Kingdom Hearts is a nightmare on Switch

polygon.com:

Kingdom Hearts players have put up with a lot over the years: story nonsense, sequel titles that don’t make any sense, finales that don’t live up to over a decade of hype, and all of our friends insisting that the entire series is terrible (when only some of it is). But the Nintendo Switch Cloud Versions of the Kingdom Hearts series are perhaps the community’s biggest burdens yet. These unreasonably priced packages are barely functional, and it’s hard to recommend them to anyone, even in the most ideal conditions.

Several newer games on Nintendo Switch have opted for a “cloud version.” Instead of running natively on Switch hardware, the game leverages the player’s internet connection and streams directly to the device. Theoretically, this allows players to jump into a game with no download times and without hardware constraints. In practice, though, it’s a nightmare that doesn’t ever perform as well as the games do on much older platforms, including the PlayStation 2. (If you want to know more about how this process works and why it’s not great on Switch specifically, we highly recommend this breakdown from Digital Foundry on YouTube).

Launching the game not only requires an internet connection — something Switch owners who share an account across multiple devices are already familiar with — but players will need to sustain that connection throughout their entire play session. Every time you put the Switch to sleep, the device will need to reconnect with the cloud and reestablish your connection. Or maybe you kept your Switch asleep too long? Well, the game might just outright crash, which can cause a lot of headache in a series like Kingdom Hearts, where most of the entries require manual saves.

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