All Those Worlds Still Waiting
The pitch has always sounded absurd: Disney characters and Final Fantasy heroes crammed into the same action RPG, held together by a mythology about hearts and darkness so elaborate it eventually needed its own glossary. It shouldn’t work. The first time I played it I was embarrassed to be this invested in a story that required me to care about Goofy’s safety, and then I was invested anyway, fully and without apology.
Square Enix released the debut trailer for Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX, collecting Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix and Birth by Sleep Final Mix alongside a cinematic version of Re:coded, all remastered for PS3. The story goes deeper—Birth by Sleep in particular fills in the prehistory of the whole series in ways that reframe everything that came before—and Yoko Shimomura’s score gets a proper audio pass. Hearing "Dearly Beloved" again, even in a trailer, does something involuntary to the chest.
Even people who bounced off the games usually admitted the music was doing things it had no business doing—orchestral bombast married to something genuinely tender. Shimomura wrote melodies that felt like memory before you’d made the memory to attach them to. That’s the part that lasts. The rest—the plot about Keyblades and Heartless and the Organization in their long coats—turns into mythology fast enough that the emotional engine underneath carries you through the confusion. Or it did for me.
Nostalgia is a cheap trick, but it isn’t always dishonest. This trailer earns it.