Kingdom Hearts has been a series that has stuck with me for a lot of my life. In terms of concept alone, there’s nothing quite like it — mixing the cute whimsy of Disney and the bizarre, zipper-heavy characters and storytelling of Final Fantasy sounds like something that shouldn’t work on paper. But in practice, this utterly wacky combination has led to a unique and widely-loved entry in the genre of action adventure RPGs, one that’s lasted 17 years, and spanned 15 games across 10 different platforms.

It’s also resulted in an absolutely ridiculous story, with time travel, alternate dimensions, multiple versions of the same person, and hearts living inside other hearts all featuring throughout its long and complicated timeline. Kingdom Hearts III is the culmination of all of this storytelling, and in a way, all of these games, bringing an end to the Dark Seeker Saga. That’s one hell of a task, but somehow, against all odds, Tetsuya Nomura and his team at Square Enix managed to pull it off beautifully.

Kingdom Hearts III starts off immediately after Dream Drop Distance finishes, with Sora, Riku, Mickey and the gang (and it is quite a large gang at this point) tasked with gathering the Seven Guardians of Light to defeat Xehanort’s Thirteen Darknesses. If you’re already confused at this point — and I don’t blame you if you are — then you should probably use the game’s Memory Archive feature from the main menu to catch up on the basics. Things are only going to get a lot more ridiculous from here on.

Sora, Donald, and Goofy take off to the realms of Disney to learn more about Sora’s latent abilities, Riku and Mickey pair off to find Aqua in the Realm of Darkness, and Lea and Kairi take to learning their new abilities under the guidance of Merlin the Wizard. It’s these three stories that you’ll be following throughout the storyline, with Sora’s taking up the bulk of the main story and the others serving as a sort of subplot that you’ll revisit after reaching certain points in Sora’s journey. It’s a slightly disjointed approach to storytelling, and it can be a little bit jarring to hop between the different storylines at a whim, but it serves its purpose of breaking up the Disney action a little bit.

But disjointed as it all feels at times, it somehow all works. Kingdom Hearts has a bit of a reputation for its messy, overly complicated storytelling, but this is the finale to it all, the end of all the major storylines that have been built up for 17 years. And to my surprise, the process is much more streamlined than I expected. If you’ve been following along with the story, playing only the bigger games in the series, you’ll find Kingdom Hearts III isn’t too difficult to follow at all. And even though it takes a little while to get going, with most of the major plot points loaded into the back half of the game, every single story has a satisfying conclusion.

I won’t spoil anything, but every non-Disney character is treated well, with a lot of care and respect given to their connections with other characters, their motivations and emotions. It’s a nicely-crafted experience that both embraces the elements of the series that people care the most about and abandons some of the knowing teasing we’ve seen in the past. As the culmination of all his work, Nomura has dropped much of the facade built up in previous games, often getting straight to the point without much messing around. That’s a huge win for everyone — lifelong fans who’ve been waiting for the conclusion to it all, and recent converts to the series will both appreciate the brevity of it all.

And for a series known for its emotional storytelling, Kingdom Hearts III delivers that in spades, with some scenes evoking the most primal of emotions in me. There were quite a few times where I found myself tearing up at a sad moment, or even involuntarily yelling “hell yeah!!” when a fan-favourite character made one heck of an entrance. Your mileage may vary, depending on how long you’ve been with the series and how much it means to you, but Kingdom Hearts III isn’t afraid of making you feel, and that can only be a good thing.

Storytelling isn’t the only aspect of Kingdom Hearts III that’s surprisingly solid, however. The gameplay itself is, somehow, an absolute dream. Much like the storytelling is a culmination of the series so far, so too is the gameplay, with combat and traversal elements from just about every major game in the series making an appearance. To quickly list it out, you’ve got Shotlocks from Birth By Sleep, Flow Motion from Dream Drop Distance, Trinity and Limit attacks from Kingdom Hearts II, and even a few elements from the mobile-exclusive Kingdom Hearts Union X, like upgrading your keyblades. That’s on top of the already solid combat that the series is known for, plus a few fancy new tricks up its sleeve.

It’s these new additions that are perhaps the most exciting, with Keyblade transformations in particular adding a whole new layer of depth to the game’s combat. Each Keyblade, when used in specific ways, will give you the opportunity to transform it into something very distinctly not key-shaped. Some turn into gun-like blasters, some turn into gigantic weapons like hammers and swords, and some present interesting gameplay gimmicks, like summoning a bunch of clones with which to beat down the enemy during finisher attacks. This, combined with the ability to upgrade keyblades and keep them relevant throughout the game, and the ability to equip up to three keyblades to quickly switch between mid-combat, gives you dozens of unique and interesting ways to play. There’s a lot of joy in messing around with different transformations and combinations to find what works for you, and exploring the synergy of how these weapons work (or don’t work) together.

On top of all that, the game just looks gorgeous, and performs incredibly well. I tested it on both a base model PS4 and a PS4 Pro, and both gave an incredibly solid performance, with very few frame drops throughout the entire game on either system. On the PS4 Pro, the resolution is bumped up a little bit, and some certain aspects of the game are a little bit prettier, but all in all, it’s going to look great and perform well no matter where you play it. Its cartoonish art style lends itself well to both the original characters and the Disney worlds, and there are even instances where the game takes a whole new direction to stay truthful to its Disney source material, such as in the Pirates of the Caribbean world, where things are a little bit more realistic, or the Winnie the Pooh world, where things are a little bit more cel-shaded and cartoony. It consistently looks fantastic, and in the Disney worlds, it more often than not feels like you’ve been dropped right into the film that inspired it.

As positive as I’ve been so far, however, Kingdom Hearts III is not perfect. As mentioned before, the main story points are very heavily back-loaded in the game, which can cause it to feel a little bloated in the front half. There’s also one world in particular that’s kind of a mess, overall, and that’s the Pirates of the Caribbean world.

As nice as it looks — and it does look nice — the story is a half-hearted attempt at recreating the third Pirates film, and unfortunately it does not land in the slightest. Any major plot points from the film are kind of glossed over, some plot points are just dropped halfway through the world, and the gameplay gimmicks themselves are just awful. There’s ship-based combat that will absolutely make you want to tear your hair out whenever you’re forced to partake. Think Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, but slower, with wonky controls, a camera that won’t go where you want it, and enemies that have to be hit by cannon fire at extremely specific points. It’s a massive failure in mechanical execution, where the idea was good but the developers just couldn’t make it work. There are things you can do to upgrade your ship and make the combat a little less mind-numbing, but it requires searching the nooks and crannies of the world to find tiny white crabs, and the less that’s said about that, the better. It’s more or less the only blemish in an otherwise fantastic overall experience, but it is a pretty noticeable blemish, and I’d have been far happier to not see a Pirates world at all than to see one this bad.

Kingdom Hearts III had the potential to be very very bad. As the culmination of 17 years of storytelling, it was primed to deliver a convoluted mess of a tale. But against all odds, Tetsuya Nomura and his team at Square Enix pulled off the impossible, and delivered a game that’s satisfying from a storytelling perspective, mechanically fun from a gameplay perspective, and utterly beautiful from a visual perspective. It’s not perfect, and there are definitely a few things that could’ve been done better, but as a conclusion to a 17-year saga, it’s just about the best anybody ever could have hoped for.

Review copy provided by Square Enix