4cr Plays – Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Once you get past the name and pop the cartridge into your DS, it takes an honest three hours for Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days to open up into a game I want to talk about. Until then, the title invests a great deal of time in introducing archetypal characters throughout a series of small missions, layered with tutorials on how to get the job ahead of you done.

This also leads to an initial boss confrontation that very nearly made me cry, seemingly intent on cutting my interest short. It wasn’t the toughest boss fight I’ve encountered by any stretch, but was made incredibly long because the boss in question is in possession of more energy tanks than Samus at the end of a Metroid game.

Eventually I prevailed…

There’s definitely a vibe that only Kingdom Hearts fans need apply, and I guess that makes sense given that this is a continuation of the series, but I wasn’t ready to believe that the game was inaccessible to newcomers. For the record I have only ever played the first Kingdom Hearts.

Did that leave me with some questions along the way? Certainly, but unless you read mystery novels backwards it didn’t prove an impossible task. I’m sure we’ve all entered narratives from different points in other mediums, and there’s just as much reason to believe that a fresh player can take more away from the game versus one loaded with baggage and expectations.

But to clear the air and keep it straight, the game offers a story that runs parallel to the GBA release (PS2 re-release). Player’s take on the role of Roxas, a newcomer to Organization XIII, a group made up of nobodies, or beings without hearts. Not having previously run into this, it came across as a fairly intense idea. The various Disney worlds the series is known for are infested with enemies called Heartless – who leave behind hearts when defeated, which can be collected to form Kingdom Hearts and give these nobodies what they are missing.

As a central plot point, it replaces a great deal of the angst I’m familiar with in Square titles with sorrow – though the majority of the members belonging to Organization XIII are angst-ridden to be sure. Still, there are plenty of quiet moments after missions between Roxas and other characters that create a legitimately softer atmosphere.

Setting the mood aside however, collecting hearts is the primary name of the game.

The catch of it all is that Roxas can wield the keyblade, which is the only means of collecting hearts left behind, otherwise they reform as new Heartless and the cycle continues. 358/2 Days doesn’t stick the player with any card games, tricks, or detours. Instead, there are a series of missions set throughout a variety of popular Disney franchises, each infested with Heartless and often accompanied by a boss encounter.

This involves the use of the words button and mashing. The bulk of the smaller enemy encounters are affairs that leave you simply wailing on enemies – there’s no escaping it, but there are some elements that help balance the scales a bit.

The game offers a slot system, beginning with a limited amount of unlocked spaces and providing more as players progress and are rewarded for their performance during missions. At the completion of each mission, the obsessive-compulsive among us can remain to destroy every enemy lurking throughout the level and gain extra rewards.

Magic, items, and new abilities that allow more complex attacks need to be placed within the available block spaces, which offers an interesting game of Tetris at times.

For instance, magic multipliers that allow a spell to be cast multiple times require more spaces, with the individual spells the player wishes to use being placed inside that larger block to connect them to the multiplier. It’s a feature that kept me more focused on making sure I took advantage of every space before leaving on a mission, and more mindful of what perks were best suited to each challenge.

New abilities are essential, with the game getting incrementally more enjoyable with each new discovery, when the player can perform dodges, rolls, and aerial moves to stave off the button-mashing as much as possible. Despite the ability to gain more magic in the field, it dwindles fairly quick and leaves the player relying on traditional combat. Larger enemies attempt to break up the gameplay, repelling a specific plant’s attack to destroy it more quickly for instance. Patterns don’t necessarily stay fresh for long, but there are a decent amount of enemy types to cycle through.

Still, missions can feel tedious at times. Levels seem fairly well sized on the DS, with occasional run and fetch side-steps to stretch out the player’s time within them. It’s certainly a convincing visual entry alongside the previous PS2 releases, with plenty of Square quality production values in-and-around, and tying up both ends of the game.

Overall, player’s can jump in, clear a few groups of enemies, catch up with some Disney characters and be on their way after a boss fight. Oddly I’m not up to saying this is a bad thing.

There’s something very cozy about the experience at times, like comfort food, leaving me neither loving nor hating, and perhaps suggesting that this is the Switzerland of Fall DS releases?

The controls and combat are very easy to sink into, there just isn’t very much to do with it – levels are fairly sparse and offer little to any interaction. And it’s really unfortunate, because potentially rich worlds are left feeling largely flat, leaving players to fall back more heavily on the story as an incentive, which really hurts my argument that you don’t need to be a fan to play the game.

What remains to be mentioned is the character designs for the Heartless, where it nearly feels like the Disney cross-over works to rejuvenate Square’s design imagination and ambition – there’s some earnestly well designed bosses and creatures ruling over the various levels.

It would also be criminal of me not to mention that the game offers a new co-op mode, which I hope to revisit as soon as I can grab somebody with a DS and spend some more time with it, since it would be more criminal to try to discuss that without having played it enough just yet.