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Get Excited About KHIII

...but not too excited.

By Jasmine CarrollPublished 7 years ago 4 min read
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New gameplay trailer released at D23 during the Kingdom Hearts livestream.

Yesterday, the D23 Expo rolled out its most exciting gaming announcement: a brand new trailer for Kingdom Hearts III including both a release year (finally) and the ball drop that the Toy Story universe is among the new worlds that will be included in the game.

As excited as we are to know that we're going to get shrunken down and turned into action figures so that we can help Buzz, Woody and the gang find Andy and rid their world of heartless, there's likely an exciting feature or two that the audience may have missed, as well as one major disappointment.

Let's break this thing down.

In the beginning, we can see Sora fighting in worlds we've already been told will be included in the game, like Hercules' world and an anticipatory return to Twilight Town, hopefully in connection with bringing Roxas back.

Sora and his pals are seen battling massive heartless in what appears to be the city of Thebes where Herc' earns his fame in the movie. Given that we've now seen Sora in both Olympus, the Colosseum and Thebes across the trailers, it's safe to say that Hercules' world will not just be the dumping ground for a seemingly never-ending tournament, but an actual world to play through, closer to how the Underworld served the game in KHII.

Along with a sick looking, Mount Olympus-themed key blade, command finishes have finally made their way to Sora and, needless to say, our strong-willed hero is going to have a brand new set of amazing moves to use against enemies in the new game.

What you may have missed here: Sora is fighting alongside Donald, Goofy and Hercules. This isn't a particularly new feature of the games, but more often than not, when Sora gains a world related partner, he's forced to give up one of his main crew to accommodate the new friend and keep his party at three.

There have been a couple of occasions where Sora fights alongside a world's hero without giving up his core partners to defeat major enemies, but the one Sora and the gang are seen fighting has a fairly low HP gauge. Could this mean that we're going to gain the ability to fight with world related characters without giving up Donald and Goofy?

The Toy Story preview says, YES!

Sora, Donald and Goofy can be seen running along the roof of Andy's garage with Buzz and Woody in tow! Much like in the Olympus preview, the additional characters' HP/MP gauges are shown as smaller icons above Sora's (a true tell that they're "in" the party) and to really send it home, the casual music that's associated with traveling and unimportant battles is playing, telling the audience that Sora and co. are simply moving from one place to another.

If this is true, it could mean a major overhaul in character usage, and no longer having to feel like a jerk for always choosing Goofy because, let's be honest, Donald always dies.

On top of getting a good preview of what the Toy Story world's plot line will be and seeing young Terra/Xehanort appear to remind Sora that, yes, there is darkness in hearts (blah, blah, blah), we get to see Sora use some amazing moves that appear to be directly connected to his cool Woody themed key blade of a cactus with a lasso wrapped around it donning Woody's famous hat.

What you may have missed here: what Xehanort has to say isn't necessarily bad. Unlike his predecessors (successors? copies?) this version of Xehanort seems, if anything, ambivalent. He doesn't display any additional malice or villainy, he just lays out the facts. Could there be a plot twist lying beneath the surface that suggests that the darkness must be reclaimed to maintain the balance of the worlds? Will it turn out that Xehanort is less of a bad guy and more of a marker, ever moving the story forward?

It seems we'll find out all this and more when the game drops in 2018!

That's right. Arguably the most exciting part of the trailer was a confirmation that after four long years of waiting, the series will finally get its final game in 2018, but don't celebrate just yet.

With still very little of the game's features and characters being revealed and no season attached to the year announcement at the end of the trailer, it's likely this game will be released for the holiday season, so we still have over a year of waiting to go. What will next year's D23 Expo have to say about the game? Hopefully a formal trailer and an official release date.

Rejoice, Kingdom Hearts fans, the game is finally coming, and it seems it's going to worth the wait!

gamingadventure games
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About the Creator

Jasmine Carroll

Jasmine is a mouseketeer studying at Full Sail University earning her BFA in Creative Writing. She hopes to be a storyboard writer, but that hasn't stopped her from working diligently on a fantasy series of her own. Disney is her passion.

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