Kingdom Hearts on Nintendo Switch: Cloudy Skies
Hey all, dunno if I’m fully back yet but this dropped yesterday and I just had to at least test this stuff out and give my thoughts. Kingdom Hearts and Nintendo Switch seem like something that should’ve been done ages ago. Sure, the latest entry would be a challenge to get on the console but having all the adventures of Sora and his friends through various Disney worlds on the go is the exact kind of thing I and many other Disney/Nintendo/Kingdom Hearts fans would pay far too much money for. In the year 2022, it’s finally happening but arguably in the most monkey’s paw way possible.
We get it, the Nintendo Switch wasn’t top-notch hardware when it came out, and it’s nearly impossible to get late last-gen games made for the likes of PS4 and Xbox One to run on it, but Square Enix is only releasing the entire Kingdom Hearts collection on Nintendo Switch as a cloud-based version. Even if you primarily play your Switch docked, that still means you better have a consistently great steady internet connection and probably a pretty generous data limit as well.
While a cloud-only version might be the only way we’d see Kingdom Hearts 3 on the current Switch in any form, there’s literally no other reason the previous games, all games released on much older platforms, could have been downloadable versions. If you can get games like Doom, Skyrim & The Witcher 3 running on the Switch there’s no reason any game in this collection besides Kingdom Hearts 3 (and it would probably take a lot of work but you might be able to get a version of it without cloud streaming) could not run on it without the need for being a stream-only option.
You can download demos for each game (all of the full versions are out on February 10th), and I tested this out and it does seem to run perfectly fine but the demo is also extremely time-limited, I didn’t even get to try 30 minutes with any game I tried so there’s really no good way to tell if this runs well for longer sessions of gaming which does not give one a lot of confidence that it actually will.
But the real final nail in the coffin for these streaming-only versions of the Kingdom Hearts series is the Switch tax. Most people know the Switch tax is basically you are often paying extra to get the Switch version of a game. Sometimes it’s the full retail price when it’s been on other platforms for years and can be found on those platforms significantly cheaper even not on sale. But this might be the most extreme case I have ever seen. It’s launching at a “discount” price of $72 for the whole collection (they are also individually priced but I have no idea why you’d just buy one of the games if you are buying them) and normally it’s $90. NINETY DOLLARS. You know how much you can pick this entire collection on PlayStation 4 right now? Twenty-five dollars. That’s a hell of a price disparity for a version of a game that you might not even be able to play in a few years.
And again, I and literally millions of other Kingdom Hearts fans would probably have been fairly easy to please in this situation. We probably would have paid $60, possibly even $70 for a downloadable version that just had the latest game as streaming-only because we understand that’s probably the limits of the hardware. As it stands now, the best option for Kingdom Hearts on your Nintendo Switch is Melody of Memory because at least you don’t need an internet connection for it and you pretty much get the whole store in a much shorter form. I can’t possibly under any circumstances imagine why someone would buy this version of these games even if the Nintendo Switch is their only console, it’s vastly overpriced even beyond the usual “Switch tax” and it’s a version that you won’t really be able to take advantage of the Switch’s best strengths. If this was the only way we were going to get Kingdom Hearts on Switch, Square Enix shouldn’t have bothered.
That’s all for today, I don’t think I’m fully back from hiatus yet but I just really had to try these out and give my thoughts on them. Look for me to fully return in late February/early March but I may still drop an entry here or there if something like this pops up in the meantime, see ya real soon!
