This was actually a surprisingly in-depth and serious review from dunkey, who is normally pretty irreverent, so I thought it was worth sharing. I have never played any of the Kingdom Hearts games...
This was actually a surprisingly in-depth and serious review from dunkey, who is normally pretty irreverent, so I thought it was worth sharing. I have never played any of the Kingdom Hearts games but have always wanted to... However, based on this review I suspect I should probably pass on KH3 at least, since it sounds pretty terrible, especially the story and dialogue.
Does anyone else have experience with the other KH games and are they all just as seemingly convoluted and messy as KH3 or is this just a particularly bad one?
I'd say KH3 is on par with the last two mainline games. If this game game out around the same time as the first two games, in the mid-2000s, we'd think this was a great close to the series with...
Exemplary
I'd say KH3 is on par with the last two mainline games. If this game game out around the same time as the first two games, in the mid-2000s, we'd think this was a great close to the series with gameplay that is just starting to feel dated. But released now... it really is a product of it's time.
Look no further than the re-releases of the rest of the series for the current (and last) gen. The KH games just do not hold up well. Even people who first tried these games by the time the X360 released were wondering how these games were considered fun. They aged poorly pretty quick.
Unintuitive but very well organized menu based action gameplay, a seriously strange way to play such a game, from a time when Square-Enix was tiptoing away from turn based combat but not committing to an action control scheme. Weirdly enough, the other menu based game I can think of like this was the original Splinter Cell, where it worked well due to its much slower paced gameplay.
The cutscenes are stilted, awkward, and overmuch. There are too many cutscenes, many of the slowly delivered lines of dialogue are robotically delivered and don't contribute much, with an obvious lack of voice direction. When you do get story, it's a conceptual swamp of familiar language used in alien ways. It's always about shadows, hearts, darkness, and light in some combination of formats, interacting in some way with each other to create a problem and a solution.
I don't know, the mechanics of this fictional universe don't seem to follow any clear logic, and therein lays why the story is a convoluted mess. All the aspects of the story interact in ways that always seems like you're missing the context. It's extremely difficult to follow along until you fully immerse yourself in the universe by engaging in as much of the lore as possible, just so you have some context for what you're being told throughout every new entry. I've never felt the need to engage.
And what story there is is okay. It's for children after all, so it's pretty tame tonally, with no death so much as clones and souls but in other terms, and a very consistently hamfisted message about friendship.
But I really like these games, so I'm really liking Kingdom Hearts 3. I just want to play an easy action RPG game set in this weird Disney/Square-Enix mashup universe, and this satisfies it well. The thing that allows me to enjoy this game so much is that I understand that this is a game stuck in the distant past of the early 2000s. Some of the people playing it right now probably weren't even old enough to hold a controller when the originals released.
I enjoy the gameplay quite a bit but it's pretty simple. The real fun is in the skills. KHs the same skills loadout system as the Tales games, which I really enjoy as a JRPG character building system. It find it lends very well to action JRPG gameplay when you can swap out abilities to change how your character plays to take on the situation at hand.
I have a lot of fun seeing what Disney world is next and exploring a thematically faithful 3D world based on it, with challenges and situations customized for the world. KH3 does this especially well, even emulating the style of the original properties where it can. The Toy Story world had me wondering if we finally have reached the point where games look as good as Pixar movies (I wonder if someone has made a comparison yet).
I never really cared about the story, I wrote that off when I was a pre-teen playing the original. It was obviously ridiculous, even at the start. KH has always had the storytelling of Metal Gear Solid but in a cloud cuckoo land which requires a completely different way of thinking to understand, and a plot that never seems to go anywhere.
Kudos to those who are interested enough to do it, but I can't imagine that it's the style the vast majority of people would be into, including fans of the main games. So far, KH3 has put in a lot more effort to explain the world than the previous games but only effectively in text. I really wish they didn't try to also do it in every possible cutscene because the way they provide exposition in cutscenes is so blatantly artificial and time consuming.
In the end, I am having an epic, if incomprehensible, adventure through bright, happy, colourful worlds with gameplay that fills with me warm nostalgia because I realize that I really am playing a game from the early 2000s but with the technology of 2017. KH3 is exactly a KH sequel, for better and worse.
I'm not sure I would call it better. They are certainly very comparable. Most of the time when there is a difference in framing it is because they changed it to hide imperfections. Note that the...
I'm not sure I would call it better. They are certainly very comparable. Most of the time when there is a difference in framing it is because they changed it to hide imperfections. Note that the camera does not do a close-up on Elsa's face.
I'm also somewhat convinced that the sequence is still pretendered, but I have no way to prove that at the moment. A lot of console JRPGs have prerendered cutscenes that have the imperfections simulated, so it can be very difficult to tell. I only found out Nier Automata had them after I read about the problems with the PC version.
That being said, I noticed that a number of the worlds in KH3 seem to look a little better than the original movies. I joke with my boyfriend that their version of Jack Sparrow looks and acts better than Johnny Depp.
The plot has always been a maelstrom of complexity. The writing is genuinely terrible, the voice acting cringey. That being said, the gameplay in 1 and 2 is genuinely fun and challenging. Lots of...
The plot has always been a maelstrom of complexity. The writing is genuinely terrible, the voice acting cringey.
That being said, the gameplay in 1 and 2 is genuinely fun and challenging. Lots of changes were made to make them better in the “.5 hd final remixes”- play those and enjoy.
3 may just need to wait for that .5 remix for it to fix the pacing and plot issues. And if you watch his other video about his opinions on RPGs and anime in general, you can probably see why KH is not his cup of tea to begin with.
Dunkey typically posts meme/fun videos but every once in a while he does do serious ones. Like the one that called out videogame critics. Kingdom Hearts is possibly one of the most convoluted...
Dunkey typically posts meme/fun videos but every once in a while he does do serious ones. Like the one that called out videogame critics.
Kingdom Hearts is possibly one of the most convoluted storylines I've ever seen, distributed among its games across consoles. Dunkey actually did a video on it, in his style of course, but it's accurate.
It's sad because I liked KH2 as a kid, and waiting what, ~10 years for a superficial game like KH3 is a huge letdown. I feel Disney really ruined things with how they handled e.g. frozen's world in KH3.
I finally finished this game with my boyfriend and can now officially say that playing this has completely taken away all goodwill I had for this series and actually made me hate Tetsuya Nomura....
I finally finished this game with my boyfriend and can now officially say that playing this has completely taken away all goodwill I had for this series and actually made me hate Tetsuya Nomura. This is actually really painful for me because I always loved Nomura's artwork.
While there are a great many good things to say about the game, those points are constantly overshadowed by the terribleness of the story. The plot of this game masturbates over it's original characters so much that it actually feels like they are trying to get rid of Disney.
The plot is so bad they literally break the concept of death. You die in a story sequence and as a consequence are forced to do what I could only describe as a minigame, which also has the side benefit of letting you go back in time by a few minutes and somehow also summons extra characters who prevent you from dying again. I would complain about how the plot desperately needed to follow the adage "show, don't tell", but the rules governing this universe are so crazy if they did that it would make even less sense.
And of course, the game spends considerable time building up story elements that have absolutely zero payoff. So much of the game is spent showing many people looking for a black box which none of the characters actually know what it contains or why they are looking for it. You never find out what is in it. It is the cheapest possible plot to get you to buy the next game - which may or may not answer the question.
It amazes me that they are still hiring Yoko Shimomura to do the music because it is absolutely clear that they have no idea how to use her. The sound mixing is so poor you will never hear the music clearly, and when you can hear it it is often not a very good choice thematically for the scene. There are no options to alter the sound mixing in any way, and there is no Japanese voice option if you want to avoid the poor English language readings.
I hate to be so negative about it, but these things were genuinely disappointing to me. I knew I would be put off by the plot, but since had no idea how much I would have my face buried in my palms. I now understand why we never got Final Fantasy Vs XIII. Tetsuya Nomura has gone mad
This was actually a surprisingly in-depth and serious review from dunkey, who is normally pretty irreverent, so I thought it was worth sharing. I have never played any of the Kingdom Hearts games but have always wanted to... However, based on this review I suspect I should probably pass on KH3 at least, since it sounds pretty terrible, especially the story and dialogue.
Does anyone else have experience with the other KH games and are they all just as seemingly convoluted and messy as KH3 or is this just a particularly bad one?
I'd say KH3 is on par with the last two mainline games. If this game game out around the same time as the first two games, in the mid-2000s, we'd think this was a great close to the series with gameplay that is just starting to feel dated. But released now... it really is a product of it's time.
Look no further than the re-releases of the rest of the series for the current (and last) gen. The KH games just do not hold up well. Even people who first tried these games by the time the X360 released were wondering how these games were considered fun. They aged poorly pretty quick.
Unintuitive but very well organized menu based action gameplay, a seriously strange way to play such a game, from a time when Square-Enix was tiptoing away from turn based combat but not committing to an action control scheme. Weirdly enough, the other menu based game I can think of like this was the original Splinter Cell, where it worked well due to its much slower paced gameplay.
The cutscenes are stilted, awkward, and overmuch. There are too many cutscenes, many of the slowly delivered lines of dialogue are robotically delivered and don't contribute much, with an obvious lack of voice direction. When you do get story, it's a conceptual swamp of familiar language used in alien ways. It's always about shadows, hearts, darkness, and light in some combination of formats, interacting in some way with each other to create a problem and a solution.
I don't know, the mechanics of this fictional universe don't seem to follow any clear logic, and therein lays why the story is a convoluted mess. All the aspects of the story interact in ways that always seems like you're missing the context. It's extremely difficult to follow along until you fully immerse yourself in the universe by engaging in as much of the lore as possible, just so you have some context for what you're being told throughout every new entry. I've never felt the need to engage.
And what story there is is okay. It's for children after all, so it's pretty tame tonally, with no death so much as clones and souls but in other terms, and a very consistently hamfisted message about friendship.
But I really like these games, so I'm really liking Kingdom Hearts 3. I just want to play an easy action RPG game set in this weird Disney/Square-Enix mashup universe, and this satisfies it well. The thing that allows me to enjoy this game so much is that I understand that this is a game stuck in the distant past of the early 2000s. Some of the people playing it right now probably weren't even old enough to hold a controller when the originals released.
I enjoy the gameplay quite a bit but it's pretty simple. The real fun is in the skills. KHs the same skills loadout system as the Tales games, which I really enjoy as a JRPG character building system. It find it lends very well to action JRPG gameplay when you can swap out abilities to change how your character plays to take on the situation at hand.
I have a lot of fun seeing what Disney world is next and exploring a thematically faithful 3D world based on it, with challenges and situations customized for the world. KH3 does this especially well, even emulating the style of the original properties where it can. The Toy Story world had me wondering if we finally have reached the point where games look as good as Pixar movies (I wonder if someone has made a comparison yet).
I never really cared about the story, I wrote that off when I was a pre-teen playing the original. It was obviously ridiculous, even at the start. KH has always had the storytelling of Metal Gear Solid but in a cloud cuckoo land which requires a completely different way of thinking to understand, and a plot that never seems to go anywhere.
Kudos to those who are interested enough to do it, but I can't imagine that it's the style the vast majority of people would be into, including fans of the main games. So far, KH3 has put in a lot more effort to explain the world than the previous games but only effectively in text. I really wish they didn't try to also do it in every possible cutscene because the way they provide exposition in cutscenes is so blatantly artificial and time consuming.
In the end, I am having an epic, if incomprehensible, adventure through bright, happy, colourful worlds with gameplay that fills with me warm nostalgia because I realize that I really am playing a game from the early 2000s but with the technology of 2017. KH3 is exactly a KH sequel, for better and worse.
I'm not sure I would call it better. They are certainly very comparable. Most of the time when there is a difference in framing it is because they changed it to hide imperfections. Note that the camera does not do a close-up on Elsa's face.
I'm also somewhat convinced that the sequence is still pretendered, but I have no way to prove that at the moment. A lot of console JRPGs have prerendered cutscenes that have the imperfections simulated, so it can be very difficult to tell. I only found out Nier Automata had them after I read about the problems with the PC version.
That being said, I noticed that a number of the worlds in KH3 seem to look a little better than the original movies. I joke with my boyfriend that their version of Jack Sparrow looks and acts better than Johnny Depp.
The plot has always been a maelstrom of complexity. The writing is genuinely terrible, the voice acting cringey.
That being said, the gameplay in 1 and 2 is genuinely fun and challenging. Lots of changes were made to make them better in the “.5 hd final remixes”- play those and enjoy.
3 may just need to wait for that .5 remix for it to fix the pacing and plot issues. And if you watch his other video about his opinions on RPGs and anime in general, you can probably see why KH is not his cup of tea to begin with.
Dunkey typically posts meme/fun videos but every once in a while he does do serious ones. Like the one that called out videogame critics.
Kingdom Hearts is possibly one of the most convoluted storylines I've ever seen, distributed among its games across consoles. Dunkey actually did a video on it, in his style of course, but it's accurate.
It's sad because I liked KH2 as a kid, and waiting what, ~10 years for a superficial game like KH3 is a huge letdown. I feel Disney really ruined things with how they handled e.g. frozen's world in KH3.
I finally finished this game with my boyfriend and can now officially say that playing this has completely taken away all goodwill I had for this series and actually made me hate Tetsuya Nomura. This is actually really painful for me because I always loved Nomura's artwork.
While there are a great many good things to say about the game, those points are constantly overshadowed by the terribleness of the story. The plot of this game masturbates over it's original characters so much that it actually feels like they are trying to get rid of Disney.
The plot is so bad they literally break the concept of death. You die in a story sequence and as a consequence are forced to do what I could only describe as a minigame, which also has the side benefit of letting you go back in time by a few minutes and somehow also summons extra characters who prevent you from dying again. I would complain about how the plot desperately needed to follow the adage "show, don't tell", but the rules governing this universe are so crazy if they did that it would make even less sense.
And of course, the game spends considerable time building up story elements that have absolutely zero payoff. So much of the game is spent showing many people looking for a black box which none of the characters actually know what it contains or why they are looking for it. You never find out what is in it. It is the cheapest possible plot to get you to buy the next game - which may or may not answer the question.
It amazes me that they are still hiring Yoko Shimomura to do the music because it is absolutely clear that they have no idea how to use her. The sound mixing is so poor you will never hear the music clearly, and when you can hear it it is often not a very good choice thematically for the scene. There are no options to alter the sound mixing in any way, and there is no Japanese voice option if you want to avoid the poor English language readings.
I hate to be so negative about it, but these things were genuinely disappointing to me. I knew I would be put off by the plot, but since had no idea how much I would have my face buried in my palms. I now understand why we never got Final Fantasy Vs XIII. Tetsuya Nomura has gone mad