Ranking the Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind Superbosses

I actually wrote this post back in February. Like many projects in my life, it has sat unfinished in a forgotten place, becoming more and more forgotten. So for whatever reason, it is being released now. Dusted off with a new intro. Enjoy.

Kingdom Hearts has never quite gotten the respect it deserves in terms of gameplay. A lot of that comes from the series' generally ease in difficulty. They rarely require you to master them. Kingdom Hearts lets you be a clumsy fool to beat most Heartless. That's fun. I love jamming the Square button and seeing monsters disappear in puffs of particle effects. Sora's combos are pretty automatic and basically solve themselves. But while you can see end credits this way, you're not seeing everything Kingdom Hearts truly is. You're not learning the system, you're sloppily overpowering it. Really learning an action game can't just be easy victories. It takes pain. This is why the ruthless Dark Souls is the most feared and worshiped franchise in gaming today. They are all pain.

Is there pain in Kingdom Hearts? Oh yes. Plenty. That pain hides in the post-game Superbosses. That's when your mashing won't save you. You can't even assume Sora's block will do all the work and open enemies up. These bosses are terrifyingly fast, they hit hard, and they only forgive a few mistakes. Your HP bar is feeble protection against the blitzkrieg of enemy combos leading into other combos as the fight slips out of your control. They are walls of seemingly impossible brutality. Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts II could kill you in a second. And I absolutely love him for it. Hurt me more, please.

Kingdom Hearts III's original release lacked this extra spice of serious challenge. The Re:Mind DLC fixes that. With the fourteen new Superbosses, you either leave nothing for granted and truly play your ass off, or you watch Sora float limply on the Game Over screen. I beat Kingdom Hearts III last year without much thought. Come January 2020, I needed to learn every skill in Sora's toolset. Kingdom Hearts can be true action games with as much sophistication and difficulty as any of the others. So maybe we should treat this series with more respect?

Here are the fourteen Superbosses that the Re:Mind DLC offers, all ranked in terms how of much I loved them. This is a journey to the heart of Kingdom Hearts III.

Top 10 March 2020 First-Watches

So how about that March, huh?

...Oh, that bad? Well that sucks.

Anyway, let’s ignore all that and talk about movies. I've been tweeting lists every month for awhile now about the five to ten best movies I had recently seen for the first time. I figure, since I'm not currently writing much of anything else, I should make it a whole feature. So here's a run-down the cinematic joys of March for me.

Also, lately I've been getting into Theme Months. This is an exercise in forcing myself to watch more movies. By setting up themes, I organize my massive backlog and give myself a motivation to get through it, chunk by chunk. In February I did Weird SciFi to finally watch things like Stalker and Upstream Color. I have literally thousands of movies I want to see at some point, and this process makes it less overwhelming.

March’s theme was Korean Movies. Once upon a time the biggest film story was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite sweeping the Oscars. (Which was only a few weeks ago, even if it seems like a different century now. The Oscars are like a relic of a medieval culture we've lost.) To celebrate Joon-ho’s win, I thought, I'd watch all his movies that I haven’t seen before. And in the process go watch like eight other Korean movies I've been meaning to get to. I found some real gems in there, even if, as you'll see, I'm a bit unhappy with my selections.

Anyway, here's ten movies I feel like talking about today: