Charles Dickens once said: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." Weepboop once said of Kingdom Hearts III: "It was the times."
My favorite part about beating a Kingdom Hearts title is reflecting on the twenty to thirty hours I spent playing the game and asking myself if I ever actually understood the plot.
For the ninth time, the answer is no. I don't fucking understand Kingdom Hearts.
I'm watching the credits roll as we speak, or rather as I monologue and I don't understand who half of the characters in the final crawl were. I don't understand what the Kingdom Hearts is. I don't understand the difference between Terra, Terra Xehanort, Ansem, Ansem the wise, and Xemnas. Every one of these I play, I realize that one Dunkey video where he goes and explains the plot of these games in jumbled detail was actually the most coherent and lore accurate depiction of the "lore" of the Kingdom Hearts universe. What the third mainline installment of this series succeeds in doing is putting together a crustless, playable, and mostly enjoyable experience to actually put in your hands. Gone is the garbage combo stun of KH1 & 2, gone are the obtrusive and malformed mechanics of the spinoffs like Chain of Memories and Birth by Sleep, and in is just good ol' hack and slash with fun buttons to press that make you do more damage and actually combo for once. The combat isn't perfect, resoundingly far from it in fact, but I'll be damned if I didn't actually enjoy fighting things from time to time. I didn't understand the spells and the saturation of gauges and bars Sora has to watch out for, but for the vast majority of the game it was coherent to utilize from a gameplay perspective. In closing of the mechanics, the formchanging was pretty neat and a great way to emphasize using different keyblades.
Outside of that, praise ends at saying it's pretty and Face my Fears was a great opener.
So where does KH3 falter? The answer is an unironic and genuine: everywhere else. The plot is mumbo jumbo complete nonsense. I presume it was written by an AI generated Animal Crossing character in their near-Simlish lingua franca, and Tetsuya Nomura scaled the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus to communicate with the Oracle of Delphi. Here he presented the acting script of Kingdom Hearts III to Pythia, who consulted her clergy around the tholos. The priests then interpreted the words and presented them to Nomura in dactylic hexameter. Nomura returned to Square Enix's offices and completely guessed at what they wrote, thus resulting in the plot and script of Kingdom Hearts III. I am in complete belief that there was nobody in the writing room at Square Enix that had the ability to say no to a creative endeavor, and all the "what ifs" were met with a unanimous "YES YES YES." I don't know why we visit any of the Disney worlds we do as Sora, or why we are tasked with playing out a shortform version of their cinematic storylines in this game. Seriously, do I really need to play Pirates of the Carribean 2 in a video game? No! Do I need to play Tangled to understand the story of Rapunzel? No! Do I need to hear Idina Menzel sing "Let it Go" and play out the events of Frozen in this game? NO. None of this adds up to a coherent or pleasant game to play. I excused it in Olympus in the first few worlds because I figured KH3 might be setting up a legitimate need to jump between Disney/Pixar IP's as part of the overarching storyline, but it became clear that they felt the need to run through their properties to attempt to appeal to fanservice and remind the player how strong Disney's portfolio is fiscally.
The fact that the mobile game I watched a summary movie for in the KINGDOM HEARTS HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, forgot everything about because it was incoherent and senseless, only to find out it was probably the most integral lore to this game is hysterically hilarious to me. I assume a majority of people who played this game or consider themselves KH fans skipped the mobile content entirely, and they're probably even more confused than I was. This is like if you somehow made it all the way to Star Wars Episode IX only to find out that the Star Wars Holdiay Special was the most integral plot to Papa Palpatine's revenge. In the final scenes and resolution of fourty years of film glory and cultural impact, Chewbacca's family come out and free the galaxy of the Sith. That's what Kingdom Hearts 3 feels like, we got Holiday Special'd in Episode IX. I won't spoil but the post-credits scene of KHIII frustrated me to an end previously undiscovered because it pulls this card again. The mobile game, why the damn mobile game? Why couldn't, I don’t know... even the worst game in the series in Chain of Memories been the integral one? I get Birth By Sleep made a large presence in this game and its overall narrative, but why is the mobile game the big hitter here?
The best part of KHIII and this review is I originally had this game as a much better score, but over thinking out my talking points I've reduced it by a half star with each new grievance. How did they fumble the bag this hard? How will Kingdom Hearts IV do it even harder? What does Sora actually do in this game? Why can everyone survive in everyone else’s heart? Seriously how many people are inside of Sora's heart? Why is there a character named Xigbar? Why is his non-nobody name BRAIG. WHO NAMES A CHARACTER BRAIG. I'm happy to be done with Kingdom Hearts (for now.) I'm happy this series cannot hurt me any longer. I am free, I am clean. I can shower and not be disgusted with who I am. I can make coffee and wave to my neighbors. I can open the blinds and say hello to the sun. Maybe the real Kingdom Hearts was the friends we complained to about this series along the way.
I don't recommend Kingdom Hearts III to anyone. It's the most playable and enjoyable Kingdom Hearts (not including Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth By Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage) to play, but it's still unfortunately a Kingdom Hearts title.
The cold never bothered me anyway.
My favorite part about beating a Kingdom Hearts title is reflecting on the twenty to thirty hours I spent playing the game and asking myself if I ever actually understood the plot.
For the ninth time, the answer is no. I don't fucking understand Kingdom Hearts.
I'm watching the credits roll as we speak, or rather as I monologue and I don't understand who half of the characters in the final crawl were. I don't understand what the Kingdom Hearts is. I don't understand the difference between Terra, Terra Xehanort, Ansem, Ansem the wise, and Xemnas. Every one of these I play, I realize that one Dunkey video where he goes and explains the plot of these games in jumbled detail was actually the most coherent and lore accurate depiction of the "lore" of the Kingdom Hearts universe. What the third mainline installment of this series succeeds in doing is putting together a crustless, playable, and mostly enjoyable experience to actually put in your hands. Gone is the garbage combo stun of KH1 & 2, gone are the obtrusive and malformed mechanics of the spinoffs like Chain of Memories and Birth by Sleep, and in is just good ol' hack and slash with fun buttons to press that make you do more damage and actually combo for once. The combat isn't perfect, resoundingly far from it in fact, but I'll be damned if I didn't actually enjoy fighting things from time to time. I didn't understand the spells and the saturation of gauges and bars Sora has to watch out for, but for the vast majority of the game it was coherent to utilize from a gameplay perspective. In closing of the mechanics, the formchanging was pretty neat and a great way to emphasize using different keyblades.
Outside of that, praise ends at saying it's pretty and Face my Fears was a great opener.
So where does KH3 falter? The answer is an unironic and genuine: everywhere else. The plot is mumbo jumbo complete nonsense. I presume it was written by an AI generated Animal Crossing character in their near-Simlish lingua franca, and Tetsuya Nomura scaled the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus to communicate with the Oracle of Delphi. Here he presented the acting script of Kingdom Hearts III to Pythia, who consulted her clergy around the tholos. The priests then interpreted the words and presented them to Nomura in dactylic hexameter. Nomura returned to Square Enix's offices and completely guessed at what they wrote, thus resulting in the plot and script of Kingdom Hearts III. I am in complete belief that there was nobody in the writing room at Square Enix that had the ability to say no to a creative endeavor, and all the "what ifs" were met with a unanimous "YES YES YES." I don't know why we visit any of the Disney worlds we do as Sora, or why we are tasked with playing out a shortform version of their cinematic storylines in this game. Seriously, do I really need to play Pirates of the Carribean 2 in a video game? No! Do I need to play Tangled to understand the story of Rapunzel? No! Do I need to hear Idina Menzel sing "Let it Go" and play out the events of Frozen in this game? NO. None of this adds up to a coherent or pleasant game to play. I excused it in Olympus in the first few worlds because I figured KH3 might be setting up a legitimate need to jump between Disney/Pixar IP's as part of the overarching storyline, but it became clear that they felt the need to run through their properties to attempt to appeal to fanservice and remind the player how strong Disney's portfolio is fiscally.
The fact that the mobile game I watched a summary movie for in the KINGDOM HEARTS HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, forgot everything about because it was incoherent and senseless, only to find out it was probably the most integral lore to this game is hysterically hilarious to me. I assume a majority of people who played this game or consider themselves KH fans skipped the mobile content entirely, and they're probably even more confused than I was. This is like if you somehow made it all the way to Star Wars Episode IX only to find out that the Star Wars Holdiay Special was the most integral plot to Papa Palpatine's revenge. In the final scenes and resolution of fourty years of film glory and cultural impact, Chewbacca's family come out and free the galaxy of the Sith. That's what Kingdom Hearts 3 feels like, we got Holiday Special'd in Episode IX. I won't spoil but the post-credits scene of KHIII frustrated me to an end previously undiscovered because it pulls this card again. The mobile game, why the damn mobile game? Why couldn't, I don’t know... even the worst game in the series in Chain of Memories been the integral one? I get Birth By Sleep made a large presence in this game and its overall narrative, but why is the mobile game the big hitter here?
The best part of KHIII and this review is I originally had this game as a much better score, but over thinking out my talking points I've reduced it by a half star with each new grievance. How did they fumble the bag this hard? How will Kingdom Hearts IV do it even harder? What does Sora actually do in this game? Why can everyone survive in everyone else’s heart? Seriously how many people are inside of Sora's heart? Why is there a character named Xigbar? Why is his non-nobody name BRAIG. WHO NAMES A CHARACTER BRAIG. I'm happy to be done with Kingdom Hearts (for now.) I'm happy this series cannot hurt me any longer. I am free, I am clean. I can shower and not be disgusted with who I am. I can make coffee and wave to my neighbors. I can open the blinds and say hello to the sun. Maybe the real Kingdom Hearts was the friends we complained to about this series along the way.
I don't recommend Kingdom Hearts III to anyone. It's the most playable and enjoyable Kingdom Hearts (not including Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth By Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage) to play, but it's still unfortunately a Kingdom Hearts title.
The cold never bothered me anyway.
8 Comments
@RedBackLoggd Thank you! I agree wholeheartedly (pun intended heh,) I drove into the sequels after playing the first because I was desperate to see if they looped back and were able to weave together a coherent narrative. Turns out after playing (and watching) ever game in the collection, the resounding answer was no. If you had fun with the first (story aside,) the second is "worth" it, but III relies so much on tertiary lore and obfuscated stories I can't recommend sticking through with it all.
Wait a second, you're saying III isn't even a cogent sequel to those who played all the previous games?! What more do you need to do to understand the plot???
@RedBackLoggd An advanced degree in Kingdom-Hearts-ology and a legitimate mutiple day study of lore. It's exhausting if you put any distance of time between playing some of those titles. LIke I said, I played uhhhh Birth By Sleep and watched the movie of the mobile game(s) with a decent amount of time in between playing KHIII and they ended up being the most important. You forget a lot in translation and even then what is explicitly told to you does not make sense.
LMAO, a mobile game movie is integral to the story???
It's ironic how the FF and of course Disney Renaissance movies were able to tell cogent stories. What a waste of an intriguing IP.
For KHII, do I only need to play Chain of Memories before?
It's ironic how the FF and of course Disney Renaissance movies were able to tell cogent stories. What a waste of an intriguing IP.
For KHII, do I only need to play Chain of Memories before?
@RedBackLoggd
Yep! And not just integral, literally the whole twist at the end and lead in to KHIV revolves around it. Insane to me lol.
Per KHII yeah thats right, but I'm going to be level with you that I'm of 100% certainty that CoM is in my bottom five games of all time. If you can find value out of it, more power to you!
Yep! And not just integral, literally the whole twist at the end and lead in to KHIV revolves around it. Insane to me lol.
Per KHII yeah thats right, but I'm going to be level with you that I'm of 100% certainty that CoM is in my bottom five games of all time. If you can find value out of it, more power to you!
Geeeeez brother, thank the Lord I ran into your review - I was actually thinking about playing every game in the franchise to understand KHIII, but know it's as much of a mess as its development hell predilected means I won't be wasting time beyond the first three.
Yeah, card-based combat systems tend to be lower rated haha. I'll just play it for the story connection and hope the gameplay's aged decently xD
Yeah, card-based combat systems tend to be lower rated haha. I'll just play it for the story connection and hope the gameplay's aged decently xD
@RedBackLoggd Yeah I really wouldn't haha. I specifically played everything to try and truly understand it all, and to see if it was worth it. I found out it's far from being so, and I try to warn people about what they may be getting into!
RedBackLoggd
2 days ago