When I started seeing Kingdom Hearts 3 ads all over Xbox, I was overjoyed. I thought back to when I was little, and bonding over this PS2 game with my siblings. I hadn’t played the game since I was young, but I remember loving it a lot. I was excited to get the game, I was hoping it would be just as fun as I remembered it was. And it wasn’t bad, but I would say it didn’t fully earn all the hype it got.
One thing I remember about the first game that made me love it so much was the usage of good worlds. They used stories like the Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, and Nightmare Before Christmas which were actually really awesome to play. On Kingdom Hearts 3, they used stories like Rapunzel and Big Hero 6 which were just significantly less appealing to me. Specifically Rapunzel, I remember being so bored with the story it made the overall game much less fun to me. And compared to a story like Alice in Wonderland, it almost just seems weak.
The thing that I love about this game was the fighting. Obviously, it’s a huge part of the game, but they just make it so fun! It makes it so easy to get lost in the game and realize hours later that you’ve been playing for hours.
When I played the original game when I was young, I’m not sure if I just wasn’t aware of how cringey the dialogue was or if I had just forgotten by now, but man was it hard to listen to at points. I understand, it’s made with Disney characters and it’s supposed to be kid friendly and that’s great but they could make the dialogue less awful to listen to and still be kid-friendly. It was just a lot of corny sayings that I found myself wanting to stop playing the game because of.
Overall, I wouldn’t say this game was bad to play, but I think that it could’ve been better. I really only bought this game for the nostalgia of it, but I did remember having a lot more fun playing the first one when I was little. But, it was cool to see all of the familiar elements of the game implemented into the third one. I probably won’t finish it anytime soon, but maybe sometime in the near future, I will get a random itch to play it and finish it.