2.5/5 ★ – KQSpidey's review of Kingdom Hearts III.

Contrary to what you’ll hear from devout Kingdom Hearts haters and ignore-ers, the story of these games isn’t actually all that complicated. To get the hypothetically maximum engagement out of this game, you just have to have played (or at least watched an official Square Enix developed cutscene compilation of, lol) all of the in-between spinoff games in the franchise that came between 2 and 3. However, the chase after that pure experience is complete folly. Yes, you will understand what Axel means when he says near the end of the game: “I should have brought Ice Cream”, if you played the DS game Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, and maybe the earnest smile it will get you to crack will be slightly larger than that off the uninitiated non-358/2 Days player, but the core idea that friendship is good and nice that informs every story beat in this game is pretty obviously there either way. The real problem isn’t convolution, it’s that the game is painfully inelegant about the way it presents its story. Kingdom Hearts superfans are not on some higher astral plane of narrative-understanding for catching the game’s obvious themes (and if you like those themes, cool! friendship is good, as it turns out!), they’re just willing to put up with the game occasionally introducing an interesting idea or new narrative inversion before immediately dropping it in order to push forward towards the inevitable conclusion of “oh, yeah, friendship was neat the whole time, wasn’t it?” the gameplay is good except for when it’s not! it fixes the one major problem with KHII’s battles (that being that only the final move in a combo can end a battle, leading to particularly frustrating moments where your adversary has 0 health but keeps breaking your late-game bajillion hit combo and effectively punishing you for maxing out your characters stats and battle potential... in an RPG...) only to replace it with screen destroying instant win buttons that remove all strategy from encounters. I put the game down for over a year, came back to beat the final boss, beat him in one go by mashing X. in an RPG. the scope is too gargantuan for the game’s own good. worlds are less fun to explore than before now that they’re 4x bigger with the same amount of stuff to fill them out, battles are big and in-your-face in a way that removes player agency over what actually happens in them, and the need to tie up every thread from every spin off game in the last 20 minutes breaks apart what little momentum this single game had going in all the Disney locales that came before the final battles. KH2 is still on my shortlist of the greatest games ever, this is most certainly not! however, this game represents the weirdest nonsense to ever be made out of the cartoon figureheads of a massive media corporation who, were it not for an elevator pitch in a literal elevator twenty years ago, would never have signed off on this kind of thing. this kind of project certainly wouldn’t be started up now! and that’s neat. but one thing I cannot abide is mickey mouse’s voice in this game. it is abysmal. I could do it better, and I have an AT2020 microphone sitting here at my desk with which to do so. seriously, Disney, my business email is kieranqw@umich.edu. we can work something out.