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KH3 Cutscenes are Too Long



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Launchpad

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That's really the thread, but in short, KH3 cutscenes are horrendously long and certain sections of the game have way too many scenes in a row. Defeating Vanitas as Aqua triggers a series of scenes that feels almost unending. You get

- The guardians of light in Yen Sid's tower
- Aqua and Ven convo outside the tower
- Maleficent and Pete convo
- Lea and Isa convo with a ridiculous amount of expository dialogue
- Riku and Riku convo
- Sora and Kairi convo

Then you get to play Gummi for four minutes, and then we get

- A pretty slow villain monologue in KBG

Then you get to fight 1,000 Heartless 2.0, THEN

- Terranort appears. Ven and Aqua spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME having facial expressions over this.
- Donald kills Terranort. Sora slowly reacts to the fact that people got hurt
- Dark Tornado slowly forms. Sora, Riku, and Aqua slowly react.
- People start dying. Sora screams and Riku tells him to shut up and dies
- Sora dies
- Eraqus and Xehanort play chess
- Sora wakes up in the Final World

Then you get to take a few steps in the final world. THEN

- Chirithy appears and EXPLAINS DEATH. THIS TAKES AN ASTONISHING AMOUNT OF TIME
- Sora panics about being in pieces. Chirithy explains this as well
- Sora decides to find the rest of himself

You can collect a few Soras and as of 1.09, we get another forced cutscene

- Sora finds Namine's star. Sora and Namine expose a lot of already known information for a very long time

Then you can stumble into an optional cutscene

- Sora and _______ meet each other. She's lost, and wants to find _______. Sora underreacts.

THEN YOU GET THE PLEASURE OF COLLECTING 111 SORAS BEFORE

- ANOTHER LONG CUTSCENE where Chirithy advises Sora to rescue the others
- Sora also inquires about Chirithy's fate, Chirithy alludes to Ven not remembering them
- Sora travels back to the moment where Riku told him to shut up and died
- Sora flies through darkness into some light while screaming Riku's name
- Sora finds himself in Olympus, Jiminy pops out and gives us all an awful fright

And then, finally... We get to play the video game for a little while, travelling to every world to face off against the Lich heartless. If this thread seems long and meandering to you, then maybe you understand my frustration with this aspect of the game. The cutscene to gameplay ratio in KH3 isn't great, but even if we HAD to have the same amount of scenes in all the same places, there are things they could do to make it less terrible. They could verbally expose less info and spend more time showing, leave more up to the imagination, and SPEND LESS TIME ON SLOW REACTION SHOTS WHERE CHARACTERS WIDEN THEIR EYES AND GRUNT/MOAN/WHINE IN RESPONSE TO THINGS. KH3's cutscenes have some great, lively moments, but there's so much rubbish in between those moments. I hate stand and explain scenes, and KH3's back half is chock full of them. Keyblade Graveyard has some awful, awful scenes like this. The animators actually got to have FUN in the Disney worlds, why must the OG stuff be so sterile?

Anyway, yeah. I hope the next KH game has less scenes, and better ones too.
 

Absent

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Yikes that reminds me of a bunch of YouTubers that I follow that played 3. When they played 3, their episodes were 80% cutscene and 20% percent gameplay. The beginning of the game is cutscene heavy too.
 

kristi-swat

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Well I liked the cutscenes but I get your point. Problem is that every relevant part of the story got cramped near the endgame, but as an overall game there are less cutscenes than KH2 for example by a big margin
 

AegisXIII

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Well I liked the cutscenes but I get your point. Problem is that every relevant part of the story got cramped near the endgame, but as an overall game there are less cutscenes than KH2 for example by a big margin
It probably comes from the fact that there is little/no exploration related to the main story as in previous games.
 

2 quid is good

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That's really the thread, but in short, KH3 cutscenes are horrendously long and certain sections of the game have way too many scenes in a row. Defeating Vanitas as Aqua triggers a series of scenes that feels almost unending. You get

- The guardians of light in Yen Sid's tower
- Aqua and Ven convo outside the tower
- Maleficent and Pete convo
- Lea and Isa convo with a ridiculous amount of expository dialogue
- Riku and Riku convo
- Sora and Kairi convo

Then you get to play Gummi for four minutes, and then we get

- A pretty slow villain monologue in KBG

Then you get to fight 1,000 Heartless 2.0, THEN

- Terranort appears. Ven and Aqua spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME having facial expressions over this.
- Donald kills Terranort. Sora slowly reacts to the fact that people got hurt
- Dark Tornado slowly forms. Sora, Riku, and Aqua slowly react.
- People start dying. Sora screams and Riku tells him to shut up and dies
- Sora dies
- Eraqus and Xehanort play chess
- Sora wakes up in the Final World

Then you get to take a few steps in the final world. THEN

- Chirithy appears and EXPLAINS DEATH. THIS TAKES AN ASTONISHING AMOUNT OF TIME
- Sora panics about being in pieces. Chirithy explains this as well
- Sora decides to find the rest of himself

You can collect a few Soras and as of 1.09, we get another forced cutscene

- Sora finds Namine's star. Sora and Namine expose a lot of already known information for a very long time

Then you can stumble into an optional cutscene

- Sora and _______ meet each other. She's lost, and wants to find _______. Sora underreacts.

THEN YOU GET THE PLEASURE OF COLLECTING 111 SORAS BEFORE

- ANOTHER LONG CUTSCENE where Chirithy advises Sora to rescue the others
- Sora also inquires about Chirithy's fate, Chirithy alludes to Ven not remembering them
- Sora travels back to the moment where Riku told him to shut up and died
- Sora flies through darkness into some light while screaming Riku's name
- Sora finds himself in Olympus, Jiminy pops out and gives us all an awful fright

And then, finally... We get to play the video game for a little while, travelling to every world to face off against the Lich heartless. If this thread seems long and meandering to you, then maybe you understand my frustration with this aspect of the game. The cutscene to gameplay ratio in KH3 isn't great, but even if we HAD to have the same amount of scenes in all the same places, there are things they could do to make it less terrible. They could verbally expose less info and spend more time showing, leave more up to the imagination, and SPEND LESS TIME ON SLOW REACTION SHOTS WHERE CHARACTERS WIDEN THEIR EYES AND GRUNT/MOAN/WHINE IN RESPONSE TO THINGS. KH3's cutscenes have some great, lively moments, but there's so much rubbish in between those moments. I hate stand and explain scenes, and KH3's back half is chock full of them. Keyblade Graveyard has some awful, awful scenes like this. The animators actually got to have FUN in the Disney worlds, why must the OG stuff be so sterile?

Anyway, yeah. I hope the next KH game has less scenes, and better ones too.
To add to this, the stand and explain cutscenes can be done in a slightly more exciting way, just take a look at 0.2s second to last cutscene where Riku is getting all navel gazey.

The camera moves around in a variety of ways, not just shot/reverse shot, while a character is talking (e.g Riku) characters in the background of the scene will visibly react and move around ever so slightly. That's a huge step up from KH3's final Mysterious Tower scene, where if you aren't the focus of the camera you're standing stock still. Also, 0.2 had the camera pan to Kairi while Riku was talking, it was shocking really, having a character talking just out of frame.

That's not to say KH3 has bad cinematography, the Disney worlds, especially the ones at the start, were amazing, and the first half of the game, even when the cutscenes were just the gummi ship, were similar in vein to how 0.2s were executed. And then the quality just really dips and never really comes back.

It doesn't help that a hell of a lot of the main scenario cutscenes before the saving aqua part is either exposition of things fans already know (a cardinal sin for me) or more UX bait. Its one thing if maleficent and Pete showed up once in Olympus and then in the epilogue, but they show up every few worlds or so, if you weren't super familiar with the series you'd expect all this teasing to lead to something.

It probably comes from the fact that there is little/no exploration related to the main story as in previous games.
KH2 had only 3 worlds out of its 15 total that were smaller than normal (even then 100 acre woods is bigger than KH3's)
Meanwhile KH3 had 5 out of its 14 (I'm counting any playable area at all as a world) worlds be smaller than the average. For arguments sake I'll say the KBG is on par with the Disney worlds.
Those 5 mini worlds are also pretty damn small too, so you're right in that there isn't much exploration for the main story in comparison to KH2. Of course quantity ≠ quality, but KH2s strength is the og worlds by a long shot, whereas KH3's is the Disney, I suppose it very much depends if you see the two as separate entities and how much you care/don't care about it all.

Looking at the numbers makes it seem like KH3 is pretty close to KH2s quantity xD
 

FudgemintGuardian

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Quantity over quality, unfortunately. I've probably said this once before, but it's worth saying again; KH3's story is not only very drafty, but how scenes are stretched out is like they're trying to reach some arbitrary quota.
 

Sakuraba Neku

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Since the beginning that the complaints about KH3 feeling like a movie most of the time aren't random. The game is plagued with bad direction and bad pacing.

Most of the Keyblade Graveyard world in particular can be mentally exhausting. ReMind isn't better either, by the way.
 
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Elysium

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I actually love all the cutscenes*, but I understand how they're exhausting for some. I think the only times the number of scenes in a row really stood out to me were the beginning of The Caribbean and just after saving Aqua.

* In part because they didn't feel as repetitive as in KH2 where it felt like a whole lotta nothing was taking up a lot of screentime. All those "Sora, Donald, Goofy!"'s added up.
 

darknessofheart

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The scene length itself didn't really bother me as I enjoyed the story beats and there was still plenty of actually gameplay. However, some of the scenes move incredibly slow.

The worst offender for me was the scene where Yen Sid saves everyone. Before he shows up, it's several minutes of the heroes trying to decide what to do before giving up. Aside from the slowness of the scene, I thought it was just plain dumb for them to be at a loss because they all took down a massive army earlier.
 

Raz

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You're right. This reflects a broader pacing problem with the game. The endings of KHI and KHII had some long cut scenes but those felt earned, the payoff you receive after playing through some of the hardest worlds. Compare Keyblade Graveyard to Hallow Bastion/End of the World or TWTNW, where it wasn't just short (and easy) boss fights followed by a poor attempt to wrap up years-long story lines and reunions.
 

Face My Fears

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I loved the cutscenes and the amount that we got... my only problem was really the scenes using the Gummiphone. I'd have rather just leave the world/beat the world to initiate the cutscene and we just see Sora in Radiant Garden talking to Ienzo. I also think that there could have been a bit more plot stuff throughout the main game, but I think what we got was good.
 

Veevee

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The worst about most of the cutscenes is that its characters not only - how you so eloquently great described it "grunt / moan / whine" as a reaction on something, but most of the characters don't even have an actual expression. What bothered me most in - vanilla, since I haven't had the time yet to play Re:Mind - KH3 was that the Yen Sid tower scenes feel especially awkward because there are several people, but only two are talking at the same time. That wouldn't be strange per se, but most of the other characters just stand there in the background, having a blank stare, partly not even in the direction of those who speak and it doesn't really feel like a lively meeting / reunion conversation, but rather some sterile "oh, I know you" - "oh, I remember you too" thing that was really hard to watch. If a character is not the focus of the scene, the expressions kinda become 😐 faces.
 

Noivern

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It comes down to what everyone has complained about since the game released and the thing Re:Mind didn't fix either: all the actual important story chunk happens at the end of the game, so we get a lot of cutscenes all at once instead of getting to play the game, when this could have been spread throughout the game (having a midway point in the story like Hollow Bastion pt2 in 2 could have fixed this, honestly. Like maybe we try to go to Graveyard and get beaten up and killed and then we have to finish the rest of the worlds to get stronger to face the endgame or something.)

Also, another thing that makes me absolutely FURIOUS is how patch 1.9 changed some cutscenes but they didnt bother to change the entire game, or the models itself. This is ok for most of the characters but it's specially annoying with Riku, since in the new cutscenes he actually looks like himself and has his standart ocean-green eyes, while in the rest of the game he has the weird emerald-green eyes that showed up OUT OF NOWHERE (and I barely see anyone talking about it, lol).
 

Elysium

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This is ok for most of the characters but it's specially annoying with Riku, since in the new cutscenes he actually looks like himself and has his standart ocean-green eyes, while in the rest of the game he has the weird emerald-green eyes that showed up OUT OF NOWHERE (and I barely see anyone talking about it, lol).
Well, that's good to hear this was a mistake, and hopefully Riku will have his correct eye color back in future games. I thought maybe we should just accept Riku would have emerald eyes going forward. You'd think this would happen to a background character like Xion or Ventus--not Riku....
 
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Noivern

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Well, that's good to hear this was a mistake, hopefully not to be repeated. I thought maybe we should just accept this is how Riku will look going forward. You'd think this would happen to a background character like Xion or Ventus--not Riku....
Well, I was part of the people who thought they wanted to make his eyes green to make him stood out more since half of the cast has blue eyes, but then the new cutscenes happened and it just clashes, lol. Kairi kept her brighter-purple from the base game so really, only Riku actually went through metamorphosis.
 

FudgemintGuardian

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Also, another thing that makes me absolutely FURIOUS is how patch 1.9 changed some cutscenes but they didnt bother to change the entire game, or the models itself. This is ok for most of the characters but it's specially annoying with Riku, since in the new cutscenes he actually looks like himself and has his standart ocean-green eyes, while in the rest of the game he has the weird emerald-green eyes that showed up OUT OF NOWHERE (and I barely see anyone talking about it, lol).
I didn't even notice.... ;-;
 

PikaPal

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There's also the fact that, when including Re:Mind, you have to go through "today is the day you all lose" four times.
First time:
"Today is the day you all lose."
(gasp)
"Oh no."

Second time:
"Today is the day you all lose."
"Not this time, my boy."

Third time:
"Today is the day you all lose."
(sighs)

Fourth time:
"Today is the day you al..."
"Yes, we god damn get it. Now shut up and fight will ya?"
*Terra's Lingering Will finally arrives*
"Oh."
 
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Ashton69

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Too long? Maybe if you have the patience of a five year old... CHILD

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