It’s taken an entire year, but the excellent Kingdom Hearts III has finally been blessed with a DLC expansion. Without spoiling anything, ReMind revisits the ending of the game – fleshing out events while actually changing up some small details in the process. For fans, it’s an opportunity to further explore the famously bonkers Kingdom Hearts lore and it certainly doesn’t shy away from doubling down on overly-complex character origins and a whole lot of ‘this person was this person but now they’re this person and that other person is a different person’.
I’ll be honest – although there are some interesting revelations and a couple of very cool new set-piece fights, I don’t think the handful of hours of rehashed cutscenes and battles in ReMind alone would be totally worth the price of admission at $45 AUD. Luckily then, after seeing the credits roll anew, an option called ‘Limitcut Episode’ opens up on the main menu and things get really interesting.
Even before its bonus offerings become clear, Limitcut Episode leads with the return of some characters that were sorely missed in the main game. Yep, Final Fantasy is back, baby! Aerith, Yuffie, Cid and Squall (I refuse to call him Leon) await players in a very familiar room in none other than Radiant Garden. It’s a small but palpable hit of nostalgia for anyone who lived and breathed Kingdom Hearts 2 back in the day. While the interactivity with these characters in this particular section is sadly minimal (more on that in a bit), they’re rendered beautifully and it’s honestly just really nice to have them back.
After chatting to these old friends for a bit, the main component of this mode reveals itself as a series of virtual boss fights – essentially just more challenging versions of the Organisation XIII fights from the main game. That might not seem overly exciting, and to some it won’t be, but these new battles bring a very welcome element of challenge to the game. I certainly had more trouble with a couple of them than I care to admit And the reward for besting the lot of them? Why, it’s another boss fight! This one’s pretty special though – I won’t spoil anything, suffice it to say that it expands on things only hinted at in the main game and closes out with one of those famous ‘secret movies’ that Kingdom Hearts fans go crazy for. This one’s a doozy, too.
So we’ve got an expanded main game ending, some tough new boss fights and a mysterious tease of things to come; so far, so dark and brooding. That’s where my favourite piece of the ReMind DLC comes in. Data Greeting is exactly the kind of lighthearted and fan-servicing content that Kingdom Hearts III needs. It is, in essence, a souped-up photo mode that lets you mix and match characters from the game, placing them in memorable game locations and posing them to create custom scenes. It’s perhaps a tad light in some areas of control and customisation, but it’s good, dumb fun that offers a break from the emotional stakes of the main game and shines a light on Square Enix’s beautifully crafted worlds and characters.
Plus, we get to see people do things like this:
#KH3ReMind #DataGreeting is the most blursed thing to happen to KH, thank you Nomura & the community for these. pic.twitter.com/HTirNTOya7
— Dreamy (@DreamyAkemi) January 24, 2020
I’m not the most creative person, so my own attempts at making cool images aren’t amazing, but I’m still having a lot of fun with Data Greeting.
There’s probably an argument that ReMind doesn’t have a whole lot of game for the money, and I’d be inclined to agree. That said, what’s there represents a decent spread of content that has something for every kind of Kingdom Hearts fan; the ones in it for the over-the-top story, the ones that revel in the slick combat, and the ones that just want to make cute holiday snaps of Sora and friends.
