Kingdom Hearts 3 - A Frustrated Fan's Review that Nobody Asked For · 3:57pm Mar 6th, 2019
If I were smart, I'd insert pictures in this blog to break it up, but I feel like I'd be putting more user experience consideration into this blog than reader consideration the storyboarders for KH3 did.
I'm somewhat hard to please when it comes to video games. I'm not a fan of JRPG's, but I like Pokemon. Also, JRPG's were a formative part of a childhood. Final Fantasy 7 in particular. I could have been recognized as one of those edgy kids who were bullied and didn't fit in when I was younger, so I'd sink into my Linkin Park and video games in order to break away from a world where I felt like I didn't belong.
At the same time though, Disney was in one of it's haydays when I was in my youth. The great movies never stopped coming. And as a result, I found myself in the perfect target demographic for Kingdom Hearts 1.
I'm not going to sit here and write several paragraphs explaining or re-hashing the existance and story of Kingdom Hearts. Hundreds of better content creators have their own versions that succeed or fail in their own ways. My personal favorites happen to be the "In a Nutshell" series and Barry Kramer's 'Good Enough' Summary of Kingdom Hearts.
From a Programmer's/Development/Project standpoint - Kingdom Hearts is a miracle.
Think about the number of beauicratic cogs and wheels that have to move to churn these games out with any sort of frequency. Square Enix. Disney. Pixar. All of the Licences and Developers all have to schedule and agree on proper representation of their IP. There's so many places where this could have failed, but didn't. Instead, they managed to create a imaginative storyline over several installments. That, in itself, is a success.
This is where the compliments nearly end.
I remember in my youth Eagerly purchasing -every single- Kh game I could get my hands on. And completing them to 100%, because I'm a masochist. But the reward felt immense to see that triple digit percentage.
And now, after playing Kingdom Hearts 3, with it's streamlined combat, Several different ways of 'catching the player up' throughout the game of the previous story, I can't help but feel like parts of the game were a straight up waste of time.
Kingdom Hearts 3 feels padded. It feels like there's nothing at stake. There's been so many twists where "Light wins even though the bad thing happens." That even when the game DOES try to shock you with some sort of srs bns. It gets repaired within 30 minutes or less. There's no feeling within the player that the protagonists will ever actually fail.
I got to the final bosses at level 39. And this is with almost no grinding. I even squandered Keyblade upgrades throughout the game, deciding to use the 'power of food' as opposed to my strongest keyblade. I still took down the bad guys with almost no effort. I used 2 mega-potions and 1 elixir in the game. Total. All in the final boss. I stockpiled nearly 50k munny that was wasting away and building dust.
So much of the game was done in cutscene that I can't help but wonder if I watched a movie more than I played a game. On top of that, some of the 'worlds' in the game have their own strange 'gimmick' that I wonder if it really deepened the experience, or served as a way to break up a fairly dry experience.
And then there's the ending. Or, I should say lack there of. A secret ending that reveals... well nothing.
And so many little collectables that were clearly intended to be cleared after the game that I can't help but feel like... "No, KH. this is where I jump off."
Between the writing, and crazy padding in this game, I can't help but wonder who this game was actually made for. Me? The veteran? New players?
I know that Kingdom Hearts can make good games. Birth by Sleep, Birth by Sleep 0.2 and KH2 are prime examples of the series at their absolute high point.
I have to take a moment and question myself: Have I out grown this game? Or am I just exhausted at the poor writing that tries to blend metaphorical and literal concepts into some sort of absurdist B-movie script.
Also, when did Final Fantasy characters decide to entirely fuck off from this series: Remember when there was Auron, Cloud, Zack, Squall, Yuffie, Aeris, and more popular characters? Did I miss some sort of stupid plot point?
Hell, have Tidus run around the corner and throw blitzballs or something. Then do his stupid laugh. I dont care. I just feel exhausted the a lot of the things that kept this series fresh and exciting have disappeared. There's no weight. In fact, the whole final battle felt like a slog. In fact: It felt similar to how general audiences handled the "endings" of The Return of the King.
There's so MANY things I could harp on and be upset about. Like the unimportance of "links" which are basically summons. The inclusion of deep Union Cross lore that was absolutely critical for the final battle, but ended up with some of the least number of players when the game was released, instead releasing a 3 hour movie that was "expected reading" prior to entering the game.
-This is not how a good game series works-
This is how an Anime like Bleach works.
And the more that goes down that path, the harder and harder it will be for Western Audiences to continue with the game.
I can't possibly begin to get into all of the things that frustrated me with this game. So I suppose I'll ask you guys:
What did you think of the game, if you played it?
Two words: Fucking Crabs.
Ho baoh.
Hocus pocus this game has no focus (and all that).
so much for the magic, baby.
I feel very similar about it. I actually stopped playing because I got bored. There were no stakes, and so much stuff being talked about that I had no clue about since I’ve only played 1 and 2. A good series shouldn’t leave me going “should I know what the power of waking is? Because I don’t.” I’m also disappointed at the news that the final fantasy characters have gone missing. It just seems like so many other things these days; there’s pretty graphics, very pretty. But the controls are clunky and the writing... could have been accomplished better by a group of Kingdom Hearts fanfic writers.
I find myself kinda liking it, but it’s not good enough to keep my interest. Whereas before, games 1 & 2 ate my free time. Ate it. At least every last person under the sun doesn’t just say “Sora, Donald, Goofy” every ten seconds. That got on my nerves in 2.
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Now it's just people looking at each other, nodding and saying "Hm".
The dialogue was so soulless.
And they're trying to shoehorn in a romance with Sora and Kairi that simply doesn't exist. You can't expect characterization from nearly 2 decades ago to be enough to go on.
Tbh, Kairi and Axel are a better ship than Kairi and Sora.
I like it. I liked it a lot.
Despite all the flaw, and there were quite a few, it was a good game to play. It felt good to play.
And at least it was an ending, to a degree. There were parts that were completely unneeded Looking at you, Kairi but we got to see how it ends and the final boss was, in my eyes, fantastic fun. And he never once went mutation ugly like so many in other games, thank god. Too many do that damn trope it's annoying.
Plus Donald is confirmed to be the single most powerful and badass motherfucker on a level beyond even Bahamut in all of Disney and Final Fantasy, so we get that, too.
I agree with every word you said here. Well almost every word. BBS and BBS .2 were not as good as they could be. Too grindy, I think.
But KH2? That is as close to a perfect game as anyone, and I mean anyone could get. Could be others but I don't care.
Now for the endings, spoiled for kindness:
There are about 3 games to be gleaned from this:
1. With the Union Cross twats back, we can expect another mobile game because fuck you they need all the money
2. Riku is suspected to be on his own and romping through all the Final Fantasy worlds. This would somewhat explain why they ain't here this time. Which would imply that's gonna be KH4.
3. Sora's ass be dead and he's in Shibuya playing the Reaper's Game from The World Ends With You, so we can suspect that there's a second TWEWY coming, maybe. I'm ok with that.
Just my own thoughts. It was good, but not great.
~Skeeter The Lurker
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And I think a lot of your points are fair, (especially with donald. hfs) but I feel like I was lied to.
I don't know how I got it in my head that this would be the end. Like the end, end. Everything would be completed with a nice bow on top.
But it's not. And with the details that will not only be more games (a new arc in fact) but also dlc?
I'm just too tired for what they want from me as a player.
And yes, whole bbs 1 Was grindy, I'm referring to the story telling. Bbs 0.2's psychological dive through the shadow realm (or whatever) is still one of my favorite memories of this franchise. It made you actually think and feel through the metaphor they were actually doing -correctly- and it set up SO well for aqua to be norted.
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Axel x Kairi, got it memorized? Yes, they are, he’s all lost puppy and she’s his rock.
But expanding on the no stakes: When Buzz goes bad, why do you resolve it in Toy Story World? That’s a perfect opportunity for him to get snatched, then there are stakes! Let Olaf, get snagged, they could have gone whole hog with the “Hey, the bad guys want to experiment with these artificial beings that somehow have souls” and it would have been great. Then whoever the actual bad guys is (because frankly, I don’t know) is on a mission to create “ultimate artificial soul-being,” or whatever. It was the interconnectedness of the plots that made KH 1 & 2 so good. But no, all world problems are resolved on the world you’re on. And as far as I’ve gotten, I haven’t locked or unlocked anything with the keyblade, which breaks my immersion, because those things were constantly used before.
Sigh. Didn’t mean to rant. But there it is.
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More than that. It makes the worlds feel like a waste of time if sora had the power of waking all along.
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Norted? She was never norted. Not at all. Ansem simply bitchslapped her ass into the dark ocean by his Heartless Stand. Which makes that scene much more powerful when you realized it was Terra himself who did it. But she was not one of the 13.
And on that view, story wise? Sure, it was good.
Also anyone who played it and all already knew from the onset that this wouldn't be a true end. Nomura's proven himself to be approaching Suda 51 levels of insane. A fanfic writer who has zero idea how to end his own fanfic and long since said "fuckit how far and crazy can I go with this?".
~Skeeter The Lurker
For those who want to watch the video Priest mentioned.
And as someone who's never managed to spend more than five minutes playing any KH game without getting bored, the appeal of the series is constantly just a little bit baffling, to me. There's disney characters and disney worlds, sure, but they always seem flat and lifeless compared with the source material. And in the early games, the disney worlds were just rehashes of the movies, except this time all the important stuff is done by a small spiky child wearing too many belts and zippers, rather than any of the heroes, robbing the stories of any actual weight.
The Organisation XIII stuff is infamously edgy and convoluted (dark dark friendship dark heart memory darkness dark), and most of the original characters (Riku, Kairi, and the various Totally Not Kairi Characters) are bland, and 1 (or even 0) dimensional. You could replace Kairi with a mop and a hastily-scribbled sign saying "important", and she'd have exactly the same character, development, and impact.
And the gameplay is just... dull. 90% mashing one button, 5% mashing other buttons, and 5% frantic menuing because you need to do something that isn't one of your regular mash buttons. And that's not even touching on the monstrosity that was that one card-based system, where you had to shuffle through some yugioh deck in order to do attacks.
I dunno. I'm not saying that people are wrong for liking KH, just... I've never seen the appeal. And to me, the disappointment KH fans are sharing almost feels like this is the first time they're looking at KH in a long time without the rose tinted goggles of childhood, where you play literally any game that has sparkly effects and cool-sounding names and have a rollicking good time. I know I'm guilty of having done similar.
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Oh he does have it? I never got that far; been watching someone else play since I took a break from it after getting most of the way through Tangled World. I figured that’d be the case though; I’ve been wanting to punch Yensid in the face every time we go back to him because I was pretty sure that’s the case.
As for the dialogue... I was hoping that this game wouldn’t suffer from the “look, we’re showing you the characters you love, but forgot what plot is” syndrome, but there it is.
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I was under that distinct impression too, that this was it.
You summed up my feelings for it perfectly.
Read the third part of my username, you'll KNOW what I wanted that I got cheated out of in KH3.
All in all, I felt that this was really little more than Square Enix saying, "Look, look! We finally got Pixar worlds in it! It proves we listened to you, Fandom!", when if they'd REALLY listened, they wouldn't have given us a Twilight town smaller than was in 358/2 days!
I went into this avoiding trailers and sneak-peeks, because I was hyped. I wanted to explore the mainland of the Destiny Islands, see how the Radiant Garden restoration was coming, I wanted to see characters like Barrett, Vincent Valentine, Rufus Shinra and Reno and Rude. I WANTED MY DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE SIDE-BOSS! ! ! ! !
I only died once, in-game, and it was because I literally fell asleep in the Frozen world.
The fact that Nomura has all but confirmed DLC is coming somehow crushes me completely, yet simultaneously gives me immense hope.
Oh,I'm not alone? Feels better man,generally anyone I see talking about it,with a few exceptions,have nothing but blind praise for it. It definitely left me kinda heartbroken,which is pretty bad because I don't have any expectations of games nowadays.
The game felt like it was missing substance. The only real enjoyable world in my opinion was the Pirates of the Caribbean. Nowhere in the game was there a gripping story. It felt too tame. About the only shock it got out of me that drew me in was the secret cutscene between the four characters in it.
As someone else who also played every KH game to completion (that I could get my hands on), none of them were particularly hard. The only times I ever really faced a challenge were eight years ago when I was a moron and ran through BBS without stopping to fight anything so Big X was 10 levels higher than me and kicked my ass, or when I was playing DDD and trying to get the Dream Eaters I wanted to use made up. I can distinctly remember breezing through all of KH2 on Proud or Critical multiple times while only using Cure because I both know how to block and because Reflect is fuck-off broken. Even KH1, which has aged like milk, was pathetically easy once you got Curaga.
Everyone likes to cream their jeans over KH2FM but no one seems to like to remember that FM dropped two years after the base game came out and it was only in the FM that there was anything resembling a good challenge added to the game. (Someone gonna tell me that Sephiroth is a challenge when he's level 70 and I can be 99? Piss off.)
Even then, the reason the Data XIII fights or Lingering Will were hard was because they were either faster than you, invincible during their combos, or both. It was less of a challenging encounter and more of a high stakes roulette game of dancing around the boss until you could get an opening before laying it on.
The writing of the series has ALWAYS been totally batshit pants on head bonkers, that's honestly part of the appeal, deciphering Nomura's Wild Ride through time travel and layers of Christian symbolism. It also doesn't prevent good scenes from existing within all the wackiness, which KH3's back end is absolutely loaded with. I'll also defend the "obtuse" nature of it's lore dumps by asking at what time watching a quick Youtube summary became a substitute for playing a game? If I wanted to be up to date on the Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't be told "go watch this youtube video", I'd be told to start at the Silmarillion. I'm obviously not comparing the two because I'm not retarded, but KH is a series meant to be experienced, not regurgitated by a guy with a weird accent trying to make jokes.
In the last few weeks I've found a way to sum it up quite succinctly; Kingdom Hearts has no "side games", period. Every game is central, every game is important, they've put out multiple collections to give people every opportunity to catch up and all it takes from your end is the will to do it. So sit down and start killing Heartless, casual scum.
On the topic of FF characters, Nomura said in an interview that they were only in the game in the first place because the suits at SE didn't think the game would sell on its own, but knew it would if Cloud were in the game. Now that the series has become popular on its own, they weren't needed to boost sales. You can even see them preparing for this as far back as 2 where basically every FF character's story was wrapped up neatly.
Also, the crabs were easy as shit. You can get all of them done in town in under 10 minutes.
But Floopy
Did you ever find a good spot to FIND SOME INGREDIENTS
Two things off the top of my head that I didn't like about KH3.
The first being that boring cutscenes were made longer by characters rambling into eposition recounting plot points from the previous game, and the second was the complete lack of the counter system of which every few enemies and even bosses from KH2 had a unique variant of specific to them.
KH3 felt like Nomura just wanted to end the story and move on. But I've also heard the he has trouble letting characters go (hence why no one dies). That kind of duality, in my opinion, feels like it can play havoc with the final product.
In terms of visuals, gameplay and music it's really good but get repetitive after a while. Also Sora became kinda the problem as he took the spotlight from other characters and became a more fanfiction character and well I dare say Gary Stu as he started to show up to save everyone yeah I know is his game but the battle with Saix he could have continued and left Axel, Xion and Roxas deal with him, the same with Terra-Xehanort letting Aqua, Ven and Riku help him as they has stronger ties to him
Also in COrona and Ariandel Sora just felt like he was there. You could have removed him and the story would have gone the same s the movies, in fact him being there just made things worse.
And Kairi, she had so much potential and was demoted to the damsel that needs rescue.
And the worst part was the pacing.
Well Disney had a Disney rerun channel before ever airing new shows just relying on old content, I sorta see it like that. They already had the ability to go 'buy our toys' at any moment. Especially cuz they are a huuuuge name.
I think that's Disney saying keep out of our spot-light, its our toys to sell not yours. We are the big dogs, look, your ff15 wasn't a huge hit. Lets negotiate your shit out.
I thought it was fun, But I feel it wasn’t long enough. I completely forgot about the Final Fantasy characters, so I guess that’s why it felt so short.