Sora, Donald, and Goofy in Kingdom Hearts 3.

Why My Disappointment with Kingdom Hearts 3 is (Mostly) Not the Game’s Fault

In Features by Chris Durston

Everyone’s got that game, or that series. Y’know: the one that was probably responsible for getting you into gaming in the first place, or was at least a really big part of your early, foundational gaming experiences. It’s probably something that you became a little bit obsessed with, that you adore with what others might think of as an irrational fervour, that you played and replayed and got to know every little detail of inside out; the one that you would finish and immediately restart over and over, that you would always kind of be playing through on the back burner even when other releases were taking up the primary bulk of your gaming time. For me, that series is Kingdom Hearts.

The first game in the franchise was the first thing I played when I first got a PlayStation 2, and I couldn’t believe what was happening. I had no idea what was going on; I’d picked it off the shelf at a rental store because the cover looked dark enough to be exciting to me, as a kid just old enough to finally have an actual console and therefore presumably to be exploring mature games and whatnot, and friendly enough to be accessible to me (courtesy of the Disney presence, although I don’t think I’d actually seen more than two or three Disney movies). I put the disc into my PS2 – a disc, for heaven’s sake! Forget Game Boy Advance cartridges, bozos, I’m playing a movie now – and just sort of allowed Kingdom Hearts to happen to me. First I travelled through a mist-and-shadow-shrouded series of beautiful stained-glass platforms while dark choral music swelled ominously; then I came face-to-face with my own shadow, a huge hulking thing that nearly swallowed me whole but which I somehow overcame; then, for some reason, I met a bunch of teenage versions of Final Fantasy characters (I had no idea who they were, of course, since I’d never heard of Final Fantasy at this point in my life) on a happy, bright beach where coconut trees grew merrily and tropical music bounced optimistically.

It was a weird experience.

A young boy stands on a stained-glass platform looking at three pedestals with floating weapons, in the opening to the first Kingdom Hearts game.

Somehow I fell in love with Kingdom Hearts, even though its primary USP was being a bizarre union of two titans neither of whom I was at all familiar with. I played it to death, spending every available hour after school each day simply doing as much as I could with the game: back in the PS2 days, of course, there were no achievements, but I’m pretty sure that I would have got the platinum if trophies had been around back then. I developed self-imposed challenges; I played the game as fast as I could (without knowing what ‘speedrunning’ was or developing any real strategies); I explored every nook and cranny of every world in search of secrets.

And then Kingdom Hearts II happened. Holy heck, y’all. I genuinely think I was so excited about Kingdom Hearts II that a little bit of froth started to form in my mouth when I thought about it. (I was twelve when it released, which is just about young enough for that level of obsession to be excusable and just about old enough for it to be considered extremely weird by just about everyone I knew.) I actually made my first-ever online purchase for KH2: I went into town on the day I’d read it was releasing, only for it to be nowhere to be found, and on that day I learned that regional release dates were a thing and that it was only out in the US, not my native England. So I went on the interweb and ordered a copy from America, at what I remember as being a very high price that completely wiped out any savings I might have had; when it arrived, I ripped off the plastic wrap and opened the box with a fervour like a shark tearing apart a bleeding fish and somehow managed to jam it into the PlayStation without breaking it. On that day, I learned that region-locking was a thing.

Anyway, I eventually stopped crying – just in time for Kingdom Hearts II to come out in the UK for realsies. The next… probably about four years or so of my life were defined by that game. I loved it even more than I’d loved its predecessor (I had played Chain of Memories on Game Boy Advance, but spent most of my time with it just hyping myself up for KH2, so I didn’t give it as much attention as it deserved), and I filled up all 99 save slots just before different bosses with different equipment or stats so that I could try out every variation I could conceive of, every method of attack and every trick I could devise. This, by the way, wasn’t even the Final Mix+ version included in the PS3 and PS4 versions of the game: it was missing an entire difficulty mode, over a dozen superbosses, and swathes of abilities to enhance the experience. And I still thought it was the greatest thing my tiny mind had ever come across in the entire universe.

A battle takes place in Kingdom Hearts 2: a hooded figure controls pillars of light.

(Then there were a bunch more games, some of which I really liked, but that’s not a particularly interesting story, so… with your permission, I’ll skip forwards a little. In fact I’m doing it with or without your permission. This isn’t Bandersnatch, alas and alack.)

Thirteen years later, something happened that I had begun to disbelieve I would ever really see. Sure, I knew that Kingdom Hearts III was in development; I’d seen all the trailers, I’d read all the theories, I’d spent months of my life thinking about little more than how I was going to play this game, this momentous, genuinely significant event, and how it would be the culmination of not only a story that had been unfolding within this peculiar fictional world but of an arc that had developed in my actual life. This was meaningful to me. This was the promise of my childhood (well, adolescence-ish) coming to fruition to me, as an adult, now ready to experience the climax of that chapter.

It was surreal, playing KH3. It’s sort of like visiting a place you’ve seen pictures of, somewhere you’ve known about all your life and thought you might never see with your own eyes: it’s familiar, even nostalgic, and because you feel that you already know it there’s a peculiar sense of a dream gone sideways, or a kind of subverted déjà vu, when it introduces something new that you weren’t expecting or hadn’t known about. I found the whole experience thoroughly strange, to be honest. ‘Like, is any of this for real, or not?

I love a lot of things about Kingdom Hearts III. I really do. The music, for example: I cannot possibly fault it, and it even made me actively seek out more music by Skrillex, a feat I would have thought impossible. I adore the way the game looks: it feels as if it’s a realisation of the beauty that my imagination attributes to the earlier games. (Know what I mean? Sometimes you think back on things from days gone by and remember them not as the slightly low-resolution images they were but as mentally-upscaled, beautified versions of what they meant in your mind.) As for the gameplay, I think it is not, as some have claimed, a case of style over substance but a spectacle, a ludicrously stylish experience built on solid foundations.

A battle in Kingdom Hearts 3. Sora, looking like a toy figure, uses yo-yos to pummel small enemy creatuers.

Now, a lot of people were in a similar boat to myself in the lead-up to KH3. This series meant – and means – a lot of things to a lot of individuals, for many of whom it has been a genuine influence on their lives and become something beyond simple entertainment, something transformative and truly important in their lives… and each of those people had a long time to develop an image in their minds of what they thought Kingdom Hearts III would or should be. There are those who were so thoroughly in-tune with every narrative and thematic element that they had developed entire, wholly believable, plot outlines for the direction they expected or hoped this closing chapter of the Dark Seeker Saga would take; others, so tremendously immersed in each detail and facet of previous instalments’ gameplay that they were able to prognosticate on precisely what KH3 would look like mechanically and how that would work.

The point is, Kingdom Hearts fans were, and remain, an invested bunch. The eventual release of Kingdom Hearts III really did feel like a world-changing, once-in-a-lifetime, important thing, and because everyone already had such strong feelings about how they thought that it ought, or was likely, to unfold, KH3 was in the extremely unenviable position of truly not being able to please everyone. After all, not everyone had the same opinions, and several of those different opinions were mutually exclusive: you can’t possibly satisfy both those who wanted Sora and Kairi to develop a romance and the Sora-Riku shippers, as just one example. More than that: with huge, vibrant communities springing up to focus on various parts of the game (entire subcultures, almost, of people devoted to plot theorising or speedrunning or, I don’t know, merch collecting), and with a lot of time for opinions to spread so widely that they were almost accepted as certain fact, many people came to feel that the fans had some sort of ownership of KH3.

I don’t mean this to sound as if the fans were at fault here. People love these games, and I think it’s great when people get super invested in a thing they love and get creative about the way they express that. It’s a wonderful thing.

That said, by the time KH3 emerged kicking and screaming into the world, it was surely completely impossible for it to live up to expectations.

A cutscene from Kingdom Hearts 3, with Sora and Donald looking like toys and Woody from Toy Story talking to a small green soldier.

Almost before the game had even released (well, actually, some of this did happen before release thanks to copious promotional material and a regrettable leak), some people began to feel let down in a very sincere, very painful way by Kingdom Hearts III. It wasn’t the thing they had been building in their minds for the past five years: the story didn’t resolve in the way they felt it should have done; their favourite character didn’t get a satisfying enough arc; the gameplay mechanics weren’t as solid as previous entries in the franchise had had.

A lot of these complaints are warranted, I think. It’s certainly fair to point out examples of what you as an audience member consider bad writing or poor design, but I think the extent to which some people heaped scorn on KH3 as if they had been owed something – not something better, even, so much as something more alike to their own conception of it – was perhaps unfortunate. I think there were both good reasons and not-so-good reasons that were floated around for criticising, if not outright condemning, the game, with the not-so-good ones becoming the focus as a vocal minority voiced them and a larger reactionary contingent got annoyed about them.

For my part, I actually think KH3 is a really good game. There’s a lot to love about its charming characterisation and design, its explosive combat (again, I think of it as a spectacle, certainly designed to be over-the-top awesomez but without neglecting the underlying basics, rather than a case of style over substance), and the satisfaction it grants in allowing me to beat up some villains who are very hateable and very fun to overcome. Sure, I agree with some of the flaws people have pointed out (and I look forward to seeing whether the upcoming DLC takes steps to address some of those things), but overall I really like it.

And yet I too was disappointed.

Here’s the thing, though. I wasn’t actually all that disappointed with the game itself. It did very few things that I felt were actively letting me down, as a player and a fan. I was not let down by Kingdom Hearts III so much as I was deflated by my own reaction to it.

See, as a kid I was so excited. I had so much time and so much energy to invest in fully losing myself in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II (and to a slightly reduced extent the other titles in the series); I could dedicate what felt like every spare moment of my life to obsessing over every detail of this world and this experience. I could live it. I could become it. I was never finished with it, never.

By the time KH3 plopped through my letterbox, though, I was an adult. Heck, it was my letterbox rather than my parents’ – that alone’s a weird enough thought. I had a job, responsibilities. I was grown.

My immediate reactions to Kingdom Hearts III were pure nostalgic joy, a feeling that those times from my childhood were returning to me – and that feeling was captured more than once as I played through the game, to what I think is its credit – and then I finished the game. And then I realised: I’d finished the game. I wasn’t going to immediately start again. I wasn’t going to scour it for every secret; I wasn’t going to play every boss ad nauseam until I could do ’em with my eyes shut. (Disclaimer: although I played KH2 for probably thousands of hours, I don’t think I could ever actually beat it with my eyes shut.)

In other words, Kingdom Hearts III was just a game to me. I actually feel kind of emotional writing that, like it’s a realisation I’ve only just had or something. This franchise has meant so much to me throughout my life, and yet through no fault of its own but through my life simply not being the same, I just completed KH3 once as if it were any other game and not the culmination of one of the things that had been the most important to me in the whole world.

I was wondering at first, of course, whether this was because I thought KH3 was in fact a bad game. When I realised that I’d finished it and then just sort of put it away, like that was just it, I wondered what it had done to deserve that. How had it offended me? But no; my memories of the game, when I think about it, are of the things I truly love about it. And I do still feel a lot of love towards it, just… not that kind of love that drives me to spend every spare minute wringing every iota of entertainment out of it. I really don’t want to say I’ve ‘grown out of it’, because I don’t think that’s the case: being an adult doesn’t mean I don’t still love the franchise and want to experience all it has to offer… so what is the difference?

Are my tastes and motivations different, or is it just that I don’t have the opportunity to act on them these days? I’m not sure. On the one hand, I certainly do have some time which I could be using to continually play KH3, so clearly I don’t care as much about doing that as I used to; on the other, that some time is now more scarce and so I want to use it on a wider range of worthwhile things. Playing Kingdom Hearts III was worthwhile, for sure. It’s just that I no longer feel that playing it to exhaustion would be.

(I absolutely do not judge anyone, adult or child, who does feel that playing and replaying KH3 or any other game is what they want to be doing. I think that’s wonderful, and I’m ecstatic that it’s making them happy!)

I really want to wrap this up positively: this feels like a sad story, but I’m not sure it has to be. I am still a fan of Kingdom Hearts, as a franchise. I still sometimes go back and play KH2, mostly, usually on Critical mode or some other challenge just to remind myself of how incredibly well-made that game is, to recall some of that obsessive adoration I had as a kid, and just to have fun. Again, I don’t feel I’ve grown out of being able to love something in that way, and I don’t think the message here is that becoming an adult means you can’t be a fan of something any more or occasionally get super excited in a way that some might think of as being a bit childish. Heck, I practically waved my arms in the air and ran around the house when my copy of KH3 arrived, I was so hyped.

It’s not that I don’t still have it in me to feel that kind of joy; I think I too was a victim of my own overexcitement, albeit perhaps not in the same kind of way as some fans were. It wasn’t that I was expecting something in the actual game, and was then devastated not to get it; it was that I thought that my reaction as a human being would be the same to this different game, in a different time and a different situation, and it wasn’t. And that’s fine!

In a screenshot, Sora takes a selfie posed to look as if a tiny Donald Duck is standing on his hand.

Y’know, I think that if KH2 had never been a thing, people would have been awestruck by Kingdom Hearts III. They’d never have seen anything like it! The beautiful combat, the sheer density of options available, the fluidity and dynamism… but a lot of people loved Kingdom Hearts II very, very much and were disappointed because Kingdom Hearts III was not simply Kingdom Hearts II again. I include myself in that category – to my regret, and it’s something I was again disappointed in myself to realise! – and that’s not the game’s fault but my own. It was a victim of the hype built around it, as I was of my anticipation of just how impossibly much I was going to love it. I just didn’t love it as much as I thought I would, but now I reckon that’s OK, at least more so than I thought it was. Things are different. Everything’s different! I can’t expect to keep having the exact same experiences and reactions to things, so perhaps the lesson is to just go with that: enjoy things for what they are, rather than worrying about what they aren’t.

Kingdom Hearts III is its own game, a new experience. It has wonderful music, astonishing visuals, and is in most ways very beautifully put together. It still means a lot to me and has a special place in my heart, both for what it means in the context of the franchise and because I had a great experience playing it. Turns out I just don’t love things in the same way I used to – or, more accurately, I don’t express it in quite the same way, for a buncha reasons – and yet I’m happy with the love I do feel and the joy that I do derive from Kingdom Hearts and other games, books, movies, places, experiences, shoes, food… I dunno, shiny spoons. That’s a lot of love and joy still in my life, and that feels like enough.

Chris Durston on Twitter
Chris Durston
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Aspiring non-procrastinator; amateur writer of odd fiction and Thoughts About Games.