You waited all year for summer to play Kingdom Hearts II. You loved the original Kingdom Hearts, its fusion of Final Fantasy and Disney. Hikaru Utada’s “Simple & Clean” is one of your jams. You plan on spending your vacation playing Kingdom Hearts II at your uncle’s house in New Jersey on his PlayStation 2, a console you don’t own. Your cousins, Ric, Arthur and Sasha, accompany you to Game Crazy to purchase the game.
That night you fumble through Kingdom Hearts II’s three-hour tutorial. You begin the game as Roxas, not Sora. You whisper, “What’s going on?” With every unfolding story exposition your interest fades. You think that maybe you’re too old, too dumb for Kingdom Hearts II. You pass the controller to your cousins. They restart from the beginning. Every explanation of the story convolutes it even more. Your cousins aren’t discouraged by this, or the cargo shorts the characters wear. They relish the verbose ramblings, “So deep!” they shout. They become obsessed. You watch with uneasy amusement.
The next day you make the mistake of moving the PlayStation 2 to your room hoping to salvage the vacation with Resident Evil 4. You will never get to play Resident Evil 4. Your cousins commandeer the console and your room. Like it or not, It’s Kingdom Hearts II. They play till three in the morning. You try to sleep, but Sora, Goofy, Donald Duck and the Disney character cornucopia won’t shut the fuck up. “King Mickey” this . . . “Kingdom Hearts Encoder” that… “heartless”… “DiZ”… “nobodies”… “Jiminy Cricket‽”… “Organization XIII”… Your mind shatters.
Two nights become three and three becomes five. You yearn for rest. Your cousins’ collective joy for Kingdom Hearts II, the flashy double keyblades and the Disney tunes – those cursed songs! – galvanize them. They beat the game over and over. After six days you’ve amassed over twenty-three hours of lost sleep. “Kingdom Hearts!”
Each day you await a game over screen, in hopes of rest. Instead, with every failure they just pass the controller. “It’s Sasha’s turn next!” Kingdom Hearts II – the postmodernist narrative equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting – becomes your villain origin story. Even when turned off, Sora, Mickey, Donald, Goofy and all the characters utter Kazushige Nojima’s translated dialogue and songs from The Little Mermaid echo inside your head. Your cousins aren’t bothered by the incoherent narrative of the game. You sleep no more. In unison they sing “Under the Sea.”
You commiserate with the antagonist Ansem – or Xemnas? You can’t keep up with the plot twists. All that matters is your shared vitriolic disdain for the protagonists, your cousins and the damn game. You scream “Kingdom Hearts” as a double keyblade wielding Sora mows down hundreds of enemies and decimates your sleep hygiene. You become a nobody, a heartless.
On the eighth day, a storm brews delivering torrential rain. For your cousins, this is a perfect opportunity to continue their binge. In their fervor and adoration of Final Fantasy and Disney icons, they forget to save. While they play, the storm causes a power outage. The lights go off immediately after Donald says, “The curse – it’s gone!” All their progress is lost. They never return to play. Kingdom Hearts is lost to them.
You sleep but will never be the same.
***
*This story was first published in Exploits Issue 72 – King Kong, An Unwinnable Publication.
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