Who sings the Kingdom Hearts theme songs?

Hikaru Utada, the New York-born singer-songwriter who became one of Japan’s defining pop artists with the 1999 debut album First Love, has provided the theme music for every numbered Kingdom Hearts game. Each theme exists twice, as a Japanese original and an English counterpart that is a rewrite rather than a translation, written by Utada to fit the same melody to a different language’s rhythm.

The first pairing set the template in 2002: “Hikari” for Japan, “Simple and Clean” for the West, the song that plays over the first game’s opening film and has since become inseparable from the series’ identity. Kingdom Hearts II (2005) repeated the structure with “Passion” and its English version “Sanctuary”; Passion later joined Utada’s 2006 album Ultra Blue. Between numbered games the themes kept working: a remixed “Hikari,” the Ray of Hope MIX by PUNPEE, fronted HD 2.8 in 2017 and topped download charts in nine countries.

Kingdom Hearts III broke the pattern by doubling it. For the first time the series had separate opening and ending themes: the opening, “Face My Fears,” created with Skrillex and Poo Bear, and the ending, “Chikai” / “Don’t Think Twice.” Both were released as a single on January 18, 2019, Utada’s first single in eleven years, and “Face My Fears” carried Utada onto the Billboard Hot 100. In April 2022, at Coachella, Utada opened a festival set with “Simple and Clean,” twenty years after the song was written for a PlayStation 2 game.