Over the past 9 months, I have played every 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kingdom Hearts game, with a couple of breaks in between to stop my brain from turning into a pile of goo. I experienced its highs and lows - its most heartfelt scenes and its most infamous moments. Having gone through all of its twists and turns, I can safely say that there is nothing else out there quite like it, and ther𒐪e probably never will be.
When you think of the series as a whole, you probably think of the convoluted plot. It’s a deserved reputation, as the sheer amount of time travel and half-Xehanorts is enough to confuse even the most confident minds. Each game in the series includes important characters, plot details, and complex lore, all of which you’ll need to take a mental note of for events that occur in later games. Unlike other long-running franchises like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed, you can’t just play the💝 numbered entries and understand what’s going on - each game is important to the whole story.
While that sounds like a chore, it led to a level of investment that very few other franchises have managed to get out of me🦂. Sticking with the same cast of characters for the majority of my time with the series meant that I ended up caring a lot more about Sora, Kairi, Axel, etc than I ever have with someone like Cloud Strife or Ezio Auditore. The amount of time dedicated to exploring the relationsh🌟ips and motivations of one set of pals is completely unmatched.
The same can be said of the game’s villains. The final few hours of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kingdom Hearts 3 have you taking on a boss rush of bad guys from throughout the series, going all the way back to Chain of Memories. It’s an incredible culmination of past struggles, as each character fights with a different method that forces you to quickly adapt. It almost perfectly mirrors the series as a whole, a colleওction of titles with ever-differing styles that changes from game to game.
It’s this willingness to mix things up that sets it apart from anything else. Long-running franchises like Yakuza and Assassin’s Creed have only attempted to shake up their once-reliab🤪le formulas after they got stale. On the other hand, Kingdom Hearts has routinely swapped between typical action RPGs, to a card fighting system, to mobile games, before finally ending with Memory of Melody - a rhythm game of all things. The mainline titles have all played the same, but the experimentation in the spin-offs makes a chronological series playthrough one hell of a rollercoaster.
Of course, that amount of experimentation means that the series doesn’t nail it every time. Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded is easily the worst of the lot, simply because it’s a recap of prior events with an hour or two of new story beats thrown in to stop you from falling asleep. However, at that point, you’re firmly invested in Sora’s growth as a character and his relationship with others like Roxas. I don’t think I’ve ever had quite the same desire to willingly go into a game I knew was a stinker just for the sake of one character and hisꦯ goofy friends.
Kingdom Hearts has its ups and downs - I’m not here to explain why it's a perfect series that can’t be criticized - but that makes it all the more appealing to me. I’d much rather spend my time with the completely baffling story of Kingdom Hearts, as it tries to explain why Sora is beating up a ghost of Xehanort with the power of music, than I would with a dozen carbon copies of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed. It’s a completely different beast that just wouldn’t exist without creator Tetsuya Nomura, and that’s why I’ll always look back on my series playthrough with nothing but fondness. Bring on Kingdom 🅺Hearts 4.