I'll be honest for a second, the wait for this game wasn't quite as excruciating for me. That sounds bizarre, I know, and I'm not trying to invalidate those who did have to wait long for this, but for me, I hardly knew about this series until this particular game was announced in 2013. And yes, the wait between announcement and release was definitely long, but consider this: I only first played a "Kingdom Hearts" game in 2014, and I didn't properly get into the series (or, for that matter, beat a "Kingdom Hearts" game) until 2017, only three years ago. By the time I'd set my hype thrusters to max, not only was the game relatively close to release, but I still had several games left to play in the series. By the time the game even came out, I still wasn't even done "Birth by Sleep!" But fortunately, about six months after it's release, I finally got through the game...and in the time I spent away from the Internet beating it, I came back to find the game's been a bit polarizing. Not precisely bad, but it seems there's some rather mixed opinions on it. So, what did I think? Was I satisfied after the long wait for the game? Well, for the most part, sure!
"Kingdom Hearts III," as one may expect from this series's first totally new venture on PlayStation 4, looks absolutely marvelous. It's vibrant, it's colorful, the character models and animations are sharp, and the visual design of the Disney worlds are lovingly created wonders to behold. The gameplay is also fine-tuned and polished to near-perfection: the combat is rock solid, the new Attraction Flow and upgrades to Keyblades help make things even more slick, the improvements to the Gummi Ship are much appreciated, and many of the changes to platforming and controls are very welcome, too. Per usual, the music is incredible, the voice acting is solid, and while the story in "Kingdom Hearts" is usually a mess to interpret, I appreciate how things wrap up here and how it still leaves the door open for potential new entries, even if this story is the end of the "Dark Seeker Saga."
That said, there are some things holding this game back from living up to the standards of the other two numbered entries. For starters, I feel like, while the Disney worlds are visual marvelous, a few of them are actually quite monotonous, and don't have the same memorability or wondrous gameplay design as previous worlds in the series (my two lowlights in particular are the Kingdom of Corona from "Tangled" and Arendelle from "Frozen"). Furthermore, I'm not quite sure what was going on with the bosses in this game: one minute, I'm fighting a rather difficult boss that takes me more than a few tries to complete, but then the next boss ends up being a cakewalk. It feels like the game didn't really have any idea how to balance the difficulty out, and instead it chose to radically shift the difficulty sliders between the two furthest ends of the spectrum at free will.
Even so, despite not being the "Game of the Century" that we may have hoped for, "Kingdom Hearts III" is another worthwhile entry to the franchise, and it's definitely a rock-solid conclusion to the "Dark Seeker Saga" of this series. Here's hoping the wait for "Kingdom Hearts IV" doesn't last until 2032.
Final rating: 8 out of 10 "Great"