Kingdom Hearts III
PS4, Xbox One
Well, if you’d been dragged arse-backwards through multiple dimensions, you’d be a bit of a mess, too. Oh, we’re not talking about Sora: with his perfectly coiffed hair and eternal Plasticine smile, Kingdom Hearts III’s hero somehow bears little sign of his troubled past. We’re talking about the game itself. Kingdom Hearts III was always going to be a difficult thing to pull off, not just as a creative balancing act between two of the world’s biggest entertainment companies, but also as the culmination of a beloved (and now tortuously convoluted) epic. Sadly, the scars from the splicing of so many different worlds – Disney and Square, levity and gravitas, ten years ago and the present day – are all too visible.
That’s not to say, however, that this isn’t a thing of great beauty and ambition. There’s an undeniable earnestness to Kingdom Hearts III that is infectious. It’s dizzyingly gorgeous, for one: the Disney worlds are note-perfect recreations of the films, Square’s artists aping the preternaturally lush meadows of Tangled’s Kingdom Of Corona as masterfully as they do the crystal-clear waters of Pirates Of The Caribbean’s sprawling ocean. Enemy design is consistently delightful, from whimsical, dandelion-headed Heartless to some earth-shaking end-of-level bosses.
Nowhere is Square’s desire to pull out all the stops for the end of the trilogy more apparent than in the Toy Story world. It encapsulates so much of what is good about Kingdom Hearts III: meticulous attention to detail, a clear desire to delight and surprise the player at every turn, moments of homage to Disney’s IP that indicate a genuine love for the subject material, and a wickedly funny sense of self-aware humour. From its Gigas mechs and possessed dollies to the ball pit full of treasure chests and various winking references, it’s here that Square’s impossible task approaches success.
It’s obvious that this world was Tetsuya Nomura’s baby. Others don’t fare as well. Frozen’s Arendelle is a flat wasteland of white and blue that has you repeatedly running up and down a mountain for no discernible reason; Big Hero 8’s San Fransokyo is over too soon, and its one-dimensional city feels like wasted potential. In the endearing, typically Kingdom Hearts rush to provide players with as much variety as possible, the quality of minigames is uneven – the rhythm and cooking games are a joy, and even an attempt at Assassin’s Creed’s naval combat works, but the less said about Hundred-Acre Wood’s match-three clones, the better.
Trying to build a game on volume and variety alone runs the risk of coming off vacuous, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the combat. It’s easily one of Kingdom Hearts III’s crowning jewels, almost singlehandedly holding together the seams of the game as a whole through sheer force of will. There’s a momentum to proceedings, helped by the return of Dream Drop Distance’s Flowmotion system, which lets Sora fling himself around lampposts or bounce off walls for flashier, high-damage attacks – although III’s more open levels mean it’s often less intuitive to activate as you endeavour to manoeuvre into just the right spot. Attractions, meanwhile, are a largely harmonious fusion of Disney and Square: nowhere else in videogames can you watch an anime lad juggle a Disney villain between the bow and stern of a glittering pirate ship while a photorealistic Donald Duck eggs him on. Each one is spectacular, a self-contained minigame in which we spend cumulative hours busting Blaster Blaze high scores and freehanding puerile Splash Run tracks. But as the hours wear on, it becomes apparent that there’s very little substance underneath all the shimmer. Aside from a handful of slight tweaks – being able to block in mid-air, or store Keyblade forms without depleting their timers – combat changes are superficial. Despite receiving new abilities right up until the end, we never feel like we’ve learnt anything of value. The most efficient tactic is usually to mash the attack button before summoning nearly-always-available and ultra-powerful Attractions or assists. There’s a sense that, in an effort to ensure everybody has a good time, the indulgence has gone further than is sensible.
Indeed, the pacing ensures playing Kingdom Hearts III is a bit like being dragged through a theme park while hungover. Giddy fun is frequently interrupted by painfully banal cutscenes: this is, of course, nothing new for Kingdom Hearts, but some traditions shouldn’t be upheld. It’s 25 hours of heavily truncated Disney movies that have no bearing on the game’s main plot, before the ‘save Sora’s friends/clones from the abyss and prevent the time-travelling bad guy from kicking off a new age of darkness’ thread resumes at a speed so breakneck it’s exhausting. If there was an opportunity to have the narratives gel, it has not been realised.
Several crucial narrative resolutions, years in the making, feel rushed and anticlimactic. But then there are other moments during the finale: dramatic, impassioned set-pieces that do justice to a decade of waiting, with ideas that inject Kingdom Hearts with a much-needed shot of modern energy. These flashes of brilliance are even more arresting for their unexpected appearance in a game with manual save points in this, the year of our lord 2019. This is a PS2-era JRPG that would have been a revelation ten years ago, parts of which have been updated along the way in an effort to keep up with the march of time, and parts of which have suffered in the attempt. It’s a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the contemporary that has struggled to extricate itself from its own tangled mythology. The problem is that – despite the glossy veneer and the best of intentions – it shows.
The pacing ensures playing Kingdom Hearts III is a bit like being dragged through a theme park while hungover