Because… a lot of the mini-games are in the Hundred Acre Wood, which is where Pooh Bear is. And Pooh Bear says “Oh bother…”. And the mini-games in Kingdom Hearts (the game) are overwhelmingly rubbish. It works.

Kingdom Hearts is an RPG series that’s generally jam packed with mini-games to enjoy. The series is well known for it, but probably more well known for its bonkers plot that makes very little sense at the best of times. The first Kingdom Hearts game is no different, if anything it started the whole thing. While we’ve already looked at the game itself, why not take a dive into the mini-games that might hold up this, otherwise, messy game. In short, they don’t. In the long, well… that’s what this is.

Pooh’s Muddy Path

Don’t let the name deceive you, it’s not as dirty as it sounds. Instead of exploring Pooh’s secret passage, if you know what I mean, you’re exploring a small swampy area. The aim of the game, if you can call it that, is to find Pooh’s friends who are scattered around the area and once you find them you enclose them in thickets so they can never run away ever again. It’s a bit dark. As far as games go it’s rather lacking, the most complicated it gets is trying to work out how to get Pooh to walk across a log with a hole in it. The complication comes not from working out how to block the gap, but instead trying to get Pooh to walk across the darned log.

This mini-game would be a simple affair of awkwardly running around the place talking to Pooh’s friends, but is made all the more cumbersome by having to lure Pooh around as he slowly plods through the world jumping off of ledges you didn’t want him to jump off of and having to try and get him to talk to the plants that make him fly. No, I’m not crazy. For an idea on how much of a bore this mini-game is, the base record time is 6 minutes, even when you know what you’re doing it’ll take around 4. 4 minutes of your precious life that you could spend doing something else.

Tigger’s Giant Pot

Tigger has a giant pot, for some reason, and it’s up to you to break it. Maybe? Now, as you’re a small child with a large weapon imbued with magic and the power to crush darkness, the logical way of breaking this large pot would be to smash nuts back into the pot until it eventually explodes. It just makes sense. Tigger, well known for jumping, is in the giant pot, and from within he throws his nuts at you in which it’s up to Sora to jump and hit Tigger’s nuts with his sword key. Do this enough times and the pot then explodes, because why wouldn’t it? To make matters worse you must achieve all this while being limited to the small surface area of a tree stump. The moment you step off the stump the game is over and everyone doesn’t talk to you for a week because you ruined their fun, AGAIN. If there was ever a single instant that so perfectly exhibits the major issues found with the combat in the original Kingdom Hearts, it’s awkwardly jumping to hit a slowly falling object while trying to not inexplicably fall off. It’s a repetitive process of moving to the back edge of the stump, jump and swing at the falling nut – in which you’ll probably miss it somehow – and once you land on the far edge of the stump move back and repeat the process, until you either die or break the pot.

Pooh’s Swing

High atop a hill there’s a tree, and low below the tree hangs a swing. Pooh demands you swing him, like a young child at the park, and once you’ve built up enough speed Pooh launches off into the stratosphere. It’s just what he does. It’s how he spends his time. It’s a simple timing game of hitting the swing button at the right time, although this is normally when Owl tells you to. There’s not much to it. The only thing you really get out of this mini-game is to witness Pooh’s posterior cause major property damage as it smashes through the roof of Eeyore’s abode.

Block Tigger

Tigger is back and this time with a vengeance. After you destroyed his priceless “Giant Pot” he clearly snapped and has decided that if he can’t have nice things then no one can eat food. He’s employing scorched Earth tactics as in this mini-game your goal is to stop Tigger from jumping on Rabbit’s crops, and not just jumping on them, stomping them into the ground. It’s up to you, Sora, a small boy to make sure the Hundred Acre Wood have enough food stores to make it through winter before reverting back to their animal instincts. Tigger jumps up high and as he descends on an unsuspecting carrot you’ll have to try and get underneath him and bounce him off like it’s volleyball. The main issue you’ll come across is that Tigger’s horizontal jumping speed is equal to that of the now retired Concord planes, so trying to keep up with him is a bit of a struggle, even with the “Rush” function that sometimes works, but rarely does. It’s a bit wonky and is just running after Tigger to try and stop his landings in an elaborate game of keepy-uppy.

Pooh’s Hunny Hunt

In Pooh Bear’s ever lust for the sweet thing you find yourself roped into climbing a tree infested with angry, angry swarms of bees. If that wasn’t worse enough, you have to accompany the gluttonous bear as he ascends the tree in his newfangled flying device. A single balloon. As Pooh ascends the tree he’ll stop off at various portholes for him to shove his grasping hands into the awaiting sticky liquid. While Pooh gets his freak on with a sticky hole in a tree is exactly when the bees descend, or ascend… they appear. As Sora you’ll have to awkwardly jump from branch to branch to try and swat these balloon seeking missiles with a single swipe of your sword blade. Decimating an entire swarm in a single swing. But wrapping his sticky lips around one gooey tree hole wasn’t enough for Pooh Bear. He begins to ascend further up the tree into the den of enraged bees. This particular mini-game shines a light on one of the other major issues with the first Kingdom Hearts, the jumping is the actual worst. Ascending the tree is as painful and cumbersome as climbing an actual tree in real life. Sora’s outlandish jumps mean hopping from branch to branch all too rapidly becomes falling from branch to ground and having to clumsily jump up to the top before Pooh Bear’s balloon gets popped and he falls down to the ground. There is a “Rush” option that auto jumps you up to the bear, but it costs you some honey in, what I can only assume, is some kind of ritual sacrifice to the goo tree. Fret not, if you fail to stop the bees taking down Pooh like it’s the end of King Kong, he just procures another balloon and takes to the skies once more, his lust moistened tree holes not sated. Never sated.

Jungle Slider

Remember that bit in the film Tarzan where he slides down on some big tree trunk through the jungle in a way that seems unlikely for trees to form? That’s what this is. Sora slides down these long routes of tree with Tarzan. Tarzan is normally awkwardly in the way of the camera which makes things infinitely more enjoyable. On your dangerous trip of increased velocity, you’re meant to try and pick up a number of small fruit like objects, “Fruit”, although these come round such blind bends that it’s rather hard to discern their rather meek model from the rest of the tree, so you’ll probably miss them all. Apparently there are multiple courses, but if you can endure the process of climbing all the way back up to the top to give it another go, you’ve a stronger will than I.

Vine Swinging

It does what it says on the tin. You swing on vines. This is already part of getting around the atrocious Deep Jungle map, but now it’s timed, and there are sometimes snakes! Jumping from vine to snake in pre-planned routes with set jumping arcs and interact points is as simple as pressing the jump button when the big prompt appears. There are also different courses, but as far as I could tell the main variation was how many snakes there were, from “No snakes” to “Oh god, I am in some kind of snake based hell where every cell in my being has been replaced with that of a snake, this is not how man was supposed to live. Thankfully it’s just as the previously mentioned Jungle Slider, and if you mess it up you only fall to your death in the hippo lagoon, so it’s not an overly long process to climb back to whence you came.

Gummi Ship

Yes, it’s not really a mini-game in that you have to do this thing repeatedly to progress the game, but it’s ultimately very different from the main game mechanics. If anything it’s the most unique part of this entire list as it doesn’t involve jumping, hitting things with your key sword or a combination of the two. What it does involve is a series of forgettable shoot ’em up segments. You pilot your small ship, which I can only assume is gelatin based, flies away from the camera and you shoot at the various enemy ships that come your way. While this doesn’t sound particularly nightmarish, it is woefully unrealised. Enemies are just a variety of shapes that float slowly towards you and the camera, not posing much more of a threat than that. You can customise your ship to your heart’s content, but really do you really want to? No. No you don’t. A major issue with the Gummi Ship in Kingdom Hearts, outside of it being slow, boring, forgettable levels and just a general feeling of being a tedious chore, is that it’s all too easy to go the wrong way. As you fly to your next destination you better damn well try and remember if you needed to turn left or right, go through the wormhole or not, as you’re given all of two seconds before the game locks in your confused face and suddenly you’re off to Agrabah, again. Also there’s a whale who randomly turns up and eats you and there’s no way around it, hell on earth. There are challenges that you can try and complete but these are mostly a variety of “get lots of points” “Destroy everything” “Don’t get hit” some are genuinely challenging, but purely through their unfairness. A challenge which claims you can’t shoot anything or get hit immediately presents you with a solid wall of panels. So have fun. You wont.

To say Kingdom Hearts continues to disappoint would be overly mean, but if you were to judge a game on its mini-games, Kingdom Hearts would be one of the most boring and tedious experiences known to man. Thankfully Kingdom Hearts isn’t, it’s wonky, but still vaguely fun to play and experience. Its mini-games are not something to write home about, and definitely not something to write nearly 2000 words over, but here we are.