![]() ![]() ![]() There are many minutes of blather about hearts of darkness, hearts of light, and making a Heartless who looks like a human. Behind the whole existential tussle is a central antagonist, Xehanort, who is sort of (but not quite) the same as the central antagonists from Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, even though they had different names and hairdos. These bad guys and gals unleash wave after wave of Heartless, enemies that exist to be bashed by keyblades and bestow experience points upon the player. Sora, backed by constant sidekicks Donald and Goofy, is confronted at every turn by members of Organization XIII, a shadowy group with mysterious motives whose sneering members boast names such as Xigbar, Marluxia, and Larxene. Also, he has other characters from previous installments locked inside his own heart, which sounds like a serious condition but doesn’t seem to trouble him most of the time. While making ample time for frivolous recreation, Sora is trying to rescue Aqua, a character from previous games who’s lost in the Realm of Darkness, which contains Kingdom Hearts (basically, a huge, heart-shaped MacGuffin). (That part is plain enough.) He’s lost his previous powers and has begun the painstaking process of leveling up again, a standard setup for video game sequels that have to justify the presence of a progression system despite the player-controlled character already having become a badass in preceding appearances. Its returning protagonist, spiky-haired Sora, wields a keyblade, which is a blade in the shape of a key. The story is set after the events of the 2012 Nintendo 3DS title, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. Even so, this is the still that best sums up my Kingdom Hearts III story experience: Square EnixĪlthough the game front-loads a series of semi-explanatory cutscenes and includes the Kingdom Hearts Memory Archive (a 20-minute recap of previous events), I’m hard-pressed to provide a synopsis of Kingdom Hearts III. Essentially, I’ve made what one of baseball’s official scorers might classify as an “ ordinary effort” to follow along. I’ve read and watched some of the many online plot explainers, which were presumably produced by people who understood the story (or cribbed from earlier explainers and convincingly pretended to). (Not even close.) I haven’t skipped a single cutscene. I’ve played Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, which a novice might mistakenly believe to supply the bulk of the backstory of Kingdom Hearts III. When it comes to Kingdom Hearts, I’m a relatively low-information player, albeit better-versed in the series than someone who’s wondering whether to dive in for the first time. And that dichotomy exposes both the best and the worst thing about video games: Given a fun foundation of compelling mechanics, making sense is still optional. The good news is that even though the latest sequel’s inscrutable story will strike some sizable proportion of players as hot nonsense, the game is still good. (Specifying precisely how many Kingdom Hearts games there are, or on how many platforms they’ve appeared, raises thorny ontological questions about what qualifies as a game.) It’s just a matter of how much time and effort it takes to reach that level of enlightenment, and whether the research is worth the reward. It’s probably possible to attain a total understanding of the story of Kingdom Hearts, which has stretched over about a dozen games released on roughly seven platforms in a span of 17 years and approximately 200 hours of playtime. During the opening hours of Kingdom Hearts III, the extremely long-in-the-making collaboration between Disney and Square Enix that came out in North America on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One last week, each player must search their own heart for the answer to one question: Do I need to know what’s happening here?
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