Original Publication Date: 01/02/2020

Republished 5/29/2024.

Kingdom hearts 3

In all honesty, despite its positive qualities, I don’t feel like I’m overreacting when I say Kingdom Hearts 3 is one of the most disappointing games I’ve played in recent years, especially in the context of the series as a whole. Strong gameplay, beautiful graphics, and some of the best Worlds in the series’ history just isn’t enough from masking the gigantic story-based flaws that fracture through this game, creating an ultimately tainted and saddeningly bad product.

I’m not really one of those people who’ve been ‘waiting’ for Kingdom Hearts 3 for fourteen years – I played a lot of the handheld games, like 358/2 Days or Dream Drop Distance, that really were mainline games without having a proper number there, so I actually knew the story was moving forward at a somewhat sluggish rate. But, at the same time, I really did get caught up in the final months before Kingdom Hearts 3’s release – seeing a ‘real’, true mainline entry in the game on the PS4 was nothing short of exciting, and none of the side games since Kingdom Hearts 2 really did much to answer any of the real burning questions, or push the arc of the game that much forward, sans Dream Drop Distance. So, I think even without realizing it, I went into Kingdom Hearts 3 with a lot of expectations for a lot of different things. Honestly, I never expected to come out of this game hating what I normally love about the series, and really loving what I normally thought little of.

Starting with the latter of that thought – the bread and butter of the games, the Disney Worlds. For a lot of people, the big appeal to these games is the Disney characters, and if you’re here for that, you’re gonna come out pretty happy. For the most part, these are the best worlds of the series – they’re bigger, more populated, prettier, and more exciting pretty much across the board. Turning boring worlds I dreaded to visit in previous games, like Olympus or Pirates of the Caribbean, into pretty exciting and enjoyable segments was a really wonderful surprise – heck, Pirates turned out as one of the best worlds in the game, having a pretty amazing mini-open-world to explore and decently fun ship-to-ship combat that feels like a remedial version of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag – in the best way possible. I was also really surprised how good the big Heartless bosses were in every level, as they were usually the weakest part of previous games, and paled in comparison to the human-level fights, but here, they’re huge, epic spectacles where pretty much any kind of insanity can happen, whilst still feeling at least a part of the world. Honestly, the only world I actively felt ‘meh’ on was the Frozen World, which really just felt tacked on because Frozen was such an insane phenomen a couple of years ago, and even then, it’s better than a lot of the worse worlds in previous games. So, without a doubt, the standard for quality Worlds in this game is so much higher than previous ones. Personally, I’m just glad Agrabah isn’t here anymore.

But easily the best worlds in the game are those that belong to the Pixar brand, which are the Monsters Inc. and Toy Story worlds. Monsters Inc, whilst a more linear experience, is nothing short of hysterical, and honestly serves as a pretty reasonable epilogue or mini-sequel to the events of the original film. It easily got the biggest laughs out of me in the entire game, and probably overall the strongest world in the game. Toy Story, on the other hand, is a literal toy box of fun to experience, with much of the level taking place in a gigantic toy store that harbors a plethora of distractions and details to be absorbed in. They are both nothing short of incredible, and stand head and shoulders above anything else Kingdom Hearts has done before.

The game is also a huge amount of fun to play in it’s moment to moment gameplay – Sora has never controlled as well as he had, and the power given to the game by next-gen machines have made it look nothing short of breathtaking. They even made the Gummi ship levels worth doing! Attacks, magic, summons, and party moves all look superb, with a huge amount of detail and character baked into each and every animation, and doing a much better job then previous games of incorporating Disney characters into attacks and such. Whilst there are less Keyblades usable in the game, each one has a state that plays very different from one another and creates a feeling of variety that was seriously lacking in earlier titles in the series. Chief among these are the Disney Attraction attacks – these are visual powerhouses that look like nothing else in the game, but at the same time, they are a double edged sword. They’re beautiful and I loved seeing them, but at the same time, they were incredibly powerful and made 90% of encounters in the game a total joke.

And that was my biggest problem with the gameplay – the game, at least within a month of launch, was insanely easy. I was playing on the Harder difficulty, and I only died twice, both of which were in a section of the final battle where Sora cannot heal, in an altered, weaker state. Back in the day, I remember having a bit of a struggle with the harder difficulties of the games in the main series, but here it just feels like a bit of a joke. Honestly, it feels like they just took the difficulty scaling from, say, Kingdom Hearts 2, but the fact they’ve given Sora so many more tools and weapons to deal with his enemy, I know in the year since they’ve added a harder difficulty mode, but it’s pushed way too far in the other direction, and there really isn’t any kind of middle ground for the players seeking a bit of a challenge, but not any kind of Soulsborne-esque barrier. But, to return to my original point, Kingdom Hearts 3’s gameplay is probably the best of the series, and easily the biggest draw of the game for me at this point.

Where I feel Kingdom Hearts 3 really falls apart, however, is its core narrative. A story that, despite its quirks, decisions and such in previous games, I generally really loved and got rather invested in. But here… not only is the story all over the place, in terms of tone, characterisation, and pacing, it just overall… feels bad to sit through the cutscenes. And to make matters worse, the Disney Worlds might as well be a completely different story to the main, overarching plot of the game, with how little influence, merit, or worth they have by the end of the game. Many of the story-based cutscenes tying into the greater arc that appear in the Worlds have little bearing on the greater cutscenes, and the ones that do might as well not – or in the worst cases, simply serve to tease character points for a future game, with no payoff in Kingdom Hearts 3 at all! It’s simply atrocious storytelling, but I had faith, whilst playing, that it would all tie up somewhere at the end – this game had been coming for so long, it just had to be going somewhere, right?

The gameplay of Kingdom Hearts 3 is strong enough to carry the game on its own, and honestly, from the start of the game until the completion of the final Disney world, I would’ve just been happy with that content. I would’ve been a little disappointed with the sparse story and weak writing, especially with how much hype was behind this game, but I enjoyed everything up to this point to make my purchase feel worth it. It was fun, silly fun, but it was fun. And then I reached the final world of the game, the Keyblade Graveyard, where all its 25+ hours of build up and plot teases were all about to pay off. I was so excited at this point, knowing it had all led up to this point.

And then it all fell apart from there, and all because of the characters. The writing of the Keyblade Graveyard, as a scenario, is weak, but the real crime here is the handling of the characters. These are characters I’ve gotten pretty invested in over the years, and seeing their arcs come to an end is something that was meant to be special, but that’s not what we got here. I couldn’t help but have expectations going in, I really couldn’t – none who’s been into the series for so long can’t help it – but what we got from this game in the way of satisfying character developments is nothing short of disappointing, and not only just in the Keyblade Graveyard, but across the game – the KG is just the worst of it, as it bastardized pretty much everyone’s characteristics, and sabotages the ending to their stories.

Characters go literally nowhere across the game, the strongest examples of which I give to Kairi and Axel. Throughout the game, as Sora is saving Disney Worlds and conquering the Heartless, we see snippets of Axel and Kairi learning about how to be Keyblade wielders, and bits and pieces of their character arcs. And with the game frequently setting up the final battle between Light and Darkness, I was nothing short of thrilled at the idea of seeing two characters I was super behind getting a real piece of the limelight.

And then neither of them do literally anything in the final battle.

And I think that’s the greatest crime of Kingdom Heart 3’s story, especially in its final act. It’s just all about Sora. Entire games worth of storytelling – Ventus and Terra’s struggle with darkness, Axel grappling with his former friends from Organisation XIII, Riku’s inner turmoil regarding his ‘clone’… all of this is thrown away just so Sora gets to kick some ass and be the real hero of the saga. Everyone eventually falls to Sora, everyone else gets, essentially, tossed on the wayside, despite the veritable cornucopia of amazing potential, character interactions and such that could’ve been, if the writer(s) had just decided to let someone other than Sora do literally anything. It sucks, because I really, really love a lot of these characters, and the game just refuses to let them be useful. Playing as Riku for a section? Gotta get Sora to bail him out. Playing as Aqua? Ohoho, she’s too weak to finish off the opponent, let’s have Sora tag team. It’s just incredibly frustrating, and nothing short of atrocious writing, making the battle of Light and Darkness just the Battle of Sora and Darkness. Even beyond a storytelling level, playing as Sora in what is meant to be this huge, personal battle between the seven warriors of light, coming down to just one kid essentially soloing everything, just FEELS bad to play. Also, to cement the awful character writing in the final stages of the game, the fact that the return of one of my favorite characters in the eleventh hour – despite there being no real reason for her to appear was one of my favorite character moments in the game speaks volume at the utter disrespect these characters get.

This is also only mildly more annoying and frustrating then the fact that that the staff of this game were not content with letting this game have a peaceful, remotely satisfying ending with some form of conclusion, but no – the game ends on a cliffhanger, a decently awful one at that, and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, making me feel like the story of Kingdom Hearts 3 wasn’t what Additionally, having two characters that are classic to every major Kingdom Hearts game (Maleficent and/or Pete) turn up literally so they can chill and talk about something that isn’t even in this game is nothing short of infuriating. If they’d left the future game teases for the traditional secret epilogue every game has had, but just throwing it into the game haphazardly just makes me feel so uninterested in what the game was trying to do. This, coupled with the fact that Square Enix are releasing PAID DLC, detailing the events that take place after the story ends for FORTY FIVE DOLLARS, a year after the game actually released is nothing short of offensive, and leaves a flat out awful taste in my mouth. I don’t care about the boss fights or anything that come with the DLC pack, the fact that storytelling elements that really do feel like they belong in the base game have been excluded from KH3 for the DLC is nothing short of depressing, and further serves to taint my already not-so-fond memories of the game.

Kingdom Hearts 3 isn’t a terrible game, in a subjective or objective sense.. It’s fun to play, and most of its Disney Worlds are generally pretty fun to play through, and overall, there’s enough here to keep you busy for a long time. However, As a narrative piece, as the finale to a saga a decade in the making, Kingdom Hearts 3 is an utter failure, failing to put the story where it deserves to be after so much hype and build up. I have fond memories of it’s worlds and boss fights, but it’s easy difficulty, awful storytelling, and frustrating cliffhanger leave nothing short of an abhorrent taste in mouth, which goes a long way in making me forget anything I liked about this ame, and ranks this among the worst entries of the series, and even more sadly, among the worst of 2019.

Retrospective: Man, I really went to town in regards to how annoyed this game made me. I think I've mellowed out on it a bit in the years since, but I've still got a tooooon of problems with Kingdom Hearts 3.