KH3 Cutscenes are Too Long

[FudgemintGuardian]

There's also the fact that, when including Re:Mind, you have to go through "today is the day you all lose" four times.

It's the Riku-Ansem scene from KH1 all over again, but a million times worse.

 

[Ink Ribbon]

I can see the complaints with the pacing or animation here and there but personally I didn't think they were long at all. Not if you compare them to a cutscene length from Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding lol. If anything, I could've used a bit cutscenes if it meant fleshing out some missing story/character interactions.

 

[Absent]

I can see the complaints with the pacing or animation here and there but personally I didn't think they were long at all. Not if you compare them to a cutscene length from Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding lol. If anything, I could've used a bit cutscenes if it meant fleshing out some missing story/character interactions.

Those examples are outliers. Most games stay away from long cutscenes because they are bad ideas both gameplay and narrative wise. Consistency is key.

 

[disney233]

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.

This is really the price KH3 pays for having too many characters and trying to clean up their jumbled up arcs in one go. That's my one thing about KH3 and how jumbled up everything went, there's too many characters and arcs to tie into one final battle. One of the reasons why the KH1 & 2 end battles felt less cluttered was because there was a small cast back then, consisting of Sora, Donald, Goofy, Riku, and Kairi. With the occasional Mickey. This is a matter of Nomura making too many characters relevant to KH3 and wrote himself into a corner trying to tie in EVERYTHING. EVEN GODDAMN UNION X!