Ethan Castro ‘24
Since the very first Kingdom Hearts game, Square Enix (formerly known as SquareSoft) and Disney Interactive Studios have continuously done great service to the gaming community. The ongoing collection with many varying main and spin-off titles is the birthplace of Disney’s collaboration with the popular gaming RPG Final Fantasy. This year, we’ve amassed two decades of adventuring with the main protagonist Sora and his well known Disney companions Donald Duck and Goofy. In celebration, all current installments of Kingdom Hearts are to be released on the Nintendo Switch console as cloud versions.
As many of you may or may not know, a cloud version is a form of online streaming that allows players to display a game on the Switch that is running from a local server. The introduction of cloud versions to the Nintendo Switch stems from it having no heavy-duty hardware capable of running high performance games such as Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil.
While many are happy that the Kingdom Hearts series will be playable on the Nintendo Switch, many are upset with the lack of serious Switch ports, saying that Square Enix is simply lazy and doesn’t want to put in the effort.. This frustration is largely credited to the inconsistency the cloud versions present. While able to play the games at high performance, you never own the game and constantly need to maintain stable connection, meaning you cannot play it on the go despite being an offline title. Longtime fans complain that this was a horrible start to this incredibly important event, as it only shows how little care Square Enix is putting into making the community happy.
For such a huge anniversary, you’d imagine the main goal of Square Enix and DIS is to please fans and get those who lost interest to rediscover their love for the game. We can only speculate what moves these two companies will make to ensure this celebration runs as smoothly as possible for them and us. As of now, we can only take what we get with the cloud versions and continue to hope for more good news from the developers as the Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary presses on.
The Salesian Spectator 