Kingdom Hearts 3 certainly managed to live up to a lot of peoples' expectations, but while some fans are already trying to figure out what Square Enix has in store for Kingdom Hearts' future, others are still hungry for more content for the game, specifically improvements to the difficulty. The series is renowned for its optional and excruciatingly tough challenges, and many found Kingdom Hearts 3 sorely lacking in that department. Fortunately, it's already been confirmed that a new difficulty option will be coming soon, and co-director Tai Yasue has now provided some more concrete details about it.

In an interview at GDC 2019, Yasue explained his and his team's approach to designing what will be deemed Critical Mode, which in previous games was the hardest difficulty option. Rather than go the easy route and simply make the enemies hit harder and have more health, they instead aimed to completely tweak and re-balance the entire game so as to provide a different experience.

Yasue didn't explicitly comment on new abilities, but he did hint that they would rely heavily on timing and mechanics like blocking, so those who want a challenge from Kingdom Hearts 3 will have to adjust to a more technical/defensive play style and not just keep wildly swinging their Keyblade around. Yasue added that the cooking minigame - the one where Sora uses the ingredients he finds to create meals that grant temporary stat boosts - will be much more integral in overcoming some particular challenges. As stated by Yasue:

“We wanted to do it the right way so it’s not just superficial. We wanted a new experience there, and we realized there was a lot we could really actually do. We added new abilities for example, for the Critical Mode, so you have a more technical based offensive battle style that you can enjoy.”

Players eager for DLC but not interested in extra challenges can still look forward to some planned Kingdom Hearts 3 story content that's currently in the works. As it so happens, director Tetsuya Nomura has already confirmed at least one of them will involve the character Xion.

critical mode dlc

For anyone that hasn't checked the game out yet, they can read our Kingdom Hearts 3 review. In it, we praise the addictive combat and charming cast of characters.

Kingdom Hearts 3 is available right now on PS4 and Xbox One.

Source: Twinfinite