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The story within these worlds, about love and friendship, is at odds with the story outside of them.

Kingdom Hearts’ marriage of Disney’s family-friendly spirit with a Final Fantasy-like sense of grandeur (and battle system) has always been one of its best qualities, but that combination doesn’t sit as well with me this time.

But as I refresh my memory on all the bodies sacrificed to darkness, and the lives still under threat from it, I’m a little bit shocked to find that the game opens with the same buoyant tone as the previous two core games. The game at least tries, at first, to be inviting with its storytelling: Cutscenes do a lot of the heavy lifting in catching me up on what I may have missed in preceding spinoffs, along with what happened in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2. The capper of such a grandiose saga should carry a sense of urgency, but Kingdom Hearts 3, from the start, stumbles toward its big finale with the pace and intent of a plastic bag in the wind.

That sounds simple only because I excluded the time traveling, cloning, and frequent lapses into comas. It must be stopped, and Sora, Riku, and their Disney companions are the ones to do it. That universe is connected to numerous others, including worlds populated by Disney characters like Hercules, Buzz Lightyear, and Simba.Įach of these worlds suffers at the hands of Organization XIII, which aims to use the hearts of good people like Sora and his friends to consume the world with darkness. So here’s the most concise summary: Sora, Riku, and Kairi were three island kids when we met them now, Sora and Riku are two of the strongest wielders of the legendary Keyblade weapons in the universe. I could burn my entire word count summarizing what’s happened in the fiction across the series. It’s a whimsical but tepid action-RPG romp through Disney worlds, with a flat story, repetitive gameplay, and very few surprises.īecause of a timeline convoluted by spinoffs, Kingdom Hearts 3 doesn’t pick up where Kingdom Hearts 2’s story concluded. Kingdom Hearts 3 is not the affirming experience I wished it would be for more than half my life. How crushing it has been to discover the end result is little more than a lackluster leftover from 2006. I’ve hoped for a game that would bring Kingdom Hearts into 2019.

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The space between Kingdom Hearts 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3 - a full 13 years - has been a test of patience. I’ve waited a long time for a proper conclusion to that boy’s story.

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But for those of us who are invested in this series about a boy with big feet and a key for a sword who makes friends with Disney princesses and Mickey Mouse, overwrought complexity is half the fun. Its knotty lore often intimidates newcomers, and has become a punchline to its more skeptical critics. And Kingdom Hearts 3, the culmination of more than a decade and a half of games, fares much worse than the previous entries did with keeping up and keeping us engaged. Kingdom Hearts has since evolved from its simpler beginnings: It’s a tangled, dense mass of plot lines and backstories. But Disney and Square Enix’s partnership proved to be a winning one - at least for a while. There’s a reason we’re still talking about Kingdom Hearts: It was a collaboration between two titans of industry that shouldn’t have worked, full of inexplicable crossovers and glossed-over plot details.

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