Kingdom Hearts is famous for its endearing but needlessly convoluted story, but apparently the quirkiness extends beyond that to the software's design, as discovered by Reddit user PhapsUnexpected, Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix save files are apparently stored within a single PNG image. Seriously!

This online detective discovered this strange 7MB image while examining files from the recently released PC port of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX. Perhaps expecting a typical save file format like .txt, they found only two PNG images, one of "system data" with Mickey Mouse ears and the other of "save data" with Sora's face. Confused, they opened the Sola image in a hex editor and found what appeared to be save data embedded in the PNG metadata. See below the discovery, which was probably recorded by ...

The whole thing is quite strange. Notice that the image itself is not hiding data in the visual layer like a secret spy code. The storage is buried within the metadata of the image, essentially a side storage area within the file that could theoretically store any simple data. If you open the file with a standard image viewer, all you see is Sola's face, but if you feed the file into a program that looks for metadata, it can find the 1s and 0s in it.

So why bother pairing images with stored data? There is no obvious advantage to this strategy beyond being a bit cleaner. It certainly does not save space (if anything, it increases file size slightly). Square Enix may want to make it easier to share Kingdom Hearts saves on social media (you can't upload a text file to Twitter, for example). However, as ResetEra user exodus points out, some image sharing services automatically remove some of the metadata from the file, which spoils the fun.

It is also possible that Square Enix just wanted to make the save file a little harder to duplicate than the standard .txt, but I have to imagine there are better ways to do that than PNG. Since the console versions of Kingdom Hearts don't seem to save saves in the same way, this could be a measure to make sure the two platforms are not incompatible.

I had never heard of embedding save files in images until today, but apparently Spore did something similar in 2008. In that game, user-created creatures could be shared as PNGs on the official site, but the save portion was literally saved as visual data rather than as separate metadata According to several ResetEra users, even in adult games some use metadata strategies to share custom characters. Heh.

Is that cool? Absolutely. Completely unnecessary? Undeniably. But what else can one expect from a series with a title like "Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days"? Of course, the series' debut on the PC comes with its own set of oddities. It would be nothing more than that.