Heart II Heart Part 9 — Re:Fwd:Re:Re:Fwd:Re:Fwd:Fwd:Re: “Kingdom Hearts III”

This is the ninth and, for the foreseeable future, final article in a series I’ve written about playing every Kingdom Hearts game for the first time. You can find links to the previous articles here. This piece contains spoilers for the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise, up through Kingdom Hearts III.

Hey, hi, how’s it goin’.

You doin’ okay? Gettin’ enough sleep? Drinking enough water? It’s really important to drink enough water.

Tell ya what. Take a moment and go pour yourself a glass of water. While you’re up, maybe do some stretches or something.

…Is this joke condescending? When I used it to open the first article I wrote back in January I thought it was just kind of a silly, cutesy way to start off on a piece that I knew full well was gonna end up being way too long, and then I thought it’d be funny to do a callback to it in the last article of the series, but now that I’m writing it out a second time I’m worried that maybe it comes off as a little bit prickish. I’m pretty sure the importance of water is both widely understood and, you know, a basic instinct in pretty much every creature on the planet? Plus if I remember right that old idea that most people are chronically dehydrated is an exaggeration. Isn’t that like, a myth perpetuated by bottled water companies or something? That sounds like something I’ve read at some point.

This went off the rails immediately, huh? Anyway.

Kingdom Hearts III, released in America on January 25th, 2019, is either the third, ninth, tenth, eleventh, or twelfth game in the Kingdom Hearts series, depending on how exactly you count. If you toss in the non-canonical Japan-exclusive cellphone mini-game and ringtone collection Kingdom Hearts Mobile, then it could also be the thirteenth. I guess there was also something called Kingdom Hearts V CAST? Which was a different non-canonical cellphone game. So, you could also consider it the fourteenth.

I’m goin’ with it being the ninth.

I have a little bit of a complex when it comes to feeling like I’m missing out on something. I… have a little bit of a complex when it comes to a lot of things, but the relevant one for the moment is that it really gets to me when I feel like I’m being left out. Even if I’m not being deliberately excluded, I have to work through a lot of negative feelings if I get the sense that my peers are enjoying something that I’m not a part of, even if I’m not a part of it by choice. This is because I have a dumb brain that doesn’t work good, and it could probably get traced back to being bullied as a kid or whatever, but, dammit I’m here to talk about video games, not critically examine myself as a human being!

(Incidentally, I had A Lot of Feelings during the scene in KHII when all the Twilight Town kids took out their pieces of the Struggle trophy and Roxas realized that he lost his. It’s a small moment but it got a bigger emotional response from me than a lot of the major dramatic beats of the series.)

I didn’t have any intention of playing Kingdom Hearts III. If I had, I woulda started playing the games back in November, so that I could be caught up in time for the game’s release date. But like, I wasn’t a Kingdom Hearts fan! The game was gonna slide right by and I was just gonna continue not giving a shit about the dumb Disney RPG! But, the closer KHIII came to coming out, the more excited everybody got, and the more my dumbass anxiety-laden brain started making me feel alienated from everybody for not being able to participate in this niche cultural moment. Before I knew it, I was plunking down a hundred bucks to buy the entire series on the PSN.

I am dumb.

Now, when I put it that way, it’s a little… I dunno, concerning? It gives the impression that I really only played these games to satisfy some kind of anxious compulsion. And… to be fair, that’s at least a little bit true! But I don’t think that’s necessarily as bad as it sounds. The silver lining to this particular breed of anxiety is that it forces me to try things that I otherwise wouldn’t, and in this case? I’m glad that I did!

I was prepared for the possibility that this entire process would be utter torture, but that really wasn’t how it turned out. There were definitely some rough spots, but it didn’t take very long for me to transition from playing these games out of a misplaced sense of obligation to playing them out of legitimate interest and enjoyment. I still don’t have the same deep, passionate love for Kingdom Hearts that a lot of people do; I don’t think it’s possible for me to love it that much, because I didn’t play the series during my formative years. But all the same, I really like Kingdom Hearts now, and regardless of why I started playing the games, I’m glad that I’ve found a new thing to enjoy.

And now, after nearly three months of playing through an entire JRPG every week, I’ve finally reached the end. I know everything about Kingdom Hearts that there currently is to know (well, almost everything. I think Union χ[Cross] updated with some new story stuff in Japan that I haven’t read up on yet). I’ve played Kingdom Hearts III with a full understanding of its context, and I’m finally, finally ready to talk about it… months after the popular discussion of the game has pretty much completely dropped off.

But, fuck it. I have been down on my hands and knees since late January, desperately searching for my gemstone from the Struggle trophy, and I finally found it. Everyone else already went home but I’m still gonna hold mine up god dangit!

I JUST WANNA BE INVOLVED

I Guess Let’s Get This Outta the Way First: This Game Is GORGEOUS… Mostly.

I kinda touched on this already in my piece about 0.2, but this game looks GREAT. It’s honestly kind of jarring to play through seven games that all have more or less comparable graphics, and then immediately leap into Kingdom Hearts III, where everything is hyper-detailed and beautifully lit and just generally looks amazing. I’ve said it before, but it’s cool as hell to play a game that looks just as good if not better than the pre-rendered cutscenes from the older titles.

But, while my overall feeling about game’s look is positive, there’s a few weird parts where it kind of falls down. It came up in -A fragmentary passage- too, but there are some animations that look a little stiff and awkward, in a way that probably looked a lot less awkward when the character models had lower fidelity. Also, for some reason, your temporary party members all have really low framerates in some of their animations. You can really see it in the Tangled world, when Rapunzel is throwing her hair like a lasso. She moves at about half the framerate of the world around her, and it’s just kinda… weird.

And speaking of the Disney worlds… I mean, listen, I’ll get to the awkward pacing of this game’s story, and how the rigidity of the Disney plotlines is especially frustrating when there’s this much plot going on, but right now I just wanna talk about the visual problems in this chunk of the game.

Y’know in retrospect, Tangled probably woke some things up in some people, huh

Don’t get me wrong, the actual artwork is really well done. But, here’s the thing. In older Kingdom Hearts titles, there was something kind of fun and novel about seeing 2D Disney cartoons rendered as polygonal models. There was a degree of adaptation happening there that made everything at least a little visually interesting, even when the games were doing their best to faithfully recreate the look of the cartoons.

But modern Disney movies are animated in 3D. Other than the Hercules and Pirates of the Caribbean worlds, there’s no work being done to adapt the designs into a different medium, which means that all of the Disney stuff looks exactly like the original movies, except… rendered with less detail, and often paced and acted more awkwardly. The Disney stories are always a low point in these games, but now that these scenes are literally cheap-looking reproductions of the movies, they feel even more dull and annoying than ever. I really love Tangled! I did not need to see what looks like a rough draft of Tangled with some Kingdom Hearts crammed into the margins.

I remember! And it’s cool that you’re back! But…

Another disappointment as far as the game’s visual art goes is the lack of cool new stuff. There’s no new monster type, and only one new original world that you don’t get to see all that much of, and which looks a lot like stuff I’ve already seen. The heroes get new outfits, which is neat, but one of the best parts of Kingdom Hearts games is seeing the new creations of the incredible art team.

I totally get why this is the case. Since Kingdom Hearts II, the series has spiraled into something gigantic and unruly, with a cast of characters in the dozens and four different factions of monsters with unique visual styles. There wasn’t really room to introduce even more new shit; they had to devote all their time to finally paying off everything they’ve been setting up for the last decade and a half. But even if I understand why that’s the case, it’s still disappointing to not see much in the way of new art. The only area the visual designers really get to flex their muscles is with the Verum Rex stuff, which only takes up about a tenth of a percent of the game.

I’m putting way more words into complaining about the game’s visuals than praising them, which is unfair, because Kingdom Hearts III is gorgeous. The vast majority of the game is beautiful, and it’s really great to see all these characters and places rendered with such high quality. There’s just… a lot of little nitpicks that knock it down a notch or two. It’s objectively better-looking than any other game in the series, but relative to the standards of the times the games were made in, this feels like a bit of a step down.

Gameplay Stuff

There’s lots to talk about with regard to how KHIII plays, but I don’t really have a ton to say about any of it in particular, at least, nothing that I haven’t already hit on in an earlier piece. Let’s just run down the list here and knock out all the various topics that feel worth touching on.

Combat

For all the whining I just did about the lack of new designs, this dinosaur is a very cool-looking exception.

I’m still booing about the removal of the Command Deck System!

Kingdom Hearts III’s combat has a few more parts to it than 0.2 had. Summons, or, sorry, “Links,” are back, and work kinda like Sora’s Dream Eater combo-moves from Dream Drop Distance, giving you a little more to do than the old Summons did. There’s also Attraction attacks, where, if you hit the right enemy at the right time, you can summon a giant amusement park ride covered in marquee lights that do a lot of AOE damage. These are really cool at first, but there’s only about four of them, and they get kind of old past a certain point. One of the cooler bits of the combat is how Styles are implemented. Instead of just switching over to fighting a different way, Sora’s entire Keyblade transforms, getting a whole new suite of attacks, which go a long way toward varying up the gameplay. It’s neat!

But it’s not the Command Deck god dangit.

At its core, the combat of Kingdom Hearts III feels like Kingdom Hearts II with a bunch of extra shit tacked on from other games in the series. That’s not… bad, exactly. Kingdom Hearts II plays, you know, acceptably. It’s a system that makes up for its fairly shallow depth with lots and lots of spectacle, and KHIII brings more spectacle than ever before. But I still just don’t understand why they backed off of using the Command Deck system. It’s so much better. I’ve spent probably a dozen paragraphs at this point talking about why I like that system so much in previous articles so I won’t belabor the point here. Maybe they went into this game knowing that a lot of people hadn’t touched one of these since Kingdom Hearts II, and wanted the combat to be reminiscent? That design felt a little weird and dated in KHII and it feels even more dated here, but, y’know. It’s functional.

The spectacle only does so much for me.

The Gummi Ship

Hey, the Gummi Ship is back! Neat… I guess!

I don’t really know why the Gummi Ship sequences have so consistently failed to do anything for me in these games. I like Star Fox just fine, and that’s basically all these sections are. They don’t control amazingly or anything, but they’re serviceable. For some reason though, the thought of upgrading or customizing my Gummi Ship just immediately makes my eyes glaze over. There’s a boss you have to fight out in space in order to get to the Frozen world, and after a few attempts at it I realized that I was gonna need to upgrade my ship to fight it and my whole body just started to sag. Luckily I could just buy a better ship from the shop and that did the trick.

I think the big reason why the Gummi Ship fails to land with me is how disconnected it is from the rest of the game. Its progression track isn’t tied to Sora’s, little to no story happens during these sequences, and it mostly just works to kill the momentum of the narrative. It’s filler, and it’s not what I’m here for. You could completely cut it out and I wouldn’t even care, as evidenced by the games in this series that completely cut it out and I didn’t care.

It’s… *fine*. It’s fine. It’s fine? It’s fine.

Flowmotion

Hey, Flowmotion’s back! Neat… I guess!

Running on walls is kind of always a cool thing to do, and you can run on way more of them in KHIII. I was a little bummed though, because they’ve put some tighter restrictions on the types of movement you can do compared to DDD, and have also been a lot more thorough in their placement of invisible walls and ceilings. All of that is… probably the right call, but I for one had a lot of fun breaking Dream Drop’s level design over my knee by just parkour-flying over everything, and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that that isn’t possible anymore. I can’t exactly dock the game points for doing a better job at something, but I’m disappointed all the same.

There’s some other bits and bobs I could go over. Lucky Emblems are a fun collectible. The cooking minigames are a fun little bit of (heh) flavor, but I literally forgot to ever actually eat any of the food I made. The little Game & Watch style minigames you can collect and play are cool. The game is mostly fun to play, and has lots of little systems and side stuff to create a pretty varied experience. I liked it! But I also don’t really have much more to say than that.

You know what I do have some things to say about though?

THE STORY

See, it’s like… a metaphor. Do you get it?

Kingdom Hearts III picks off immediately where 0.2 ended, with Mickey and Riku heading off to the world of darkness to search for Aqua while Sora goes to Olympus to get advice from Hercules on how to restore his power. Sora is dying to help with the rescue mission, but Yen Sid is insistent that he work to get his powers back, particularly the “Power of Waking.” This was, sort of touched in in DDD? Exploring the Sleeping Worlds was supposed to give them the power to wake up anything that was asleep, and Riku was able to use it to save Sora from his Nort-coma. I figured Yen Sid wanted them to have it because he knew they’d need to wake up Ventus at some point, but apparently it’s way more important than that, in vague, unexplained ways.

However, Yen Sid is entirely uninterested in giving Sora any information or advice on how to get the Power of Waking back, and Hercules doesn’t have any ideas either. With no supervision or guidance, Sora immediately blows off his assignment and decides instead to start working to free Roxas from within his heart. He enlists the Twilight Town kids to help, who start trying to break the encryption on Ansem’s simulated Twilight Town in the hopes that it’ll provide some clues. He also gets in touch with Ienzo, the restored “Somebody” of Zexion, who’s eager to help to try and atone for the trouble he caused as a member of Organization XIII. Their best bet would be to extract Roxas’ heart from Sora and put it into one of Vexen’s replicas, but unfortunately, Vexen’s decided to rejoin the Organization.

Meanwhile, these two do a buncha fuckin’ *nothin’*

From here, Sora starts hopping from world to world, because… uhhhhh I actually don’t remember what the reasoning is! That’s just sorta what happens in these games, so he does that. He does some of that classic Kingdom Hearts episodic Disney stuff, occasionally bumping into Organization XIII. They reveal that they’re on the lookout for seven new Princesses of Heart, since I guess the old ones lost their power in Kingdom Hearts? The plan is to use them to fill out the ranks of the seven guardians of light they need to forge the χ-Blade, in the event that Sora and pals don’t get enough people together. They’re effectively holding the princesses hostage to force the good guys to come together and fight Xehanort, even though that’s exactly what he wants.

Eventually, the… plot… clock, hits midnight, I guess, and Sora has to stop fucking around in random Disney worlds. He heads to the Destiny Islands, where he finds Aqua’s Keyblade, which somehow made its way there from the world of darkness. With it, he’s able to teleport to the dark beach from KHII, where Riku and Mickey are currently getting their asses kicked by a darkness-possessed Aqua (the memes lied; Aqua did not, in fact, get norted). Together, they manage to save her, and bring her back to the Destiny Islands, and maybe I cried a little bit shut up.

*Massive, heaving sobs*

Aqua takes Sora to Castle Oblivion, which she transforms back into The Land of Departure. They fight Vanitas there, and Sora finally manages to bring out the Power of Waking to return Ventus’ heart to him.

With Ventus and Aqua saved, and Kairi and Axel having spent the game being trained off-screen by Merlin, the seven guardians of light have finally been assembled. They take a day to prepare before facing off with Organization XIII. Aqua and Ventus catch up, Sora and Kairi have an obligatory romantic moment, and Riku has a heart-to-heart with Replica Riku, whose soul he happened to find while wandering the world of darkness. Meanwhile, it turns out that Vexen only pretended to defect to the Organization so he could get access to his research again, in order to make a new body for Roxas. He manages to get Demyx on his side as well, and the two deliver the replica body to Radiant Garden.

I got a baaaaaaaaad feelin’ about this!

The good guys make their way to the Keyblade Graveyard for the final confrontation. Unfortunately… they kinda suck. The team gets completely murdered by Xehanort’s Heartless, like, literally. Everyone dies. Why did Xehanort even do this? Doesn’t he need them to fight his Organization to make the χ-Blade? Whatever, point is, everyone gets blown away, and not even Donald breaking out the single most powerful spell in the history of Square-Enix JRPGs can save them.

…But apparently, Terra’s Lingering Will can? In the afterlife, Sora talks to a lot of lost souls who still have some connection to the realm of the living, in particular, a Chirithy from the mobile games. I completely missed this, but apparently one of the souls you can talk to manages to pull some strings to get Terra’s empty suit of armor involved in the fight. Sora manages to escape the world of the dead and use the Power of Waking to restore everyone back to life, which also… resets time by a few minutes? Because why not I guess??

In the new timeline, The Lingering Will shows up and helps the team defeat Terranort, and when the swarm of Heartless come to kill them, Ephemer appears and uses the Keyblades of all of the fallen Keyblade warriors to help Sora fight back. The plot really turns into Calvinball around this point, but this moment is fuckin’ cool, with the player mashing triangle to summon real usernames from Kingdom Hearts χ to use for attacks.

It ALMOST makes playing Union χ[Cross] Worth it. ALMOST.

With the Heartless defeated, the full Organization XIII finally reveals itself. It’s comprised of Marluxia, Larxene, Luxord, Saïx, Xigbar, Vanitas, and six versions of Xehanort: original flavor, Terranort, Heartless Terranort, Xemnas, Lil’ Norty, and Riku when he was possessed by Xehanort in Kingdom Hearts. The thirteenth member of the Organization keeps their identity hidden for the time being.

Xehanort splits everyone off so that they’re paired up with thematically appropriate opponents, and the final fight commences. Sora moves from one fight to the next, helping everyone defeat their nemeses. Every fight is a climactic, emotional moment. Marluxia remembers who he used to be and thanks Sora for freeing him. Terra finally breaks Xehanort’s hold on him and returns to normal. The thirteenth member of the Organization turns out to be Xion, who gets her heart back from Sora and also manages to summon Roxas’ new body to get his heart out of Sora too. Replica Riku sacrifices himself to steal one of the Organization replicas so that Naminé can be revived with it, finally fulfilling his promise to protect her. Even fuckin’ Luxord gets a surprisingly poignant death scene. Luxord!

What the fuck why are you suddenly making me have feelings about LUXORD

During all of this, Kairi gets kidnapped, because of course she does. Xehanort is still one piece shy of the full χ-Blade, so in order to force Sora to fight him, he murders Kairi, because of course he does. The true χ-Blade is forged, and Kingdom Hearts is summoned. It seems like everything is lost, but the heroes manage to turn Xehanort’s time magic against him, sending him and Sora both into Xehanort’s past. They have one last climactic battle, and Sora finally beats him once and for all.

Defeated, Xehanort starts ranting about how no, really, he’s the good guy, and he needs to recreate the world so that it’ll be free of darkness. Not even Sora is dumb enough to buy into his bullshit, and soon he’s surrounded by all the heroes of light. Eraqus’ ghost emerges from Terra, has a tearful, apologetic reunion with his students, and guides Xehanort into the next life.

Despite everyone’s protests that it’s too dangerous, Sora uses the Power of Waking to bring Kairi back. The finale of the game shows Naminé being revived and everybody having a fun beach party on the Destiny Islands. Sora and Kairi watch the sunset together as Sora slowly fades out of existence.

In the epilogue, four of the five original Union leaders meet up in the Keyblade Graveyard, along with Xigbar, who reveals himself to have been Luxu all along. He has the box with him, and Maleficent silently spies on their meeting while the Union leaders angrily ask Luxu what the fuck happened and where Ava is.

Fuck dude I dunno.

In the secret ending, Sora wakes up in Shibuya from The World Ends With You, while Riku wakes up in the world of Verum Rex, a video game published by Square-Enix in the world of Toy Story. A hooded figure contemplates turning Earth’s moon into Kingdom Hearts, and that’s where we’re left for now.

I — Hm. Uhhhhhhh. Hmm.

I have a really hard time sussing out how exactly I feel about this story. On one hand, there are dozens of incredibly cathartic moments that had me cheering, crying, laughing, and just generally having a great time. On the other hand, the pacing is some of the worst it’s ever been, with huge chunks of the game given over to time-wasting filler.

And I don’t just mean the Disney stuff. Like, take the opening of the game. Sora goes to Olympus to try and get his powers back, while Riku goes to the world of darkness to find Aqua. Both of them fail, come back to Yen Sid’s tower, and then set out again on the exact same missions. You could completely cut the first two or three hours of the game and it wouldn’t matter at all (you know, assuming you adjusted the end of 0.2 as well). The game is loaded with these kind of plot cul-de-sacs that do nothing but waste time.

That’s a little bit of a problem in most of the series, but it’s especially bad here, because there isn’t a strong throughline that the game can fall back on to make everything feel relevant. Instead it feels like you’re playing about five different Kingdom Hearts games that are all competing for time. Nine of the thirteen members of the new Organization need to be re-introduced and given meaningful moments, while everyone on the heroes’ team needs to have their own big cathartic dramatic beats.

There’s not enough time to do justice to everything, and that sucks even more when you see who and what they were willing to sacrifice to make room for more aimless, meandering plot.

Hey, KHIII? I Like You a Lot, But Fuck Off

I need to talk about Kairi.

In the beginning of Kingdom Hearts, she’s presented as a third main character, alongside Riku and Sora. The game sets up its story as being about a group of three friends. Then about forty-five minutes later she gets put in a heart-coma and the whole driving force of the plot becomes Sora and Riku making different choices about how to save her. She’s revived near the end, and gets to contribute to the plot exactly one time in order to restore Sora’s body after he becomes Heartless, but other than that she’s a complete non-character.

That sucks, but, okay, it’s only the first game. They had time to improve! She’s not really in Chain of Memories because there’s a different damseled love interest in that one (that’s a little unfair, but, only a little). But Kingdom Hearts II rolls around, and early on it seems like the game might finally make good on making Kairi the third protagonist of the story! We cut to her frequently in the early going and she’s feeling some kind of pull to the outside world. But then it takes forever for her to actually answer that call to adventure, and when she does, she gets immediately kidnapped. She does eventually escape, and even gets a Keyblade, but there’s zero gravitas to any of it, and her actual contributions to the ongoing conflict are so minor that you’ll miss them if you blink. Once again, her only true role in the story is to save Sora at the end, with her letter giving him and Riku a magical friendship bridge back home.

Yeah, for like… two seconds.

Again, this sucks, and my patience is starting to wear a little thin. But, okay, alright, Kairi has a Keyblade now, and she’s become at least a competent fighter, even if the game does its best to keep her competence off-screen. Maybe she’ll get to actually do shit next time!

Birth By Sleep and 358 focus on different characters, and coded is a weird like, character study of Sora, so sure, fine, fair enough that she’s not in those (although you could sub in Kairi for Riku in coded and not really change anything about the plot). But then we get to Dream Drop Distance. Yen Sid is worried that Xehanort’s return is imminent, and that the side of light needs more well-trained Keyblade masters pronto. So he sends a letter to invite… two of the three Keyblade wielders he knows of to come train with him. He just fuckin’ leaves Kairi out! Sora and Riku go on a whole big magical adventure where they grow closer as friends and get cool new powers while Kairi just… I dunno, fuckin’ skips rocks back on the Destiny Islands I guess! Near the end of the game, Sora gets a moment where he give a big impassioned speech about how his friends are his power, and for one shot, we see all of his friends crowded behind him, backing him up. Where’s Kairi in that group shot? Allllll the way in the back, with Aqua, Terra, and Xion. His canonical love interest gets put with two people that he met once as a kid and one person that he never met at all. It’s infuriating.

On the other hand, at least she was allowed to be a part of the cool group shot. I guess no one remembered to invite Naminé.

In the secret ending of DDD, Yen Sid finally remembers that there’s a third Keyblade wielder he should be training, and sends for Kairi. At this point, the series has been giving Kairi a raw deal for about a decade, but, okay. Here, now, is a scene where the game is openly and explicitly stating its intent to give Kairi an active role in the story. It sounds like they’re finally, finally going to stop fucking up and give her something to do other than stare at the horizon and pine wistfully.

Hahahahaha nope.

Kairi spends the vast majority of the game sidelined along with Axel, hidden in some kind of magical hyperbolic time forest where they can take as long as they need to develop their Keyblade skills. This is not inherently a bad plot development. It isolates them and keeps them from interacting with other characters, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. They could get interesting character moments of their own! The game could do a cool training montage, or have an Organization member find them so that Kairi and Axel have to team up to fend them off. But, no. We only get a few glimpses of them for most of the game, and it’s when they’re taking breaks, so that Kairi can pine for Sora and Axel can start remembering Xion. And don’t get me wrong, Axel’s sudden crying fit when he saw Kairi eating ice cream was a powerful moment! But it’s also the, like, eightieth time that Kairi has exclusively served to advance some other character’s emotional arc.

Fuck *off*.

Kairi and Axel finish their training and join up with the other guardians of light for the final showdown, but by this point, like… fool me four times, shame on you, fool me five times, shame on me. Kairi gets to use her nebulous friendship powers to bring Sora back from the brink again, and then she gets fuckin’ kidnapped again, and then Xehanort literally says that he needs to murder her to motivate Sora to fight him and complete the χ-Blade. She gets fridged, and her fridging is explicitly textual.

At this point, I don’t even fuckin’ know why they bothered writing Kairi into the story in the first place. The writers clearly have no interest in her as a character, and her treatment in KHIII borders on open contempt. I’ve seen someone joke that she only exists to disabuse people of the notion that Sora and Riku are gay, and honestly? I can’t come up with a better explanation for this character’s existence. Kingdom Hearts III has a few token romance scenes between Sora and Kairi, and while they’re totally fine on their own, the series hasn’t done a single iota of the work necessary to make me buy that these two people love each other. They barely even interact.

It would be bad enough if Kairi’s treatment was uniquely terrible, but it isn’t. Kingdom Hearts does pretty badly by all of its female characters, and for the most part, Kingdom Hearts III doubles down on all of the series’ most sexist tendencies. The women in the game mostly get shoved to the sidelines or shown as objectively inferior. Aqua’s a great character in BBS, but she’s stuck on the bench for the vast majority of KHIII, and when she finally gets into the game she gets immediately dunked on. She insists on fighting Vanitas herself, because, in her own words, Sora has seen her be “too weak, too often.” You even get to play as her during this boss fight and it rules!

Oh come the fuck on.

…But then Vanitas nearly kills her and she needs to be saved by Ventus and Sora. Why!? Why would you… Gah! She beat Vanitas like 4 different times in Birth By Sleep!!! They do try to justify it, by saying that Aqua’s still drained from being in the world of darkness, and having Vanitas beat her by forcing her to take a bullet for Ventus, but like… they didn’t have to write it that way! Aqua just escaped a decade-long ordeal, and got reunited with one of her closest friends. This scene should be a moment of unambiguous triumph for her, and Vanitas should’ve gotten the ass-kicking of his life. The fact that he manages to beat her is a steaming hot load of bullshit.

The other major female characters don’t get quite such a raw deal, but only because they’re just, not in the game that much. Naminé doesn’t show up at all until about five minutes before the ending, and Xion only appears a few hours before that. The moments they do get are good, but there’s just not that much of them, because the game is too scatterbrained and unfocused.

Hey! Speaking of “scatterbrained and unfocused,” let’s switch gears and talk about that!

It’s Just Not Put Together That Well

After the clunky false start, Kingdom Hearts III actually seems pretty promising. Sora’s initial goal is to save Roxas, to which I’m like, hell yeah! That right there’s why I love Sora! He’s completely blowing off this dumb mystical quest bullshit to go help someone that needs him! And then from there, you go to the Toy Story world, which is… probably the single best Disney world in the entire series. The story elegantly weaves through the themes and characters of the Toy Story franchise, and draws those characters into the overarching narrative instead of slamming on the brakes to do a rote repetition of an old movie. The game reintroduces Young Xehanort, and at this point I was hopeful that he would be a major character in the story. The dumb fanfic version of the game that I had in my head was that Sora and Young Xehanort would confront each other over and over again, and that despite himself, Xehanort would start to like and befriend Sora, and that would cause a time paradox that erased the evil Xehanort of the present.

But nah. I’m pretty sure Young Xehanort doesn’t show up again until the very end of the game, and all he does then is taunt Sora because he knows that he’s gonna die soon.

Alright, well, bummer, but that’s fine. There’s lots of other directions they could go! Sora goes to the world of Tangled next, which is a much more bog-standard Disney world that pretty much just follows the script of the movie with a light sprinkling of Kingdom Hearts on top. But hey! Marluxia is here! That’s rad! He was a little underdeveloped in Chain of Memories, and now that Union χ[Cross] has shed some light on his past, I was excited to see them dig into his character some more. One of the next worlds is Frozen, which is even more of a rehash of its movie than the Tangled world, but it brings back Larxene! So, okay! This might be cool! The two conspirators from CoM are back, and are already talking about taking over the Organization again! Plus, Xemnas is telling them that they need to regain their lost ability to use the Keyblade! Hell yes! This sounds like a great direction for the story to go!

It would be cool if this went anywhere.

But… nope. Again, these two don’t show up again until the end of the game. Their death scenes are fun, with Marluxia remembering his past and Larxene being annoyed that she got killed by a dweeb like Sora, but neither character really gets to influence the story. They don’t even get those Keyblades Xemnas mentioned. So now that’s… two potential plots that get suggested and then discarded. Demyx is also around at this point, and he reveals that his coward schtick in KHII was just an act, but don’t worry, none of that goes anywhere either. At least he technically does something during the game and helps Vexen steal a body for Roxas, but like. Vexen also could’ve just done that on his own.

The Monsters Inc. world is pretty solid, but not quite Toy Story-tier. Vanitas gets put back in play, and unlike every other bad guy in this game he does get to come back before the finale, but, I already talked about how annoying that part is. Plus, the game doesn’t use Vanitas to make any kind of overarching thematic point. KHIII isn’t about the kinds of things that he represents. Vanitas doesn’t have an interesting point of view or represent anything greater. He’s just the next in a long line of assholes looking to cause trouble.

And that’s the recurring problem with Kingdom Hearts III. There’s no central idea for the heroes to be pushing against. There’s just a bunch of random, unconnected villains who happen to have gathered under the same banner. All of them represent really great pieces of storytelling and character development on their own, but the game doesn’t do the work to make them coalesce into something greater. Kingdom Hearts III ends up mostly feeling like a bunch of pointless fucking around, with engaging, powerful moments sprinkled throughout. In isolation, those moments can be really funny, exciting, and emotional, but they’re not properly set up and don’t serve as the pay-off to anything within the game itself. This gets taken to the extreme in the finale, which is practically a montage of every cool character moment the series has been teasing since the first game.

This all sounds pretty harsh, but here’s the thing: despite the sloppy construction of the plot, pretty much all those moments work.

I Think This Game Is Bad, and I Also Think I Love It

Whaddo I look like, Ansem, Seeker of Darkness?? I’m not *heartless*.

Honestly, I didn’t realize just how many problems I had with this game’s story until I sat down to write this piece. I came away from it feeling great, and it’s only on reflection that I can see just how shoddy its narrative construction is. Sure, Woody’s incredible takedown of Young Xehanort doesn’t go anywhere, but it still rules in the moment. Sure, Demyx is entirely ancillary to the plot, but the two or three scenes he features in are a hoot. Sure, Axel barely gets to do anything, but I still loved it when he joked that he’s too popular to get killed off.

For as sloppy as this game is, it’s still cashing in on a decade and a half of storytelling. I love, or, in some cases, love to hate all of these characters, and this game is determined to give each and every one of them (you know, except Kairi) a powerful dramatic moment. The result is incredibly cathartic. Kingdom Hearts III is deeply, deeply flawed, and these powerful moments would be even more potent if they had been organized into a more coherent narrative. The mid-game drags hard, with the Tangled and Frozen worlds representing the absolute worst ways that Disney’s strict brand management policies harm the story of Kingdom Hearts. And then suddenly the game speeds way up. The finale feels upsettingly rushed, with the writers trying to cram in as many fan-pleasing moments as they possibly could before time ran out.

And yet… for all its problems, and for all the ways it fails, I just… can’t help but love it anyway. The cynical take on the game is that it’s a pandering, unorganized mess, bogged down by greed-fueled obligations to advertise Disney properties. But… that’s not the impression the game gives me at all. It feels like a labor of love, determined to reward long-time fans in as many ways as it possibly can, creating satisfying resolutions for a huge cast of characters while wrapping up a complicated story in spite of a troubled development process and frustrating corporate mandates. I mean, hell, they brought back Replica Riku, a character that I and like three other people give a shit about. That’s not pandering. That’s earnest affection, both for the world of Kingdom Hearts and for the people who love it. I can criticize this game all day, but at a certain point I can’t help but be charmed by it.

And that… kinda suits Kingdom Hearts, doesn’t it? It’s a franchise that seems like it should be deeply cynical, something born out of a couple of executives deciding to mash their intellectual properties together to make a quick buck. But somehow a bleedingly honest and heartfelt story arose out of that, a story about being bleedingly honest and heartfelt in a cynical world, about the power of emotional vulnerability and the ways that love can transcend the possible. Of course KHIII succeeds despite itself. That’s what Kingdom Hearts is about, baby!

At the climax of Kingdom Hearts III, Xehanort is defeated. The brilliant tactician meticulously crafted an unstoppable plan, and prepared for every conceivable contingency. He should have been incapable of losing. And yet despite everything, even with the power of God Almighty shining down on him and clutched in his bony hand, he was completely undone by a single boy.

This is when Xehanort finally presents his ideology and goals in plain and simple terms. The world was corrupted by darkness, and it needs to be erased and rebuilt from scratch, with the evil that poisoned it removed. The lights that’ve sustained the world since the Keyblade War are too small and weak; only the true, original light of Kingdom Hearts can save everything. The world needs a “strong” leader, “to stop the weak from polluting the World with their endless darkness.”

Xehanort is explicitly, nakedly, a fascist. He wants the power to dictate who lives and who dies, to be the sole arbiter of what kind of existence should be permitted in the world. He truly believes that he is a superior being to those around him, and that he is therefore entitled to determine the course of their lives.

Sora firmly tells Xehanort that he doesn’t have the right to decide the fate of the world, and he angrily barks back, demanding to know who does have the right to decide if not him. Sora doesn’t give him an answer, because there isn’t one. Nobody, no matter how well-intentioned, should have the kind of power Xehanort wants.

Xehanort can’t help but be charmed by Sora’s earnest passion. There’s a whole lot of business where Eraqus’ ghost shows up to tell Xehanort he’s lost, but it’s not necessary. Xehanort already knew that. His spirit reverts to a time in his distant past when he was innocent, and he ascends to the afterlife. But first, he passes the χ-Blade on to Sora. His intent isn’t said out loud, but I like to think that he’s come to believe that Sora is the leader the world really needs, because even now he still doesn’t get that the world doesn’t need a leader, at least not the kind he envisions. Sora uses the weapon to seal Kingdom Hearts and gets rid of the damn thing.

This game’s plot spins its wheels in the mud for a good two dozen hours, but that’s really not Sora’s fault. He’s eager from the first moment to dive right in and get to work doing what needs to be done, but everyone around him refuses to let him. Yen Sid insists that things be done the proper way, and that he devote himself to learning the Power of Waking instead of helping out with the Aqua rescue effort. In response, he blows Yen Sid off, and starts working to save Roxas, a character that most everyone else seemed to have stopped giving a shit about. In the finale, he’s determined to use the Power of Waking to resurrect Kairi, despite the mortal danger it poses to him. Everyone tries once again to force him to wait, to do things the right way, to stop and think and strategize. He flat out refuses, and eventually, everyone lets him go.

Sora is brash and stubborn here, but I think it’s a pretty powerful moment. Yen Sid kinda sucks, and his approach of sitting back, doling out cryptic knowledge and slowly making esoteric preparations that fail to ever pay off allowed Xehanort to nearly destroy the world, what, four separate times? By the end of KHIII, Sora isn’t willing to put up with his dumbass magical filibustering anymore, and does something wild and reckless for the sake of his friend. It costs him dearly, but he knew that it would. It was worth it to him. In his final moments, Sora refuses to do things the right way and instead insists on simply doing the right thing. He sacrifices what he has for the benefit of people who need it, moving forward with utter conviction that so long as he acts with true, uncompromising love, everything will work out in the end.

No one needs the kind of leader that Xehanort believes in, but Sora sure seems to be growing up into the kind of leader that people might actually need.

Random Stray Thoughts

• This game is fuckin’ funny. The Kingdom Hearts. II.9 title card, the Verum Rex ad, Sora declaring that he’s “not a business guy,” Axel complaining that it’s gonna be too hard to explain the plot of Kingdom Hearts to Ventus and Aqua, and Vanitas getting thrown through like ten doors in Monsters Inc. all stand out as really great jokes.
• Part of me is a little miffed that the game put so much time into teasing what’s gonna happen in future games when it struggled to fit in everything it wanted to accomplish in this one, but also, I am so completely in to everything being hinted at that it’s hard to be too mad.
• Listen, I don’t wanna get into a whole thing here, but I’m pretty sure that whoever came up with that boss fight against the giant goth doll in the Toy Story world was real horny about it.
• Who’re the New Seven Hearts gonna be? We got Rapunzel, Elsa, Anna, and Kairi so far. Moanna and Vanillope seem like shoe-ins, but that’s still one short. Maybe Ariel will finally get to hit the big-time!
• Heyyyyy, looks like playin’ The World Ends With You will eventually pay off after all!
• Who’s Subject X supposed to be? I can see the case for it being either Ava or Skuld but I’m not sure if there’s hard evidence one way or the other.
• Boy, Maleficent really didn’t do jack shit in this game, huh?
• Oh, oh, another great joke: Luxord being disappointed that Davey Jones’ heart was just literally a blood-pumping organ.
• I will never be over the way Woody eviscerates Xehanort.
• I’ve seen speculation that the secret ending is implying that the next game will use Square-Enix worlds instead of Disney worlds, and that sounds great, but I have a hard time buying it. I’m pretty sure Disney partially owns the Kingdom Hearts brand, and I don’t see them greenlighting a game that they can’t use to advertise their movies. I’d love to be proven wrong though, since they really dragged this game down.
• I can’t get the idea out of my head of how cool it would be if S-E announced Verum Rex as a real game.
• Hey I haven’t brought it up at all in any of these articles and I feel like I’d be neglecting my due diligence if I didn’t take a quick moment to say: fuck Johnny Depp, and fuck James Woods.

Conclusion

Kingdom Hearts III is an extremely messy game. I’m not sure I could really call it good by any objective measure. The gameplay feels frustratingly old-fashioned, and the story is a sloppily put-together mishmash of practically random moments that lack any kind of proper set-up or payoff, which constantly gets shoved out of the way in favor of dull repetitions of Disney plots that mostly fail to even connect with the story thematically as well as they have in previous games. The game seems to honestly hate Kairi as anything other than a prop, and it seems ambivalent at best toward its other female characters. There’s about a thousand changes big and small that they could and should have made to this thing.

And yet… despite all of that, I kinda love it. The deluge of cathartic moments in the game’s final hours is way more effective than it has any right to be, and no matter how far the game gets lost in the weeds it never loses sight of the earnest and heartfelt core that’s made this series work from the very first game.

Alright, welp! That was a longer one than usual! I guess come back next week so we can dig into just what’s going on with the Union Leaders, and Subject X, and Yozora, and…

Oh.

Oh no.

I have to… wait before any of that gets addressed. For a minimum of a few years.

Fuck.

Okay, but, no, really. I wanna take a second and just say thank you to anyone who read all the way to the end of this piece. And, if you’ve been reading along with all of these articles? Then, just… God bless. It is incredibly kind of you to have given me that much of your attention, and I really hope that you got something out of it. I’ve had a blast playing through this series and writing about it. I should do something like this again some time!

For now though, I think. Instead of sitting here coming up with a witty conclusion to this article? I’m just gonna go to bed. Goodnight, and please don’t use the Power of Waking on me. It’s the weekend and I wanna sleep in.

God, what a dumb joke to end on. Ms. Utada, if you’d be so kind as to play me out?