Jim Reviews! Kingdom Hearts III

[Jim 2,990]

                After all this time waiting for Kingdom Hearts III, I never expected it to live up to all the expectations we had for it. I was even still cautious when I heard reviewers giving it 11/10 across the board, and saying things like “literally the greatest thing since sliced bread,” “Perfect amount of water, 7.9/7.8” and “Like Skyrim with keyblades.” But having played it myself now, I can finally confirm that it is without a doubt Square Enix’s greatest masterpiece to date. Yes, it is even better than Final Fantasy XV, which I reviewed a couple decades ago.

  First off, the gameplay. Kingdom Hearts III has taken the gameplay of all of its predecessors and somehow combined them into a delightfully simple yet incredibly complex hack-and-slash game, with elements of turn based RPGs, fighting games, and Goat Simulators. When Nomura announced that the keyblade would be able to transform, he seemed to let the little bit slide of how many transformations it was capable of. During my playthough, I was able to have it transform into everything from guns and clubs to gliders, cannons, portal guns, frying pans, wii remotes, diapers for Donald, trashcans, Big Daddies, iPod Shuffles, a Tardis, DLC offers, the Bladekey, and a life model decoy of Scarlett Johannsson with the voice of Morgan Freedman that explains the entire story of Kingdom Hearts up until that instant that you selected that particular transformation. Let me just warn you about that last one though, since if you happen to press the x button at the wrong time, it goes through the entire story from BBS to 3, and that’s longer than watching the entire Lord of the Rings Extended Edition trilogy back-to-back-to-back.

  The battle mechanics also received some welcome tweaks. The AI makes full use of the current gen processing power, and it definitely shows. As recently stated by Nomura, each shadow heartless in the game will be running on a code that’s more complicated than that of the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. And the other heartless and the boss fights are even more complicated! Donald and Goofy have received AI buffs as well, so that now they can last up to six seconds before being knocked out. It is truly revolutionary. To compensate for this, the game has been made much more difficult than its predecessors, especially in the new difficulty, Masochistic Mode. This mode gives you a quarter of the HP that you get in other modes, along with 30x the damage received from enemies, and your own damage dealt reduced by 99.999%. On top of that, Masochistic Mode introduces a mechanic where Sora has a 1 in 10 chance of “Dropping” like in DDD every ten seconds, except since there’s no other characters to play as, Sora falls into a coma and dies and you have to start the game over again. It’s a thrilling and well-balanced mechanic, and it brings a ton of extra challenge to the game.  Drive Forms also make a welcome return, offering new forms such as “Keyblade War Form,” where Sora throws countless Keyblades like No Heart does in BBSFM, “Brawler Form,” where Sora puts away the Keyblade and fights with punches and kicks (Kicks doing extra damage because of his comically oversized shoes), and Anti Form’s aptly named spiritual successor “Instant Death Form,” where everyone in the room, including Sora, instantly dies.

  Once again, we have ourselves a masterpiece of a story. Many people have stated that the Kingdom Hearts series has always had its head up its butt, and Kingdom Hearts III is no exception. In fact, Kingdom Hearts III’s head has far surpassed that point: its head has gone up its butt, gone back out its own mouth, and stopped to tickle Toriyama’s armpit before briefly returning to settle comfortably in its own rectum again.  But, in the words of Zero Punctuation: “Sometimes it’s kinda nice to be up someone’s butt, if it’s cozy and warm and they’ve put some interesting conversation pieces up there.” And what a cozy butt it is, complete with comfy couches, character development, great emotional setpieces, superb voice acting, and an ending which is so mind blowing that some Xbox Ones have been known to explode during the cutscene or (SPOILER) the final boss battle against Tetsuya Nomura . Throughout the story, I laughed, cried, smiled, puked, and felt pity for the characters, and this is all thanks to the excellent writing. It also brought relatable real life themes to the table, and these were so deep that I sometimes walked away wondering serious real-life questions like, “Wow, I wonder if I could really summon three keyblades if I had the hearts of eight sleeping princess Norts in my nobody?” It really makes you re-think your life.

                The voice acting in particular stands out. Kingdom Hearts III features the talent of all the voices we’ve come to know and love in the series, and they’re joined by everyone who has ever played a Disney character, alive or dead. Haley Joel Osment performs great yet again as Sora. They’ve done facial capture on him this time, so that Sora now looks like he has the face of a toddler on a normal sized body. It’s quite immersive.  Mark Hamill blew me away with his returning performance as Master Eraqus, but I wasn’t as impressed with him as Luke Skywalker, who sounds about 30 years older than he looks. Teaming up with him using a lightsaber-keyblade you get from that world (which incidentally has a sick transformation similar to the Monado Blade beam-sword-feature in Xenoblade Chronicles) is no less fun though.

                 I’d suppose that the only thing keeping people from buying this game is the three terabyte data install that’s required. But this game is worth every bit of data! It runs at a cinematic 2,400 frames per second, and the frame rate never chugs, even when the game has to render the battle of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Heartless. It is truly an impressive game, but I can’t decide what my favorite element of it is yet. Perhaps it’s the fact that every copy of the game comes with a clone of Yoko Shimomura, who will bring the nearest Philharmonic Orchestra into your house and play the music of the game while you play, or maybe my favorite thing is the way you can control the entire game exclusively using the PS4 touch Pad. OR, maybe it’s the Limit command you can use with Elsa, where she and Sora sing “Let it Go” to wipe out all the Unversed in the room! I could really go on and on with things that I could call my favorite. Even the weakest portion of the game, which is again Atlantica, is still infinitely better than KH2’s Atlantica, because Sora’s job is to time-travel into the past and beat up every singer in each song in KH2, while shouting “ARE YOU HAVING SOME FINNY FUN NOW?” But I digress. Anyway, my point is that there is just so much to like about this game. It is practically perfect, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anybody on the planet.

 

 

11/10

Edited December 23, 2014 by Jim

[Soravids 1,056]

                After all this time waiting for Kingdom Hearts III, I never expected it to live up to all the expectations we had for it. I was even still cautious when I heard reviewers giving it 11/10 across the board, and saying things like “literally the greatest thing since sliced bread,” “Perfect amount of water, 7.9/7.8” and “Like Skyrim with keyblades.” But having played it myself now, I can finally confirm that it is without a doubt Square Enix’s greatest masterpiece to date. Yes, it is even better than Final Fantasy XV, which I reviewed a couple decades ago.

  First off, the gameplay. Kingdom Hearts III has taken the gameplay of all of its predecessors and somehow combined them into a delightfully simple yet incredibly complex hack-and-slash game, with elements of turn based RPGs, fighting games, and Goat Simulators. When Nomura announced that the keyblade would be able to transform, he seemed to let the little bit slide of how many transformations it was capable of. During my playthough, I was able to have it transform into everything from guns and clubs to gliders, cannons, portal guns, frying pans, wii remotes, diapers for Donald, trashcans, Big Daddies, iPod Shuffles, a Tardis, DLC offers, the Bladekey, and a life model decoy of Scarlett Johannsson with the voice of Morgan Freedman that explains the entire story of Kingdom Hearts up until that instant that you selected that particular transformation. Let me just warn you about that last one though, since if you happen to press the x button at the wrong time, it goes through the entire story from BBS to 3, and that’s longer than watching the entire Lord of the Rings Extended Edition trilogy back-to-back-to-back.

  The battle mechanics also received some welcome tweaks. The AI makes full use of the current gen processing power, and it definitely shows. As recently stated by Nomura, each shadow heartless in the game will be running on a code that’s more complicated than that of the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. And the other heartless and the boss fights are even more complicated! Donald and Goofy have received AI buffs as well, so that now they can last up to six seconds before being knocked out. It is truly revolutionary. To compensate for this, the game has been made much more difficult than its predecessors, especially in the new difficulty, Masochistic Mode. This mode gives you a quarter of the HP that you get in other modes, along with 30x the damage received from enemies, and your own damage dealt reduced by 99.999%. On top of that, Masochistic Mode introduces a mechanic where Sora has a 1 in 10 chance of “Dropping” like in DDD every ten seconds, except since there’s no other characters to play as, Sora falls into a coma and dies and you have to start the game over again. It’s a thrilling and well-balanced mechanic, and it brings a ton of extra challenge to the game.  Drive Forms also make a welcome return, offering new forms such as “Keyblade War Form,” where Sora throws countless Keyblades like No Heart does in BBSFM, “Brawler Form,” where Sora puts away the Keyblade and fights with punches and kicks (Kicks doing extra damage because of his comically oversized shoes), and Anti Form’s aptly named spiritual successor “Instant Death Form,” where everyone in the room, including Sora, instantly dies.

  Once again, we have ourselves a masterpiece of a story. Many people have stated that the Kingdom Hearts series has always had its head up its butt, and Kingdom Hearts III is no exception. In fact, Kingdom Hearts III’s head has far surpassed that point: its head has gone up its butt, gone back out its own mouth, and stopped to tickle Toriyama’s armpit before briefly returning to settle comfortably in its own rectum again.  But, in the words of Zero Punctuation: “Sometimes it’s kinda nice to be up someone’s butt, if it’s cozy and warm and they’ve put some interesting conversation pieces up there.” And what a cozy butt it is, complete with comfy couches, character development, great emotional setpieces, superb voice acting, and an ending which is so mind blowing that some Xbox Ones have been known to explode during the cutscene or (SPOILER) the final boss battle against Tetsuya Nomura . Throughout the story, I laughed, cried, smiled, puked, and felt pity for the characters, and this is all thanks to the excellent writing. It also brought relatable real life themes to the table, and these were so deep that I sometimes walked away wondering serious real-life questions like, “Wow, I wonder if I could really summon three keyblades if I had the hearts of eight sleeping princess Norts in my nobody?” It really makes you re-think your life.

                The voice acting in particular stands out. Kingdom Hearts III features the talent of all the voices we’ve come to know and love in the series, and they’re joined by everyone who has ever played a Disney character, alive or dead. Haley Joel Osment performs great yet again as Sora. They’ve done facial capture on him this time, so that Sora now looks like he has the face of a toddler on a normal sized body. It’s quite immersive.  Mark Hamill blew me away with his returning performance as Master Eraqus, but I wasn’t as impressed with him as Luke Skywalker, who sounds about 30 years older than he looks. Teaming up with him using a lightsaber-keyblade you get from that world (which incidentally has a sick transformation similar to the Monado Blade beam-sword-feature in Xenoblade Chronicles) is no less fun though.

                 I’d suppose that the only thing keeping people from buying this game is the three terabyte data install that’s required. But this game is worth every bit of data! It runs at a cinematic 2,400 frames per second, and the frame rate never chugs, even when the game has to render the battle of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Heartless. It is truly an impressive game, but I can’t decide what my favorite element of it is yet. Perhaps it’s the fact that every copy of the game comes with a clone of Yoko Shimomura, who will bring the nearest Philharmonic Orchestra into your house and play the music of the game while you play, or maybe my favorite thing is the way you can control the entire game exclusively using the PS4 touch Pad. OR, maybe it’s the Limit command you can use with Elsa, where she and Sora sing “Let it Go” to wipe out all the Unversed in the room! I could really go on and on with things that I could call my favorite. Even the weakest portion of the game, which is again Atlantica, is still infinitely better than KH2’s Atlantica, because Sora’s job is to time-travel into the past and beat up every singer in each song in KH2, while shouting “ARE YOU HAVING SOME FINNY FUN NOW?” But I digress. Anyway, my point is that there is just so much to like about this game. It is practically perfect, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anybody on the planet.

 

 

11/10

Lay off the fruit Crash Bandicoot.

[Elijah Gravenhorst 480]

IGN's review- "Meh, It was too repetitive" 3/10

[Master Eraqus 1,340]

IGN's review- "Meh, It was too repetitive" 3/10

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they said that or "too many heartless"

 

EDIT: "Too many garbage characters", "Too much character development with Roxas", "Has too much of a ravenous fanbase"

Edited December 23, 2014 by Master Eraqus

[Dio Brando 5,810]

7.810 "Too much hearts"-IGN

[Jim 2,990]

Lay off the fruit Crash Bandicoot.

k

[soranjaxx 54]

Someone time traveled...

[Shulk 8,623]

A Keyblade like the Monado? Best game in the series.

 

Also, I can't wait for all of the finny fun in the new Atlantica! I heard the framerate is really just 2,399 frames per second, though. That's making me reconsider whether or not I'll get the game. The Wii U pre-order bonus sounds cool, though. I've always wanted my own Nomura Play Arts figure!

[Firaga 5,947]

Eh, it was okay. I think Kingdom Hearts IV will be better.

[Jim 2,990]

Eh, it was okay. I think Kingdom Hearts IV will be better.

Eh, 4 wasn't as good as 3 tbh. 

[Firaga 5,947]

Eh, 4 wasn't as good as 3 tbh. 

 

What about 5 then?

[Jim 2,990]

What about 5 then?

Surprisingly good! The ending was kinda meh though

[Firaga 5,947]

Surprisingly good! The ending was kinda meh though

 

Yeah, I feel you. It just felt like there was something missing. Do you think 6 might fill in the hole?

[Jim 2,990]

Yeah, I feel you. It just felt like there was something missing. Do you think 6 might fill in the hole?

If they ever freaking release it, maybe. All these spin-offs on the 5DS are starting to get really annoying.

[The Transcendent Key 12,109]

Good lord, this is the best review I've read in ages!

[Firaga 5,947]

If they ever freaking release it, maybe. All these spin-offs on the 5DS are starting to get really annoying.

 

Yeah, by the time they release it, the Playstation 7 and the XboxFour should be out by then. Sheesh.