I’ve played every Kingdom Hearts game multiple times, and yet the series will always drag me back again and again for even more time spent in its various worlds. Do I really need to see Sora earn the Keyblade once more? For Roxas’ fleeting summer vacation to come to an end? To watch Mickey Mouse crawl through his own equivalent of the Microwave Hallway? My answer will always be yes, and so here I am again covering another collection encompassing the entire series (sans Melody of Memory and other, forgotten spinoffs). This one’s a bit different though, as each of these games was technically already available on the target console, the Switch 2, through the Integrum Masterpiece Cloud Versions. Game streaming was an interesting experiment for a while, but has largely been rejected as, unless you have the best internet known to man, it kinda sucks. This latest collection is native to Switch 2 (also available on PS5, with just KH 1.5+2.5 being on Switch 1 as well) and, while it has its problems, it’s a vast improvement over the Cloud Versions.
Kingdom Hearts 2.8, containing Dream Drop Distance, 0.2 Final Chapter Prologue, and the Back Cover movie, happened to download first, so I ended up running through 0.2 again as I still don’t like DDD. If you were hoping for some performance improvements compared to the Kingdom Hearts 3 demo, well, prepare to be disappointed. It’s slightly better, as we’ll get into with KH3, but it’s still nowhere near stable. You’re gonna be hovering somewhere in the range of 20 to 60 frames per second, which can leave the game feeling a touch sluggish and unresponsive, especially compared to the cap of 120 fps on PC. The battles with Phantom Aqua come the closest to 60 fps, which is dearly needed as she’s pretty tough. I still thoroughly enjoyed going through this short prologue, but it’s definitely not the ideal way to play.
The same goes for Kingdom Hearts 3; I had a great time with what I played, but having just completed a replay on PC, the game feels far from smooth. It’s better than the demo, at least in so much as Attractions like the pirate ship no longer tank the framerate. There are more moments of stability compared to 0.2, however, and facing off with the Titans at the top of Olympus or the demon tide in Twilight Town felt better than fighting groups of Heartless. Exploring areas like the forest in front of the old mansion probably fares the worst, with Sora, Donald, and Goofy emerging from the Twilight Town sewers and into a veritable slideshow. Kingdom of Corona isn’t quite as bad, but still noticeably choppy.
This version of Kingdom Hearts 3 comes with yet another platform/retailer exclusive keyblade, this one titled Long Night and modeled after Mickey’s Star Seeker. It comes with 4 Strength and 4 Magic off the bat, with Leaf Bracer and Magic Roulette. It’s nice not to have to wait so many levels to finally get Leaf Bracer, especially since I usually go with the Guardian Route, which gains the ability at level 26.
I wasn’t able to get very far in any of these titles aside from 0.2 (I had, like, a day and a half with the collection before needing to write this), but with KH3 you are able to convert your save file from the Cloud Version before you start playing. Unfortunately, conversion wasn’t available before launch, but if the game gets any substantially worse or better later on I may update this article to reflect that. My cloud save got all the way to Arandele, so I should be able to check out the rest of the game from there. I am a little confused as to why the other collections don’t support save conversion, as I definitely have saves for all of them, but whatever; I was expecting to start over regardless.
Kingdom Hearts, Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts 2, and Birth By Sleep all fare as you’d expect. They’re all locked to 60 outside of cutscenes, which is what we’ve come to expect from these titles. It would have been nice if we could get 120 fps in portable mode and uncapped cutscenes, but that would probably take more time and effort than Square Enix is willing to put in for yet another release of this collection. The movies are all par for the course too, though Coded and 358 look pretty fuzzy with their pre-renders.
I did run into one fairly significant issue in this collection, and it was with Kingdom Hearts 1’s opening movie. For some reason, there are various points where it’ll stutter for a second or two. I have no idea why this is, and while it’s something minor in the grand scheme of things, it speaks to a lack of care for these ports. That’s something I’ve felt in the vast majority of Square Enix’s Switch 2 ports, though mostly with regards to their consumer-hostile pricing and practices as opposed to their actual quality. There have been some fantastic Switch 2 ports lately, particularly from Capcom, and it feels like at bare minimum I should expect a pre-rendered opening to look as it did back on the PS2.
Still, it’s nice to have all these games portably, though if you have the PC versions and a Steam Deck you’ll get a better overall experience. I’ve been planning on a full series replay before KH4 next year (words I still can’t believe are true) and I’ll probably do that here for the sheer convenience of portability. I love these games and will continue to play every port, remake, rerelease, or future installment I can get my hands on. This does present an interesting opportunity for Square Enix to fully and truly create a complete Kingdom Hearts package on Nintendo hardware by releasing the original version of Chain of Memories on NSO. I vastly prefer that incarnation to the remake, and it would be fun to revisit. If Nintendo ever decides to add DS titles to NSO, the same goes for 358/2 and Re: Coded, as I also consider both of those superior to their movie incarnations. With how minimal these ports can feel, however, I’m not holding my breath.
