wholly unique fashion.

One could say that Sora’s journey is more literally applicable to many of us than we might realize. Young children, aching to see and learn more about the world, being transported to other lands and learning important lessons from colorful, wondrous Disney movies. The mere presence of Disney properties in this game reinforces its themes and atmosphere. Even if, in the end, they’re just another step in our journey.

SAMUEL GRONSETH is the creator, writer, and host of the popular YouTube channel, “Games as Lit. 101.”

https://www.youtube.com/user/gamesasliterature

Photo credit: Jesse Elliott

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