I tried a variety of different setups, each in an attempt to better the experience. For the purposes of this review, I played the intros of four: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 2, Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep, and Kingdom Hearts 3. There are six games total, with one short prequel experience and three games-turned-cutscenes. You also can get all of them together in a single package called Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece for Cloud for $89.99. The Kingdom Hearts series is divided into three packages on Switch: Kingdom Hearts HD - 1.5+2.5 ReMIX - Cloud Version ($39.99), Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue Cloud Version ($49.99), and Kingdom Hearts 3 + Re Mind (DLC) Cloud Version ($49.99) - if those titles are obnoxious read, just imagine how annoying they are to type. Or maybe you kept your Switch asleep too long? Well, the game might just outright crash, which can cause a lot of headache in a series like Kingdom Hearts, where most of the entries require manual saves.īut losing progress due to a connection error will be the least of your worries with these ports.

Every time you put the Switch to sleep, the device will need to reconnect with the cloud and reestablish your connection. Launching the game not only requires an internet connection - something Switch owners who share an account across multiple devices are already familiar with - but players will need to sustain that connection throughout their entire play session.

(If you want to know more about how this process works and why it’s not great on Switch specifically, we highly recommend this breakdown from Digital Foundry on YouTube). In practice, though, it’s a nightmare that doesn’t ever perform as well as the games do on much older platforms, including the PlayStation 2. Theoretically, this allows players to jump into a game with no download times and without hardware constraints. Several newer games on Nintendo Switch have opted for a “cloud version.” Instead of running natively on Switch hardware, the game leverages the player’s internet connection and streams directly to the device.

These unreasonably priced packages are barely functional, and it’s hard to recommend them to anyone, even in the most ideal conditions.

But the Nintendo Switch Cloud Versions of the Kingdom Hearts series are perhaps the community’s biggest burdens yet. Kingdom Hearts players have put up with a lot over the years: story nonsense, sequel titles that don’t make any sense, finales that don’t live up to over a decade of hype, and all of our friends insisting that the entire series is terrible (when only some of it is).

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