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• Kingdom hearts 3 series#

Like every theme park visit, however, there comes a point when you’re tired, your feet hurt and you’re starting to feel sick from all the cheap fast food.

Every moment of tranquillity is swiftly followed by some big set piece, the game constantly crying out for action: hey, look at this, let’s go faster. Every different Disney world boasts at least one area that has you pointing at the screen, eyes round at how pretty everything is, whether that be a large toy store display of plastic dinosaurs, a pirate cove near the glittering sea or a flower-filled meadow buzzing with insects.

Collectibles are directly inspired by real-life Disneyland. Kingdom Hearts III is phenomenal at evoking the dizzying sugar rush that comes with visiting a theme park as a child.

Kingdom hearts 3 series#

Fighting is inelegant chaos, with plenty of new skills that give you a break from mashing one button over and over, but this utter bedlam is very emblematic of the series as a whole – it shouldn’t work, but it does. New special attacks involving Disney theme park rides are screen-filling explosions of colour and glittering lights. There is next to no wall you can’t run up, pillar you can’t swing around or spell you can’t use. Sora zooms around the battlefield, taking on large groups of enemies at once, with the unfortunate effect that they all blend together in the general melee. Fighting them is fun and freeing, letting you string together combos of every move that’s ever existed in Kingdom Hearts. The design of Sora’s kooky adversaries, the Heartless and Nobodies, is astounding, from floaty, flower-like beings to lady Heartless that shoot lasers from their umbrellas. This is disappointing, because Kingdom Hearts is best in those moments where you and Sora truly get to interact with Disney’s worlds, in mini-games with Mickey or whenever Organisation XIII meddles with the plot of a Disney film. The connection between Disney and the other elements of the plot, always shaky at best, now hangs by a single thread. Attempts to bring the audience up to speed end in bits of plot exposition that sound like conversations between amnesiacs: “Do you remember us doing that thing?” “It’s on the tip of my tongue … You mean that time when we went and did that other thing?” “Yeah! This is an important bit of information I probably should have mentioned sooner.” Kingdom Hearts III makes it very easy to forget about all the impending doom, mostly because it doesn’t bring any of it up until very late in the tale. Sora, the boy who wanted nothing than to save his friends and return home, has lived through some harrowing events, but here he essentially starts at zero, once again journeying through various theme-worlds inhabited by Disney characters in preparation for a final showdown with the shadowy Organisation XIII. The game is mostly content to ignore all the backstory baggage and instead keeps the tone cheerful. After all this time, Kingdom Hearts III now tries to reconcile Disney’s ever-expanding dream world with Square’s brand of drama – with mixed results. Since then things have got … rather more complicated, as subsequent games have taken the series further away from its roots and towards its own identity, layering on lore and extra characters and plot twists. K ingdom Hearts started out in 2002 as a happy accidental collision between Disney and Square Enix, a cheerful adventure that brought the American animation giant’s instantly recognisable characters into the drama-fuelled world of Japanese role-playing games.