This collection includes a slew of Kingdom Hearts games, but all but two of them are essentially… well, they’re PlayStation 2 games. There’s a difference in these games, however: they’re all full-fat new-generation games that would otherwise likely be impossible or very, very difficult to shrink to the Switch.Īnd that’s where I get hung up on Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts isn’t the first, for the record - Control, Hitman 3, and a smattering of other titles released on the machine this way, and Square Enix’s own Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy game did the same. Not so for the Switch’s cloud-based game releases. You still have the option to hop back over to native hardware and to all the benefits that bestows. These services are all used as an option to squeeze in a bit of exploration of Sea of Thieves when you’re waiting in the doctor’s office, or to stream Evil Genius 2 to your TV rather than playing it on your PC. We’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s Xbox ‘xCloud’ service, and I’ve got a lot of time for Nvidia’s GeForce Now. On paper, there’s nothing wrong with cloud gaming. You buy the games, but then whenever you boot them, they’re being streamed to you over the internet from some centralized, more powerful hardware running it from afar. You see, the Kingdom Hearts titles on Switch aren’t running natively on the machine - they’re a cloud-only release. Not the one from Final Fantasy, who appears in the KH series as a brooding mercenary.
