I work with a lot ofKingdom Heartsfans and, frankly, their enthusiasm is scary. The obsession with a series that splicesFinal Fantasywith Donald Duck is absurd from the outside, but I’m desperate to see what all the fuss is about. So, I got stuck in with the first game, powered through some honestly pretty mediocre levels, and had a decent time. Then the first spin-off reared its ugly head and all my motivation crumbled into ash.
Chain of bloody Memories. I was warned that this would be the game to crush my soul most, but this absurdly repetitive follow-up with a strange hybrid of card and action combat is as integral to the story as the mainline games. It introduces key players and puts in motion events that will be paramount in Kingdom Hearts 2. But every world is the same string of blocky rooms that you complete in the same order to get snippets of uninteresting cutscenes that retread the same Disney movies the first game already bled dry.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m not a big Disney fan.
I put it down after a few hours, frustrated to no end by awkward gimmicky boss fights and a deck builder loop that’s incredibly ill-fitting with the fast-paced action. But Chain of Memories is not a one-off. Kingdom Hearts is everything I feared about Final Fantasy as a kid - seeing that high number on the box, whether it was 7 or 13, put me off completely. I always figured you had to play all of them to keep up with the story. Luckily, Final Fantasy is an anthology. Kingdom Hearts is not.
There areso manyspin-offs and all of their stories are important. I’m in too deep now to put it all aside so fine, sure. Spin-off away. I booted up 358/2 Days and after sitting there for an hour watching bland cutscenes, got incredibly frustrated. I looked up when the gameplay was meant to start. It doesn’t - there is none. If I want to actually play the game that explains who Roxas is, I’d have to go back to the DS.
Kingdom Hearts is not beginner-friendly. There is no easy entry point, and to keep up with the story, you have a mountain of lore to sift through. Even if you skip games, you need to know the stories enough for the sequels to make any sense, which means a lot of research and a lot of cutscene compilations, famously the best way to engage with video games.
I didn’t anticipate that I’d have homework, wiki scouring, and hours of footage to watch just to play the second game. YeteveryKingdom Hearts fan I’ve ever met has urged people to get into this series, sugarcoating the bleak reality that is a wave of unending monotony before it finally gets going. I’ve no doubt the second game will at least be okay-to-good, a fun pastime for the holidays, but I’ve spent the past two weeks dragging myself through spin-offs I hate and reading up on lore I don’t care about.
There’s clearly something there or people wouldn’t be pawing over every single clue for Kingdom Hearts 4 andthe mobile spin-off, but I couldn’t in good faith recommend a series like this to anyone. It’s simply too obtuse to get into, the barrier sky-high. Considering it’s aimed at kids, I’m baffled by the whole thing. Maybe you just had to be there, because going back decades later is like sifting through a dusty attic full of misplaced mementos, trying to piece together a forgotten narrative from faded scribbled notes.
