XIII Cheers For Sweet Revenge: Kingdom Hearts Goes Emo Album

Hello fellow gamers and music lovers, Racula here and welcome to a musical XPN Gaming review!

So who or what is GameGrooves?

GameGrooves is a platform - website, record label, podcast, that spreads the gospel of video game music (VGM) with albums, articles and interviews. Their mission is to celebrate the diversity, passion and creativity of the VGM community. On April 5th 2024 GameGrooves were pleased to present XIII Cheers for Sweet Revenge: Kingdom Hearts Goes Emo.

Now being the rocker/goth girl that I am, you'd be surprised to know that I do actually like listening to game music. In particular, I do love the Kingdom Hearts music, especially the main tracks done by Utada Hikaru. So when I heard that there was an album out by GameGrooves, that had covered some of the Kingdom Hearts tracks and had turned them emo. I had to take that opportunity and give it a listen.

Kingdom Hearts Meets MCR

So lets begin with the album cover, as I said in the header, it really does look like Kingdom Hearts meets My Chemical Romance (MCR), as that was the design MCR used for their first Album. Even the cheers part for revenge is taken from the MCR album as well as a sort of homage to them, the only difference is the numbers, picture and title. MCR have the number three written out on their's, whilst GameGrooves uses the roman numeral for 13 (XIII), which is a homage to the group known as Organization XIII that plays a major part within the Kingdom Hearts franchise. The picture that GameGrooves uses is very similar to the MCR album cover, but they use Sora (the main protagonist) and Kairi (the love interest) as the couple on the cover.

My Chemical Romance's Album Cover

So what about the music itself?

XIII Cheers for Sweet Revenge has 15 tracks in total, all from the Kingdom Hearts franchise. So you have 7 tracks that are Disney music from the world levels, three of the main songs from the 3 games, sung originally by Utada Hikaru, 3 Japanese versions of the main songs as well and 2 instrumental tracks. One of them being the iconic Kingdom Hearts song: Dearly Beloved.

My thoughts on the Album?

When I heard the first song being played - Dearly Beloved, I was instantly taken back to my childhood, when I first played Kingdom Hearts and the good memories I had playing it. That being said however and I'm going to be honest here, out of the entire album - XIII Cheers for Sweet Revenge, I only enjoyed 3 tracks out 15. The music to me, sounded more like screamo type music, like Enter Shikari and Bring Me The Horizon, which I'm not a big fan of to be honest, I'm just not overly into that type of music sadly. So with that being said, this album is just not for me, but other's may enjoy it if your into that sort of music.

XIII Cheers for Sweet Revenge: Kingdom Hearts Goes Emo is available to buy or listen to on any available music platform. Click on the link and have a listen yourself.

Click Me

Thank you to everyone who took time out of their day to take a moment to read this review, your support is always appreciated and means a lot to me.

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