So I finally finished my Final Fantasy 12 game. The game was great and there was a lot of stuff I didn’t do so I might even play it again. I’ve started playing Kingdom Hearts 2 and the Little Lady beat it yesterday. I’m so proud of her. She took several months break from it because she was having such a hard time beating the last guy. She asked if she could play when she got home yesterday so I saved my game and let her. Then it took her about an hour and a half, perhaps two hours, as she repeatedly died and continued to play.
The ending was pretty fantastic though, so it was worth it. The ending for FF12 was great, too. I can’t wait until 13 comes out. We watched the trailer for Kingdom Hearts 3 and we are a little confused about it because it doesn’t look anything like the previous two. Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 are both amazing visually and story-wise - but then that’s what you get when you work with the amazing people who created Final Fantasy (Square) and Disney. Now, I’ll be completely honest. I don’t care for Disney at all really. Neither does my daughter. I believe it has to do with my childhood, which wasn’t all princesses and pink ponies. I know, shocking, right?
I grew up in the age of pink ponies and Barbies and Disney. I did end up getting into Barbies with my best friend though ( I do blame her for the collection of clothes I ended up with ) and I remember hauling a garbage bag full of stuff for us to play when I went over to her house ( she did the same ). We weren’t your normal Barbie players though. There had to be a STORY. There had to be a LIFE. We didn’t do the ‘I’m going to grow up and get married and have babies’ bit. We did the “I’m gonna go go college, have fun, get a great job and meet a great guy” storyline.
Our imaginations never did collide with our reality though, for the most part. Perhaps we should have been writing instead of playing.
Anyway. Two people I know, one being my best friend, are lovers of all things Disney. I guess I just never got the whole ‘the princess finds her prince and they fall in love at first sight and after some serious struggling with some evil wench they come together and are forever happy’. I knew it wasn’t like that at all in real life.
So why do I like the Kingdom Hearts games? Because they skew that fantasy a bit. Everything isn’t all happily ever after! You have to fight to be free and you have to fight the darkness to have the light. You have to keep from giving in to your despair and fight one more day in order to preserve what you love. Will what you love be the same after fighting for it? No, but it’s even more precious because you were able to preserve it.
I love Final Fantasy games and I love Kingdom Hearts and I will always play these games. I may not be the best gamer out there, but I do love a good story and these games provide me not only with good story lines (most of the time) but they also give a great visually stimulating story that I’m involved in making happen. Yeah, it’s just a game, but if it makes me feel better, then that’s not so bad, right?
