Kingdom Hearts 3 Chronicles is my attempt to keep up with my thoughts on Kingdom Hearts III after every session. Today’s post will cover the 2nd world. As before there will be spoilers up to that point. Also worth knowing that I am playing on Proud Mode, the hardest difficulty available from the start.
Ok so my first play session actually ended at the start of this level but it didn’t feel right for me to start writing about it and then stop before anything significant happened, so here we are. For starters, you’re introduced to a new version of the Gummi Ship, which for a lot of fans is the worst part of any Kingdom Hearts game. On my re-playthroughs last year I found them not as bad as I remembered, but maybe I’ve just developed more of a enjoyment for rail shooters. They’re not exactly good rail shooters, but they’re fun enough for mixing up the pace of the game. If you invest just a small amount of time into upgrading your ship, it can be more fun. So I was somewhat surprised that Kingdom Hearts III almost entirely ditched that playstyle. It has more of an open world feel to it with the ability to explore freely. Only problem right now is that I can’t figure out what the point of exploring would be? When you beat Olympus you see the world marker for Twilight Town on the map so there’s not really any reason that I can see to not go directly there. Maybe there’s a point later in the game where multiple worlds open up at the same time and you can explore the world to pick which one you want to go to? Part of me wonders if Square is just locked into the idea of space travel at this point and is just trying their best.
However you feel about the gummi mechanics, you go to Twilight Town next and immediately things start getting crazy. You fight a version of the boss you fought as Riku (the Demon Tower? Demon Tide? Something like that, I’m afraid to Google it. It’s a swirling funnel of Shadow Heartless) and honestly I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be able to win this battle. I fought for a couple minutes, almost died a few times, and then it just ended. I was maybe a third of the way through its health bars, and it definitely didn’t kill me at the time the battle ended, so I really have no idea what was going on there, except for them wanting to start Twilight Town with a cool set piece. It was effective for sure. One cool thing is that you get access to Links, essentially Summons, right before this battle starts, so it’s a chance to try out your new buddy. This first one is actually the cat Dream Eater from Dream Drop Distance which is nice to see back. Last time I said nearly every battle mechanic from a KH game was in KH3, and adding Links makes that even more the case.
I really like Twilight Town as a location, and this game really expands the feel of the place, even though currently you can’t explore as many areas as you could in KH2. Instead you get the big tram commons just filled with people in a way a location has never been filled in a Kingdom Hearts game before. NPCs are everywhere and pretty much all of them will talk to you if you want (and again, the lines are all voiced!). Every building is scalable to some degree, so you get to stretch your freerunning legs and experiment with Flowmotion a bit more. They’ve done a good job of making an old location feel fresh and new.
We also get 2 new minigames in Twilight Town, one of which functions within the “gummiphone” - a new communication device that also hosts Jiminy’s journal. The loading screens in this game are basically social media posts, so I guess this is the cellphone they come from. The first minigame is the “Classic Kingdom,” where you play Game & Watch style minigames starring Sora and Mickey. The first one is...fine but honestly I hope they get better or I won’t be coming back to this. The other main minigame is cooking with “Little Chef,” AKA Remy from Ratatouille. I LOVE this way more than I expected. They super simple reflex minigames based around doing some kind of analog stick movement or button press to specific timing. If you succeed you get a dish which can be used to increase some stats. Honestly I haven’t used the food for anything yet but I cooked every dish that was available at the time because they were just way more fun than they had any reason to be.
At this point there’s a lot of character stuff that fascinates me, like Hayner saying “we sent Roxas to Twilight Town,” which is odd because as far as we know, he knew nothing about that, but now somehow all of the kids know about the computers, and how to get over there. It could be an oversight, I could be misunderstanding, or it could be meaningful. Who even knows. I’m also interested in how Xigbar reacts to Ansem and Xemnas watching over Sora - he scolds them as if he’s in charge, but as far as we’ve known until this point, Xemnas was his boss. So is the fact that Xigbar/Braig was like, the original Xehanort lackey actually give him a rank above Xemnas/Ansem in the new Organization? Or am I reading too into it again? Also why does Ansem suddenly look like a pretty boy fashion model, was he always like that and the graphics only just now really show him off? So many questions. I also like that the game is attempting to address some of these questions as they come up, like why Ansem and Xemnas are back, and why Master Xehanort is old again. These are things that fans have speculated over for years and the fact that the game is willing to at least set up answers to those questions is reassuring.
Stray thoughts: There is just SO MUCH in this game. And I love it.