There are also moments that I can't spoil here, where the strange collisions of the game's themes and characters give way to remarkable experimentation. Kingdom Hearts III contains within it some of the most beautiful and surprising things I've seen a game of this scale attempt. It's almost as if the game's sheer unlikeliness opens up some deep creative door, encouraging the designers to do whatever wild thing they can think of.

Well, since the first game, Kingdom Hearts has been compromising between one-against-a-hundred brawler, Dynasty Warriors-style combat on the one hand and something like Devil May Cry character action on the other, and in Kingdom Hearts III the action goes hard into chaos. Huge attacks light up the screen, Sora can climb nearly anything, and entire encounters happen in mid-air now like some Disney-themed Bayonetta mod. It's fast and engaging, though the discordant energy of it might not be for everyone. It has a bad habit of wanting to take the player's control away to highlight all the cool things going on, and while this might be irritating to more devoted action players, gosh, there are actually a lot of cool things going on. A large portion of this game is taken up with boss fights, and they're visually and conceptually dazzling. The battle system here feels like a perfection of everything the series has achieved up until this point.