Kingdom Hearts III: Re Mind Reviews

Kingdom Hearts 3 is the exciting culmination of the first Kingdom Hearts saga, and succeeds in creating a compelling experience both on and off the Steam Deck.

Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind is a great ending to an already great series. I love the cinematic scenes throughout the game. Since I’ve played this series for so long I’ve grown up with these characters and it has been great to see an arc come to its conclusion. This DLC does not change up any controls but it does add some cool additions like being able to play other characters in the DLC and a photo mode. I love the new additions as it doesn’t take away from the game but offer a little bit ...

Now, I must preface this Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind DLC review with that I am not exceptionally invested into the series, though I do keep up with the news on occasion. Thus, I aim to provide an objective review on the merits of the DLC itself. You can check out the review of the base game here.

The exposition offered on the story's plotholes is a much-needed addition and the secret bosses are some of the best challenges in the series.

Re Mind is a fantastic DLC for those that are seeking a greater challenge than the base game offered. For those here for the story, you’ll be left sorely disappointed but with everything else the package offers, there’s something for everyone.

Re:Mind's new story expansion has a little too much retreading, but the fantastic new boss fights are the highlight of both the DLC, and of Kingdom Hearts III as a whole

In 2016, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XV. Like Kingdom Hearts III, XV launched with obviously missing content, plot holes and features. Square Enix spent months updating the game with new cutscenes, quality-of-life features and playable characters, and did this all for free. It hard not to compare the $29.99 Re Mind with the free Final Fantasy XV content because what they both add is so similar. Re Mind rehashes so much Kingdom Hearts III that, when stripped away, leaves little new and worthwhile to dig into. The base game remains as fun to play as ever, but players don’t need to pay extra money to enjoy that. The new Limit Cut battles are a highlight that displays the complexity of the mechanics, but the other new additions aren’t anything special. Scala Ad Caelum and the Final Fantasy characters are deeply disappointing. The new cutscenes are nice, but they don’t answer many of the lingering questions. Kingdom Hearts III remains an excellent game, and Re Mind does allow players to jump back in for a few hours, but $29.99 is too much to ask for a DLC that barely adds anything new.

Overall, fans of Kingdom Hearts will find little more here than a handful of new cutscenes to enjoy, and a continued cliffhanger for where the series goes next. For a franchise that rose to AAA status on its basis of blending the worlds of Disney and Final Fantasy, it doesn’t feel like either of those things are really core to the future of the franchise. At least, not directly.

As a Kingdom Hearts fans, I can only look at Re Mind and wonder... what happened here? I'm not going to pretend the original story was perfect, but it felt like a satisfying conclusion. Re Mind is a lot of familiar ground, only with much more exposition so as to make things as confusing as possible, followed by a series of disappointments and baffling decisions.

I liked Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind. The retelling of the final battle made the ending of the game that much more emotional for me but the issue I have with the DLC is that it is not worth the $30 price point. Completing the story and four of the 13 boss fights granted me a total of five hours of content.

Kingdom Hearts fans are used to crazy plot twists and cliffhangers that leave them with more questions than answers. The core Kingdom Hearts III experience finally provided resolution to hanging threads, but the Re Mind DLC muddied those waters and made me feel toyed with. Re Mind was an opportunity for Square Enix to provide additional context and shore up the story’s weaknesses. Instead, this add-on feels more like a director’s cut, with only a few new scenes and tweaks to battles. It offers flashes of worthwhile content, but Re Mind demands too much of players to see it.

If there was ever a piece of media so utterly devoted to confusing its dedicated fan base and actively pushing away those who didn’t choose to invest their time in playing nine previous instalments, it's Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind. The base game's one and only piece of major DLC is probably the least accessible expansion of the PlayStation 4 generation -- arriving a year after the title's hotly-anticipated release and throwing you in at the deep end with new lore, story sequences, and a long, long list of characters to catch up on. It's not necessarily a bad piece of downloadable content, but it is wholly designed for the most hardcore of Kingdom Hearts fans.