Kingdom Hearts is right at home on Steam Deck

It feels a little wild that it’s been over 3 years since I first looked at it The heart of the kingdom III‘s excellent PC port, and the PC market has changed a lot since then. Most notably, the Steam Deck popularized the handheld gaming PC and expanded the need for companies to at least test their games for Linux compatibility with the Proton. Since any modern PC will be able to run any of the PS2 or 3DS Kingdom Hearts games, I thought it made more sense to focus on how these updated ports are handled on the Steam Deck.

Part of this is because older versions of these games on the Epic Games Store had notoriously mixed results running on Steam Deck, even with discounts on the hoops one would have to jump through to even get them on the device. Fortunately, Square Enix has hired a third party to help them fix any major issues before they finally release the games on Steam. The results? Barring the few remaining small issues, these will probably be my new preferred ways to play games.

Pretty neat; HD 1.5 + 2.5. These have been real problem children in the past when it comes to Steam Deck compatibility, with a lot of quirks about compatibility even on Windows PCs. In the interest of time – and in search of one particular potential problem – I decided to run Re: Chain of Memories through the collection. Instantly, the FMV cutscene at the beginning of the game played without any issues and without the need for any adjustments. Performance once properly in-game was also flawless, with over 5 hours of battery life on the OLED board while running the game at the target 90 FPS. If you’ve ever tried to run Steam Deck games before these new ports, you’ll understand exactly how much of a problem this is.

The same can be said for Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, although it’s worth noting that you can run into cutscenes in either game that run at 30 FPS regardless of your settings. Additionally, while there is an option to set the game’s resolution to 800p, none of the games I tested could actually use that full-screen area and will simply run internally at 720p without stretching the output to fit the entire display. That’s better than the alternative, but it’s at least a bit of a shame that native 16:10 support wasn’t added along with the more important Steam Deck compatibility fixes.

This is where I jumped into Kingdom Hearts III, and as expected, players will have to make sacrifices depending on their preferred gaming experience in terms of their chosen graphics settings and internal resolution. I pointed out that the lack of fine-grained control over the port’s internal resolution was probably one of my main complaints back in the day, and that goes double for Steam Deck performance – where 60 FPS would probably be just as achievable at 85% resolution scaling as it is with 75% one. To make it clear; the game still runs pretty well regardless.

On the medium preset and 100% resolution scale, players can expect a near-locked 45 FPS – only the word “near-locked” due to the nature of pre-release gaming on the Deck, which presents an issue with shader compilation stuttering. At 75% resolution scale you’ll be good for 60 FPS – and for either option I’d say you’d expect about 3 hours of playback on an OLED board. For the original model, expect closer to 2 hours; and of course you can increase your battery life by playing at 30 FPS, although I personally would never do that. Our time was limited before the embargo, so I wasn’t able to test it as much as I would have liked, but I would expect similar if not slightly better performance in 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage.

One issue that most gamers probably won’t care about is that Kingdom Hearts III currently doesn’t allow the player to enable HDR on an OLED board. Personally, I’ve found the HDR implementation for the game to be pretty good in the past, so hopefully this issue can be fixed without too much post-launch lag; I suppose it will. Other than that though, I have no complaints about the state of the games on the Steam Deck.

It might have taken us too long to get here, but finally there’s a handheld solution to playing the entire Kingdom Hearts series that doesn’t require you to be tethered to an internet connection. For many RPG fans, this is probably a dream come true – and I can’t blame them. Kingdom Hearts is worth playing on Steam Deck; whether it’s your first Sora journey experience or your tenth.

The code was provided by RPG Site for the purpose of this coverage.