Kingdom Hearts 3

[Hero-of-Time]

Spoiler

Absolutely loved the battles in the Realm of Darkness. Epic music, heartbreaking cutscenes and the rescue of Aqua made for a fantastic experience.

I wanna say that's all the Disney worlds done now, which means the story is probably really going to kick into gear from this point on.

 

[Hero-of-Time]

Spoiler

Getting to play as Aqua again to take on Vanitas was hype as hell! I was going nuts.  

The awakening of Ven was pretty special as well. I had tears of joy and excitement welling up in my eyes. 

I don't think I'm even close to the end of the game and it's already nearly had me in tears. I knew this game would break me.  

[Hero-of-Time]

Well, it's all kicking off now...

Spoiler

Facing off against the horde of Heartless and then Terra shows up! Brilliant moment! Although I hope it explains where he went because he just kinda disappeared. 

The next part gave me memories of the true ending of Nier Automata where people IRL gave you a hand to defeat the enemy ships. Just like that, Keyblade users from the mobile game came to my aid in order to clear away the darkness. Fantastic stuff!

Next up, I'm in various battles fighting multiple members of the Orgaization at the same time. It's crazy!

I'm in KH heaven at the moment. The game is massively exceeding my expectations. 

[Hero-of-Time]

Well, the game finally pushed me to tears.

Spoiler

Axel being defeated was not what I wanted to see but Xion saving him is certainly what I wanted. Xemnas going for the kill only for Roxas to be revived and make the save had me shed tears of joy and then a few were shed when all 3 of them had a proper reunion.

I don't think a game has ever had me this emotional, certainly not in terms of tears of joy. 

*continues playing*

Edited February 2, 2019 by Hero-of-Time

[drahkon]

I wonder if he likes the game.

[Julius]

3 minutes ago, drahkon said:

I wonder if he likes the game.

He said that he’s not crying tears of joy, so they’re probably tears of despair. 

His dedication to continue playing a game that he’s clearly not enjoying is almost unnerving. 

[Hero-of-Time]

11 minutes ago, drahkon said:

I wonder if he likes the game.

Awful game. Worst JRPG ever.

[drahkon]

12 minutes ago, Julius said:

He said that he’s not crying tears of joy, so they’re probably tears of despair. 

His dedication to continue playing a game that he’s clearly not enjoying is almost unnerving. 

That's H-o-T for ya, always pushing through for that Platinum  

[Hero-of-Time]

The end boss has been defeated, the ending viewed, credits have rolled and secret ending movie unlocked and watched. Brilliant game! 

I was thinking that after waiting so long for a conclusion to this saga that it wouldn't have been able to live up to what I had built up in my head over the course of the years but S-E delivered and then some. For someone who has followed the series since the release of the original game back on the PS2 this was the ultimate finale. The second half of the game is like one giant love letter to the fans of the series.

There is one criticism I have with the game and that's with the voice acting of Master Xehanort. You could never have replaced the late, great Leonard Nimoy but the guy they hired isn't even close to sounding like him. His performance was pretty rough and lacked any passion. I'm pretty sure he was speaking with an accent at times as well. Very weird.

As expected, the ending got me pretty good and hit me right in the feels. More tears were shed. I'm gonna have to go drink a load of water to rehydrate my body after playing this.  

 

[Aperson]

I thought I was getting through the game quite quickly for a game that took six years to develop... but it turns out I was only about halfway after three days.

 

I have pretty much played the game all day today so I was able to clock up many hours of progress, beating all the Disney worlds.

 

I find Sora's reason for visiting the worlds kind of shallow. I get that he needs to build his strength back up again but that appears to be the ONLY reason for visiting the Disney worlds and there is no other reason for Sora's quest to go to all these worlds. That said, the worlds themselves have been very good. SanFransokyo really felt like playing Spider-Man PS4 what with the massive open city world and the ability to run up walls being very reminiscent of Insomniac's title. I've never seen Big Hero 6 but based on KH3 alone it seems like an awesome movie.

 

Oh yeah, turns out I was wrong about Vexen. The Organisation apparently has "reserve" members should any of their existing ones fall by the looks of it. They also reveal Demyx as a reserve member although I initally thought he was actually in it himself

 

 

The Pirates of the Caribbean world was something I was looking forward to, even if it based off one of the less good Pirates movies and a few people warned me that it was something of a disappointment. Aside from the 300 Crab mission it wasn't actually that bad though. And in comparison to other Disney worlds you ACTUALLY GET TO FIGHT THE MAIN VILLAIN. Fighting Davy Jones was awesome and I loved the build up to the fight as well, even if it was ripped directly from At World's End. It's still better than some random Heartless coming out of nowhere and being the main boss of the world. One of the earliest fights though seemed like something out of Shadow of the Colossus

The variety in gameplay really stands out in this game which isn't something I expected, and it extends to the boss battles, the main boss of the Big Hero 6 world turning out to be an earlier mech battle was awesome.

 

Then this revelation seemed rather interesting:

 

I called it being a replica pretty quickly. This makes the organsiation, Xehanort, Young Xehanort, Ansem, Xemnas, Terranort, Xigbar, Saix, Vanitas, Dark Riku, Luxord, Marluxia, Larxene and one other, but I guess Aqua was going to be the last one. Now I think Demyx and Vexen may end up among the 13 if they recover Terra from Xehanort's body.

 

I wonder who the seven guardians of light will actually be? With Aqua rescued I guess she'll be there in the final fight and I guess by proxy Ventus will be one, but I guess Sora needs to save Terra too so does that mean some of the people he saves aren't actually going to be guardians of light?

 

I am very intrigued to see how this game pans out now that the Disney worlds are done and the game can go full on it's own plot to build up towards what will hopefully be an epic conclusion. After the amount of build up they are giving it I'm really hoping it delivers.

[Aperson]

Wow... O_O

 

So after rescuing Aqua from the Realm of Darkness she in turn wakes Ventus and they become the last two Guardians of Light alongside Sora, Riku, Kairi, Mickey and Axel. And now this game is showing even more parallels to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Not only does this game have the main bad guy want to split himself up into multiple versions of himself but...

 

 

The main character dies only to be revived just afterwards.

 

The whole sequence when Terra showed up was completely unexpected. This game is doing things way beyond what you would ever imagine and as the climax to the series so far they are really going all out. I mean, who would have seen this coming?

 

The chess board analogy went unexpected places too and then the part where Sora had to rescue Donald, Goofy and all the other Guardians of Light was really cool. Only for time to seemingly rewind to a point before they were all defeated and things seemed to play out as before but you just knew that this time there was going to be a twist.

 

I love that they actually put players in this game. Everyone who signed up to the mobile game seems to have had a chance of having their name in the final game and they help defeat the big Heartless Tornado that had previously "won" it for the Dark Side. Then Yen Side shows up and finally does something other than sitting at his desk, demonstrating his true power to hold back hordes of Heartless. You have to wonder why he can't beat Xehanort but I guess that's how these things always go.

 

 

So much cool stuff happens and I've only just NOW reached the 7 light vs. 13 Darkness encounter. Nomura demonstrating his strengths in really cool looking set pieces again.

 

I'm eager to see what happens next. Apart from Xehanort inevitably being defeated and being the Final Boss, because I think we all would have expected him to be, I have no idea what is going to happen next in the story which should be very interesting. How does the brand new world factor into all of this? What could prompt that to be the location of the final battle instead of the Keyblade Graveyard? Given this series' reluctance to actually kill anyone I'm also surprised they even mentioned death at all in this game let alone creating an entire world of the dead and revealing it to be where Sora and Roxas went in KHI and II as well as this one when picking everything.

 

Please get through the Disney worlds people, the story and this game gets even better after that part.

[Hero-of-Time]

@GenericAperson

Spoiler

Talk to all the stars when Sora went to that place? There's a pretty big scene there were you can talk to Namine and it explains why Lingering Will shows up to take on Terranort. A lot of people are kicking off because they scene is missable and many have indeed missed it.

Glad to see you enjoying it as much as myself. I guess you are in the same situation as me. Playing through the games last year has kept everything fresh in your head so you are now able to appreciate what's going on in the story.

Yesterday I started working towards the platinum trophy. I've now nabbed all of the treasure chests and found all the Lucky Emblems. The chests are much harder to find in this game than they were in previous games. This is mainly due to how massive the worlds are now.

I took on the 2 secret bosses last night. One is a Gummi Ship fight and the other is a standard fight. The Gummi Ship one took some doing, that was until I rebuilt my ship and levelled it up significantly. After that i took down the boss pretty easily. The same could be said for the standard secret boss. I had unlocked the Ultima Keyblade before facing it and I cut though it like a hot knife through butter. Usually I like to be max level to fight these kind of bosses but at level 70 with that Keyblade in hand I made very short work of it.

I've just the 5 trophies left to get now, with some of them tying into each other. The level 99 trophy is easily done but I will need to farm items for the synthesis trophy so it's pointless grinding exp as I will be getting a bunch while searching for items. Getting A rank on the Data Tracer minigame is best done once you are level 99, so that will have to wait until I reach that. For the game records trophy I am missing a Keyblade. This can be obtained by cooking all of the cuisine in the restaurant, which is another trophy I need. So, yeah, they all pretty much tie into each other.  

[Aperson]

I've just finished the game now HoT. I did indeed do what you put in the spoiler bracket. I also got 30 Lucky Emblems and on Proud Mode that was enough to unlock the Secret Ending.

 

While I enjoyed the game as a whole, I think I need to address the elephant in the room, even on Proud Mode this game is WAY TOO EASY. I think there's only like two bosses in the main game that offer any semblance of challenge and one of them was the final boss. Even then I only really died twice to the Final Boss and I wasn't even overlevelled or anything. Once you get the Pirate Keyblade then mash X to win becomes a spectacular strategy because it's so strong and you get so much extra range from using it.

 

Everything else I want to mention is Spoiler related so here goes. The game actually stops you from screenshotting the ending or recording it so I wasn't able to post anything on that front.

 

Why? Why was Kairi trained as a Keyblade Wielder only for her to not do anything when actually fighting the monsters and just rely on Axel? Then she gets kidnapped again to allow Xion to come over to the other side and take her spot. Ugh, why? You tease actual potential character development for this character and to make her more of a dependable fighter... only to throw that all away towards the end because the developers realised that Sora has no immediate motivation to be able to be the one who actually fights Xehanort at the very end of the game and seeing as he's the main character he needs to be the one who actually fights Xehanort.

 

Those are really my two major gripes with the game, that and the fact that they give you no prior warning like in KH1 and KH2 that you are hitting the point of no return. You literally take a few steps into Scala and the final boss starts. They showed a bit too much in the trailers really, I guess that's what happens when you announce a game so early in development and need to keep it relevant. The actual way they handled the confrontation was great, it provided a nice build up to the ultimate confrontation with Xehanort.

 

Then the ending happened and I'm extremely confused. What was the ultimate price Sora was to pay for misuing the Power of Awakening. Is he trapped in some sort of limbo that causes him to fade between worlds? Is that why he disappears right at the very end of the game? The ending was one so full of hope and they really made it feel somewhat conclusive, only to throw a huge wrench into the picture by making Sora disappear right at the end.

 

Then the epilogue happened and Xigbar is Luxu? What? That almost came out of nowhere apart from the fact that they interrupted him in Olympus. I did highly suspect that the mobile game was introducing so many new elements with the intention for it to "take over" as the main plot after Xehanort was defeated, but Xigbar being Luxu is something that seems to have come completely out of left field. Also the secret ending is Sora and Riku in the world of Verum Rex? Is Nomura just going to do Versus XIII but in Kingdom Hearts instead? Is that what Kingdom Hearts IV is going to be?

 

I appreciate the part in the final boss battle where Xehanort forces you into Rage Form, it made that part of the fight much more intense and contributed to my second death in the final boss because I couldn't use Magic so I couldn't heal until I dealt enough damage to be able to get my light back. Then the part where Donald and Goofy are talking to you through the controller to try and encourage you to mash X to revive yourself was a cool use of the PS4's controller speaker and really made the final moments more triumphant.

[Hero-of-Time]

Well deserved.

Yesterday evening I continued my journey towards the platinum.

The first thing on my list was to do the cooking mini game. It wasn't half as bad as I thought it was going to be. Cracking the eggs can be a little tricky but once I got the hang of it I reloaded my game ( didn't want to waste the ingredients ) and I managed to get an Excellent rating on them all. I did have to go and farm a few more ingredients from the 100 Acre Woods mini games but that didn't take too long. 

With that done, I was gifted my final Keyblade and set about completing the game records part of the Gummiphone. Using all of the Shotlock attacks caused me a bit of a headache. I was missing 2 and I couldn't figure out how to pull them off. With the game being pretty new there wasn't much info out there to find out what I needed to do. It took a bit of searching and I eventually found that I needed to be doing a max lock-on attack directly above an enemy for this new attack to appear. After that, I just had to register 2 more mini games into the records section, both of which were the Data Tracer mini games. Doing these netted me the trophy for getting an A rank on the Data Tracer game and another for completing the records in the Gummiphone.

The final two trophies ( level 99 and completing the synthesis section ) i'm still working on. It's taking me a while to farm certain items due to them only being available in specific areas of the game. Doing these runs really highlights just how long some of the load times are within the game. Still, it wasn't too bad as I tried to mix things up a bit by doing some material grinding in the Gummi ship and then dropping back down to a Disney world to do some there. I think i've only got about 15 more things to make and 9 more levels to grind to reach level 99. As I expected though, the level trophy is pretty much coming naturally while farming for items. 

[Hero-of-Time]

Cracked on with this as soon as I got in from work and a half hour later I got my platinum. If I knew it was only going to take another 30 minutes I would have just pushed through it and finished it off last night. 

It was a fun game to platinum and it was definitely the easiest to do out of all the KH games. This time there were no difficulty related trophies and no need for a second play through of the game.

Kinda gutted both this and Resident Evil 2 are done and dusted now. I enjoyed both of them immensely and both left me wanting more. 

 

[Tales]

Kingdom Hearts VR Experience is available for free download. More will be added later this year.

The Hikaru Utada Laughter in the Dark is still available as well.

[Hero-of-Time]

Wow! I thought this was just gonna be a quick bit of DLC to play around with but it looks like it's the Final Mix version of the game. Data bosses, playable Kairi, Final Fantasy characters return, new story beats...all coming next month. Amazing!  

The start of next year continues to be stupidly stacked.

[WackerJr]

So I’m a little late to the party, but I finally decided to try the KH series. After playing through 1.5 + 2.5 I was still left wondering what the fuss was all about (I gave up on Re:Coded) as it seemed to be a great concept that hadn’t quite reached my expectations.

KH3 was by FAR the best game in the series! It built on the better aspects of the previous games, added so many variety throughout the other worlds, the trophies were easier to get & I was happy to explore and grind to get to level 99.  It looked lovely throughout too, as if you really were in a Pixar film.

I’m glad I persevered through the series - great game!

[Sheikah]

Debated posting this since I don't want to be a negative Nancy, but I feel like I'm the complete opposite to you @WackerJr.

Back when I was younger and played KH1 and 2, the story was much less complicated and the games felt like they took themselves less seriously. They were neat little games to play through some Disney environments without worrying too much about the story, and they had Final Fantasy characters and some neat little boss battles (like Sephiroth in KH1).

When I got KH3, I had to watch an hour-long video just to know what was going on! I feel as though whoever has been given control of writing the story has nobody directly managing them and has had free reign to invent the most ludicrous, self-absorbed, intangible storyline that they possibly can!

KH3 left a very bitter taste for me, it was a bit of a shame to see the series come to this. I decided after completing it that I'm done with the series.

Edited December 21, 2020 by Sheikah

[WackerJr]

13 minutes ago, Sheikah said:

Debated posting this since I don't want to be a negative Nancy, but I feel like I'm the complete opposite to you @WackerJr.

I’m always understanding that others may not share the same opinion, so glad you posted it.

Quote

When I got KH3, I had to watch an hour-long video just to know what was going on!

I watched through the full three hours of cutscenes of 358/2 Days and still had no clue what was going on! 😂

I agree with you about the simplicity of the story in the first game.  I admit to struggling with the storyline throughout the series, whether that’s me or the lack of clarity in the game I’m not sure!  Probably me!