Playing the Kingdom Hearts series on your handheld device is now a possibility with the Steam Deck, Valve’s latest handheld gaming device. Here, we’ll guide you through installing and successfully running Kingdom Hearts 3, 0.2 Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, and Melody of Memory.
Prerequisites
Before we start, you’ll need some essential tools:
- Proton Up QT
- Flatseal (if you plan to run the game off an SD card)
- MF Install
These can be found and downloaded from the Discover store on your Steam Deck. In addition, you’ll need the Heroic Games Launcher and your chosen Kingdom Hearts game already installed.
Installing Kingdom Hearts 3
Begin by launching the Heroic Games Launcher and pressing play on Kingdom Hearts 3. For most users, the game will hang on a black screen after the copyright notices.
To fix this, you’ll need to change some settings. First, install Proton Up QT from Discover, then add the G Proton 7-20 compatibility tool. Once you have that installed, head back to your Heroic Games Launcher and go to the settings of Kingdom Hearts 3. Set your wine version to Proton GE 7-20. Make sure to also check “enable e and fsync.”
For those wishing to run the game off an SD card, use Flatseal. After installing from Discover, navigate to the Heroic Games Launcher and scroll down to file systems. Add /run/media to allow the launcher to read and write to the SD card. You’ll need to select this as your install location if you’re going through the install process.
The next step involves MF Install. Open this tool and download the zip from the code section. Extract the MF Install Master, open Terminal within the extracted folder (right click and select “Open Terminal” or press shift + F4), and prepare to build the script.
Open K Write from the utilities section of the Steam logo and paste in the script provided in the original video. You’ll have to replace the placeholder text in the script with the wine prefix folder location from the settings of your Kingdom Hearts 3 game in the Heroic Games Launcher.
Once the script is ready, copy and paste it into the Terminal opened in the MF Install Master. Run the script, then close everything and head back to Kingdom Hearts 3 in the launcher. If everything was done correctly, the game should now successfully boot.
Installing Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage
To get 0.2 working, follow a similar process to Kingdom Hearts 3. The game will hang on a black screen initially. Just like before, you’ll need to set up the wine version as Proton GE 7-20 and enable e and fsync.
There’s an additional step for 0.2. Navigate to your game directory, find the Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep folder, and right-click the Kingdom Hearts Birth by sleep.exe. Select “copy location” and paste it into the “alternative exe run” field in the settings of the game in the Heroic Games Launcher.
Run the MF Install script as before, substituting the new wine prefix folder location from 0.2. After running the script, 0.2 should now boot successfully.
Installing Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory
Melody of Memory can run without the MF Install, but applying it fixes the distorted pre-rendered cutscenes. The process to set this up is identical to what we did for Kingdom Hearts 3 and 0.2. Change the wine prefix in the MF Install script, run it, and your game should now boot successfully with fixed cutscenes.
With these steps, you should be able to enjoy the Kingdom Hearts series on your handheld Steam Deck. This method isn’t exclusive to these games; you can use it to fix other games that fail to boot or hang on a black screen. If you have any questions or need more details, please leave a comment below.
