KH3 spoilers abound, kinda.

I got halfway through the game's finale and just... hit the eject button on my PS4. I don't have the energy to deal with this shit anymore. I wonder what absolute torture the developers must've endured to look at this product and go "Yes, this is an acceptable game". I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics Tetsuya Nomura undertook in order to delude himself into thinking this is decent.

It fucking SUCKS.

The gameplay is so mind-numbing and trivial that I feel like I'm playing Pong against a corpse. Mash X, push Triangle, occasionally dodge. It's even more braindead than 2 was. By all rights I SHOULD be having fun - I like brainless spectacle fighters after all - but I'm not. This game is about as engaging as an ASMR video carried out in a soundless void.

And Aqua, poor Aqua, they fucked up my baby. They made her a bottom. They took away any sense of agency her character had, however little it was. EVERYTHING she does in this game is done to make men look better. She's turned evil just to make Sora more heroic, she's OHK'd by Vanitas to let Ventus come to life, etc etc. Even the SOLE moment she's playable is immediately nullified by Vanitas going "lol nah" and destroying her. The most heartbreaking thing is that Aqua gives a speech about how Sora has only seen her as weak and that she needs to prove she's strong, as if 1) A fucking keyblade master needs to prove herself to a twink and 2) Nomura is gonna LET her be strong.

Don't get me started on Kairi. She was already a plot token - unabashedly so - but KH3 comes along like "She has a keyblade and a mentor now, she'll be useful!"

She isn't. She has as much impact on the plot as Wakka did back in 1. Her personality has been euthanised and she's now Lea and Sora's emotional support dakimakura. In spite of acquiring a keyblade and training, her response to any threat in the game is to metaphorically shriek and beg for male assistance rather than DO SOMETHING. I googled the rest of the finale only to find out that yes, she remains a plot token and is even ganked by Xehanort to show how evil he is.

But hey, enough bitching about the women, let's talk about how EVERYONE gets shafted in what might be the worst setpiece I've ever played in a game.

Terra-Xehanort comes along and everyone's IQ is suddenly lowered to single digits. Everyone gets murdered by a character that Aqua previously beat so hard you'd think he was a masochist and they just... stand there. Ventus gets murdered and Aqua's reaction is to go :O until Terra-Xehanort comes back around to fuck everyone else up along with the Demon Tide (which is reused like what... 5 times in the entire game?) The worst part is that the game interrupts itself to make you spend an hour reclaiming everyone's hearts so you can... redo the entire setpiece but Sora's IQ goes from single digits to like 16 and he decides "maybe I should do something, I guess?" and averts the entire thing. Somehow.

Then the game decides to throw multiple bosses simultaneously at you, and then fucks up any semblance of a good boss fight by interrupting them with cutscenes every time you kill one, which kills the fucking momentum harder than a brick wall does. If you asked me a year ago "Hey, does the idea of fighting Xemnas, Ansem and Young Xehanort simultaneously sound hype as fuck?" I'd've told you "YES IT DOES INJECT THAT SHIT INTO MY VEINS".

But every bossfight in the game feels so... pointless? Like they just added them for the sake of being there. Those three bosses gave me hell individually but here they were less difficult than the final bosses of the Frozen world and the Tangled world. Same goes for every fight I endured in the finale (that I played). The only one of any note was Roxas, Sora and Xion vs. Saix and even then all I could think was "I should be playing as Roxas and Lea should be here by my side". So they couldn't even do that right.

Speaking of soulless: Music and acting. The music is comprised of NOTHING but remixes, and very few original compositions. The problem is that aside from a few pieces (Mostly remixes from BBS or 358/2 Days for some reason), a lot of it just... passed me by I guess? I got excited when I heard Vector to the Heavens and The Other Promise together in sync but that was the only time I truly cared. And the acting... Dunno if it's just my cynicism and misery clouding it, but most of the performances except for Sora, Donald, Goofy and Aqua sounded half-assed. As if they were recording their lines at gunpoint.

All in all... the game just fucking sucks, man. I couldn't recommend this for free, and I wholeheartedly regret getting into Kingdom Hearts since the ultimate emotional payoff just didn't land. I watched the reunions between Roxas/Lea/Xion/Isa and Terra/Aqua/Ventus and I felt absolutely nothing. This game is so fundamentally bad that it gave me EVERYTHING I WANTED story-wise and all I could feel was apathy, occasionally antipathy.