Kingdom Hearts III Review

Early in Kingdom Hearts III, series primary protagonist Sora returns to his spaceship with his Duck Dad Donald and his Dog Dad Goofy. This nuclear family sits in silence and ponders a crisis. When we last saw Sora elsewhere in this seventeen-year-old video game franchise, it was either moments or eons ago.

He had failed a crucial examination. He had been denied the title of Keyblade Master. 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.

Now he has to regain them from scratch. His level has been reset to one, both literally and figuratively.

Other characters are elsewhere searching for another character. 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. 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.

Duck 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.

A smartphone ringtone punctures the cold silence.

This frightens our characters. They didn’t know any of them even had a phone. Sora doesn’t even know what a phone is, right up until the moment he removes the ringing phone from one of his pockets. 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. Like all things technological in the Kingdom Hearts universe, the phone is made of magical Gummi blocks.

Its default call mode is Facetime. 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. I reach over on the sofa to wiggle the analogue stick. The Xbox has turned the controller off as well.

I wait for the controller to turn back on, and the Kingdom Hearts III cut-scene’s next moment yanks me back to reality. 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. When Kingdom Hearts I came out, I didn’t even have a phone.

The Gummi Phone thus serves two purposes. First, it canonically explains the presence of Kingdom Hearts III’s industry-standard in-game photo mode.

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. 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. That didn’t happen. It sure never stopped feeling like it might happen.

An entertainment product as big as Kingdom Hearts III does not come along every day. Heck, it barely comes along once per decade. 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.

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. If you’re a fan of this series, chances are you are not even reading this review. 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.

Good news: it’s not the worst game ever made. Not by a long shot. It just has a lot of baggage.

Kingdom Hearts’s reputation for narrative convolution will always precede it. This reputation is largely unearned. You only need to watch one or two summary videos to learn enough to follow every relevant plot beat in Kingdom Hearts III.

The game even does a good job of reminding you what characters’ names are and where they came from. There’s a helpful cutscene very early on where you learn everything you’d need to know about series antagonist Xehanort.

While the series isn’t actually as complicated as its reputation indicates, it does have its weird gatekeeping aspects. Try Googling “How many Kingdom Hearts games are there” and not getting a headache. It’s also unclear what order you should even play them in, and which ones are skippable, if any. Series director Tetsuya Nomura has been notoriously performance-arty about the structure and flow of his opus. New entries in the series often exist seemingly to plug a single plot hole in a past episode of the series.

Kingdom Hearts I was a cute and experimental action game with role-playing elements. It tied up a dozen Disney-film-themed planets into a crossover universe wrapped up with a neat little Final Fantasy-flavored narrative bow. Eleven years and a dozen games later, Kingdom Hearts χ [Ki] came out to depict and explain the lead-up to events leading up to events leading up to events hinted at in Kingdom Hearts II. Kingdom Hearts χ [Ki] began as a browser game, by the way, yet contains lore details absolutely crucial for understanding the full scope of the plot of Kingdom Hearts III.

Therefore, it is perfectly and even hilariously on-brand for Tetsuya Nomura to say that Kingdom Hearts III’s epilogue movie is not included in the pre-release data download provided to me as a critic.

Being a Japanese role-playing game with its roots in the PlayStation 2 era, Kingdom Hearts III would arguably be incomplete without the promise of a “True Ending”. True Fans will hold their heads up high as they begin the experience, knowing they possess the will to see the True Ending no matter what, while casual players might be in it just to see their favourite Disney characters beat up monsters.

It is even further on-brand for Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura to provide only cryptic hints to the press about the method for unlocking this True Ending.

Apparently, the True Ending requires players to use the Gummi Phone’s photo mode to take photographs of what the game calls “Lucky Emblems”. These are shaped like the iconic three-circle Mickey Mouse head. Every once in a while, these emblems may catch your eye, etched into otherwise inconspicuous walls. Sometimes Donald or Goofy will quack or ‘gawrsh’ about how maybe there’s a Lucky Emblem nearby. Dutifully, the believer in the True Ending whips out their camera.

As a player romps and frolics through lovingly rendered Disney film action experiences accompanied by the genuine heroes of these respective films, they’re free to photograph anything they want. You can flip the camera around and take a selfie. You can get Woody and Buzz Lightyear in the selfie. You can get Rapunzel in there. You can point the camera at Donald and hear him perfectly quack, “You want to take a picture of me?” It’s perfect.

As I approached the end of the game, on the cusp of confronting ultimate evil, in a backward-looking frame of mind, I opened the camera menu and looked through my photo album. You can keep a maximum of 100 photos. I knew this as I began documenting my journey through Kingdom Hearts III. There’s me and Buzz Lightyear. There’s me and Woody. There’s Donald. There’s Goofy. There’s Rapunzel.

At first, photos of Lucky Emblems stick out as punctuation marks between sentences of jocular selfies. Over time, that changes; the pleasure fades and the business takes over. I never took a selfie with Anna from Frozen. I never took a selfie with Dollar Menu Johnny Depp. A forensic scientist leafing through my Kingdom Hearts III photo album would likely declare the deceased as possessing an obsession with walls.

Is this a mockery of completionist video game behaviour? Is this a representation of Sora’s perpetual smile just barely masking a struggle to focus on the good memories and not allow the weight of his fate to crush him psychically dead? By requiring the player to photograph a few dozen walls if they want the True Ending, is Tetsuya Nomura trolling us?

Not necessarily. The True Ending only requires that you take the photos. You can always delete them right after.

Or can you? Given the wildly messy nature of Kingdom Hearts’ complex system of rules regarding body possession and time travel, I decided it wouldn’t surprise me if I had to keep the photos. So I kept them all.

In Tokyo in 2005, two years before the iPhone, I met a woman in a bar. As was popular bar conversation in those days, we compared our phones. She showed me her photographs. Every photograph was a picture of a tiny cake or cupcake. Every photograph in my phone was a picture of a band playing music. She asked, “Do you see bands every day?” and I said no. I asked, “Do you eat cake every day?” and she said no.

Therefore when assessing Kingdom Hearts III we need to decide if we are seeing bands every day, eating cake every day, or staring at stone walls every day. The truth is, all of us are always doing all three of those, all day every day.

We only pick which one we photograph.

I want the True Ending. So I have a lot of pictures of walls.