Kingdom Hearts, what a unique video game franchise. Despite only having two numbered games in the series so far, Kingdom Hearts has a mind boggling amount of entries across an equally mind boggling amount of platforms many of which are essential to understanding the overarching plot. Kingdom Hearts 2.8 is the latest piece of the puzzle and all of it is meant to contextualise and precede the highly anticipated Kingdom Hearts III.....It’s also a load of old bollocks!

Think of everything good about your favourite Kingdom Hearts games, the first had robust and weighty combat which gave a great challenge. It also had great platforming based exploration which unfortunately, the second game scrapped but Kingdom Hearts II had fast paced, free flowing combat which some might have preferred. Birth By Sleep returned to the slower paced combat of Kingdom Hearts 1 but was much more of a power trip through deeper and wider customisation of increasingly powerful moves. Most importantly, it fixed the pathetically weak magic of previous games. In my mind, these are the three cornerstones of enjoyable, coherent Kingdom Hearts games.

Unfortunately, as we know from most of Square Enix’s recent first-party games, they have completely forgotten what makes their games good and the first entry in the Kingdom Hearts 2.8 collection is no exception to that. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (originally released on the 3DS in 2012) seemed promising upon first impression & it actually continues the story where Kingdom Hearts II left off. Yen Sid has tasked Sora & Riku to take the mark of mastery exam and become true keyblade masters. In Birth by Sleep this involved Aqua & Terra fighting some glowing orbs and then each other but understandably this was changed and perhaps what follows is just Yen Sid’s particular way of testing. When the game started out I logically assumed that Yen Sid had put Sora & Riku in a dream like state where they would visit these worlds to train themselves mentally more than physically. Unfortunately this is not the case, it turns out that the worlds destroyed by the heartless in the first game are only partially restored and are now “sleeping.”

I simply cannot understand why writers Tetsuya Nomura & Masaru Oka decided to do this, it feels like they just went with the first idea that popped into their head and the events of the game seem to contradict everything we know. Sora & Riku, despite NOT being in a dream are back to their original, younger appearance. All their powers are gone, yet they can travel between these sleeping worlds by…”diving” a mechanic which unlike the armour in Birth by Sleep, does not have any particular story purpose for existing. (Unless they were in a dream which they aren’t.) The new ‘flowmotion’ ability enabling the characters to wall jump and zip around the much larger environments that this game has is something which seems tied the the characters from The World Ends With You which we meet in Traverse Town, the first world. This is again, at odds with the logic of the story, you wouldn’t see Quasimodo for instance zipping around wall jumping everywhere just because these worlds are “sleeping.” The basics of combat are pretty much a simplified version of Kingdom Hearts 1 with this flowmotion system completely tacked on & very clunky in how it controls but its worst offense is that while doing these moves, at any time the player can perform powerful special moves that throw enemies around or hit an area of effect. With unlimited access to these environmental special moves, the core combat of Dream Drop Distance is rendered a pointless, repetitive, frustrating mess.

Nomura didn't just settle for one tacked on system though, the new enemies in this game are called dream eaters and are stylistically more cute and colourful than previous enemy types. Riding a trend that Level 5 also rode to huge success with their blatant pokemon rip off Yo Kai Watch (and slightly more original Ni No Kuni) the player can now train their own dream eaters and add them to the team in place of Donald & Goofy.

The game makes some minor attempts to give this system some relevance in combat, first of all by allowing the player to use special team moves depending on the types of dream eaters in the party. Secondly by tying the abilities and stats of the player to the growth of the dream eaters. Unfortunately these abilities, though similar to other Kingdom Hearts games on the surface, feel far more arbitrary and incremental. Worst of all, the AI is simply awful, often these cute creatures would rather wander around aimlessly than contribute to the fight.

The second game to look at is Kingdom Hearts 0.2: A Fragmentary Passage and with Aqua being my favourite Kingdom Hearts character I was looking forward to this one even more as it continues her journey through the realm of darkness. It's also somewhat of a tech demo for Kingdom Hearts 3 as it uses the unreal engine and has modern graphics including some beautiful particle effects which one would expect of Unreal. This game does a lot of things right: magic looks and feels incredibly powerful, the creepy atmosphere of the dark world is spot on & exploration as well as platforming seem to be making a comeback...but for everything this game does right it falls flat on its arse with something else.

Moving Aqua around feels immediately hideous, it’s incredibly floaty and there’s this strange acceleration effect where after moving forward for a second or two Aqua will suddenly speed up way beyond what would feel like natural human movement. Some of her animations are clearly unfinished such as the cartwheel which at a certain point just teleports her to an upright position. Minor physics bugs, aliasing, a camera which never seems to be where you want it to be, these are all issues which really have no excuse to be in a game from a team who should know exactly what they’re doing by now.

Enemy AI is a vast improvement over Dream Drop Distance but playing on proud mode is not particularly balanced. Many attacks will come from behind or seem unavoidable and blocking/jumping seem to become unresponsive just at the times you need them most. The most un-enjoyable section of the game comes when Aqua must fight the same frustrating boss 3 times. This boss teleports around constantly and throws moves at you which are often practically unavoidable, it’s so cheap that when you lose it doesn’t feel like you have learnt anything. They decided to bring back the charging MP bar which was by far the worst part of Kingdom Hearts 2’s combat and it means that in these moments when you know you’re probably going to die from some cheap move that you won’t see coming, you’ll be running around aimlessly just waiting for that stupid bar to fill so you can use a cure spell, which of course uses the entire bar all over again.

This game seems like a similar idea to Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes but the difference is, Ground Zeroes was incredibly polished and felt rewarding to replay almost endlessly. Fragmentary Passage rewards the player by letting them dress up Aqua which is quite nice in theory, but a lot of the clothes, especially the ones you can put on her back look like they were thrown together in a couple of minutes and shoved in there. All in all, this just didn’t feel like playing a Kingdom Hearts game, it felt more like playing a prototype for a game that has just launched its Kickstarter campaign...of course, one that I might consider backing but with this apparently being a taste of what Kingdom Hearts 3 can offer, this is where I start to get worried.

The final part of Kingdom Hearts 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue is a short CG film that seemed primed to fill in some gaps in the complex history of Kingdom Hearts: What is the purpose of the keyblades? Why & how were the worlds separated? Why is Xehanort such an evil bastard? With the writing of Kingdom Hearts on the whole being quite hit & miss and far more complicated than it needs to be, all I wanted from this was to be told a simple origins story with a few well realised and unique characters that explained some of the more out-there concepts of the Kingdom Hearts universe...

What I got was a cryptic mess starring the most typically Japanese cliche characters ever. The stoic, serious leader. The easily manipulated brute who believes he would be best suited for leadership. The youngest of the bunch who is sickeningly unsure of herself. Various Final Fantasy games explored these character tropes years ago!

Then there’s the character who I hesitate to call the antagonist who is apparently responsible for breaking up the worlds & in the games own words is now the most important & possibly powerful character in the entire series. What do we know about this man? He is an intensely irritating joker who is hard to take seriously as any kind of threat. He put his eye on the No-Name keyblade so he could see into the future & one day be resurrected. He also put something in a locked box & said never to open it...the hows and whys of this situation are apparently not important. This is presented with some truly lifeless voice acting and It all culminates with the realisation that we now have about a billion unanswered questions on top of any we might have had after the end of Kingdom Hearts II.

So, on to Kingdom Hearts 3 which upon release could of course be everything we hope it should be but to temper our expectations, lets recap on what Tetsuya Nomura & his team need to learn from the previous games. In my opinion, Kingdom Hearts 1 is the only game in the series that is perfectly balanced for a proud mode playthrough. Each encounter is challenging yet damage can mostly be avoided by studying your enemy and utilising all of Sora’s abilities. Though levelling up allowed small customisations & abilities which were useful on a situational basis, Sora never became overpowered. The other games however, have some frustrating enemies and plenty of ways to die without knowing how or why. (looking at you Nobodies you flailing bastards!)

AI is possibly the most important thing in most games, certainly when it comes to Kingdom Hearts’ combat but if you study the trailers so far you will notice that while everything looks great, the enemies are usually just standing around or walking in circles and we barely ever see Sora having to avoid damage. He is absolutely destroying the heartless in all the trailers and a lot of it seems tied to the shotlock system. This mechanic was overpowered in Birth by Sleep and almost useless in Fragmentary Passage which leaves me wondering if it really needs such a big place in Kingdom Hearts 3, will it detract from the fun just to show off some flashy, particle effect heavy, rain of death or will it be a fail-safe to get out of a sticky situation as the drive gauge was in Kingdom Hearts II?

As important as the combat is, I think exploration and level design needs to be seriously considered in Kingdom Hearts 3. The second game was severely lacking in this department and the worlds seemed to lack the character that the first game had. Using Sora’s abilities to find hidden areas such as in Agrabah’s waterfall cave where reaching certain ledges needed a high jump or even a glide, was incredibly satisfying. Recent Japanese RPGs have been terrible for connecting circular combat arenas with various lengths of corridors & considering that “level design”...it’s not and it needs to stop.

As for the story, this is something that at this point I really don’t think can be salvaged. It’s all a complete mess and I think it’s down to being too eager to release too many games. It’s gotten to the point where there are now more bad Kingdom Hearts games than there are good. There is no possible way Kingdom Hearts 3 can explain the nonsense presented in 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue so the best thing that could happen is that Kingdom Hearts 3 completely ignores it. One of my biggest worries is failing to do justice to the characters, a big part of which is the voice acting which seemed jarringly bad in some of 2.8. There’s a specific line from Mickey for example where he just sounds completely different to how he did in the other games and the intonation of the line delivery is simply awful. That to me suggests poor direction & comes as yet another worrying sign on top of the increasingly bad game design choices we’ve seen from Tetsuya Nomura and his team.

After all of Square Enix’s recent failings: Drakengard 3 & Star Ocean 5’s abysmal budget, Final Fantasy XV being released completely unfinished and now this truly disappointing Kingdom Hearts 2.8, I cannot help but worry about the quality of Kingdom Hearts 3. Tetsuya Nomura & his team need to take a step back & look at what made Kingdom Hearts good in the first place. Not least of all, it was a simple, character driven story of light vs dark.