Amid the confusion of coming of age, a peculiar silence settles over one’s sense of identity before we really know who we are. For me, it began with falling. I was ten years old when I first watched Kingdom Hearts‘ Sora descend through endless clouds, suspended somewhere between sleep and consciousness. Below him, an impossibly calm ocean stretched into the distance.
Then he struck the water, but it wasn’t really water. There was no splash. He passed through the surface as though entering a memory, sinking until the light faded and shadows gathered around him. Somewhere in the distance, a choir began to sing. Then the darkness opened, and a circle of stained glass emerged beneath his feet.
No enemies waited for him, and no urgent objective loomed. Instead, Tetsuya Nomura’s Kingdom Hearts asked questions about one’s strength, fears, and sacrifices endured. Before the game taught me how to fight for myself, it asked something much harder to answer: Who are you? Most games begin by teaching mechanics. Kingdom Hearts begins with introspection.
At ten, I did not have the language to describe why those opening moments affected me. I only knew they felt different. The Station of Awakening wasn’t frightening, but it carried a strange uncertainty. Here, Sora was alone in a place that seemed to exist outside ordinary time and geography, guided by a distant voice that didn’t fully explain where he was or what awaited him. I would understand that feeling differently as I grew older.
Today, I am a fourth-year medical student drawn to cardiology, and part of my research examines how immersive experiences influence learning and memory. Somewhere between the ten-year-old holding a PlayStation 2 controller and the adult standing in a hospital, I realized my thoughts often returned to the same game as I became a different person each time.
A great deal of life now separates those two versions of me. Since then, I’ve learned to drive, gone to college and graduate school, lost people I loved, watched friendships change, and discovered ambitions I couldn’t have imagined as a child. Yet every few years, I return to the same Kingdom Hearts save file.
Its playtime passed 100 hours ago. I never skipped the cutscenes, not at ten, and not when I returned years later. I revisited every world and completed every optional challenge. Old video game save files, of course, know nothing about the person who created it. It records levels and hours played, but nothing about what happened between those hours.
Kingdom Hearts itself has long since stopped being the improbable experiment it was in 2002. The premise still sounds strange when described plainly: Square and Disney placing Final Fantasy characters in a universe shared with Donald Duck and Goofy and asking players to take the resulting story seriously. What could have remained a novelty became an enduring franchise that survived several generations of hardware.
The children who first encountered Sora are adults now. Many of us have careers and families. Our parents have grown older. We have experienced losses the children holding PlayStation 2 controllers could not have anticipated. Kingdom Hearts lasted long enough for the passage of time to become part of what it means to return to it.
As the series approaches its 25th anniversary and Kingdom Hearts IV moves toward its planned late-2027 release, I find myself less interested in what has changed in the game than in what has changed outside of it. Returning to an old save file seems, at first, like returning to a familiar world. In practice, it also means encountering the person who once occupied that mind space. The questions waiting for the player on the Station of Awakening remain exactly where I left them. The person answering them does not.
Photographs show us what we looked like, and journals preserve some of what we thought. An old video game save file does something more unusual. Mine preserves the questions I was asking before I really understood how to ask them. The older I become, the less I think of the Station of Awakening as a tutorial. I think of it as a psychological landscape. Unlike the recognizable environments Sora will eventually explore, the Station refuses to locate the player anywhere familiar. A stained-glass platform hangs in darkness with no visible destination beyond it. The effect turns the player’s attention inward before the larger adventure begins.
As a child, I understood darkness as mystery. Now I see uncertainty in it. The stained glass beneath Sora’s feet depicts characters and images connected to identity and memory, while everything beyond its edge remains unknown. Whether every part of that symbolism was intentional hardly matters to the experience of standing there. The Station feels like the moment before a life takes shape, when what lies behind you is more visible than whatever comes next.
Eventually, most people encounter their own version of that place. It can arrive after graduation, when a structure that organized years of life suddenly disappears. It can happen during a phone call after which the world no longer feels arranged the way it did before. Sometimes it comes quietly, with the realization that no one else can decide what you are supposed to do with the life ahead of you.
That may be why the Station feels familiar even after so many years. Its uncertainty is not confined to Sora’s story. What makes the beginning of Kingdom Hearts unusual is the patience it shows with that uncertainty.
Video games usually try to orient the player quickly. They explain where you are and what you need to accomplish. A tutorial is generally designed to eliminate confusion. The Station of Awakening lets confusion linger for a while. Before explaining its world, Kingdom Hearts lets the player experience it. The opening has room to be quiet. It trusts that a question can matter before the player understands why it is being asked – or how to honestly answer it.
That patience feels increasingly unusual to me. Much of adult life is organized around the expectation that uncertainty should be resolved quickly. Another deadline or decision is always waiting. Even leisure time can become another form of progress, measured through achievements and completion percentages.
The Station asks very little of the player at first. You walk around and make choices without fully understanding their consequences. Eventually the game moves forward, but it doesn’t rush to explain the place you just visited.
That is probably why I remember those first minutes more vividly than many battles that required far more effort. What stayed with me was feeling alone somewhere beautiful and unfamiliar, aware that something important was happening without knowing what it meant.
Childhood contains many experiences like that. We feel things long before we acquire the language necessary to understand them. As I grew older, I gained some of that language, and it quietly rewrote Kingdom Hearts for me. Studying memory changed how I understood returning to the past. Medicine gave a game that had always insisted the heart was more than an organ a new meaning. My work with immersive technology made me think differently about why interactive worlds can stay with us long after we leave them.
The heart became the strangest point of convergence. When I was ten, Kingdom Hearts sparked my fascination with it. I knew nothing about coronary arteries or electrophysiology. As the game presented it, the heart was where something essential about a person resided. The game imagined hearts as things that could connect people across enormous distances and somehow survive being lost. Somewhere in childhood, that metaphor sparked curiosity about the organ itself.
More than two decades later, I find myself drawn toward cardiology. I can now describe the heart in terms that would have meant nothing to the child playing Kingdom Hearts. I can watch it contract on an ultrasound screen and recognize what happens when its rhythm fails. Learning what the heart actually is never made the childhood metaphor feel smaller. If anything, it made me more aware of how long I had been thinking about the same object in completely different ways.
Long before I learned how the heart works, a video game taught me to wonder what the heart means. Memory works in a similar way. We often talk about memories as though they were recordings stored somewhere in the brain, waiting to be replayed. The reality is less tidy. Autobiographical memory is reconstructive. Recollection occurs in the present and is influenced by what we have experienced since the event being remembered. Returning to something from childhood therefore cannot be a perfect return.
Video games make that relationship with memory especially interesting because they do not ask us merely to observe our past. They allow us to perform parts of it again. I do not simply watch Sora descend into the Station of Awakening. I make him walk across it. I answer the games’ questions again using the same controller inputs my younger hands once learned. The images on the screen may be familiar, but the person moving through them has accumulated decades of experiences that were absent the first time.
That may help explain why video game nostalgia can feel unusually intimate. Looking at an old photograph places the past in front of us. Playing an old game asks us to participate in that past, if you will.
My generation is among the first to experience that kind of return on such a large scale. Many of the games we played as children did not disappear when the hardware of our childhood became obsolete. If the data survived, we didn’t just remember these places; we could enter them again. They were ported, remastered, rereleased, or preserved, keeping entire virtual places that once belonged to a particular period of our lives accessible long after that period ended.
Perhaps the stranger realization is that I spent much of the life between those visits doing what Sora does at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts: leaving the small world that had once seemed complete.
Years later, while studying abroad on an island, I remember looking across the water and thinking about how differently a horizon appears after you have crossed one. As a child, Kingdom Hearts‘ Destiny Islands seemed idyllic. Only later did I understand the restlessness built into it. Sora and Riku live surrounded by beauty, yet both remain fascinated by whatever exists beyond the water.
When I was ten, I understood that as adventure. I wanted them to leave because that was where the story was. Growing older complicated that interpretation. The farther I traveled, the more I understood that crossing a horizon does not necessarily make the world easier to understand. It often does the opposite.
That changed the way I understood Kingdom Hearts, too. The game is full of characters searching for answers about worlds beyond their own. What separates them is not simply what they discover, but what they believe that knowledge permits them to do.
Medicine has made that distinction particularly important to me. A physician may understand a disease in ways the patient does not, but the patient still possesses a life that cannot be reduced to the disease. Knowledge can help us care for another person. It does not give us ownership over the meaning of that person’s life.
The question that once drew Sora toward the horizon was essentially: What else is out there? As I grew older, my version of that question changed. I became more interested in what happens to us after we find out. No single field I studied could answer everything I wanted to understand. Medicine could explain what was happening inside a failing heart, while public health could ask why illness reaches some communities differently from others. Experiences outside the classroom showed me how much of a life happens before a physician enters it.
The more I learned, the less interested I became in finding one explanation for everything. Today, my research involves virtual and augmented reality, which means I spend part of my professional life thinking about how designed environments affect what people notice, learn, and remember. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the first immersive environment that made me think seriously about any of those things wasn’t a medical simulator. It was a PlayStation 2 game.
Over the years, I moved through different fields while continuing to ask versions of questions that interested me long before I knew what those disciplines were called. I wanted to know why some experiences remain with us and what happens when we return to them after we have changed. Those questions are part of what brings me back to Kingdom Hearts. Every replay has become an act of remembering, but not simply remembering the game. My oldest save file feels less like a record of progress now than a time capsule whose contents were never intentionally placed inside it. The software recorded what I accomplished in the game. I supplied everything else.
Somewhere inside those 100 hours is the child who first created the file. Later versions of me returned to it, carrying things he couldn’t have anticipated. I played this game after leaving home and after losses. I returned at different stages of school, becoming increasingly unsure that adulthood ever reaches the point where uncertainty disappears.
The save file recorded none of those changes, yet its permanence makes them visible. That is the strange thing about returning to places that remain mostly unchanged. They become reference points. I notice what is different because I remember what it felt like when it was new.
The Station of Awakening still asks who you are without providing an answer. I used to think that question belonged to the beginning of the game. Now it seems like the sort of question someone can spend a lifetime reconsidering. Even the darkness surrounding the Station means something different to me now. As a child, I assumed darkness in a video game would eventually need to be defeated. Now I am less certain that all darkness represents evil. Sometimes it is simply whatever has not yet been illuminated. A future can look like that.
The child who first watched Sora fall into that darkness believed adulthood existed somewhere on the other side of uncertainty. I expected that you would eventually become the person who knew what came next. Instead, adulthood has involved crossing one horizon only to discover another. That is what my oldest save file has preserved better than I ever intended. It has not documented my progress through life. It has simply remained in one place long enough for me to notice it.
When I first stepped onto that stained-glass floor, I thought I was beginning a video game. I could not have known that I would still be thinking about the questions the game raises more than two decades later. I used to think I returned because I loved the game. I still do, of course, but that no longer feels like the whole explanation. Every few years, I stand again on that stained-glass circle and hear Utada Hikaru’s music, “Simple and Clean”.
The game asks the same question it asked when I was ten. Who are you? I still don’t have a permanent answer. Maybe I was never supposed to.
Works Cited
D23. “DEEP DIVE into KINGDOM HEARTS at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event”. 15 August 2026.
Dominguez, E., M. Casagrande, and A. Raffone. “Autobiographical Memory and Mindfulness: A Critical Review with a Systematic Search”. Mindfulness, 2022.