All right then. One game, one movie, and one more review to go before the release of Kingdom Hearts 3. Lets do this.
Let's start with Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep 0.2 - A fragmentary passage. As always, I'll cover the gameplay first, and then move on to the story.
Not that there's much to cover about the gameplay in the first place. Unlike in all other games, which all have their own gimmicks and additions, the gameplay here has been boiled down to its most simple (and clean) essence. All you've got, apart from basic moves such as block, counterattack, dodge and air-dodge, is your basic Keyblade attack, three elemental attack spells, a Cure spell, one Shotlock, and a basic variation of the "Command Syles" from the Birth By Sleep game, which you activate by performing an attack or a spell a few times. In practice, given the limited options you have, this translates into an upgraded elemental spell attack, and Aqua's old friend the Spellweaver command style. Later in the game, once Mickey joins up with you, you also get the Wayfinder command style as well.
The game does carry over the rail-grinding move from Dream Drop Distance to move around, but you can't use a finisher with it. There are no other Flow-motion based techniques in this game, though the inclusion of the rail-grinding was enough to trick my muscle memory to try and jump off walls several times throughout the game, or to press the square button at inappropriate times.
But what the gameplay lacks in mechanics complexity, it makes up for in jaw-dropping gorgeous aesthetics. The spells you use are all visually impressive and powerful, particularly the more powerful -ja spells, and they do make you feel like you're a real Keyblade Master using the most advanced techniques available. The command styles and Shotlock are also visually impressive.
In fact, pretty much all the graphics in this game are visually amazing at all levels, especially the environments. I mentioned in my previous reviews that I love big game environments that give the impression of a larger world beyond the confines of the invisible walls. Not only does this game do that well, it also captures the eerieness of the Realm of Darkness, and the damage and corruption done to the fallen Princesses's worlds, while still retaining enough familiar elements for the players and Aqua to recognise what these places are.
So overall, I guess the gameplay of this game gets a 9/10. I was actually going to give it a 10/10, but then
@ZerbanDaGreat 's review above reminded me about the bad features of the boss fights with the Demon Tower, Demon Tide and Darkside. Now that I remember it better, I think it was Demon Tower and the Demon Tide that were a bit annoying to defeat in my playthrough, due to some of their annoying attacks and little feedback from your attacks to it that indicated you were doing something right. But I guess they weren't too much of a problem on the Standard difficulty I was playing at, which is why I forgot about it when writing this review. Perhaps I would have noticed them better if I played a higher difficulty. Nevertheless, if this is a sample of what we will get in the next game (which, by the looks of the trailers, it pretty much is), then I have high hopes for Kingdom Hearts 3.
As for the story, well, as the title says, this is a direct sequel to Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, picking up from Aqua's secret ending in the Realm of Darkness. The last time we saw her, Aqua had spent almost 10 years in the Realm of Darkness, travelling through cave-like environments and fighting endless hordes of Heartless to seek a way back. And at the end of that game, after defeating a Heartless boss, we see her stumble into a forest environment, with Cinderella's castle in the distance.
This game pick up straight where we left off, with Aqua arriving at the village in front of the castle, and then continuing her journey through the familiar worlds of the Disney Princesses that she visited in Birth By Sleep, now fallen to the darkness. Because of this, each of the Disney worlds doesn't have a specific Disney related plot, as per the other games. However, there are elements of each of the Princesses's stories that show up as obstacles in Aqua's path, though most of the time, they merely serve as obstacles to Aqua's travels through the Realm of Darkness, such as the clock in Cinderella's world that needs to be rewound to rebuild the passage to the castle, or the wall of thorns impeding the passage through Sleeping Beauty's world.
The sole exception is the mirror of the evil Queen from Snow White's world, which plays a big and interesting role in the story, via the presence of Aqua's mirror clone. This phantom is basically prying on Aqua's increasingly diminishing will to fight and to live, voicing the doubts buried deep into her heart. We saw hints of at the beginning of the secret level in Birth by Sleep, but these doubts gets magnified through the encounters in the mirror world, and embodied in Aqua's phantom, who seeks to destroy her. Fittingly, the whole world is based on mirrors and tricks, making you question what is real and what is not.
Of all the levels, this is the most interesting in terms of giving us a better insight into Aqua's character, and how she sees herself. As for the other levels, there's not much to say about Cinderella's world, since it basically acts as a tutorial level and there's not much story content, other than the vision of phantom Terra. Aqua does meet up both phantom Terra and phantom Ven in later worlds, and this comes to a climax in the Sleeping Beauty world, where she manages to talk to Terra through his phantom, only for it to be possessed by Xehanort, who tricks Aqua into revealing Ven's location.
Finally, we get to the last level, based on the fallen Destiny Island. Here, we get to find out what Mickey was doing in the Realm of Darkness back in the first game (and how he lost his shirt XD), as he reunites with Aqua in his quest to find out why the worlds kept disappearing. Aqua's story takes a bit of a backseat in this level, as her main focus now shifts to helping Mickey in his quest so that he could then help her to get out of the realm of Darkness. Unfortunately, due to the Demon Tide towards the end, Aqua has to sacrifice herself to prevent it from attacking Riku and Mickey, and prevent the ending of Kingdom Hearts 1 from happening.
While this last part does have some interesting story elements, and some heartwarming interaction between Aqua and Mickey as they catch up with each other on what's happening in both realms, I think this part could have benefited from being longer, to give more time to explore Aqua and Mickey's friendship and Mickey's time in the Realm of Darkness. Indeed, I think more gameplay and story time would have been useful to flesh out the story of this game a bit more, but, this game being pretty much a tech demo, I can understand why they kept the story short here, so that they could focus on Kingdom Hearts 3.
So, at the end of the day, I guess the story gets a 7/10, which means that overall, the game gets an 8/10.
And now, for the Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover movie:
It seems to me that the developers of these movies have fallen into a pattern in which they make one step forward in learning from the mistakes of past movies, but then make one step back in a different element.
In this case, the step forward is that this feels like they weren't just mashing cutscenes from a game together and hope it works. Instead, they designed it as if it was a movie, and so they had a much tighter control of the pacing of the script and the amount of story elements introduced. No more text based summaries in this movie! It also meant that they could work on the graphics and the cinematography, making this look like a real movie.
However, it seems to fall back into the same mistakes that the 358/2 movie made, in that it was mostly talking between characters, with few action scenes in between. Indeed, from there it makes a further step backwards in terms of the story it chooses to present, and the characters it follows. I've had a look at a summary of the Kingdom Hearts Union X game, which this movie is supposed to cover, showing off the key elements that one needs to see in order to understand its role in later games. And yet when I compare what's present in the game and what's present in the movie, I see that there's a lot of content of the game that the movie misses out.
This movie doesn't even follow the adventures of the main character of the game, or any of his fellow Keyblade wielders, especially ones who may or may not match characters we see in later games of the Kingdom Hearts timeline. Instead, it follows the motivations and backstory of the Foretellers, the leaders of the Union you join and presumably your main quest givers. The plot of the story is basically about how they struggle to follow what the Master of Masters told them to do, and how they respond to the threats reported in the Book of Prophecies that he wrote, especially after it emerges that there's a traitor amongst them. This plot drives the conflict between the characters and sets them against each other, but in the end, it never gets resolved in the story, with the real traitor, Luxu, getting very little screentime himself.
Essentially, this feels very much like a flashback or side story to the main plot of the game, which this movie is supposed to summarise. And I might have found this choice reasonable if they decided to follow some of the more interesting characters of the game. Instead, it seems to me that the movie decided to focus on perhaps the blandest characters of the game. The only really interesting character of those shown is the Master of Masters, the teacher to the Foretellers. His chill and quirky personality is the only thing I really liked about this movie, and especially how it plays off the more serious-minded and straight-faced Foretellers, as he picks on their flaws and manipulates them into essentially starting off the Keyblade War and the events of the Kingdom Hearts games. I'd really like to see more of this character in future games, or at the very least I hope to get more hints about why he did what he did in later games.
So yeah, at the end of the day, this movie made a few steps forwards and a few steps back compared to the previous Kingdom Hearts movies, and apart from watching the Master of Masters interacting with his students, you could easily skip this movie, read a summary online, and not miss a thing.
That concludes my reviews of all the Kingdom Hearts games that have come out thus far. I hope you've enjoyed reading them, and I appreciate any feedback that you can give me on them. Were they interesting? Were they funny? Were they fair to the game?
Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm going to have to bow out of this thread for the time being, as I won't be able to start playing Kingdom Hearts 3 until mid-February at the earliest, and that is assuming I don't find a job in Italy or outwith commuting distance from my home in Edinburgh in the meantime. Therefore, I'd like to try and avoid seeing Kingdom Hearts 3 spoilers for the time being. Knowing me, I may end up giving in to temptation anyway soon enough, but at least I'll have made it harder for myself to find spoilers if I avoid this thread for a while.
So have fun with playing Kingdom Hearts 3 starting next week, and I'll see you all again once I start playing the game myself.
