When I was a teenager, Kingdom Hearts came out and it was awesome. I remember vividly buying the game at the GameStop, where the clerk wearing a bud light lanyard literally made fun of the game as I was buying it. I was slightly offended, but little did I know how right he was. Putting Disney and Final Fantasy characters in the same game is "dumb."

It was a good game. At least, I enjoyed it. I played Kingdom Hearts 2 several years later, and also enjoyed that. Had a KH3 come out a few years later, I probably would have enjoyed that as well. But they made spin offs. And they kept making spin offs. Until the spin offs had spin offs.

I waited almost 15 years for this shit. There have been like 8 other Kingdom Hearts games in those 15 years, but not one of them was the penultimate KH3 that I was waiting for. So I avoided all the "spin off" games thinking they didn't matter. If you have not played any of those games, ignore this game completely. I had absolutely no idea what was happening, and I even watched recaps. All this weird bullshit about "heartless" and "nobodies" and "the organization" and how... you know what, it doesn't fucking matter.

Nonsensical story aside, I fondly remember Kingdom Hearts' combat to be fun. This is probably the worst case of Nostalgia goggles I've ever had. That shit was trash. You just mash one button over and over, and cool shit just sort of happens. I was reminded that the combat for Final Fantasy XV feels almost exactly the same. And that game was hot trash too.

I could've kept it going to just to see all the new cool worlds. Kingdom Hearts weirdest flex is that you basically just ride a spaceship to different Disney worlds. Previous games had Nightmare Before Christmas, Hercules, Winnie the Pooh, and each world was kind of cool to explore and see what was packed in there.

Only about half of the worlds in this one are new, and the one I was most excited for, Toy Story, was a huge wet fart. They also removed every single Final Fantasy character from some reason. It's literally just a Disney game now.

The voice acting is like nails on a chalk board. The breaking point was the Tangled world. They literally just acted out the plot of Tangled with Kingdom Hearts characters, poorly. I shut it off in the middle of a cutscene. And I never went back.