Game With The Best Cut Scenes

I feel like this one is probably going to be obvious, it's probably at the top or near the top of most peoples' lists when it comes to cut-scenes but I'm choosing it anyway. Kingdom Hearts is simultaneously one of the most captivating and yet the most confusing game franchises ever created. From release, to release, to rerelease, to remaster, to port, to related media, the canon of Kingdom Hearts at this point is so complex that even if you have played every game in the series you would probably need to sit down and revise before you could even think about explaining it in depth to someone else.

Despite its complexity, Kingdom Hearts as a series has lore so deep it could be made into several movies - there have been attempts in the past, a cancelled film project that never saw daylight, an animated movie that most fans now ignore as despite starting out as a Disney commission it was eventually taken down at their request and isn't considered canon. Rumours have abounded that Disney has another movie in the works but that has never been given any serious weight, likewise a Disney+ series was also suggested but never came to fruition.

The original game started out with a story that incorporated some Disney characters, but in hindsight the properties Disney allowed to be included were long dead or dormant save for one token appearance of Mickey near the end of the game. Nevertheless the game proved popular and a sequel further expanded upon the story. Disney took greater interest in the game as the revenue started rolling in and everything snowballed from there. Arguably some long-dormant IPs like Nightmare Before Christmas owe Kingdom Hearts a debt of gratitude for bringing them to a new audience. The movie became a cult classic and owes much of its popularity today to the kiss-of-life that Kingdom Hearts gave it.

In terms of a specific iteration for this post I have chosen Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix, which is a reworked package that includes the original game, additional content from the final mix, the Re:Chain of Memories story, and Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. It would take you several hours, potentially several days to complete the whole thing if you do want to play it, the entire franchise not just this instalment is now available on Steam if you don't have a console, or if you prefer I'd recommend PlayFrame on YouTube as that channel has played through every game in the series if you want to check out the games and their content without playing them yourself.

There are also supercut videos on YouTube where people have stitched together all of the cut-scenes from the games, this one for instance has every cut-scene from 1.5 - be warned it is four and a half hours long so I'd recommend watching it in stages rather than all in one go, although I'd be lying if I said I hadn't watched longer videos all in one sitting so if you have the time then go for it.

There are many things to criticise about the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole, but if you consider the early games as being of their time you can forgive some of the story elements and their overly complex narratives and chalk it up to a lack of production value and oversight. You can certainly see as the series progresses and Disney's interest in the game and the story itself grows there's more consistency, the complications tend to arise from the need to maintain continuity from the older games in the series namely the Princesses of Heart story element and Sora's "resurrection" which we don't need to get into right now.

Kingdom Hearts still takes the crown for cut-scenes (no pun intended) because of the potential to string them all together in this way and essentially create a movie.