Let's Talk About Kingdom Hearts - The Heartless of KH1

Written by Vixichrome and Luna Sugarstar

First we're several months late for Pikmin's big 20th anniversary and now we're a lil late for Kingdom Hearts' 20th anniversary. We just keep being fashionably late! Kingdom Hearts was one of the PS2 pillars we almost skipped on entirely if it wasn't for a few friends introducing it to us well after KH2 was out. Our first experience playing a KH game was with KH2 actually so you can only imagine how flabbergasted we were about everything.

...That said, as much as we don't think the main story is as hard to follow as people make it out to be, we would still be here all day explaining the Heartless and their exact mechanics in the universe and what they do and where they go and why they where the what. The gist of what you, a potential not-knower of Kingdom Hearts needs to know is that Heartless are born from the darkness in people's hearts and seek only to multiply their numbers by consuming more hearts. They're also capable of destroying the many Disney worlds because the worlds themselves have hearts apparently and if the Heartless eat that heart the world becomes a new dark place for them to call home.

Okay that's all ya get, play the games if you're interested in learning more beyond that. The most-of-the-series collection is available like, everywhere. We're here to talk about cool monsters.

Shadow:

Shadows are the boggiest of bog standard Heartless, the "Goombas" of the game since we apparently keep using that analogy. They are little more than pure black imp-like creatures with nothing but beady, yellow dot-eyes and a pair of crooked antennae. And they're absolutely perfect that way. You know they really hit the sweetspot between "creepy" and "cute" when there's all sorts of adorable fanart and plushies of this thing alone.

AND it's adorable in ways that don't even sacrifice the menace! This little creep, true to its name, can sink into the ground and become untargetable, crawling around while flat. Much like a shadow! They also got big menacing claws to boot. 

Darkside:

The first boss of the game is the even more menacing Darkside, a giant humanoid Heartless that looks like a more extreme version of a Shadow. We love the Tangela-like mass of "hair" its head is wrapped up in, and the huge heart-shaped hole in its torso. Even the dinky, non-functioning wings serve to make a look. All this makes this design super striking, especially because most kids and barely-teens playing this game for the first time when it was new probably would've expected something notably more jovial out of a Disney game, and then they have you fight THIS thing. Definitely feels like it was meant to leave a hell of a first impression, since the Heartless don't get this intimidating again until the endgame.

Soldier:

Then here's a change of pace! Okay, one more brief Lore Bit. The Shadow and Darkside Heartless covered so far are referred to as "Pureblood" Heartless, more or less meaning that they're completely naturally-occurring Heartless. They're identifiable by having mostly pure black bodies.

Soldier, on the other hand, is what's called an "Emblem" Heartless, and all you really need to know is that they were artificially created somehow and tend to be A) a lot more colorful, B) themed around the world they inhabit, and C) bare the iconic Heartless sigil, the symbol on Soldier's chest.

Anyway, Soldiers are another form of common Heartless, being slightly more dangerous than Shadows. They have huge claws and a knight-like helmet with a cartoonish opening flap that looks more like a mouth with its beady yellow eyes poking out. And we're suckers for face-within-a-mouth types of creatures! It's also interesting to see this Heartless combine jester and knight imagery to some extent, with them having pretty jerky and overexaggerated movements.

Another feature common on Emblem Heartless though: most of them still look like Shadows a little bit. A lot of Emblem Heartless have this general look of having their colorful selves be juxtaposed with a pitch black face with the yellow glowing eyes; so these Heartless all look like they're Shadows wearing costumes!

Large Body:

These are another common Heartless, being the bigger more advanced of the common mooks. Their whole shtick being they're invincible to blows to their big belly, so instead you have to hit them in the back. While equating fatness with visual signifiers of strained clothes is a bit of a tired design trope, there is something inherently amusing about their design being a big and burly dude with a tiny head no bigger than a Shadow's.

The Musical Mage Heartless:

Heartless magic users! These Emblem Heartless are adorably simple, having pottery-shaped bodies with comically tiny bird feet poking out of the bottom. They're like Black Mages from Final Fantasy with a Heartless spin! They float around and cast magic, the spell they use equating to what color they are. They're the Red Nocturne, which casts Fire magic. The Blue Rhapsody, which casts Ice. The Yellow Opera, which casts Thunder. And Green Requiem, which casts Cure on its Heartless allies. They also have a bit of a music thing going on; they make chime noises when they cast magic or get hit and their names reference a genre of music. Love these tiny bird-mages!

Guard Armor:

The boss of Traverse Town, the first non-tutorial world, is an Emblem Heartless made up of floating pieces of knight's armor. This design, while definitely still feeling cool in its own right, does feel like it's meant to tone down the creepy factor a bit, showing that the Heartless generally are fairly whimsical in design at least. Fitting, given this is also the first fight with familiar Disney characters by your side!

The armor can act as one or even come apart to act independently and get new attacks that way. It's overall a pretty neat design and a cool introductory boss for how Heartless are gonna be for a while!

Opposite Armor:

During a revisit to Traverse Town, you fight another Guard Armor as if it's going to be a refight before it turns itself upside-down and becomes this goofy thing. Like its previous form, its limbs can float independently or come together to form the whole. Amusingly, it fires blasts of energy out of its underside as if a cannon.

It's extremely sad Wonderland doesn't really have any Heartless to call its own, at least not until the sequels. Which is a shame because as far as settings that happens to be in Disney movies, Wonderland is up there as one of our favorites. Wonderland in general sadly just gets treated as a filler world in most games, with the only segments of the movie ever being covered being the locked door scene, the tiny forest, and the Queen of Hearts' domain. Where's the especially imaginatively wacky Heartless?!?

Creeper Plant:

So we're gonna cheat and little bit and include them here. This game's direct, GBA sequel, Chain of Memories, only introduced a grand total of 3 entirely new Heartless, which isn't really worth a whole review article by itself. And it just so happens all three were featured in Wonderland, AND fit the aesthetic of Wonderland, so why not?

The Creeper Plant is a Heartless that is rooted in one spot, firing projectile seeds from a distance. The Pistil of a flower acting as a face is a cute, classic design trope, and it's funny to have this Heartless look at least somewhat uprooted, with it looking a bit like it just has legs stuck in the ground rather than roots.

Crescendo:

This one is simply adorable! Looking like a living bike horn, it has a bulbous body and a funny head with a little musical note motif, some headphones, and that huge, honkin horn-mouth. It squeaks and honks as it bounces around adorably, and can either call for reinforcements or heal its Heartless allies. See, this thing is so cute it couldn't possibly do harm!

Tornado Step:

Then there's these adorable little fells with a funny wizard hat and floppy tassels in place of arms. They hop and spin around, kicking up gusts and tornados, true to their name. They're just so adorably simple designs, and we love the little zig-zag mouths certain Heartless get!

Trickmaster:

Anywho, Trickmaster is the boss of Wonderland, and it's one of the most instantly recognizable designs in the series. Trickmaster is a tall, slender figure with arms like folded paper, legs that are made up of two smaller legs, and a funny, tall head that looks like several heads stacked up on top of each other. It also lights its batons on fire to make its attacks hurt a little bit more and cast fire magic! Again, it's up there as one of the coolest Heartless bosses! Funnily enough, the thing's ACTUAL size would make it shorter than Sora normally, but because you only ever fight it while small, it ascends to "giant boss" status.

Powerwild:

See, even the Deep Jungle gets its own funny monkey Heartless! And Powerwild is just that, a funny monkey that almost looks like a Shadow in a onesie. It's fairly quick and attacks erratically, making them one of the more annoying Heartless to deal with in the early game, but being annoying is arguably the point of an evil monkey creature, isn't it?

Bouncywild:

There's also a cutesy "girly" version that stays far away and shoots at you with its slingshot rather than get close to any capacity. It also comes with a recolor variant with "Sniperwild", a supped up version that can flee quickly and shoot from even further away.

Black Ballade:

The Final Mix, essentially a "definitive edition" version of the game, also has a couple extra enemies that weren't in the original. Black Ballade being among them, a variant of the musical mage Heartless that creates clones of itself and you have to play a game of "Find the Ball" essentially and smack the right one for an award of... something neat, we're sure. We've still yet to play the FM versions of the games, okay! We need to get on that.

Stealth Sneak:

The boss of Deep Jungle is a giant chameleon. And it's cool in a way chameleons are inherently cool, but it's probably among one of the least imaginative Heartless designs out there. There's very little whimsy to it, other that having a lot more digits but their hands and feet nonetheless being the same shape as chameleon feet. If it weren't for the Emblem on its chest, you probably would never know this was a Heartless.

Bandit:

Sadly Olympus Coliseum doesn't have any Heartless to call its own in this game; it's essentially the Battle-Tournament mode of the game. Instead, we move onto Agrabah, featuring scimitar-wielding Heartless that are basically Soldiers with swords and a getup to fit in with the Arabian setting of the Aladdin movie. Neat that they're covered in jewelry to fulfill the whole "bandit" thing.

Fat Bandit:

And if Bandits are essentially Soldiers for Agrabah, these guys are easily the Large Bodies. Their thing is that they're now fire-breathers, and spit fireballs and breath fire as attacks. Like Large Bodies though, they're only vulnerable from behind.

Air Soldier:

There is a new fairly common enemy to the fold though: a flying variant on the Soldier! It is kind fun how they have the aviator getup and little wings made of what seems to be be cloth, but otherwise it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It's a Soldier with wings!

Pot Spider:

Now we're talkin! Sometimes in this world, the pottery just lying around will suddenly sprout long spider-like legs and begin attacking. They're like Kingdom Hearts mimics! We don't really get to see what they REALLY look like in there, but perhaps they simply ARE the pot. Jiminy's Journal says they're just regular pots turned into Heartless, after all!

Pot Scorpion:

Final Mix introduces Pot Scorpions, an upgraded Pot Spider that's more dangerous and, of course, has the claws and stinger of a scorpion! You can also see the yellow eyes peering out of the pot , which is neat!

Pot Centipede:

The world's mid-boss is this thing, an extra looooong Pot Spider! In actuality, Pot Centipede is nothing more than the severed head and butt of a centipede-like Heartless; it simply uses Pot Spiders as its body! If you hit it long enough, it falls apart as the head and butt helplessly flail and do their best to fight back, which they're weirdly good at for being nothing more than a head and an ass. Either way, this thing is one of the more adorable Heartless in the game!

Kurt Zisa:

Agrabah though, is home to one of the game's secret superbosses, Kurt Zisa. Zisa is undeniably one of the coolest Heartless designs in the whole series, being a huge armored warrior with two giant swords and several pairs of arms. It's both a physical attacker and can cast magic, even being able to block off your party from using magic as well. And easily one of the coolest parts about the design is how it's essentially a giant mech piloted by one, tiny cobra-shaped Heartless. It's cool to stun this thing and then see its little snake head stretch out of the body to try and defend itself!

Search Ghost:

Man, these guys deserve to be reviewed when we get to Halloween Town. BUT, they're one of only a couple Heartless introduced within Monstro, so it gets to go here. Search Ghosts, though, are among our favorite Heartless designs! They're so lovable, portrayed as little cartoon ghosts with floating glove-hands and a couple of huge eyeballs within their almost Jack Skellington-esque stylized skull-face! One eye even drooping out, which is normally a no-no for use because boy howdy is our ommetaphobia a thing, but thank goodness the stalk of the eye is replaced with a chain. Like if anything that's MORE gross but whatever makes it less gorey. Why do we like the slightly exposed ribcage then? Is the stylization making it okay? Why are we like this?

They're called Search Ghosts because their still-in-socket eye shines like a searchlight, which turns a menacing red when  they spot Sora and the gang. Not that getting spotted necessarily does anything, it just makes them actively attack. They also phase in and out of existence, as you'd figure with any ghost.

Barrel Spider:

Monstro also introduces a barrel-hiding variant of the pot spider, now showing the single peering out from within. It's not too different from Pot Spiders, except it has an attack where it'll explode, doing a bunch of damage to the KH crew. Casting fire on them however causes them to backfire, exploding them and damaging their Heartless allies!

Parasite Cage:

The boss of Monstro is the Parasite Cage, an adorable creature that looks like two Heartless stuck to each other. Is the Parasite Cage itself a parasite, since it lives inside a giant whale? Or is the Heartless on top the parasite for the one on the bottom? Either way, it's a fun design! With long, stalky arms that it makes long-range, sweeping attacks with.

The "Cage" part comes in with its lower half's mouth, which it uses to hold things inside with its cage bar-like teeth. The first time you fight it, you have to free Pinocchio from inside of it! In the second fight, with its mouth freed, it can now do a big move where it swings its body around and chomps with those huge jaws.

Sea Neon:

Since the Atlantica world takes place entirely Beneath the Ocean™️, the world is forced to have mostly its own cast of Heartless to suit the big gameplay shift. The first of which are these slow, adorable little jellyfish enemies. They have such adorable little heads encased in a huge membrane, like a subnautical helmet! How adorable! Their huge front tentacles are also adorable. They're just great all around!

Sheltering Zone:

There's also a HUGE variant of them! And they'll split into three Sea Neons if you don't finish them off with magic!

Screwdriver:

The Heartless' own take on mer-people are these fellas, predictably wielding tridents but nonetheless having flipper-feet and heads shaped like an entire fish! Their faces are even stylized to look like their face is hidden within the mouth of their own fish-head! They just feel really sick and nimble!

Aquatank:

The undersea Heartless just keep winning! This is another one of our absolute favorite Heartless designs in the entire series, the Aquatanks posing as our beloved angler fish! The huge arm-like fins also call frogfish to mind, which is a type of anglerfish! And that cartoonish zig-zag mouth that a ton of Heartless have has never looked cuter than as this thing's silly, toothy grin. And that bio-luminescent angler is also adorable!

They're also occasionally seen being carried around by several screwdrivers, making up for the Aquatank's serious lack of speed!

Gargoyle:

OH BUT NOW WE ARE AT OUR HOME, HALLOWEEN TOWN! The TRUE home of Search Ghosts!!

But here is the Gargoyle, another killer Heartless design that mostly just calls Gargoyles to mind. It honestly looks a bit more like a scarecrow with wings, but that still counts for something! What are scarecrows if not just rural gargoyles! The Heartless aesthetic really fits in with Halloween Town too, especially the Beetlejuice-esque stripey pattern on its horns and the torn sleeves. All topped off with an adorable mouth that is barely hung on, on the back, but can cartoonishly hinge open to fire energy attacks from.

Wight Knight:

Gosh, that's SUCH a killer name for a Halloween baddie. Wight Knights are lanky mummy-like Heartless wrapped in bandages, to a point where there's a single eye poking out from their face. Or perhaps its their only eye! The Wight Knight's spindly form is lovely, with such noddley limbs and long arms tipped with spear-like fingers. Even their ribcage are just some spindly arrow-shaped things! These fellas are simply one of the coolest designs in the whole series.

Chimera:

The Chimera is a sub boss of sorts, but only appearing in the Final Mix version of the game. And its design is just as badass as the other Halloween Town Heartless. It has the appearance of some Frankenstein's monster-adjacent creature, looking like several other things stitched together, with the hand of one monster, the scissor-arm of another monster, and severed heads or masks floating in a jar of green ooze it calls a head! Can't help but get the feeling Nomura or whoever designed these Heartless was a big fan of Nightmare Before Christmas, because damn do the Heartless really fit in with that aesthetic!

Pirate:

Neverland feels a bit like false advertising. Like sure it's TECHNICALLY in Neverland, but the world takes place entirely on Captain Hook's ship. I guess whatever's necessary to avoid the rather yikesy material from the original movie.

Either way, you get these stylizations of Soldiers that are now dressed up more like cartoon pirates! Loving how despite wearing a bandana that covers their true eyes, they have an eyepatch over their eye anyway, haha. The sword with a face is also really neat. Can't help but wonder, is that a Heartless too? Are you swinging around a buddy of yours there, pal?

Air Pirate:

A variant on the variant! These are simply Pirates, but with a slight wardrobe change and wings, of all things. Rather than wield any weapons, they simply knock your daylights out with their humongous fists.

Battleship:

Probably one of the most ridiculous-looking Heartless in the game is this bozo. He's like a pirate captain centaur, except his centaur half is an entire friggin boat. As such, it's one of the most complex common enemies in the game, with a wide variety of attacks and different destructible parts like its cannons and sail!

Shadow Sora:

Technically a Heartless, this is a pureblood Heartless that mimics the protagonist and you face off with. It's more or less not just some foreshadowing for an event only a few more hours away, but also is Sora but with the powers of a Shadow, as it can meld into the ground just like shadows can. As well as have all sorts of teleporty, create-clone-ey magic shenanigans to it.

Phantom:

Another of the game's secret bosses is in this world, which you fight in the series' most terrifying and dark location to date, Great Britain.

More specifically, Big Ben clock tower. The Phantom itself is one of the most intimidating Heartless designs in the series to date, with it looking like a floating cloak much like a grim reaper. That also feeds into its fight gimmick, where it'll cast death magic on Sora and the gang, which will cause one of the party members to be PERMANETALLY taken out of the fight whenever the clock makes a full rotation. But thanks to Stop magic, you can halt the clock's movement.

Otherwise, its core is something you gotta hit with the appropriate, color-coded magic. Yeah, that's sadly a little anticlimactic when you find out you can nullify the one element of terror so long as you bring plenty of MP-restoring items and don't simply just forgot to re-Stop the clock every few seconds. Especially with such a sinister design.

Darkball:

The stage that made it into Smash is actually the penultimate area of the game, the wholey original world Hollow Bastion. In this world is definitely where Heartless get notably more intimidating than their usually whimsical selves, such as the pureblood Darkball, which is a a floating ball of darkness with gross, veiny skin. Despite their simple design, they have a versatile amount of attacks, including thrashing about in a single spot, chomping forward, and reducing their form to a dark smog before approaching an enemy and exploding as they regain their physical form.

Wyvern:

This Heartless takes the form of a flying dragon, and they're definitely one of the fiercest enemies in the game. Whipping around the battlefield quickly with charges and kicks. Their ragged wings especially giving them a sinister edge to them. Notably a lot more "Final Fantasy" than "Disney" in overall tone.

Defender:

Then you get these knight-like fellows, almost feeling like the logical conclusion of all the Soldiers you've been fighting across the course of the game. They're one of the toughest common enemies in terms of HP, and they're invincible from the front to boot. And that bestial face on the shield isn't just for show! It's actually the source of most of this thing's attacks! Chomping, being swung around, and shooting fireballs out of its mouth. This thing feels so iconic to KH1 it's really odd how this is the only core game it ever appears in, otherwise only ever showing up in the spinoffs that are recounting KH1's events anyway.

Wizard:

Almost as if to be a Donald to the Defender's Goofy, the Heartless have their own mage in their ranks now! And it's an adorable, if a bit unsurprising design! We like how the curly hat design typical of wizards translates well with the crooked curls Heartless usually have on their designs. As you'd imagine, it casts all sorts of offensive magic, casting its own version of Fire, Thunder, Blizzard, and Gravity spells, as well as having the perk of being completely immune to your own magic attacks.

Behemoth:

Our knowledge on Final Fantasy things is limited, admittedly, but to our understanding the "Behemoth" is a recurring monster in the FF series, so KH gets its own version! As the final boss of Hollow Bastion, it's a little anti-climactic after the big showdowns with both Maleficent and a Riku possessed by the game's big bad, Ansem. Especially since this is far from the last time it'll be fought, but as a design it's decently gnarly for a beast creature. The giant, curvy tusks seem a little impractical, but I guess throwing around shockwaves and lightning attacks is more its thing. The only vulnerable part of its body is the horn, which you have to climb onto its back to reach.

Fungal Friends:

Before the move onto the final area of the game, here's some little guys! They can randomly appear throughout any world in the game, them being the White Mushroom, Black Fungus, Rare Truffle, and Pink Agaricus, the latter of which is Final Mix-exclusive. They're simply adorable little mushroom-people wearing oversized jammies! We love them! They initiate minigame-type things, like the White Mushroom playing charades and you have to cast magic on them accordingly, Rare Truffles challenging you to keep an air combo going as long as possible, and so-on.

Invisible:

It's here that we reach the game's final area, The End of the World, a byproduct of all the Heartless' world-munching, apparently being the dark remnants of the worlds they've destroyed. It's here that the Heartless are at their most powerful, evident with the new Invisible, a pureblood Heartless that wields a sword and casts all sorts of magic. We like how their head-dress forms the silhouette of a heart too, very fancy! The only thing we're not a fan of is how those cartoonish, comically batwings kind undercut the seriousness of the rest of the design.

We miss when Heartless could be this menacing on the regular. In future games, when they start introducing more species of enemies like the Nobodies, they kind of take over as the game's most menacing force over the Heartless, which nonetheless get to be adorable and whimsical, but things like the Invisible don't really happen nearly as often, the only other thing being quite this menacing is the Dark Inferno from III, which is a spinoff of Invisible anyway. (Quick edit: So we finished writing this yesterday at the time of upload, one day before KH4's announcement. And it's funny we make this comment just before they showed off Kaiju Darkside.)

Angel Star:

The Angel Star certainly feels out of place in a realm full of darkness, presented as a flying, angelic lightbulb that hangs in the air and shoots bursts of light and air from afar. It sticking out though is what makes it so fun and interesting, especially when its angelic features feel a bit artificial. It's like a dark creature appropriating the appearance of an angel!

Neoshadow:

Final Mix also features these creatures, which look like taller, more "grown-up" Shadows! They're sleek and badass looking, but nonetheless hold onto that simplicity their Shadow baby brothers have.

Bit Sniper:

This one is an oddball, mostly in how it only appears DURING the final boss as little pest enemies that he can summon. They're mostly dangerous in how you fight said final boss in pitch darkness, and these guys are equally pitch dark. They themselves though are also adorable, being cartoony corruptions of bats with a teardrop-shaped body and little bat wings that end off in claws, but not where claws should be!

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness:

Okay, plot jibber-jabber is a bit unavoidable here, but yes, this is technically a Heartless! All the information we'll indulge is that he's the Heartless of a researcher named Ansem, who was enamored with researching the darkness in people hearts and finding out what made hearts and the Heartless tick. This of course, inevitably consumed his own heart. He's a mysterious figure in how he's operated almost entirely in the background of the game, you only finding research reports with his name on them before being left to connect the dots that he's the mysterious dude in the robe you met at the very beginning of the game.

Ansem in his new Heartlessy state is now set on unleashing the titular Kingdom Hearts, which he believes the contents of which is neverending darkness to swallow all worlds with, his line of logic being evil, or "darkness", is an integral ingredient for every person's heart, no matter how pure of heart they are. Thus the place where all hearts come from must be the source of all darkness as well.

Dark Figure:

Or more commonly referred to as "Ansem's Shadow," or as he calls it, "Guardian." The Guardian is a Heartless-like figure that does the bidding of Ansem as if an extension of himself, even blocking attacks for him. It's easily one of the creepier designs with its face all wrapped up in bandages and having a mouth eerily similar to human teeth.

World of Chaos:

The final FINAL final FINAL boss is a massive, battleship-shaped Heartless that Ansem and the Dark Figure graft themselves onto. It has grody flesh, and a still-beating organ that you battle as one of the phases on its back. It also summons loads of Heartless and can also apparently just fling things into a dark dimension of nothing but a black void, and most of the final fight is spent essentially dismantling the thing.

Once the World of Chaos itself is dealt with, you get a final battle with Ansem himself again, the Guardian taking a new form and jeez this art looks AGGRESSIVELY like a Final Fantasy boss sprite. There is something extremely cool though, about the overall presence of this thing essentially looking like a giant robe while Ansem himself rests within the thing's ribcage, attached to its innards like he's an organ. Like some kind of Heart, if you will.

All in all, Kingdom Hearts' enemy design is top notch stuff, the Heartless being some of our favorite designs for video game enemies ever. It's impressive how conceptually flexible they are, being able to range from creepy, to goofy, to downright sinister depending on the tone of the world they inhabit. So you bet one day we'll go over KH2, then its obscene number of midquels, then KH3. (And probably KH4 when it releases in like, 2026.)