
Your special moves and combo attacks are the dopamine hit Kingdom Hearts 3 delivers best. Equipping your weapons, abilities, and ensuring Donald and Goofy are well-stocked with items to keep you alive will increase your chance for success, and gives the game a more strategic element that can change the way you approach each battle. The Keyblades acquired by protecting the Disney worlds from darkness grant you new powers and flashy attacks, letting you change up your fighting style whenever you wish. Combat is exciting and fast-paced, pitting you against multiple enemies at a time. Oh, and don’t expect to see any cameo appearances from your favorite Final Fantasy characters, either.Īs far as fighting on the ground goes, you’ve got options. In another, where you must rescue citizens from danger, the townspeople seem oddly relaxed, seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding around them. In one world, where one might expect to find a bustling, creature-populated city, there are virtually no signs of life. I’m all for the hero’s journey, especially one with anime-inspired storylines, but the game’s continued reliance on characters’ repetitive explanations isn’t engaging or informative in a way that guides new players, nor does it respect the intelligence of gamers old enough to remember playing the previous titles, ostensibly the target audience for this conclusion.Įxploration, mainly to collect items used for cooking or fabricating more powerful weapons, isn’t enticing enough to shake the feeling I was walking through long-abandoned lands. Genuinely interesting themes about the soul and existence were given as much importance as generic platitudes about fate, friendship, and the forces of darkness. It’s an unfortunate flaw considering how gorgeous it all is. In a game so dependent on dialogue to advance the plot, I was taken aback by how dull the script actually was, and sighed in relief when conversations between tertiary characters finally ended. As you advance after each battle, you’ll encounter more often than not stilted dialogue, drawn out cutscenes, and an uneven pacing symptomatic of a tale stretched far too thin. It’s a story-driven game, and cutscenes are prolific. Unfortunately, even being up to speed on the story can’t save Kingdom Hearts 3 from its own presentation.

That means fans of the first and second game will be guaranteed a plot that makes little sense before viewing at least one YouTube explainer. Kingdom Hearts 3 might take place after Kingdom Hearts 2, but the multitude of games in between the two do the heavy lifting in terms of setting the stage. Given the release schedule of prequels, sequels, and spin-off titles in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, as well as the in-story timeline involving body swapping, identical characters, shared souls, memory loss, and time travel, describing the story in detail is challenging to say the least. In it, you reprise your role as the sword-adjacent Keyblade wielder Sora, and are sent on a mission - along with allies like Riku, Goofy, and Donald Duck - to regain your lost powers in order to protect the titular Kingdom Hearts from radicalist Keyblade wielder and primary antagonist Master Xehanort.
Kingdom hearts 3 release date series#
The twelfth entry in the franchise’s 17-year run, Kingdom Hearts 3 is the conclusion to what is planned to be the first of a series of stories set in the Kingdom Hearts universe.
