Finally, Kingdom Hearts is available on Switch. You can now experience the adventures of Sora (y’know, the final character to be added to Smash Bros. Ultimate) on Nintendo’s beloved hybrid console. But you know what? It sucks.
The games are good, don’t get me wrong. The Kingdom Hearts series is an important one in many respects, having broke new ground in terms of helping the company that built Final Fantasy to master live-action RPG combat while partnering them with arguably the most important intellectual property owner in the world. The games tell a convoluted, but ultimately lovable, coming-of-age story that pretty much anyone can relate to – and if you have a sense of nostalgia for any of Disney’s biggest movies, you’ll fall in love with at least a couple of the game’s worlds. So, what’s the problem?
Well, it’s all about cloud. Not the one from Final Fantasy, who appears in the KH series as a brooding mercenary. This is the cloud that the games run on. You see, the Kingdom Hearts titles on Switch aren’t running natively on the machine – they’re a cloud-only release. You buy the games, but then whenever you boot them, they’re being streamed to you over the internet from some centralized, more powerful hardware running it from afar.
