Kingdom Hearts 3 Chronicles is my attempt to keep up with my thoughts on Kingdom Hearts III after every session. I kinda failed at that because I finished the game already and haven’t posted, but you’ll see how that happened, as the game packed so much into a short time that the posts got super long. Today’s post will cover up to the Final World and some junk around it but not the full ending of the game. Also worth knowing that I am playing on Proud Mode, the hardest difficulty available from the start.
Ok so you get to the Eclipse and the gummi ship flight there is like this weird spaceship kind of feel… honestly the aesthetic is a little confusing to be INSIDE a spaceship but whatevs, it’s like the final challenge of this side mode and I haven’t really talked about it in these posts anyway. Since enemy spaceships are obviously a thing out here it makes a degree of sense that this kind of area is possible, I just don’t think you’re ever shown flying into anything, it’s just like a set dressing. I’m undecided over whether the boss here is actually difficult or just long, but either way once you beat it you are able to land in the Keyblade Graveyard.
The whole team of guardians arrives at the Keyblade Graveyard and Xehanort approaches with his lackeys, saying the time has arrived, etc. villain monologue. Anyway a swarm of Heartless shows up and you get to fight a gauntlet of these things. One of my favorite aspects of Kingdom Hearts is fighting huge waves of enemies so this satisfies that urge immenself. The train roller coaster summon from the Rock Titan fight returns at the climax which is great because it’s probably the most fun of these things and you only use it that one other time. You get Glide for beating everyone and I only then realized I didn’t have Glide so better late than never I guess. At this point I thought I was nearly done with the game...but boy was I wrong!
You enter a clearing and get a cutscene where you FINALLY meet Terra-nort (Terra possessed by Xehanort) and he basically kills Ventus. He knocks Axel to the side, then goes for Kairi only for Sora and Goofy to shield her, and then Donald goes BANANAS and casts Zettaflare on the guy and apparently vaporizes him, but the power was too much for Donald and he collapses. I made that sentence long and exhausting because that’s how it feels in the moment. Just hit after hit, taking down your friends, and you feel like you’ve been knocked to the ground. At this moment the Demon Tide shows back up and turns into a tornado, which sucks up EVERYONE except for Riku and Sora. Sora breaks down - his friends are his power and his friends were just killed in front of him, so he’s now powerless. And the game makes it perfectly clear that this is really what happened - it wasn’t like they were just sucked into the darkness and can be rescued by diving in after them - they’re straight up DEAD. Riku says “you don’t believe that” you’re powerless to Sora, and he prepares to face the whole tornado himself. It’s too strong though and the darkness swallows him AND Sora.
Cut to black. Text on the screen says that darkness prevailed and light expired. We return to the not-chess match between younger Xehanort and Eraqus. Xehanort has Eraqus in checkmate, but Eraqus shows he has one more move - to retreat to safety, and says that “light can come from the past” as new chess pieces appear. That seems like cheating to me but whatever it’s magical chess, I don’t know the rules, maybe it’s a valid move.
Sora awakens in the world where the sky is reflected in the ground, which we saw briefly in the beginning of the game during the Dive to the Heart, except this time Sora is see-through. A Chirithy appears and tells him he’s in The Final World, and that’s he’s dead. Basically. BUT something is tethering him to the real world, so he can come back if he rebuilds himself. There’s a couple interesting things in this exchange; for starters the Chirithy says that Sora HAS visited this world before on his various visits to the Station of Awakening, which is the name of the place you go during the Dive to the Heart. Now we knew already that that area is basically a dream within Sora’s heart but I think this is the first time anyone has referred to it out loud? Also Chirithy being here raises some questions, because Chirithy is a Dream Eater, specifically the one that worked with the Keyblade Wielders during the Keyblade War. This one says that the line between sleep and death is very thin, which could be an explanation for why it seems to be in charge here.
Several versions of Sora pop up, just walking around, and you have to run into them to recomplete Sora. You also see a bunch of stars all around which you can talk to, and they’ll give you little story bits about how they’re clinging to life for some reason (I THINK they all refer to a relationship they had with someone that they’re longing for, but these relationships take varying forms). You also talk to 2 stars that have actual voiced scenes (there may be more than 2, I don’t know how necessary this bit is to continuing the story but I found 2 of them that did this). One of them is a mystery girl’s voice who says she is waiting for someone, and when Sora offers to tell the person she whispers in his ear and it seems like Sora recognizes who she’s talking about. So a couple things here: is she waiting for a character we know? Is she a character we should know? Is this the missing “girl” that keeps popping up in conversation? It’s such an odd piece, and especially the fact that it feels missable makes me wonder what could possibly be the point here. With the background lore knowledge I have in the series my gut says this is Marluxia’s sister, but I cannot imagine many players of this game are going to make that connection. The other voice you talk to is Namine, who says she is here but that she thinks Kairi is still ok, and that Kairi is the reason Sora is being pulled back to reality. She also mentions that she talked to Terra within Sora’s memories and that she thinks she can tug at the memory threads to help Terra come back. Sora promises to save Namine.
After you get all the pieces here you’re tossed into an even more confusing section that’s like a giant MC Escher painting where you have to run around and collect 111 copies of Sora to complete him. You can rotate this world to explore different sections more easily, but I couldn’t find anything to do here besides just collecting the Sora pieces (later I found out there are rewards for at least getting 222 and 333 Sora’s, but yikes that sounds tedious).
Once you do that Sora appears in Olympus, at the gates of the Gods Realm or whatever it’s called, and suddenly Jiminy Cricket is with him and they have to save the hearts of the other guardians. You run inside and find Riku’s heart being stolen by a Heartless called the Lich, which you chase after and fight.
OK at this point I have to make a confession: I played all the way up to this point of the game without realizing you could Airstep AT ENEMIES. The Lich flies around in the air and is hard to reach normally BUT if you Airstep to him and then attack he is significantly easier. So do that! I discovered this by accident when trying to use a shotlock and reflexively hitting Square to Airstep instead. I can’t even imagine how different this could’ve made the rest of the game for me, but I guess I’ll just have to replay to find out!
You chase the Lich through every world of the game, saving the hearts of each of the guardians in turn. In San Fransokyo, Young Xehanort appears to warn/threaten that the Lich is a Heartless which drags hearts deeper into darkness, and that Sora has put himself in grave danger by following it, as he is not closer to the darkness. But Sora asserts his heart is strong and Xehanort just goes away. Sora notes that they didn’t find Kairi’s heart, when Chip and Dale call him to say they found a new path to the Keyblade Graveyard, and Sora thinks Kairi must obviously be there. He uses his heart to go there and finds Kairi waiting, the light in the darkness that Sora was going after the whole time.
Then we arrive back in the Keyblade Graveyard and it seems as if we’ve actually gone back in time a bit, because we’re right before the initial Terra-nort showdown. I guess that could make sense, because everyone just lost their hearts, and hearts can travel through time, so Sora finding their hearts could return them here before they lost them. This time the Terra-nort sequence plays out a bit differently. Donald never gets the chance to Zettaflare because the Lingering Will appears and fights Terra-nort itself. I can imagine some people will be confused by this. The Lingering Will is Terra’s Keyblade Armor, left over when Xehanort took over his body in Birth by Sleep. Eagle eyed fans may have made the connection that the Lingering Will was last seen in the Keyblade Graveyard (it’s a secret boss in Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix) but there was no real indication it would make an appearance. Namine gives you a slight clue in the Final World when she says she’ll try to contact Terra, but that’s really all you have to go on. So yea, this moment is pretty random, especially if you don’t remember all of the background lore…but I really liked it. I thought it was an excellent bit of fan service, and showing the Lingering Will’s Keyblade transform to blast Terra-nort away was one of the biggest “hell yea!” moments in a game packed with “hell yea!” moments.
So once this bit of fan service ends, we’re immediately treated to another one, which is probably the biggest of these moments in the entire game. But again, it requires you to have been playing along the whole time. The Demon Tower returns but this time everyone is ready to fight it. Sora and team take it on, but despite their best efforts they aren’t able to defeat it. It sucks up all the surrounding Heartless and Nobodies and turns itself into the tornado of darkness that killed everyone earlier. Sora determines to stop it, running and leaping straight into the heart of the tornado, when a bright light appears and a young boy with white hair appears to ask Sora “Need some help?” The boy is Ephemer from Kingdom Hearts Union Cross (and the movie Kingdom Hearts Unchainedx back cover. He summons a wave of Keyblades for Sora to ride toward the tornado. Sora jumps on a Keyblade, and when you return to the battle system your Reaction Command turns into names, presumably those of people who played Union Cross. With every button press your Keyblade explodes in a burst of light (that even looks like a bunch of Keyblades) which fight back the darkness and allow you to fly into the center of the dark tornado. Hit your button about 300 times and the command becomes “Union,” one final burst of light which pierces through the core of the tornado, propelled by the power of the ancient Keyblade wielders. This moment is amazing if you’ve played Union Cross and became invested in its story about the original Keyblade War, but again, I’m hard pressed to imagine what it might feel like for someone without that context. I was practically jumping out of my chair with excitement over it though, so I do think it’s incredibly effective at its mission.
Once the Heartless are defeated the Keyblades disperse and for a second it seems like we’ll get a break in the troubles, but instead Dark Riku shows up. Mickey says this Riku is the same from when Ansem had possessed Riku. He summons a huge darkness which turns into more Heartless which surround our heroes. Sora even calls out “this again?!” at the redundancy of their situation, but it’s fine. Everyone tries to figure out what to do. The tower of Heartless rises again, reading to defeat everyone, when a bolt of light from the sky appears and Master Yen Sid appears. With great magical power he disperses the Heartless and makes a path for Sora and co. to follow. Mickey of course doesn’t want to leave Yen Sid behind, so Donald and Goofy decide to back him up while the Keyblade wielders move on ahead. These Seven Guardians of Light run out of the darkness and into a deeper part of the Keyblade Graveyard.
They reach a crossroads and stop. In the distance, the Thirteen Darknesses approach, with Master Xehanort in the back. Master Xehanort gives a speech about his plan to see the Keyblade War’s secrets, and that they will forge the X-blade - the key with the power to open Kingdom Hearts. Summoning his own Keyblade, Master Xehanort splits the ground, raising himself and his darknesses up to higher plateaus, and creating a kind of labyrinth for Sora and his friends to fight through. Everyone runs into this labyrinth in their own direction, and this new set piece feels like the best place to stop this entry…
See what I meant by this getting long? I have no problem with the ending going and going because it gives me more content to enjoy, but it does start to feel exhausting by this point when I thought for sure so many times that I had finally hit the end and the final battles would be just ahead. But there’s a whole detour out of the Keyblade Graveyard, a bunch of cutscenes, a few more battles, then more cutscenes, and then we get a whole new “dungeon” within the Keyblade Graveyard world to explore. It’s just a lot, and I don’t begrudge any of the commentators I’ve seen who said this part drags on too long. I had a really great time with it myself though. It does a lot to make fans feel like their long term investment in the series was worthwhile. The Final World is an odd place that raises a lot of new questions about the series (like who does that Chirithy belong to? Ventus I’m assuming?) but it’s not so odd that I have to discount the game for it. It has some of the most memorable bits in the game, and some of the most surprising - for instance the whole Lich sequence is a turn I never would’ve expected the game to make. It portends dark things for Sora and his allies as they move into the final arena. What did Young Xehanort mean by his warning to Sora in San Fransokyo? Is their any way to prevent Master Xehanort from forging the X-blade, or are we just playing into his hands?
The next post will attempt to address these questions and more, and will likely be the last post in terms of pure game recap/commentary, as we truly, finally, approach the final gauntlet…