Kingdom Hearts 3: SEVENTEEN YEARS!
I don’t even know where to begin with Kingdom Hearts 3. I have grown with this series, I have lived this series for so long, and when the wait for an end was finally over, I can’t help but wonder if it was worth it all.
normally the best place to start is the beginning, but honestly, I had problems with the game before it even started. Dearly Beloved has been around since the start of the series. It is the staple start-up menu theme, and even though it is a rather simple melody, it is one of the finest pieces of music to grace an opening screen. With each game, the melody has grown more complex, with accompanying instruments, and added melodies, but the core has always been there. KH3 immediately throws this tradition away, as the core melody for Dearly Beloved is lost in a mess of other instruments. I am truly disappointed by this. The song that plays is still a good song, but it isn’t Dearly Beloved anymore.
Continuing with the music theme, you don’t get very far in the game before you hit the next jarring piece of music. “Face My Fears” is the opening theme of KH3, and it is surprisingly good considering that it was made by Hikaru Utada, the main vocalist for all other Kingdom Hearts themes, and Skrillex, who generally makes a specific type of music that I don’t like. Through some restraint though, “Face My Fears” is a really nice song, and the accompanying video, a CG masterpiece chronicling 17 years of story, is chilling. The power of this combination can’t be understated
It’s hard to talk about the story of KH3 because the game is still so fresh. But it follows the paths of its predecessors by mixing Disney worlds into a Square Enix branded JRPG, a combination that shouldn’t work, but has stood tall over the years. Each world visited in KH3 is unique save for 3 of them, though of those 3 one scoots by on a technicality thanks to a clever troll move at the beginning of the game. Some worlds are retellings of more modern Disney movies, with Sora just kind of being there. Others, seem to take place after the movies that they are based on. If you are a Disney fan, it might be nice to see some characters doing things after their respective movies. It’s after these Disney worlds wrap themselves up that the meat of the plot relevant story bits begin to shine through.
This is also where things get spoiler heavy, so I will try to move about this as elegantly as possible. If you like the characters of previous Kingdom Hearts games, there is bound to be something in this that will make you happy. The endgame is packed with story threads from previous games wrapping themselves up in a way that feels nice. I just wish there was more of it. Honestly this is where things begin to fall apart for me. Because this is all endgame stuff, the content here can feel like its moving too fast, and it can leave you wishing there was more time to fit things in, because not only are we wrapping up the plot threads of a seventeen year long story arc, but we are also wrapping up the plot threads of 10 games worth of original characters. It is a lot to sift through, and there really isn’t enough time to do it all. The game even says this itself as if poking fun at itself for just glossing over plot points. I won’t make too big a deal over how convoluted everything is, because calling Kingdom Hearts confusing is like saying the grass is green.
Also, the game is super short, my clear time was sitting at about 40 hours, but other people have reported right around 30. Mine might also be inflated due to leaving the game running, and also having to backtrack to find the important collectable in the game. It may seem like this is a big game, but honestly, Trails of Cold Steel 2 clocked in at around 60 hours for me, and Persona 5, which doesn’t hold anywhere near the same amount of cultural importance was 105. It may just be me, but it just didn’t feel like enough.
Combat wise, it’s what I’ve come to expect from Kingdom Hearts. Fast paced, stylized, Action RPG content is what the series does best, and it is no slouch in this regard. That being said, some of the additions to the combat mechanics don’t sit very well with me. One of the nice things added is the ability to equip up to 3 keyblades and switch between them on the fly, and each keyblade can be upgraded to ensure it remains viable throughout the game. Performing consecutive combos triggers a formchange, which transforms your keyblade, and give you a new move set to go along with it. Each keyblade has one to two different formchanges that make it unique. This formchange system is fun ad interesting, but it comes with the added burden of non-skippable transformation animations, which trigger frequently enough to make the flow of combat feel very stop and start. There are also team attacks that trigger randomly which can also halt combat with more animations. Finally, there are the attraction attacks, which trigger when you hit an indicated enemy in battle, these attacks are powerful, but they happen far too often, and while you can skip the trigger animations, they still manage to get in the way all the time, and they take you completely out of the combat. I found myself forcing these to stop almost every time I used them. Also, they have their own music, so each time these attacks happen, they cut into whatever battle music was already playing, and that can be jarring. There’s also summons which are even more animations that halt combat, but I never used them, so I can’t really complain about them.
Complaints aside though, the combat when it was flowing properly, felt satisfying, and the formchanges were fun ways to make each keyblade feel unique as opposed to past games where each new keyblade was just a stat buff. My personal favorite keyblades were the Wheel of Fate from The Pirates of the Caribbean world, and the Frozen Keyblade, because I am an ice hoe.
The last thing I want to mention is the ending, without specifics of course. The short version is that I really didn’t like it. Tetsuya Nomura had an opportunity to wrap up the final bits of the story that we’ve been following for 17 years, and he threw it away. The game is left with an ambiguous ending to leave the door open for sequels, because of course it was, and that leaves an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I firmly believe that a good ending is important to a good story, and the if the ending doesn’t leave me feeling satisfied, then what even was the point. This is the same problem I had with Danganronpa V3. We’ve fought this series tooth and nail to get some semblance of closure from its confusing as heck plot, and it really feels like it wasn’t worth it in the end. That is the most important feeling that Kh3 has left me with, a sense of disappointment. I never expected this game to be the be all end all of RPG’s because that would be ridiculous, but I didn’t expect it to disappoint me, and right now, as I finish writing this, that’s all I feel is disappointment, with a twinge of anger. If I did any kind of grading scale I feel like I would give KH3 a 5/10, because there are far too many things holding it down.
If you want to play Kingdom Heart 3, you can buy it on PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
