This has been your Re:Minder that Kingdom Hearts was Always (Good) Bad

"Kingdom Hearts 3's plot has some poor pacing"

 "Kingdom Hearts has always had that"

"Kingdom Hearts 3 has some really bad filler"

 "Kingdom Hearts has always had that"

"Kingdom Hearts 3 has some wonky voice acting"

"Kingdom Hearts has always had that" 

 Kingdom Hearts has always been bad. Or has it? Could it be that Kingdom Hearts was actually good all along, and that the fanbase has inadvertently created the narrative that every game in the series was of the same level as KH3 in order to pooh-pooh (Oh, Pooh...) criticisms of the latest, much-anticipated entry?
The answer is Yes, Yes, they have.

You cannot pin down one singular outstanding quality to only one KH game. In terms of plot, KH1 and CoM are rather masterful, and Days and BBS are no slouches either. In terms of character writing and interactions, Days and KH2 and even 0.2 are pretty high up there, and as for 0.2, it makes great use of cinematography - better than the game it's purportedly a demo of. In terms of combat, KH1, KH2 and now KH3 all share that crown.

There is hardly anything in KH3 that hasn't already been done before in the series, and done better - with the Photo mode being an exception. It is deflating and discouraging to hear fans of KH3 constantly reiterate the mantra that whatever issue there is with KH3 is a non-issue because "other games were just as bad or worse".

Let's nip that in the bud.

As I already outlined, there are plenty of games in the series that do things well, and of course, not so well.

KH3 has some fantastically written cutscenes between Sora, Donald and Goofy, which build up off the foundation laid for them in KH1 and KH2. However, the good dialogue writing in this game is almost wholly limited to those three, Larxene and Demyx, and a couple of one liners some of the Disney characters get. To give credit where it is due however, Olympus and Kingdom of Corona felt like a cut above the rest in terms of dialogue and interactions, which is nice to be able to say. However, that's only about 20% of the game. The rest of the game is filled to the brim with awkward pauses, flat deliveries, and unnecessary exposition.

I cannot in good conscience say other games were like this. I cannot bring myself to say that the cutscenes in the original DS version of Days had bad VA performances and pauses. I cannot bring myself to say that KH1 or BBS deliver unnecessary exposition. Hell, as much as I dislike the way that KH2 had the DTD described, I can't exactly say it was unnecessary, as the player wasn't aware of that information at all by that point.

By contrast, the first cutscene of KH3 reiterated points fans already knew, which is fine and even expected for an introduction, but after that is where it starts to get egregious. Practically every single Riku and Mickey cutscene prior to the saving of Aqua tells the player things they already knew. We know Aqua is in the Realm of Darkness, we know replicas exist, what we don't know is how you upgraded your keyblades but Please, tell me more about 15 year old concepts that have been repeated to death purely through Days and CoM alone. Similarly, every single Gummiphone conversation has us finding out something mind blowing! If it was still 2009, that is. We either check in with Ienzo who is a Good Guy now (one of the more acceptable ones to swallow) or we hear Sora grousing over how he can't save Roxas or Aqua yet. why. why do people think this is effective writing

By contrast, in every previous game, we are given a well defined motive for the protagonist to follow, and those motives mean something to the player, because we played with Riku on the island and sure he was a jerk but he wasn't a bad guy, and Kairi was so sweet -  she didn't deserve being swept away like that, and then, we gotta keep pushing on because there is some serious shenanigannery going on with our brains and the only answers we'll find is if we keep moving forward, and then Oh, Roxas is such a sweetheart, he just wants to go to the beach but he keeps getting pulled into these weir- Oh, Ohh noo, but Sora is back! And we do need to find Riku because he made up for what he did and who knows where he is and - ah Roxas is back again, and all he wants is a purpose, he's just tryna figure things out and - but Terra just wants to prove himself, and he's not a bad guy, not really, and Ven has to know what's gonna happen to Terra - he can't leave his friend like that and neither can Aqua but then - well Sora and Riku are taking their finals now and that is a pretty big milestone for the both of them.

And now we are looking for the "Power of Waking". What. The premise is not even that bad, it's the fact, after Olympus, Sora never brings up the PoW again in a Disney World. How is he supposed to know how to get it if he won't ask? People will often retort with how Sora looking for Riku in KH2 was just as weak of a premise but, by dint of Riku being an actual tangible achievable goal that players already had an idea of, plus the fact that Sora constantly brings him, does at least pay lip service to what the aim is supposed to be. KH3 doesn't even do that.

More importantly - every one of these games had a midpoint. Now I don't mean a midpoint in the style of:

" Think you can handle this many?"

although that is SUPER awesome, I mean something much quieter. The midpoints in KH games happen when the protagonist's motives either change or evolve. In Sora games, he tends to keep his original motive (looking for his friends) and then adds a new motive onto that (save the world). Just something as simple as this can really help from keeping a game from getting stale, because I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say "KH3 was starting to lose me around The Caribbean/San Fransokyo".

I will not let people try and retroactively accuse games like KH1, CoM, KH2, 358/2 Days, Re:coded, BBS and 0.2 as being on the same level of either overall or specific quality as KH3 when every single one of them had something to offer that let them become more than the sum of their parts, rather than simple 1+1 addition.

This has been your Re:Minder that Kingdom Hearts was Always Good (Not Bad).