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Do You Still Care About Kingdom Hearts?

Do You Still Care About Kingdom Hearts?

Last week was a big week for Kingdom Hearts news. Square Enix showed off a trailer for Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue , announced another port of the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 and 2.5 Remix games, said Kingdom Heart’ s Sora would appear in World of Final Fantasy as free DLC, and released a few Kingdom Hearts III screenshots. That all happened in one day, on October 27, 2016. Now, of all of those Kingdom Hearts announcements, which one did you actually care about?

As someone who’s played every Kingdom Hearts game, even the horrible Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, I can’t help feeling like enough is enough. Do you know how many Kingdom Hearts games have been released? Ten. There are ten. Do you know how many are Kingdom Hearts III ? None of them. It has been about 10 years since Kingdom Hearts II was released, and the trilogy still hasn’t been completed. Instead of moving forward, all Square Enix has done is wear out the series’ welcome and perhaps made people stop caring about it.

Look at how many ports we’ve seen. Let’s go chronologically, shall we? Kingdom Hearts is on the PS2, PS3, and soon PS4. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories appeared on the Game Boy Advance, PS2 and PlayStation 3. Kingdom Hearts II ? It’s on the PS2, PS3, and PS4 too. Kingdom Hearts Re:coded was on phones and the DS. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep is on the PSP, PS3, and soon PS4. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance is on the 3DS and will be on the PS4 soon. That’s ridiculous. Instead of spending time putting effort into the game that will answer questions and (hopefully) end the trilogy for good, we have all these reprisals designs to milk as much money as possible from this cash cow.

The last time we had a new, entirely original Kingdom Hearts game worth playing was in 2012. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance was the busywork equivalent of a game. It provided some exposition between the second and third installments, showing Sora and Riku going through training. We even saw some new worlds, which is incredible since this is a series that keeps taking us back to Agrabah, Wonderland, and Olympus Colisseum.

Let’s not even talk about Kingdom Hearts x[chi] . That’s the mobile game that completely abandons everything we know and are familiar with now, to transport us to a world 100 years prior to the events we know. Why? So Square Enix can make money off of a freemium game set in a time when Keyblades are as common as housekeys. All so people can feel like they’re a part of a series and something special. Oh, and maybe hopefully forget that Kingdom Hearts III doesn’t have a release date yet.

Do You Still Care About Kingdom Hearts?

Or Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep–A Fragmentary Passage . I’m all for new content. Especially when it features a character like Aqua, who hasn’t worn out her welcome. But this isn’t a full game. It’s a brief experience that is only going to be the length of one Kingdom Hearts world. It isn’t even a new world, either. Despite her being in the Realm of Darkness, she’ll be exploring a fragmented form of the Castle of Dreams, Cinderella’s world from Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep .

But hey, all of this is okay, because last week we got a whole two new screenshots from Kingdom Hearts III! We got to see static images of Guard and Power Drive Forms, in what looks to be a world based on, wait, could that be something from Disney’s Hercules again? One of the screenshots was even edited by Square Enix, because the Keyblade shown in it hasn’t been announced yet. Yeah, because that’s a huge concern when we’ve been waiting for an installment since 2006.

I used to care about Kingdom Hearts . I even loved the series up to and past Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep . But now? I just don’t even care anymore. With all this posturing and porting, I wonder if I’m the only one. At this point, sometimes I feel so sick of it that if Kingdom Hearts III ever does manage to, by some miracle, get released, I’d rather wait for others to beat it and put together a three sentence summary of the end.

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