Mar 272020
After Kingdom Hearts III’s Re:Mind DLC launched in late January, one thing about its reception became very clear.
Players who had no interest in fighting superbosses often criticized the DLC as not having enough content, while players who enjoyed superbosses generally found the DLC to be fantastic.
Now I’ve finally finished playing Re:Mind in its entirety.
The DLC is divided into three major parts: the Re:Mind story scenario, the Limit Cut, and the Secret Episode.
(Plus the Data Greeting feature, which lets you pose characters to set up your own scenes for a ton of creative potential. I messed around with that for a while, although I was disappointed that some of my favorite characters like Vexen weren’t available for it.)
Each unlocks after the previous one, so you begin with Re:Mind. The start of the scenario is a little bland, since it largely retreads the final part of the game, with new context and content.
I enjoyed the changes to the cutscenes, but it is a bit repetitive. After that, however, things become more interesting, as Re:Mind gets into new content and lets you finally explore that certain area in Kingdom Hearts III that felt like it should have been an explorable world. The latter half of the Re:Mind scenario has some pretty cool moments, and I enjoyed it a lot.
I took my time exploring, and so that part took me about 5 hours.
Then I unlocked the Limit Cut episode and realized that not only were the superbosses a good portion of the DLC’s content, but I would also need to fight them if I wanted to see all of its story.
The first boss I attempted immediately destroyed me. I was tempted to call it quits there and look up the cutscenes online or even play through the main game again to use the newly-added EZ Codes to make the fights easier (the DLC also added Pro Codes, which make fights harder), but after waiting so long for Re:Mind and finally experiencing a Kingdom Hearts game when it came out instead of years later, I decided to give the fights an honest try.
And so I leveled up until I hit level 99 and started fighting the Limit Cut bosses. It’s strange, but while each boss has its own pattern and style for you to learn, I also felt like I had to learn how to fight superbosses at all. I’d never beaten a Kingdom Hearts superboss before, and they all felt impossible at the start, but there was a certain point where it clicked and I understood how to learn the fights.
Countless deaths and hours later, I’d defeated all of the Limit Cut bosses and unlocked the Secret Episode, which presented me with the most challenging boss I’ve ever faced.
I don’t want to think about how many hours I spent on that fight. Certainly more than 10. I’d sit down in the evenings and fight for an hour or two, dying over and over but slowly learning how to deal with each attack and gradually getting better, until I finally won.
As for the story, I’m confused about everything, but I’m ready to ride this wild ride to the end and see where Nomura is taking us in the next Kingdom Hearts saga.
Re:Mind left me with some satisfying story moments, many hours of death entertainment, and a sense of accomplishment from beating all of those fights. I’m one of the people who found Re:Mind to be an excellent conclusion for Kingdom Hearts III.
Would you mind elaborating on how to do the boss fights, compared to how you normally went through the game?
For example, did you play much more patiently/defensively?
Playing much more defensively is part of it, but there’s more to it than that.
In the main game, my combat strategy wasn’t too complicated. Mash the attack button, dodge if the enemy is attacking, use special attacks when they become available, heal every now and then.
I learned very quickly that I couldn’t do that in these fights. Here I needed to learn every single fight to understand the boss’s attack patterns, the tells for each attack, when to dodge, when to block, which attacks could lead to an opening, and how to exploit those attacks to get an opening. It’s not just that attacking randomly will leave you vulnerable, but that you’ll barely do any damage. They require a combination of patience and speed–patience to slow down and study the fight, and speed to react fast enough once you understand the attacks, since they’re often very fast.
I’ll give an example of how some of the secret boss’s fight works:
-Boss jumps into the air. I know he’s going to do his laser attack. Several attacks come rapidly that I need to block or dodge. If he shouts “Nope,” after them, I can get in an attack if I close the distance between us fast enough. However, if he shouts “Let’s go,” I need to immediately roll backwards, then block the new attack, and then close the gap to attack.
-Boss raises his sword and starts charge it up. I need to wait. The moment he disappears, I need to block, then block again for two attacks that come afterwards. He begins charging his attack a second time. Now I need to close the distance and attack before he disappears, but immediately block, then use the air-step mechanic to close in on him as he jumps away to get in an attack before he disappears again.
The secret boss is the most extreme, but they almost all came down to a combination of reacting quickly while fighting as deliberately as “when he gives this specific tell, I need to block three times and then dodge.”
Many of the fights have their own little tricks to make them unique beyond just their fighting style, too. Xigbar’s fight, for example, requires you to deflect a lot of projectile attacks and then attack at the right time in a gunslinger-style scene, while Luxord’s involves games where you have to pick the correct card.
I’m reading this whole thing and it reads like you’re learning standard action game things, but you’ve played through Dark Souls so I dunno why you weren’t applying this kind of focus to begin with.
I’m slightly more concerned that apparently you can go through the whole Kingdom Hearts III without focus and just mashing the attack button. >.>
Dark Souls and Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind are totally different experiences. You can’t approach these bosses the same way you would a Dark Souls boss.
(The main game of Kingdom Hearts III on the normal difficulty setting is pretty easy, which was a criticism many people had with it.)
“As for the story, I’m confused about everything” is the perfect summation of kingdom hearts as a franchise. And yet we love it so
I’d argue that Kingdom Hearts’s story isn’t really that confusing until you get to Dream Drop Distance. KHUX and now this secret ending have gone way off into confusing territory, though.
[…] I played Re:Mind, I knew that the basic story premise for Melody of Memory is that Kairi is going back through her […]