Kingdom Hearts 3’s new DLC boss and ending is some mad, meta shit

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Kingdom Hearts 3’s Re:Mind DLC expansion has a new ending that is absolutely crazy, and you don’t even need to be a Kingdom Hearts fan to understand why.

The main ending to Kingdom Hearts 3 as released last year does a pretty good job of putting a neat little bow on the winding, convoluted narrative the series had told prior in its two numbered entries and eight hundred spin-offs. It also posed some pretty interesting questions about the future of the Kingdom Hearts franchise. The all-new DLC expansion picks up some of these dangling threads – and it’s honestly some lore-warping, brain-melting stuff.

The rest of this article contains full spoilers for Kingdom Hearts 3 and the Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind DLC. You’ve been warned. If you scroll past this image of Sora dual-wielding some of the keyblades added in the DLC, well, that’s on you.

Back in February of last year, I wrote about how Kingdom Hearts 3’s secret ending “teases possibilities ranging from the mundane to the insane“. I wasn’t quite sure if the Re:Mind DLC would pick up on this thread or if it’d be saved for a future game, to be honest – and the truth is that it sort of does both, bringing back the key character from that mystery and confirming fan theories about his identity.

The thing is, when I talk about the identity of a character, none of this really has to do with Kingdom Hearts. If I’m honest, I like Kingdom Hearts well enough but have felt in recent years the series has lost its way; where the earlier games told an original story almost as a means to an end in order to visit a variety of exciting and nostalgic Disney worlds, KH3 was almost entirely focused on its own winding narrative. The Disney aspects almost felt in the way, in fact, something best shown in the story’s pacing; actual forward narrative momentum would grind to a halt to facilitate a few hours of Disney movie magic before a pivot back to word soup Japanese RPG exposition dumps.

Anyway, here’s the rub: new character ‘Yozora’ in Kingdom Hearts is essentially Noctis – the lead character from Final Fantasy 15. Except he isn’t. Except he is. Hold tight, as this is where it gets meta, and complicated.