![]() ![]() There’s a helpful cutscene very early on where you learn everything you’d need to know about series antagonist Xehanort. The game even does a good job of reminding you what characters’ names are and where they came from. You only need to watch one or two summary videos to learn enough to follow every relevant plot beat in Kingdom Hearts III. Kingdom Hearts’s reputation for narrative convolution will always precede it. Good news: it’s not the worst game ever made. ![]() You don’t need this review to know that you need to know what happens in this game, even if it winds up being the worst game ever made. If you’re a fan of this series, chances are you are not even reading this review. Somehow, it satisfyingly ties up a billion narrative threads pertaining to bakers’ dozens of characters who thrive and suffer both cosmically and comically across a dozen spin-offs, mini-episodes, micro-episodes, and exclusive downloadable or unlockable cutscenes. While it’s only the third numbered entry in the series across seventeen years, there are also several other offshoot games, which this one takes into account. Heck, it barely comes along once per decade. It sure never stopped feeling like it might happen.Īn entertainment product as big as Kingdom Hearts III does not come along every day. Over the course of Kingdom Hearts III’s thirty-two-hour run time (I didn’t exactly rush, though I didn’t come close to 100% completion), I kept thinking the game might freeze-frame just as I’m in the midst of smacking a boss with my Key To The City, and then I’d have to talk to my kid nephew for a half an hour. It is also the crystallization of a lurking threat inside the player’s subconscious, that any moment of high-speed game action can turn into a long family drama conversation with literally any character in this entire universe of games and movies. First, it canonically explains the presence of Kingdom Hearts III’s industry-standard in-game photo mode. The Gummi Phone thus serves two purposes. When Kingdom Hearts I came out, I didn’t even have a phone. As a character tells Sora he can use his Gummi Phone to take photographs, it fully hits me: Kingdom Hearts II came out two years before the iPhone. ![]() I wait for the controller to turn back on, and the Kingdom Hearts III cut-scene’s next moment yanks me back to reality. The Xbox has turned the controller off as well. I reach over on the sofa to wiggle the analogue stick. Sora’s family spends so many minutes talking to multiple friends, like they’re calling the extended family on Thanksgiving, that my Xbox One X dims its display brightness due to lack of controller input. Like all things technological in the Kingdom Hearts universe, the phone is made of magical Gummi blocks. Chip and Dale, erstwhile Rescue Rangers, inform us that so-and-so wanted Sora to have this phone, so they put it in the pocket of his new clothes for him. Sora doesn’t even know what a phone is, right up until the moment he removes the ringing phone from one of his pockets. They didn’t know any of them even had a phone. The Sorcerer from “Night on Bald Mountain.” This wise man tells Sora that he must acquire “The Power Of Waking.” Whatever this power is, what it does, where Sora will find it, how he will use it, and what it will do, Yen Sid does not know.ĭuck Dad and Dog Dad look on lovingly as their teenage son racks his brain about where in the too-big world they should dare to begin their search for whatever they’re looking for.Ī smartphone ringtone punctures the cold silence. The only clue anyone has of where or how to find this missing person comes from literally the moon-and-stars-hat-wearing wizard of our collective subconscious, Yen Sid, a.k.a. Other characters are elsewhere searching for another character. His level has been reset to one, both literally and figuratively. Sora has lost all of the phenomenal cosmic powers he once used in a clash with a group of zipper-loving, pleather-clad dark wizards. He had been denied the title of Keyblade Master.
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