There is thought that the more sluggish a game, the more it pledges itself to cinema, while the more quickly it moves, the more action and spectacle coalesce into a central torrent of 'pure videogame'. Kingdom Hearts III gets closer to this than KH2 where Sora's feet never touched the ground and the linear level design revealed not so much the experience of turbulence as a rush to get to boss fights (where the surprisingly involved action game would begin and end). III ever so slightly tangles the levels to suggest nonlinearity, and offers a consistency of headrush from level movement to the bigger fights, but before long it is clear that it only wants us to get to the end, that there is no interest in the levels beyond their function in the story, that it is all surprisingly empty.

The tragedy is that there is actually a good game in this but that it is all shoehorned into the product that ties the most loose ends. Which reveals a kind of ignorance on the part of the developers — fandom thrives on ambiguity, on unpolished edges, on exchanges left unsaid, and not on what this thinks it's doing.