– Visuals-

I am not a fan of how the characters look in the new artstyle.
While environments, animations and particle effects look great, many character models with a more cartoonish origin appear like well animated plastic, especially Mickey and Donald look absolutely awful in my opinion.
For modern CGI Disney movie characters on the other hand this new artstyle works just fine.
The Tangled, Toy Story and Frozen worlds look fantastic and so do the characters, but as soon as you play through worlds from traditionally animated Disney movies like Hercules, you see how much the new artstyle hurts these characters.

– World Design –

Most of the worlds you are visiting feel really uninspired, boring and even rushed towards the end.
They are either open world, HUB based with missions to carry out or corridors without any branches allowing for exploration, outside of occasionally being able to find a chest here and there with mostly nothing interesting in it.
The Pirates of the Carribean world for example is huge for a Kingdom Hearts world and invites you to explore it to your heart‘s contend, sailing from island to island.
Question here is, why would you want to do that?
There is nothing interesting to find anywhere.
The islands are all very similar to each other and finding upgrades for your pirateship don‘t net you anything outside of that particular world, because you can‘t use the ship anywhere else.
No matter what kind of world you are visiting, all of them feel empty and dull.
While I liked the Tangled world the most, I can’t say that I really liked any of the worlds to be totally honest, and since visiting these worlds makes up 3/4 of the game, it is quite a huge letdown.
The Gummi Ship missions are replaced by another open world-esque area, where you can move freely between the accessible worlds, find optional treasures, challenge strong heartless space ships and set new records for missions.
None of it is engaging or even remotely interesting and the shere size of it combined with the very slow speed of your vessel makes navigating from world to world very tedious.
The Gummi Ship missions are probably one of the first features many Kingdom Hearts fans would like removed from the game, because no matter how the developers change them up, they always feel unfun and unrewarding to play.
The new aspect of being able to run up walls, hence allowing the level designers to experiment more with verticality in the levels, never feels like more than a floaty and clunky gimmick and doesn‘t add any more depth to the world designs.

– Writing –

Pacing is the major writing problem of Kingdom Hearts III.
Plotwise it is supposed to be the big finale of the Xehanort saga, the ultimate clash with the main villain and his organization, built up since the first game from 2002.
But instead of fueling that tension by putting more emphasis on that final battle, the game just occasionally throws story bits your way and forces you to grind through the Disney worlds, barely advancing in the overall plotline.
The final act, my personal highlight of the game, then comes very suddenly and is shoved down your throat in around 5 hours.
What I really liked about Kingdom Hearts III though was, that it actually managed to tie in every single prior entry and important character in the series into the main plot of the game without it feeling forced or unnatural.
I didn’t even know, that I cared about some of these characters, until I saw them making a comeback in Kingdom Hearts III.
I was genuinely happy to see them, going through major nostalgia and feeling sympathy for these characters I didn’t know I had in me.
Especially the villains go through more character development in a couple of minutes in Kingdom Hearts III than in hours of previous games, making them alot more likeable and relatable.
Even worse that all this happens during the way too short final act.
The bad news for newcomers to the series are, that you almost have to play through all previous Kingdom Hearts games or atleast know the story of them to really understand what is going on.
The writing itself is very Kingdom Hearts-esque, so a bit clunky, cheesy and clumsy, but out of all Kingdom Hearts games this game has by far the best writing.
The humour works more often than not, the animations during the conversations make them less dull and the word exchanges are way shorter, more on point and have a better flow.
The ending of the game itself is as emotional as I anticipated it to be without needing a tearjerker at the end.
It triggered a mix of relief and happiness in me, after all these years waiting for it and feels like a well done closure to that long road of the Xehanort saga.
I can‘t say that the game has lived up to my expectations when it came to the writing, but the cutscenes after the final battle fullfilled me greatly and I‘m happy they made them exactly how they were, a bit of reconciliation, not a full happy ending and a massive tease towards the next arc of the series with a fantastic reveal.
The soundtrack isn‘t as phenomenal as it used to be in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, but it is still far above average.
Thank you, dear composer team and of course Utada Hikaru, for the amazing and iconic music elevating every moment in the series to a new level.

– Gameplay –

If you have finished the oldschool Kingdom Hearts games, which you most likely have because otherwise it makes no sense to play Kingdom Hearts III at all, don’t play this game in anything lower than Pride Mode.
Kingdom Hearts III is probably the most unchallenging game of the entire franchise and straight up boring on standard difficulty with the game almost playing itself, when you hammer the attack button enough.
Another contributing factor to that is the developer‘s decision, that you need completely overpowered moves in your arsenal to make even bosses a complete breeze.
Some of the situation commands, summons and especially high level magic make most battles trivial and most mob fights messy and cluttered with a special move being followed up by another special move and so on.
Most of the time you don‘t even get to finish a standard combo with your keyblade, before a new special move presents itself, waiting for you to trigger it.
The patched in Critical Mode is an absolute godsend here, it is demanding but still fair and satisfying.
Probably the absolute worst aspect of the entire game are the tons of unskippable, terribly designed minigames you are forced to play in almost every world you visit.
They feel like fillers to drag out the game, so you have to atleast get 20+ hours in to finish it.
For everyone, who wants to spend more time in the various worlds of Kingdom Hearts, there are optional activities like completing a photo collection, finding new ingredients to cook and hidden micky mouse symbols or the already mentioned minigames and Gummi Ship quests one can tackle.
Sadly, like so often, most of these optional features seem like forced content to inflate the potential playtime of the game with very redundant and sometimes even time wasting quests, adding nothing substantial to it.
But there are also positives.
Every keyblade has transformations, unique finishers and shotlock commands now, so every keyblade actually feels different from the other, outside of minor stat boost changes, look and range.
Also you can equip three keyblades at the same time and swap between them, depending on the situation or what you feel more comfortable with against a certain enemy type.
This adds variety, helps craft your own playstyle and works very snappy, feeling very natural and well implemented into the overall very fluent combat.
Outside of the clunky wall climbing and the Gummi Ship segments of the game, the controls in general are as nice and responsive as ever.

Conclusion: I still can’t say that I think that Kingdom Hearts III is an objectively good game.
It does some things very wrong and some things super right, but it balances out somewhere in the grey area of being average to me.
Nonetheless it’s one of the better games in the franchise and I am somehow glad that I was able to accompany the franchise from 2002 to now to see how that whole Xehanort saga comes to a close (most likely).

Kingdom Hearts 3 is a game hardcore fans of the series have waited for and for a very long time, I should add. I haven’t reviewed the other games since I mostly want to replay them in order to give them a fair rating since I haven’t played them in a long time. This is going to be a somewhat fleshed out review of the game as a whole. I have played every single game entry of the series (minus the phone game and most of Union X) so I have a good understanding of the plot. With that being said, lets move forward.

To begin with, I want to address the gameplay. I want to talk about plot but I have quite a bit to say about it so I’ll talk about that later. The gameplay itself is fun and when I say fun I don’t mean “I could do this for hours” kinda fun. Once you begin your trek across the Disney worlds, your moveset gets pretty outlandish. You learn how to use attraction flows which is basically another way for Disney to advertise their hand in making this game. The flows wouldn’t be a problem if they were like summons and weren’t thrown in your face. Instead, a reaction command pops onto your screen for like 24 seconds urging you to bash your already easy enemies into oblivion. Additionally, Sora’s keyblade transformations can make the game so ridiculously easy. They aren’t earned in a way that make them interesting, either. You simply string countless combos together mindlessly until a reaction command appears for you. Granted, the attractions and transformations are cool, but they really should have considered balancing the game so that Sora doesn’t feel like an unstoppable force of nature. With those things aside, basic combat is fun. Just like the other main titles, you learn abilities from leveling up that enhance basic combos into longer ones or more flashy ones. Magic looks pretty and has its place in the game and you can make builds that make you more powerful in whatever way you want.

Moving on to visuals, this game looks so nice. In every world Sora, Donald, and Goofy never look too out of place. The lighting is fantastic and beyond anything I could have imagined after coming out of Kingdom Hearts DDD. The cinematics draw you into what’s happening as you wander through the Disney worlds and sometimes it even seems like you’re watching the Disney movies unfold in the universe of Kingdom Hearts.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Finally, the story is one of the biggest hindrances of this game. Now, for the sake of making the review not stick out as a 20 page essay on why the writing in Kingdom Hearts is an absolute mess, I’ll focus on 3. Starting off with the overall story of the series and how 3 plays into it, I have to say that Nomura and Yasue really screwed the pooch with this game. Over every different game on every platform it was released, new characters have been introduced that get incomplete arcs and no resolution. I refer to the trio in both BBS and Days as well as Namine, and I was really hoping this game was going to put a nice bow on everything that this series tried exposing us to in previous games. As I played the game, I realized KH3 was a big marketing scheme for Disney to promote their movies, as over half of it is Sora and the crew running through Disney worlds in an effort to learn his lost power of Waking. Nothing relevant to the Square Enix plot of KH3 is even happening throughout your journey into Disney worlds, save for when members of the new organization call Sora a nerd and leave after a two minute monologue at the end of them. The writing was one of the most underwhelming aspects of this game, as it fails to complete story arcs in a way that satisfies the fans and the original story it seems like it was trying to tell. The only real interesting part of this game is the end, where Nomura and Yasue go nuts and tell the story they obviously wanted to tell since the beginning of the game. It’s cool but it’s so overly rushed that you can’t enjoy what’s happening in the moment because you’re fighting off multiple people at once, like some kind of KH dream gauntlet you’d read about in a fanfic. I wish I could say that I’m satisfied with the handling of every character, but I just am not. Most of the character development was poured into Axel, which isn’t completely bad but in a series where you’re managing a group of technically main characters it seems like you’re just throwing them into situations while they learn almost nothing from it. Kairi is a big example of this, and at this point I’m pretty sure Nomura just doesn’t know how to write for Kairi. At the end of DDD, Kairi was shown learning how to use the keyblade at the end with her training extending all the way through most of KH3. Her and Axel don’t really leave training until it’s time for them to rally against Xehanort and his darknesses. Just when you think she’ll be useful again, she gets absolutely shafted. When I say shafted, I mean she hardly holds her own and is used yet again as motivation rather than a character that could be useful. Xehanort literally just snatches her and kills her so that Sora will fight him. At the end of the day Xehanort, the guy that literally commits murder and tears apart worlds as well as uses people as tools, gets the “I was just a curious person” cover and rides off into Kingdom Hearts with Eraqus. That’s really how it ends.

Well there it is. I said I was going to be unbiased but there are definite points that needed to be personally addressed. I am a hardcore fan and a lot of my thoughts on this game were personal. I hope I wasn’t too harsh but if I wrote about everything I loved and hated about the game and talked about it, you guys would be looking at about ten pages of content.

After 14 years we can finally say it. It’s here. Kingdom Hearts 3 is one of the most anticipated games in arguably our generation so far. Ever since number two came out, I’ve graduated school, joined the military, fell in love, traveled the world, and have a professional career. A lot has happened in my life since Sora returned to Destiny Islands to be reunited with Kairi and the rest of his friends. But the story couldn’t end there. There were too many plot holes not filled, too many loose ends not tied, and evil was still after Kingdom Hearts. The story was not over. So lets start this experience up.

EYECANDY – The visuals in Kingdom Hearts 3 is a definite highlight of the game. The whole entire game looks like a fully rendered Disney movie and at times, the cinematography is so great that you will be watching a movie at times. Just straight up. The video direction, art department, and animation studios went all out and spared no expense. Whether you’re battling toys with Woody and Buzz, Riding the tram at Twilight Town, or sailing at The Caribbean, no detail was missed or looked over and not at any one point with the visual experience that Square Enix delivers disappoints.

SOUNDDESIGN – So there’s not a lot going on in the sound department here. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means there wasn’t anything innovating or new, but they more played it safe. BUT this was also where they cut some budgeting. The biggest drawback is its voice actors. The voice acting in Kingdom Hearts 3 is so hit or miss it’s not even funny. Some of the actors are the their counterpart from the movies, others are sound-alikes and do a decent job, and some are just terrible. Bland delivery, no emotion, no character, just straight up bad. And even then, the direction of the voice acting and the writing was so cringey at times I was playing it by myself and felt embarrassed. Now the bright side though would be the music. It was great. The composer did a phenomenal job in keeping the world songs familiar, but at the same time putting the Kingdom Hearts spin on it. So if we were to look at the aspects of the sound in this game it would go like this: Soundtrack 10/10, sound design, not great but overall not bad, voice acting? Jesus.

GAMEPLAY – The first thing you’ll feel on your controller is the pace of the game. The maps are huge, Sora is almost constantly sprinting, sliding, dashing, and jumping from enemy to enemy getting knocked back, recovering, and getting back into the action. Which is a good thing but the game made it an overwhelming system. Especially with it’s new attractions combat mechanic. Which are quite literally Disneyland rides with LEDs all over them. There’s the teacups, carousel, the Buzz blaster(?), pirate ship, pretty much all the rides that are famous at the happiest place on earth. Honestly, they’re pretty dumb in my opinion. And that was partly due to the fact that easily ten hours into the game it’s still giving me tutorials on other new game features that they shoved in. Which on one side is a good thing because all these details really do tailor to the whole “play as you want” approach but on the other end it feels wrong because these aren’t major abilities, power ups, or upgrades. Like typically in a game when a major mechanic is introduced I think it’s more than appropriate to have a tutorial or “practice” section in the game where you can get used to that mechanic. Or if it’s a new item or weapon so you build that situational familiarity within the game. Examples noted like God of War or Zelda. The main issue at hand is you forget all of the abilities available to you and you’re unsure of what to use when, and which mechanic would work best on which enemy or situation. When you’re not fighting the heartless, there’s very little the game offers to have you explore or revisit each world. You’ll waste minutes on top of hours aimlessly searching for hidden chests, items, or any other little goodies that you might think will be lying around. Which actually I’ll give them the balance of having good level design because while the game is open, it’s still linear. Meaning that Kingdom Hearts 3 does a really good job of leading you where they want you to go, and if there is anything “hidden” to be found, they’ll give it to you. There will be a character cue, or a not-so-hidden- path, or something of that nature. The game is extremely assist heavy, and there’s almost no difficulty to the game. I was going into worlds almost ten levels above me, no potions, unequipped, and decimating boss battles without any issues. Out of the entire game I only died around seven times, most of it being at the end where there is a noticeable difficulty spike. Which was what made the game enjoyable because it was finally a challenge and I was no longer bored with the game. But this wasn’t the only aspect of inconsistency in the game.

STORY – The narrative in Kingdom Hearts 3 is the lowest point and the highlight of this game. As convoluted the story has become with its almost Game of Thrones style writing and character weaving, number three did a great job to keep you up to speed at the beginning but didn’t do a great job as to figuring out how to lead you to the end of the game. You aimlessly travel from world to world for quite literally no reason, er rather the reason of “following your heart”, but even if that was the driving factor to progress the story, when you go to these other worlds, once again there’s no reason. Organization XIII might show up every now and again, but rarely do they actually have a motive for invading these worlds. It didn’t have that flow and sense of adventure the last two had. You quite literally just jump from one world to the next for fan service and to get the world specific keyblade. At one point Org13 reveal that they have plans which is why they’re at that world, i.e. experimenting on others for their endgame plan, and that aspect could’ve easily been a forwarding factor in the story. And it requires minimal writing so it could’ve been easily implemented. I would go into it more, but spoilers would follow. The only good part about the game is about the last five hours where the actual story sits. It’s the only moment in the game where the pacing picks up, it gains momentum, you want to keep playing it, and then it ends. And even then, there’s parts in the ending that just drag it out and they stuff with filler just to make it about an hour longer, or at least that’s how it felt to me because while the part I’m talking about loosely fit, it just didn’t make sense as to why. Like it was a sudden shift in tone and characters and it was minorly off-putting and I found myself staring at the screen quizzically wondering where this section came from. But I digress. Without going too into, the ending of this game is done pretty well, and the final cutscene… It’ll give you mixed feelings.

CONCLUSION – At the end of the day a lot of this game is filler. I spent about 15 hours cluelessly flying from world to world only to actually having an engaging story start up at around 20 hours and then finally play something of quality almost 23 hours in. For about 5 hours. So the game can be beat in less than 30 hours. It’s still directed towards children and meant to be family friendly. Which is fine. But the average age group, or demographic, of the people playing this game on average are not the children you had back in 2002 when the first Kingdom Hearts released. I get it, it’s Disney. But you’d think the game would’ve grown up with us at least a little bit. All in all, this game is Kingdom Hearts 2.5. There was nothing Square Enix did to set this one apart from the other two games in the trilogy.

Fantastic gameplay and pretty middling story. There’s effectively no story at all until the final couple hours, in which they wrap up nearly every single loose thread like they forgot homework was due that day. Overall fine enough and excited about where the series is going.