To say I was blown away is an overstatement. Kingdom Hearts 3 is a bad video game. It has rote, pointless cutscenes that break gameplay tempo, long load times, a plethora of circular dialogue that is drawn out far past its point of impact, and inciting action that is poorly motivated or ill-timed. Its graphics, sound design and score make it more palatable.
However, Kingdom Hearts 3 cannot be evaluated as a video game. Kingdom Hearts 3 is a corporately-funded public art exhibit: a trip to Disneyland. More specifically, Kingdom Hearts 3 is a trip to Disneyland where your childhood friend who you haven’t seen in years, and is relatively unchanged from then, invites you along with his friends and family, very few of whom you know. It’s the sensation of third-wheeling but with an 18-wheeler semi-truck. You witness family drama, romance, break-ups, make-ups, and fist fights all while the sun beats down murderously. You try to eat ice cream that melts too quickly — your fingers stick together with the sugary liquid and going to the restroom to wash your hands will mean that everyone else moves on without you, leaving you behind in the labyrinth of venture capitalist experiments designed to extract pure adrenaline, fueled by culinary explorations that are (somehow) simultaneously dull and unique. I am terrified of amusement parks, if you couldn’t tell.
What even is the point of such an experience? A better question is this: would you endure a day with a crowd of strangers in the summer heat, listening to their gossip, their idle chatter, their endless jabs to annoy and mock each other, just for some sort of respite from the emotional slog that is the exploitation from capitalism or your job? The point of these games was never fulfillment (maybe at some point it was, but if any of them were they wouldn’t have made so many). The point of this metaphorical day of discomfort was the idea that for once you didn’t need to be productive or do something meaningful — and by that, I mean develop an avenue for profit either social or monetary. You could say something was shitty because it was, not because it was a time where you needed to agree with a stranger to be cordial. Conversely, you could say something was great and enjoyable because it was, not because you have to avoid bringing even more negativity into an already tense environment. You could complain about the difficulty while trying over and over again because you weren’t under the oversight of some authority figure, because Kingdom Hearts is an honest experience. It is free from much of the political deficiencies most media has these days simply due to its abstract premise. The dialogue is simple, slow, and easy to understand. Much of the conflict can be assumed as originating from simple motivations (We are searching for “X”, Nobodies/Heartless are attacking “X” world, etc.), and even from that, prior experience with Disney properties will allow you to more easily understand those conflicts. The platitudes of Sora’s, found in conversation with each member of Organization XIII, boil down to a roulette of heart, darkness, light, love, doppelgangers, suffering, and other seemingly immaterial themes made material by the premise. It’s possible that Nomura had this in mind — making the immaterial material and rendering the material irrelevant — but overall, it creates an experience that allows for some ideological escapism (assuming that can be done through Disney properties).
Oddly enough, Kingdom Hearts 3 never shies away from making the player hyper-aware that they are consuming Disney properties. Rather, it seems to embrace it. Many of the worlds are de facto re-enactments of their movie counterparts, only with Sora, Donald, and Goofy inserted into the scenes, existing to reflect audience reactions, like in a test-screening. This degree of removal is fascinating, allowing the players to experience familiar media (Disney movies) through a familiar medium (video games) in a wholly new and impersonal way. While Sora’s reactions match that of the audience’s, given that Sora is controlled by the player, it can be extrapolated that cutscenes become extensions of player control, keyword being, “can.” Anyway, the joy of Kingdom Hearts 3 came for me in the form of these cutscenes. At the end of the Kingdom of Corona level, Sora, Donald and Goofy watch as Eugene is healed by Rapuzel’s tears, alliterating to both the movie Tangled and Pokemon: The First Movie, and they cheer and hug in delight, something no socially-adjusted adult would do when feeling that emotion (and if they did it would be creepy), but since Sora, Donald and Goofy are fictional characters, their reaction is honest, refreshing and even wholesome. During the Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Davy Jones announces his cynical, sophomoric view of love in a theatrical way, “Love, a dreadful bond,” before being suddenly interrupted by Sora shouting, “that’s not true!” We, as the audience, given that we are not going through a romantic break-up of some kind, share this sentiment. Love is not, “a dreadful bond.” It’s a complex social relationship between one, two, or even more (no judgement) people that cannot be reduced to a single adjective. And this interruption by Sora further immerses the player in the role of the audience. Davy Jones’ statement is ridiculous and dramatic. We should openly acknowledge that it’s not true, that the existential complexities of love, of the heart, are only meant for those who value both, even if we don’t understand them fully. Funnily enough, the only overtly political element to the Pirates’ world, and most of Kingdom Hearts 3 — the use of the British Navy as the military force of colonization in the Caribbean islands — is included only for the sake of being faithful to the movie adaptation. When the main characters confront the British Navy, the admiral (or who I assume to be the admiral) says, “It’s just good business,” as if the player, from Sora’s point of view, is supposed to understand or care about the transactional relationships associated with the act of colonization, when the entire game’s narrative, as previously stated, makes the immaterial material and the material irrelevant. The same can be applied for the cutscenes outside of Disney worlds, which are still populated by Disney properties per the appearance of Donald, Goofy, Mickey, Jiminy Cricket, Master Yen Sid (Disney backwards), Chip and Dale, and others I’m surely forgetting. Much of the shocking developments, usually involving the sacrifice of one of the aforementioned characters, are inevitable, with Sora being incapable of preventing their demise. Like an audience member, he watches helplessly. However, with the audience’s wishes, Sora is granted the chance to act in places where he seemingly couldn’t. He time-travels, recovers hearts, enters the world of darkness, all to satisfy the desires of the audience: to save all the characters we care about and achieve a happy ending. Sora acts both as the audience as well as on the audience’s behalf.
This is all to say that Kingdom Hearts 3, while a rather boring game, is a bizarre, unique media experience. The gameplay itself is often a slog, the enemy varieties serve largely as punching bags and the combat requires little finesse up until the end-game where it can still be brute-forced to a point. Many of the attraction mechanics end up becoming stale and ineffective, and the special world-specific attacks end up the same. Exploration within the worlds, while encouraged, is dragged down by Sora’s mobility, which is only enhanced towards the end of the game when flying is unlocked as an ability — apart from that, traversing the terrain feels dated in comparison to other open-world games. Much of the normal interaction between the main trio could be further integrated into the gameplay to cut down on the cutscene length and quantity. The levels themselves are grand in scheme, beautiful to look at, and tiring to get through — the point of progressing is to get to the next cutscene rather than obtaining some in-game ability that enhances the gameplay while allowing you to progress. But, again, the meat of the experience is mainly in the cutscenes, the moments where Organization XIII lectures Sora while Buzz and Woody interject, Elsa and Anna watch from afar, Mike and Sully devise an ambush, Hiro wallows over the reincarnation of the original Baymax, and so on. Modern AAA games are so focused on immersing the player within the character and setting, or having clean, uninterrupted gameplay. Kingdom Hearts 3 falls somewhere outside where it neither immerses you in character or gameplay, choosing instead to give you a heavily abstracted cinematic experience that doesn’t exist elsewhere, to my knowledge. In doing so, it becomes a surprisingly pure and honest experience, never too complex or heavy in its material. For distracting me from work, from having to wake up early in the morning and spend all my emotional energy on what amounts to a front-facing customer service job in the middle of a pandemic, I find it fascinating.
