Kingdom Hearts feels perfectly at home on Steam Deck

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

Part of this is because the older Epic Games Store versions of these games had notoriously mixed results on a Steam Deck, not even taking into account the hoops you had to jump through to even get them onto the device. Luckily, Square Enix hired a third party to help them fix any major issues before finally dropping the games on Steam. The results? Barring a few remaining minor issues, these will probably be my new favorite ways to play the games.

First things first; HD1.5 + 2.5. These have been the real problem children when it comes to Steam Deck compatibility in the past, with a ton of compatibility quirks even on Windows PCs. For the sake of time – and in search of one specific potential problem – I chose to start Re: Chain of Memories through the collection. The FMV cutscene at the beginning of the game played immediately without any problems and without any adjustments being required. Once properly in-game, performance was also impeccable, with over 5 hours of battery life at your disposal on a Deck OLED while running the game at a target of 90 FPS. If you’ve ever tried to run the games on a Steam Deck before these new ports, you’ll understand exactly how important this is.

The same can be said for Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, although it’s worth noting that in each of these games you can encounter cutscenes running at 30 FPS regardless of your settings. Furthermore, despite there being an option to set the game resolution to 800p, none of the games I tested can actually take advantage of that full screen, and will simply run internally at 720p without stretching the output to accommodate it. fits the full screen. This is better than the alternative, but it’s at least a bit of a shame that native 16:10 support hasn’t been added alongside the more crucial Steam Deck compatibility fixes.

This is where I stepped into Kingdom Hearts III, and as expected players will have to make sacrifices depending on their preferred play experience when it comes to their chosen graphics settings and internal resolution. I pointed out that the lack of precise control over the port’s internal resolution was probably my single main complaint, and that goes doubly for Steam Deck’s performance – where 60 FPS would probably be just as achievable with an 85% resolution scale if it is with a 75%. To be clear; the game still runs pretty well anyway.

On the medium preset and at 100% resolution scaling, players can expect a nearly locked 45 FPS – only saying “nearly locked” due to the nature of playing games that are pre-release on Deck, which eliminates the stuttering issue of shader compilations are introduced. At 75% resolution scaling you’re good for 60 FPS – and for either option I’d say you’d expect around 3 hours of playtime on a Deck OLED. Expect closer to 2 hours for an original model; and of course you can extend battery life by playing at 30 FPS, even though I personally would never do that. Our time was limited before the embargo and as such 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 players probably won’t care about is that Kingdom Hearts III currently does not allow the player to enable HDR on Deck OLED. Personally, I’ve found the HDR implementation for the game to be quite good in the past, so hopefully this issue can be resolved post-launch without too much delay; I assume this will be the case. Other than that, though, I don’t really have any complaints about the state of the games on Steam Deck.

It may have taken far too long to get here, but there’s finally a portable solution that lets you play the entire Kingdom Hearts series without having 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 the first time you experience Sora’s journey, or the tenth time.

Code has been provided to the RPG site for this reporting.