UNENDING BOREDOM
Also for: Xbox One
I am angry. In a moment of weakness a couple of years ago, I checked out the
hundred-dollar Kingdom Hearts: All-in-One package on the PS Store.
It contained the entire series in one way or another, including the recently released
Kingdom Hearts III. I had seen the review scores of Square Enix's third major chapter of the series - they were pretty great - and I had seen videos and screenshots of its amazing
visuals.
Some YouTubers were disappointed with it, but they are a hard bunch to please. I just thought: "Wow, Kingdom Hearts III looks great, so it must be great." I reasoned just
like a dumb kid, and I bought the entire bundle of action-JRPG:s to get up to speed with the franchise. It cost me around 1000 Swedish crowns (roughly 100 dollars). That's the most I've ever spent in a single game purchase. And then I proceeded to spend hundreds of hours playing through the entire saga, just for the sake of getting to the meaty Kingdom Hearts III with a good grasp on the story.
And to my absolute disgust, it turns out that Kingdom Hearts III plain effin' sucks. It's unbelievably bad and boring.
The great irony is that, having just finished the entire saga (so far), I still have no grasp of exactly what's going on. Too many unnecessary characters are involved, and the
entire plot just seems put together on a whim. The series has never
established any sense of consequence, nor even a ruleset of what is possible or
impossible within its magical universe. That is why I defeat the same villains time and
time again. They always come back to life.
It's as if I'm watching a silly children's cartoon, like Road Runner, that attempts to create a melodramatic story canon to explain why Wile E. Coyote is so evil, and how he survives all
his "deaths". Who the heck cares? The entire point is that he is a hungry bad guy and gets hurt because of it. And we get to laugh at it. Tears are out of the equation.
It's simply impossible to take the continuous tale of Kingdom Hearts seriously, no matter how hard it begs me to. Fortunately, I have gotten at least some things of value out of it - some of the previous entries had really
challenging combat mechanics, and a couple of them had addictive ways to
acquire new skills. But playing one or two of them would've sufficed. By playing through the entire saga, I've wasted hundreds of hours watching and listening to absolute
hogwash storytelling, and button-mashed my thumbs into premature arthritis.
Kingdom Hearts III is one of the worst entries of the series - it's all hogwash
and no challenge. It is allegedly the final chapter of the "Xehanort-saga",
which doesn't necessarily mean that the series is over. Xehanort (here
voiced by the late, great Rutger Hauer, one of my favorite actors) is the villain who,
in one shape or another, has tormented our protagonist Sora (Haley Joel Osment) since the start. I believe I've beaten him at least two times, but through
the power of hocus-pocus he keeps coming back.
This time, however, promises to be the ultimate battle between light and
darkness.
You assume the role of the young Keyblade-wielder Sora, starting off in wizard Yen Sid's
tower alongside a handful of old friends. In order to stand a chance
in the upcoming battle against the dark lord, they must find and
rescue the three missing Keyblade masters you controlled in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. The old wizard gives Sora and each of his friends a specific task, and Sora's is to
"rediscover the power of waking". How to do that is anyone's guess, and
that's the motto that propels the game absolutely nowhere. You just go out into the universe in hopes of finding it. In hindsight, I cannot even say for sure how we managed to get it back.
This universe consists of an array of disconnected worlds you visit in your
Gummi spaceship. The worlds are technically marvellous, with big maps, boatloads of
Heartless enemies and minigame distractions. This time around, they also feel less like backdrops, as you interact more with them. For the first time, people actually inhabit the streets of settlements, and you can manipulate certain things in the environment. But the worlds are also a hodgepodge of
shallow, insignificant short stories we could have done without. Each one summarily reenacts parts of the movie it's based upon, unconvincingly trying to squeeze bits of the main plot into the mix.
So off you
go, controlling Sora on a quest he seems to forget about, just so that he,
Donald Duck (Tony Anselmo) and Goofy (Bill Farmer) can be
distracted by enchanting Disney fluff. In earlier entries, these worlds belonged to a bunch of the classic Disney
movies, like Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio and
Fantasia. Now they are shameless commercials for the modern,
3D- and live-action films. Here we visit movie sets like Toy Story, Big Hero 6 and Frozen instead - places all completely new to
Kingdom Hearts and unfamiliar to Sora. These movies would've made more
sense in a new trilogy. Now we don't get real closure with old friends like Peter Pan, Simba or
Jack Skellington.
The game gives off a great first impression, and as I fight my way through the early stages, I'm under its spell. The environments shift
dramatically, with great lighting effects giving each setting its own tone, and the first couple of worlds look amazing. But when I reach the linear corridor setup of Monstropolis (of Monsters, Inc. fame) all my interest has already faded, and from there it all goes downhill.
All of the combat skills you obtain in quick succession during the first few hours of the game. For as long as
that happens my attention's piqued. But after learning them all you start
using them repeatedly, gradually relying more on the most effective ones,
until you spam but a couple of them. The character levels provide you with a
steady influx of predetermined stat boosts, allowing you to button
mash more efficiently against stronger opponents. It feels like a rail shooter working under the guise of freedom.
Any semblence of challenge is mostly gone. Instead you get a queue of
different charged powers to unleash at your command. Regular combos, powerful
spells, form changes, combo finishers, coordinated attacks, shotlock commands,
summons, flowmotion attacks and destructive Disneyland rides are all at your
disposal.
I could go into detail about how these attacks differ, but what's the point? No matter what you prefer, they all make short work of your enemies, including
bosses, who arrive in greater numbers but stand no chance against your arsenal of powers. Defensive maneuvers like dodging and parrying work and fail at a
whim, making an all-out offensive the safest
bet.
Visually it looks nothing short of spectacular, with a flurry of air
acrobatics, magical fireworks, and elemental effects sharing the screen with
imaginative, colorful environments. It's intoxicating at first, as you tear through enemy
ranks with style. But it's all smoke and mirrors for the lurking boredom of
realizing how little you accomplish.
Every world represents a little playground in
itself, with completely pointless mini-games, like an Entangled rhythm dance section, a Toy Story FPS mecha simulator and a Pirates of the Caribbean naval simulator. They're functional but not particularly fun. And nothing of what happens reflects on the
overarching plot or the characters, nor does it serve any purpose other than to bloat the game.
And each world's self-contained subplot is so roughly summarized it only
follows the three act-structure with the narrowest margin. In terms of
geography, the worlds are drawn out to the breaking point. Off in every
direction you go, often even vertically, and although the environments look open and free they're very linear. The size just means it's harder to find the right
way, and seems to exist mostly to make room for crafting materials, used to level up your weapons.
The Gummi ship segments are also bigger; in fact, they've become a
bona fide open world. You can spend hours upon hours there fighting enemies,
mining or looking for secrets. You can obtain blueprints for new Gummi ships,
or build your own vessels from parts mined in space. But all the progress you make only
improves Gummi ship performance, making the time spent there ultimately a self-contained waste of space, time and spacetime.
To further prolong your strife, the game often interrupts the gameplay flow
with cutscenes. Sora has always been slow on the uptake, but now he has degraded into a clueless dimwit who needs everything explained in detail. In that sense he
serves as the audience's substitute, but if the audience is anything like me,
they're just not interested. Every cutscene is plot exposition. People talk
summarily about what's happened, and then they explain what they're about to
do. Every scene is like that, with almost no exception, to the point that it
becomes the entire plot of the game.
These horribly directed and acted scenes are, of course, drawn out with long
awkward pauses. Characters move, then pause, then talk, then pause, then turn
around, then talk, then pause... Like in Playstation 2-era cutscenes, characters seem incapable of doing two things simultaneously. A lot of these interactions
would have served the game better as in-engine banter. Instead, the banter is
wasted on your companions endlessly pointing out hidden collectibles in the
vicinity.
And on it goes, this story about nothing and everything. Light and darkness,
what does it represent? Friendship and loneliness? Happiness and depression?
Life and death? Well, to each one his/her own, I guess, but in this lore it
might as well simply represent light and darkness. And with every serious line
delivery overloaded with drama it becomes like unintended comedy.
Whatever Kingdom Hearts III attempts, it does it badly, and its profundities
are lost in translation.
And here I am, angry at the gaming outlets for letting their biggest Kingdom
Hearts-fans review this shallow mess of a game. Of course they'd love it,
because they love it for all the reasons I hate it. They really do love it for
the writing. Not for the plot, but for the profound little character interactions, for the
depictions of friendship and for the nostalgia of fantasizing about the world as a curious kid,
instead of witnessing it firsthand as a jaded adult.
I admit that in earlier and better entries of the franchise, a few touching scenes existed, carried
single-handedly by Yoko Shimomura's amazing soundtrack. But Kingdom
Hearts III has no such moments. It's just impossible to empathize with Sora and his friends after the onslaught of bad writing they've
endured since those days.
And here I am, angry at myself for not realising sooner that
Tetsuya Nomura is incorrigible as a game designer, even though he
excels as a character designer. With this series, he's shown time after time
that he really struggles to communicate his ideas across the screen. Playing
Kingdom Hearts gnaws at my patience, and whatever greatness you may stumble across, please know you may find it better represented elsewhere.
For instance, look up Red Dead Redemption II for a story about friendships
falling apart, and the Dark Souls games for challenging
gameplay set in a world ravaged by the conflict between darkness and light.
Play Kingdom Hearts II and
Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance on a harder difficulty than normal,
and enjoy the action combat. But whatever you do, stay away from the rest.
Kingdom Hearts III is an especially overwrought visual tech demo, and nothing more.
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