May 15, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Dispatch from the Dive Chapter 19: Chapter 18.9

I’ve braved the depths of Hollow Bastion, looked Xemnas in the eye as I beat the life out of him, and fought Ansem, boatman of the River Styx. I’ve danced with Jack Skellington, endured the antics of Jack Sparrow, and sang very bad ripoffs of Little Mermaid songs. I’ve summoned storms of thunder and ice, created life in dreams, and driven through bizarre mini-games. I’ve trod the lands of Aladdin, Fantasia, and Steamboat Willy. I’ve gone behind the curtains of Daybreak Town and the World that Never Was.

Over the past four months, you’ve seen me become: the time-stopping, spell-dropping, earth-shocking, prompt-rocking, cast-quaking, χ-shaking, meld-making, Potion-taking, testifying, death-defying, one and [EXPLETIVE DELETED] only, legendary WOLF. MAN. JEW.

And thus, we move onto Kingdom Hearts III, a conclusion to a trilogy—though not the conclusion for the franchise, which apparently intends to be a trilogy of trilogies—with a lot of history behind it. It took years of development just to get it out the door, time enough for an entire branch of the franchise to be built around its absence. It sold millions of copies. It handles not only the mammoth iconography of Disney proper but Pixar as well. The culmination of all these years of myth-making and plot setting was a huge release. It was well revealed, though it all but shattered against a tide of fan hopes and expectations.

But as a game, what is it like? How does it play? How does it conclude what has become an impenetrable saga of Light and Darkness, Keys and χ’s, and many minutes’ worth of awkward silences? Well, no time like the present!

May 8: Began Kingdom Hearts III, entered Olympus.

Kingdom Hearts III has two opening videos. Two. They show mostly the same things, scenes from the games (except A fragmentary passage and possibly χ Back Cover) in narrative order. One uses old footage from the games, one uses fancy CGI and might have scenes from later on, but they have the same message: this is a conclusion, and this conclusion is happening. The weight of seventeen years of Kingdom Hearts is meant to crush you like a steamroller. And while it’s overwhelming indeed, these montages perhaps rely a bit too much on the idea that you’ve experienced this series in as short a timeframe as I. It’s certainly hard to imagine this meaning much to anyone coming into the franchise for the first time, or even more casual fans.

I’ve only played KH3 for about an hour and a half, but that feeling has already cropped up repeatedly. The first non-montage scene is a chess game between a young, unnamed Xehanort and Eraqus; it’s as subtle as a klaxon (D’Angelo Barksdale and Bodie Broadus they are not) but meaningless to anyone who didn’t play Birth by Sleep. The first contemporary scene is the ending scene from A fragmentary passage. The loading screens? Dear lord, the loading screens; they’re Instagram posts by characters from the game, all with hyper-referential hashtags. The opening level’s emotional pulls are very dependent on your experience with this series. This session was a decent encapsulation of one criticism I’ve made of Kingdom Hearts, that it treats newcomers poorly and indifferently.

But even these elements are mild compared to the outright dumbest and most obnoxious narrative choice of all, in which, before starting the very bit of substantial gameplay, Kingdom Hearts III turns back the clock and temporarily renames itself Kingdom Hearts 2.9.

“Why” the first level is being stylized as the prologue, not the official story, comes from that fragmentary passage ending scene. Sora’s lost his powers, so he needs to learn from Hercules, the only hero Sora knows who can teach him about true heroism (or, failing that, the one with the best attendance record, as he’s in more games than almost every character). So once our boy gets his mojo back and stops Hades’ latest evil scheme, we can actually be on our way and actually play Kingdom Hearts III. I guess.

I have problems with this, namely that it would be good if Sora building himself back was how KH3 starts—and we know this because divorced from the naming convention it is—but they aren’t only narrative. I’m worried that all those years of struggling to produce this game and making dumb side projects in its stead may have given Kingdom Hearts a convolution addiction. It can’t just release this long-awaited work of art; it’s gotta be weird about it. It needs hardcore in-jokes that don’t even make sense, needless beats that are more confusing than enlightening, and odd proclamations. Also, the title “Kingdom Hearts III” already came up earlier, during one of the two opening montages, so it messed up its own joke.

It’s not like there isn’t already enough confusion. Xigbar—and apparently he is Xigbar, not his original form of Braig (not that there’s a difference)—is on hand to spout vague threats against Sora. Those are pretty weak, seeing as we know that Sora has to be part of the villain’s plans anyway, but they’re at least better than Maleficent’s plot. She’s going after a black box, and while we can ascertain that it’s the black box from the Back Cover movie, without that context it sounds like she’s looking for a downed airplane manifest. She was the main villain of Kingdom Hearts I, for god’s sake, and she’s now reduced to the role of sidelined day player.

Since I’ll hold off on talking about the new mechanics for brevity’s sake, I’ll only mention that I quit mid-session. Part of the Olympus level involves saving people who give you stuff if you help them. I forgot to talk to one of the people I helped, and they disappeared before I came back, so I decided to jump back to my last manual save and get them. They were just stock healing items, but it still felt worth doing. Characters like them and your partners now have voiced dialogue during regular gameplay, which feels like more of a game-changer than it probably is.

May 9: Continued through Olympus, entered the Realm of the Gods.

Honestly? The gameplay is fine. Fine and not much else. It’s very much Kingdom Hearts II with some extra affectations, as A fragmentary passage was. The Flowmotion moves from Dream Drop Distance are back; they seem less powerful (sadly, you can’t dash through the map by jumping off a wall anymore), but balancing them was probably the right move. I like Sora’s new Water magic, and I’m interested to see what new spells there are. Auto-refill is as useful as ever. Forgot to try the Shotlock.

All the new big things are little more than bombast. Team attacks are easier to activate than ever, and as usual they’re all very flashy, simple moves that hit everything. Trinity Moves from KH1 are back, currently in the form of a sequence where you slide over fiery floors on Goofy’s shield. There’s a new version of the limit from previous games that turns Sora into various Disneyland attractions. Sora can run up walls, a potentially exciting addition for the platforming and combat that mostly seems to exist for its own sake. None of them are bad, but each addition feels a bit like gilding the lily. It’s coincidental that I’m fighting the Heartless in Ancient Greece, because KH3 feels far more like the original God of War than anything from this series—and not just because the first boss fight is against a Titan so mammoth that Sora has to summon a rollercoaster to kill it.

The Pirate Ship is the worst looking attraction, the least fun to play, the one that isn’t actually based on a Disneyland ride, and the one you use the most by far. Naturally.

This movement from the quieter pleasures of Kingdom Hearts is matched by the game’s art direction, which has gotten smooth and lifeless in the transition to HD. Instead of the balloon-headed Bratz dolls from their first adventure, Sora, Riku, and Kairi are now perfectly average video game characters. There’s an underlying lifelessness to the people; Hercules is especially plasticine, but everyone feels kinda static. And the world follows it. Thebes is boring for its role as this blockbuster sequence. The subsequent trek up Mount Olympus is a bit better, but still pretty bland.

It’s not all negative, to be clear, and the end of my session provided the most enticing element so far. After beating the Rock Titan (bad by normal video game boss standards, fine by Kingdom Hearts boss standards), I was ushered into the Realm of the Gods. It’s no boring streets, no blandly pretty mountains, but a grandiose hall that looks like the set of a Wagnerian opera. Even the theme, a fantastic remix of the classic Olympus Coliseum theme, feels big. While it has never been able to perfectly depict it, Kingdom Hearts is at its best when it adapts more “painterly,” impressionistic art styles. The Realm is a nice counterpoint to Halloween Town and Symphony of Sorcery, though of course I’ll have to get through it to see if that comparison holds.

May 10: Completed Olympus, explored the first Gummi Ship section.

Unfortunately, another good comparison would be to some of the lesser worlds of Kingdom Hearts II. That game was also invested in tangible size, and its weaker levels ended up being too big for their own good. But even the more samey parts of the Land of Dragons or Pride Lands are nothing compared to the Realm of the Gods, which is absurdly bloated. It’s… it’s insane! It’s so big, and so empty! There are crazy sections that don’t go anywhere, one solitary puzzle in the forge of Hephaestus that’s really cool but out of place, and a poor use of space. It’s just more bombast.

It also features Sora’s new dramatic attack fall, another thing that is, perhaps like Sora himself, fun but largely empty inside.

Naturally, this extends to the boss fight: a two-parter that pits you against three Titans, first Ice and Lava together and then Tornado solo. These are huge enemies; you’re supposed to zip to them using that weird new grapple move (though you can jump and slash at the first two Titans normally). The Tornado Titan forces Sora to glide through the air like it’s Ansem, the worst boss in the Kingdom Hearts franchise. As a fight, it’s all very cinematic and intimidating and… boring. Totally boring. The scale feels meaningless when you can literally just do a standard combo and fly into two of the Titans, and none of the four have any weight at all. That God of War comparison has only made more sense.

This also fits the weak ending of Olympus, where Sora learns that being a hero means throwing yourself into danger to help someone you care about, something with which he is pretty well acquainted already. He doesn’t unlock any old power, the “power of waking,” or anything that justifies that “Kingdom Hearts 2.9″ joke, but getting this extremely basic idea was apparently all worth it. We don’t get anything new out of Hercules as a character either, but perhaps that’s the point. He’s extremely static in this game, befitting how my best friend put it this week: that if Disney Hercules is essentially Superman (which is great; that’s my favorite superhero), Kingdom Hearts Hercules is the stony, unchanging Superman of the Superfriends cartoon. He has no more need for character development, I guess, because he’s cracked the secret and just has to be the hero forever.

Olympus was a bust, but I think I know why it was picked for the starting world. It has been part of Kingdom Hearts from the start and has been in almost every game. It’s rarely been more than a combat arena—an arena that isn’t even part of the Hercules movie. And while there’s honestly nothing about the crossover’s version of Hercules that’s any more heroic than any of the other Disney heroes it reuses, it’s easy to slot him into the role of the person Sora admires. In theory, this makes it a perfect jumping off point. You can finally see beyond the Ionic (Doric?) columns to gaze upon all of Thebes. You can get what feels like the first real ending for a Disney World in this franchise. You can get more time with Herc and Meg and Phil before crossing into the realms of newer, more marketable IPs.

And there’s the rub: we could get these things, but we didn’t. Meg and Phil were royally shafted (the latter doesn’t speak to honor his recently passed Japanese voice actor, Ichirō Nagai). The ending, where Herc leaves the Olympian Gods to live in Greece, feels unearned when we’ve only just met his divine family. Having the ending only makes me think of how dumb it is to segregate the Disney characters into their own worlds, thus only allowing very limited kinds of character growth. Thebes is a lifeless town on a lifeless mountain. It’s not an awful level; it’s not Space Paranoids or End of the World. But it’s a bad way to start off. I think it could’ve been good, even really good, had it reigned in the size and focused on those characters.

But before we end, and on the subject of characters, let’s also pour one our for rightwing madman, alleged probable cokehead, and America’s Number One Hades fan—like, apparently his Hercules contract actually stipulates he gets first refusal for playing the character—James Woods. He’s been as prominent a Kingdom Hearts actor as anyone else, and the God of the Dead’s mixture of boredom and sleaze has always been entertaining. This was a pretty perfect exit for Hades (unless you think the blue flames in the Kingdom Hearts IV trailer are teasing his reappearance). He speaks Yiddish, talks trash to Maleficent, gets zapped by brother Zeus in the latter’s first onscreen appearance, but is treated as a comforting constant. He hopefully won’t make any more schemes involving planetary alignment, because wow was this one bad, but we do kinda hope he’ll continue to ineffectually bedevil Herc, mesmerizing performance in tow.

May 11: Didn’t play.

Since I’m not playing today, this would be a great time to talk about the many, many things I found yesterday between finishing Olympus and accessing Twilight Town. Let’s just write a list for them:

The black box from Back Cover contains the Book of Prophecy, though whether or not it has the lost page that everyone gave a damn about is unclear.
Maleficent wants the book, presumably because that’ll be what really puts her on top of the villain ladder.
Xigbar has something scary to say.
Pete and Maleficent found “a” black box. It’s actually purple, and it’s actually Pandora’s Box. Xigbar might want that?
Riku and Mickey’s mission was to find Aqua in the Dark Realm, but they couldn’t find her—and Riku’s cool evil eye sword was cut in half. No joke, most powerful death in the series so far.
Less of a tragedy: you get to play as Riku, and all his spells are better.
Riku’s deeply uncomfortable with Mickey’s suggestion that Aqua is like Sora. Why? I don’t know if I want to know the answer…
Even though she’s in a deeper abyss than before, since no one’s seen Terra or Ventus for ten years, we need to rescue Aqua first to find them. Sensible plan, since it’s not like either of them would be helpful for finding her.
Sora has a new costume! It’s probably his best one.
Sora also has a new phone, courtesy of Chip and Dale. This explains why every loading screen is, once again, a social media post filled with too many hashtags.
Jiminy is back!
Two of the Organization XIII guys—or, rather, their original forms—are now on the good guy team. They’re operating out of Radiant Garden, unsurprisingly.
We’ve gotta find Roxas. Why? I’m, um, not sure. Sora feels the two hearts inside him, which he assumes connects him to Roxas and not Ventus. Admittedly, he might still be unaware about Ventus’ whole deal.

I need to be clear that all of this was from a series of cutscenes and one bit of gameplay. It was right after finishing the first world and before I had a chance to start the second. I didn’t have a moment to save after finishing Olympus. In fact, it seems as though I can’t save in the world map anymore, which is a shame (I’ll need to check further). Kingdom Hearts III seems very invested in dumping plot on you, and in practice it comes across a bit like stream of consciousness. It’s odd to me how things like “develop Kairi into a better character” seem to have taken a backseat to finding McGuffins that don’t mean anything to the vast majority of the cast.

After many games of it blissfully gone, the Gummi Ship has returned with a vengeance. Somehow, this weird side mini-game based on a long-terminated licensing deal Disney had with a candy company has a larger role in this game than it ever had before. Now, the Gummi Ship goes through what appears to be a grand space sandbox, full of optional battle screens and puzzles. It’s insane. It’s also not good. Maybe these games are going about it the wrong way. I respect wanting to keep in a system and not simply get rid of it, but maybe it would be okay if the Gummi Ship was simply relegated to a smaller part of the game.

May 12: Entered and completed Twilight Town.

Side note: I wrote a more conventional Kingdom Hearts article yesterday!

It seems those post-level cutaway scenes are here to stay. I think it’s a good idea, mostly, since Kingdom Hearts basically has too many characters to keep track of and no willingness to not use all of them. Mickey figures out that the reason why Ansem and Xemnas look young was because they were split from a Terra possessed by Xehanort (which deep-sixes my original theory that he used magic to make them look young). All the villains seem sure they’re going to get Sora to join the Darkness this time. And Kairi is still vaguely training alongside Axel. No, not Lea; he wants her to call him “Axel.”

Meanwhile, Ienzo goes out of his way to refer to Zexion, his dead Nobody, in a hashtag. I have to wonder exactly how many characters are Instagrammers now.

Okay. Recap time. So, Lea was a guy who was split in two. One of those halves became a Nobody who looked, sounded, and acted exactly like him. This Nobody joined Organization XIII under the name “Axel,” because every member was a Nobody whose name was their original’s name shuffled around and with an X (or rather, the Recusant’s Sigil, a memetic tracking device). Axel died, like everyone else in Organization XIII, and dying brought back each member’s original forms with their Nobodies’ memories. So now Lea, with Axel’s memories, is on the good guy team. People keep calling him Axel even after he asks them to call him Lea, except now he’s asking people to call him Axel. This seems true for the members we’ve seen come back and explains why we’re calling Braig “Xigbar.”

That’s fine for me, because the Nobody names are way more fun to write, but holy hell is this needlessly confusing. Again, convolution addiction. Or maybe it reveals the probable reason these characters are actually coming back and using their old names: to be another gift to the players, as Organization XIII has a lot of dead fan favorites whose original forms and names don’t cut it. “Hey,” it shouts! “They’re still the same cool cats from Org XIII you know and love! You don’t have to settle for just liking people who are incredibly similar to them; they’re as good as back from the dead!” It’s such an odd bit of pandering.

Coincidentally, that fits today’s world. Because if the return to Olympus was about fulfilling fan wishes, the return to Twilight Town—the world that kicked off Kingdom Hearts II, the setting of 358/2 Days—seems to be about easing fan concerns. Ever since Kingdom Hearts became a franchise, not just one nutty game, it’s kept making side games and spinoffs, most of which star or feature new characters. Many of those characters have been left by the wayside, few more thoroughly (and arguably deservingly) than Roxas’s friends Hayner, Pence, and Olette. The three, and the other members of the sleepy town, were exceptionally boring kids who helped give KH2 a bizarre opening act. Dislike them though I do, they have fans who spent a decade hoping to finally see them again. Bringing them back could be hard because they don’t really have a reason to return, but that didn’t stop fans from hoping.

And now they’re back! In fact, Twilight Town really feels like an attempt to recapture the investment fans have in the series’ weird detours, particularly the ones tied to Roxas. The city itself (at least, a few rooms thereof) is recreated perfectly in HD. It has the nasty underpass, the odd forest, even the trams. Sora can’t stop mentioning how long ago his last visit felt, because even though it’s been barely any time for him—KH3 happens directly after Dream Drop Distance, which happens directly after KH2—fans had to wait ten years to see this place again since its last appearance. You fight Nobodies again. Skateboarding, Roxas’ preferred way of traversal, is gone, but an NPC makes sure to mention the sport. Naminé gets a reference. And the plot hinges on finding her virtual Twilight Town from KH2 via the datascape of KH coded. Yep, coded is more important to Kingdom Hearts lore than Kingdom Hearts I now.

On the gameplay side of things, we’ve got four new additions, two of which involve Sora’s new smartphone. He can take pictures (with an environmental puzzle based on photographing Mickey Mouse symbols in each world that I am here for) and play Game & Watch-inspired Kingdom Hearts games that Uncle Scrooge has turned into silent films. Those are cool. Less interesting is the new summoning system, a fun but slight mechanic that involves the Dream Eaters from the last game, and a new cooking mini-game run by Remy from Ratatouille. The latter has bad quicktime event prompts and a nebulous reward, but it mostly seems like a way for this series to incorporate crafting, which was omnipresent a few years before KH3 came out. This did have a very long development, after all.

Why, it seems like this is turning into another long one, isn’t it?

May 13: Entered Toy Box, got up to the Toy Store.

Okay, look, I just… I… okay, this is just getting too much. I can’t handle it. It’s not even bad; my brain is just breaking from all of the weirdness of seeing Toy Story stuff in this game. I’m only a week out of dealing with the utter insanity of the live action 1994 Flintstones movie where Fred Flintstone is played by John Goodman and almost gets lynched and goes to a concert to watch the B-52’s as themselves in Prehistoric times. This is way too much concentrated insanity. I’m gonna stop playing for the rest of the week, take the rest of the day off, and write up my initial thoughts on Toy Box tomorrow.

I know the series now has Pixar stuff, and I know Ratzenberger’s their lucky charm, but wow, I really, really did not expect to hear Cliff in a Kingdom Hearts game.

May 14: Didn’t play.

I came into Kingdom Hearts III knowing a number of plot points and features, one of which was the list of Disney IPs that made the cut for worlds. Of the new ones—your Tangleds, your Big Hero 6s—the only one I’ve seen, let alone have nostalgia for, is Toy Story. But damn, nostalgia I have. I only saw Toy Story 2 once as a kid, and I’ve not watched any of them as an adult, but I loved them. I loved the characters, too, Woody especially. So, as was the case with A Nightmare Before Christmas, I was excited to go back to it here. And as appears to be the case with Nightmare’s Halloween Town, the Toy Box is so far quite a big bump in quality. It’s got some of the same problems as Olympus, like being too big to sustain the gameplay, but that’s far more justifiable when the premise is that you’ve shrunken down to the size of an Army Man™. I’m quite excited to keep going tomorrow.

So quality was not the problem I had yesterday. The problem is that Toy Box is way too f___ing weird. I realize that organizing my writeup by the linear order of events is not that interesting, but this was like a cascade of surprises, and not even in the style of Kingdom Hearts’ usual rapid-fire reveals. It kinda broke me, even though it was by far the most fun I’ve had with the game.

So. Sora, Donald, and Goofy find their way into Andy’s bedroom, the suburban home of the characters from the series (even if most of the movies, and most of the world, primarily take place outside it). They’re surprised that they’re small, only slightly more surprised that they are literally made of plastic, and meet the rather truncated Toy Story gang: Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Rex, Hamm, three Army Men, and three of those cultist aliens. Everyone else has been abducted by Organization XIII, leaving this much more manageable blend of licensed real life toys and original characters. Everyone’s gonna have to team up, escape the house, and sneak into the toy store to save the day! So it’s crazy, but no crazier than Kingdom Hearts normally is, right… ?

Well, first, it’s the acting. While Tom Hanks and Tim Allen unsurprisingly do not return as Woody and Buzz, Hanks’ (comparably talented but far less famous) brother Jim is here in his stead, saving us from a Woody impression by Tom’s loser son Chet Haze. It is a disarmingly good impression, but it only caused me to be blindsided by the Toy Story actors they did get, and who I forgot were in the movies. Classical actor Wallace Shawn—you know, My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, Deep Space Nine Wallace Shawn—reprises his role as joyful dinosaur Rex. John Ratzenberger is back, too, as Hamm the piggy bank. Ratzenberger is Pixar’s lucky charm (even Coco, which strove to have an all-Latinx principal cast, has him in a cameo), but again, that still means that Cheers’ know-it-all barfly Cliff Clavin is now in Kingdom Hearts. Cliff and the Grand Nagus are in Kingdom Hearts! This is not normal! Why didn’t I hear stories of players losing their minds over seeing the first five minutes of this level?

It’s not bad, to be clear. It’s quite good! But it’s also mind-boggling.

It took me a while to settle down from this; I’ll probably try to rewatch the Toy Box’s first cutscene because the shock was hitting me pretty bad. So I decided to take a few minutes and quietly explore the bedroom. It’s the first good use of size in Kingdom Hearts III, and it was fun climbing around. But then, I saw an open window. And I remembered our destination. And then I… jumped out the window. It was great! But that also shocked me; Kingdom Hearts is often obtuse about mechanics, but never about directions. Jumping out without being directed to do so was immensely powerful in a way I’ve almost never gotten from this series. After that, it was a lot more calm: see the pretty grass, jump on the roof from a trampoline, find a Mickey symbol, walk on the street, see that there are left and right exits, and go with the rightmost one. Very easy.

And yet, the weirdness stays. It’s lesser, admittedly, but it stays. You get to team up with Woody and Buzz and Donald and Goofy, a nice leap over how Kingdom Hearts I and II forced you to choose between a guest party member and a regular one. After walking maybe a tenth of a block (this is not a demand that Kingdom Hearts fully recreate an entire small town), we wind up at a toy store. We learn that toys can only come to life if they become aware of that fact, which Young Xehanort likens to hearts and Nobodies because Xehanort is in all likelihood not that great a scientist. He then has an army of giant toys attack Sora (just like… Nobodies?). Sora jumps into another toy, the game suddenly becomes a first-person brawler / shooter / mech game, and afterwards we learn that this whole time we may have been in another version of the Toy Story world built by the Real Organization XII. After all, Buzz, why else would your laser pointer suddenly start working as a blaster? It’s… it’s a lot.

But none of that even comes close to the craziest thing of all: the very first thing you do in the world—other than fighting a terrible Gummi Ship boss—is watch a trailer for a fake video game! You’re ready to hang out with Tom Hank’s Brother, and instead you’re subjected to this, like, two minute FMV preview for Verum Rex, a hacky fictional JRPG that looks suspiciously like a Final Fantasy spin-off. Is that where the mech toys come from? And Hamm and Rex from Toy Story… they’re… they’re fans of this game! They think Sora is the protagonist! And then Ratzenbeger mentions Gigas, and Shawn mentions Bahamut! This stupid game presumably paid Wallace Shawn real money so he could namedrop the Final Fantasy version of a mythological whale! The utterly out of place Verum Rex crosses the line between baffling and banal, and knowing that it’s going to be a major part of Kingdom Hearts IV does not make it any more digestible for my brain.

Okay, watch that, and now imagine that right afterwards, we pull back to see that it’s playing on a Nineties CRT television and being rapturously watched by the evil brain from the final season of Regular Show.

Look, if you play Kingdom Hearts, confusion will quickly be a bedfellow. This is a monumentally bizarre franchise, and the fact that I can’t help myself from writing more and more about it is a testament to that. But I feel like this is definitely a different sort of demented. It has Pixar and what might be our first major CGI franchise and two actors that don’t fit Kingdom Hearts at all. But most of all, it uses that weirdness to prop up an even crazier bit of weirdness, i.e. the trailer for a game that doesn’t exist, published by the real world company that makes Kingdom Hearts, but also has “secret” history behind it and is only going to become more intertwined with a franchise that’s supposed to be about hanging out with Simba and Ariel. The convolution addiction is only getting more… tangled.

…You get it? Because I’m going to be doing the Tangled world next?

Final Thoughts: There are a number of adjectives Kingdom Hearts III is trying to hit in its opening acts. The one it hits hardest—though it’s a dead heat between it, “crazy,” and “incomprehensible”—might be “loud.” This is a game that screams everything it wants to say. It wants everyone to hear it, to see it, to play it. Everything is greater in size and scale, the perfect way to send off Sora’s fight against Xehanort. In theory.

The truth of the matter is that so far, that noise has been pretty hollow. The story is no more complex or deep than any other Kingdom Hearts experience, none of which were that great at it to begin with. The gameplay is pretty and polished, but it feels shallower than most of the entries I’ve played. What new things are there are either light embellishments (the zipline move, the Disneyland attractions) or features that got more time than they probably needed (the cooking game, the Gummi Ship sandbox) And, really, the story is only more difficult to understand by the sheer number of samey characters involved; it’s rather simple. Sora, like always, has to go from world to world until he eventually figures out the thing.

This loudness does impact the story, because it’s putting the eccentricities of this franchise into overdrive. Kingdom Hearts is weird. It has always been weird. We all know this; anyone reading this has experienced it, either through a game or YouTube clip or meme. But Kingdom Hearts III has taken the weirdness and turned it into outright derangement. Instructable storylines from different entries are being rammed into each other like toy cars, and you’re expected to remember even the tiniest details. Lampshading and in-jokes are so prevalent that every character is rushing to their Gummiphone to post about them. And all the while, the series is still doing plot revelations and exposition as it always has, i.e. breathlessly stating each one with no personality. Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty telling Jafar from Aladdin that she wants to get seven “Princesses of Heart” is weird. Maleficent telling Hades from Hercules that she wants to get a magic black box we last saw in a movie set tens of thousands of years before this game takes place is deranged.

If nothing else, that has given the game a lot of energy. And I’d be lying if I claimed that the silliness or the bombast weren’t big parts of the appeal. I’ve always had a lot of fun joking about the dumb plotting and tone-deaf writing and general goofiness. The same is true for the series’ general beauty and style and scope, all of which wouldn’t have happened if the games weren’t a bit loud. These are less “important” to Kingdom Hearts than downright foundational. Hell, at a certain point this article used “weird” or a derivation thereof twenty-four times.

But they don’t stop the issues from being issues (in fact, they sometimes exacerbate them), and they should not keep the series from evolving. Because Kingdom Hearts needs to evolve. Not just because that’s important for every series, but because we are nearing a point of maximum derangement saturation. It can’t keep trying to make every spin-off game—and no matter how important they are to the plot, most of the entries not labeled with an integer are spin-offs—equally necessary to the story. It shouldn’t go so far out of its way to confuse anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with every game and Disney movie. It needs to be willing to let some things go, and I don’t mean Disney IPs. Because so far KH3 has been an overwhelming, almost cult-like experience, and mostly not in a good way.

However, now let’s cut away to a conspicuous new scene for our dramatic ending stinger. I’m at my computer, trying to type out sentences about this franchise. I look at the header I’m making in Pixlr, watching the chapter numbers go up. We’re almost done with this one. And thus does a voice in the back of my mind ask: “what comes next?”

Overall progress: Started Kingdom Hearts III, making it through two levels and into the third.

Other games played: