Kingdom Hearts III review

Reviewed on: PS4

Review by Keyblade Master Samuel Rohling

Kingdom Hearts III is an extremely difficult work to review. On one hand, my emotion as a fan of the series speaks loud, making what is good GREAT and what is bad TERRIBLE. On the other, it’s necessary to look at it impartially. It is, despite the name, the twelfth game (disregarding countless collections, re-releases, remasters…) of a franchise that is already more than fifteen years old. I’ve followed the series since the first game, and have religiously bought each new release, on each of the different consoles – the reason I bought a PSP was Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. And FF7 Crisis Core. Since I wanted an HD re-release of Crisis Core… But anyway, back to the subject. So I can say I have some knowledge of the series and its history – and when I say “history”, I don’t mean the game’s plot, but the actual development history.
I’ll spare the dear reader the details, which can be easily found on the internet if you’re interested, but suffice it to say the series suffered a lot over the years, with changes of development team and a director involved in many projects at the same time. Add to that the fact that the series works with several Disney franchises, the biggest entertainment giant in the world today, and you can imagine the hell it must have been to develop Kingdom Hearts III. None of this forgives, however, the sad mistakes this game makes, which make it an unbalanced work.
Let’s go. For the uninitiated, Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG series from the same publisher as Final Fantasy, in which a group of spiky-haired heroes join Donald, Mickey and Goofy to explore Disney worlds in a universe in danger at the hands of the most outlandish villains with the most nonsensical plans in the history of RPGs. And that’s not a criticism – Kingdom Hearts, the first, is a light adventure game that tells the story of Sora on a journey to reunite with his friends. Needless to say, with each new game’s release the story kept expanding, and years went by until, a dozen games later, we have the conclusion of the saga in Kingdom Hearts III.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: the game is stupidly GORGEOUS. The visuals are impressive. Every world visited is very detailed, and you truly feel inside a Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. movie in this regard. There is no shadow of a doubt that this is a spectacular game visually. The same can be said of the soundtrack – Yoko Shimomura is responsible for the series’ music, and even someone who hates Kingdom Hearts has to admit the music is incredible. One theme in particular, from one of the game’s last battles, is a remix of several earlier songs from the series, and it is SPECTACULAR.
The actors’ voice performances for the characters are also, for the most part, quite satisfying. Some are perfect and completely above average for a video game, like Hades, the villain from Hercules, and Rex, the toy dinosaur from Toy Story, and Olaf, the snowman from Frozen (who have their original voice actors from the Disney films, something that happens with many of the game’s characters). Other voices are clearly from actors different from the original material, and although that isn’t bad in itself, they leave something to be desired (like the voice of practically everyone in the Pirates of the Caribbean crowd).

As for gameplay, most of the time you’ll spend in Kingdom Hearts III will be in combat, and if you’ve played anything from the series, you know what to expect. Battles are real-time, and Sora has the greatest number of options the series has ever given. Besides the Keyblade combos, the player has access to magic, summons, group special attacks with Donald, Goofy and any other character on the team, other super-powerful special attacks, plus context-sensitive combos – Sora can jump off walls, spin around poles, etc. On top of all that, the best part is the Keyblade transformations, a novelty of this game. Each of the available Keyblades transforms into different weapons – the one obtained in Hercules’ world, for example, transforms into a shield that makes combat much more defensive and focused on counterattacks.
All of this would be lovely if the game weren’t stupidly easy. All these combat options end up having no strategic sense because the damage Sora deals is always very high, the damage he takes is low, and the special attacks have no cost at all and are very common and easy to execute. I played on the hardest mode, never stopped to level up (I just defeated the enemies that appeared naturally), and finished the ENTIRE game without seeing the Game Over screen. That’s right – an entire action RPG, 36 hours, without dying a single time. Sure, I’m used to the series’ gameplay, and I play many games in the genre, but I’m no video game master, the kind who does 2-hour speedruns at level 1 without using items and without getting hit. I’m a regular player, who to this day hasn’t defeated all of Kingdom Hearts II’s secret bosses, but KH3 presented no challenge. I hope this will be rebalanced in a future patch.
The problem is that this low difficulty is a sign of something I suspect happened in Kingdom Hearts III – Disney’s hand. This is a game that seems much more influenced by the mouse emperor of the entertainment industry than previous games. After all, why make a Disney game with high difficulty? That Disney hand in the game can be seen in several areas, and that’s where my biggest problem with Kingdom Hearts III begins.

The greatest charm of Kingdom Hearts is the union of Final Fantasy and Disney. What attracted me most in the earlier games was seeing Disney stories again, new and old, retold from the point of view of an interconnected universe, in which villains and heroes of a Japanese RPG influenced the stories. In Kingdom Hearts II, Xaldin steals the rose from Beauty and the Beast. In Kingdom Hearts, King Triton of Atlantica learns about the Keyblade. In Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Aqua helps the prince defeat Maleficent and rescue Sleeping Beauty. In Kingdom Hearts III, however, most of the time Sora just watches the stories unfold and doesn’t have the main role he should have. In many worlds, iconic places from the films aren’t even accessible, like Elsa’s ice castle in Arendelle, which you only see from afar.
I won’t give any spoilers here, but some of the worlds tell the films’ original stories, and Kingdom Hearts’ plot has practically no influence at all. Other worlds do the complete opposite, and bring original stories, in which Sora and Organization XIII end up having little or no influence on the outcome. One world stands out positively in this regard and brings a really interesting story that connects perfectly with KH3’s plot and with the original film’s story, but it is a drop of fresh water in an ocean of disappointment in this regard.
Another very strong problem with the game is the pacing. The game starts strong, with a very good prologue in Hercules’ world. From there, you’ll spend 20 hours hopping from one world to another, so that, after everything, you spend about 6 hours in a sequence of story and a thousand bosses that will wrap up the saga’s story. Not that the saga’s conclusion is bad – it has problems, some quite big, but overall I was satisfied. The problem is that everything happens at the same time, at the end of the game, and the player has no time to absorb the emotional impact of a scene that is already followed by another, and in the end few things have the result they should in the narrative.

To sum up, the game is poorly written. The ideas for the ending of each of the characters’ many stories are actually good, but it’s all rushed and with a pace that throws everything in the player’s face at once. The quality of the dialogue also dropped considerably compared with previous games – Kingdom Hearts has always had this more relaxed vibe and never took itself too seriously, but it had a certain charm. In this game, there is a large imbalance in this regard. Some dialogues are excellent, especially from some specific villains, but overall the quality dropped considerably. The story, therefore, divides fans. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it is very, very poorly executed. Some scenes resonate with the emotions of those who followed the series for 15 years, while others are poorly crafted and poorly written and leave the feeling of a missed opportunity.
All of this story is told in endless cutscenes. I think this is the game in which I’ve watched the most cutscenes in my life. Many of them are important, beautiful and very cool, while others are too long, and in the end, at many moments, you watch more than you play. Kingdom Hearts III, on top of all that, also begins planting the seeds of the series’ future saga, with characters, mysteries and hints of what is to come. This game should have focused only on completing the plot, but spends too much time on scenes that will probably only make sense in about 5 years, when the series’ next game is released.
Finally, I decided to dedicate a paragraph to the Gummi Ship, always a controversial point in the games. In Kingdom Hearts III, the Gummi Ship is highly optional – the player can fly straight from one world to another without doing practically anything along the way and completely ignore that this part of the game exists. If you want, however, you can explore quite a vast space, with various challenges, and I ended up liking the final result quite a bit. For people who like Star Fox and games of the genre, perhaps Kingdom Hearts III’s Gummi Ship will be a good surprise.

If you’re a fan of the series, you’ve probably already bought and finished the game anyway, but if you haven’t, do it. You’ve come this far and will need to see the story’s conclusion. If you’ve never played anything from Kingdom Hearts and found KH3 interesting because you saw a trailer with Donald talking to Olaf, stop right now: Kingdom Hearts III is not a game for beginners, and won’t be enjoyed by those who haven’t played the others. It’s as if tomorrow Iron Man 4 came out in theaters and you had never watched Iron Man 1, 2 or 3. Or Captain America Civil War, or Avengers 1, 2 or 3. Kingdom Hearts III is a game that demands prior knowledge to be enjoyed, even if that enjoyment, in the end, is quite questionable.
After all this, I still must say that I liked Kingdom Hearts III. I finished the game two days after launch, with 36 hours of play, and finished practically all the post-game challenges the next day (there are very few, the smallest number the series has ever seen, which is a shame). It was a journey with highs and lows, with fun combat, magnificent visuals, spectacular music, and a story with a conclusion that had some very sweet moments but ended up leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

Narrative: 5.0
Mechanics: 8.0
Audiovisual: 10.0

AVERAGE: 7.7

PlayStation 4 version