Roxas sighs.
I, admittedly, have a great deal of brand loyalty to Kingdom Hearts. The initial installment on the Playstation 2 was astoundingly enjoyable, and in my opinion Chain of Memories on the Gameboy Advance was a worthy follow-up. However, Kingdom Hearts 2 was a letdown of preposterous proportions. This leads me to the DS's Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. I'm about 2/3 through, I think.
I really dig the three main characters, Roxas, Xion, and Axel. Roxas only took ten freakin' hours to get vaguely interesting, and Axel, in what I suppose is his natural habitat, managed to be significantly rounder and less annoying. I do actually find myself pretty hooked, wondering what's going to happen next. However, I pretty much know where they end up since this game, like Chain of Memories, is bridging the time lapse between KH1 and KH2. Surprisingly (and much to my relief) it feels much less like a giant heap of Squaresoft wankery than KH2 did, choosing to deal less with bombastic insanity and absurd plot twists and more with the inner politics and plots of Organization XIII and leisurely-paced character development. Oh, and I hate the bad guy in the way I like to hate bad guys.
Basic gameplay is the usual Kingdom Hearts hack-and-slash with a new highly customizable ability and magic system that I really don't care to explain further. The character models are decent, but suffer from distracting plankhands; the backgrounds are the sort of terrible, boxy low-res to be expected from the DS. The mission system that I liked in Crisis Core, built around bite-size missions ideal for on-the-go between-class gaming is back. However, it seems about three times as repetitive, sending the player on far too many missions in the same map. The greatest downfall: no new worlds. The overwhelming majority of existing worlds didn't even get a makeover from their initial layouts pulled from the KH1 or KH2. Arbitrary, unnatural barriers and invisible walls intended to herd the player along are also used more often than I would like. The voice acting's okay, but absent except in fully rendered cutscenes; the text dialogue is accentuated by a horrid assortment of chuckles, grunts and sighs that gets very stale very quickly.
I will likely continue to play these games until well after they cease to deserve my attention. I'm enjoying 358/2 Days for the low-key plot and likable characters, but the gameplay is significantly less than spectacular. At least it's not Lunar: Dragon Song.
I really dig the three main characters, Roxas, Xion, and Axel. Roxas only took ten freakin' hours to get vaguely interesting, and Axel, in what I suppose is his natural habitat, managed to be significantly rounder and less annoying. I do actually find myself pretty hooked, wondering what's going to happen next. However, I pretty much know where they end up since this game, like Chain of Memories, is bridging the time lapse between KH1 and KH2. Surprisingly (and much to my relief) it feels much less like a giant heap of Squaresoft wankery than KH2 did, choosing to deal less with bombastic insanity and absurd plot twists and more with the inner politics and plots of Organization XIII and leisurely-paced character development. Oh, and I hate the bad guy in the way I like to hate bad guys.
Basic gameplay is the usual Kingdom Hearts hack-and-slash with a new highly customizable ability and magic system that I really don't care to explain further. The character models are decent, but suffer from distracting plankhands; the backgrounds are the sort of terrible, boxy low-res to be expected from the DS. The mission system that I liked in Crisis Core, built around bite-size missions ideal for on-the-go between-class gaming is back. However, it seems about three times as repetitive, sending the player on far too many missions in the same map. The greatest downfall: no new worlds. The overwhelming majority of existing worlds didn't even get a makeover from their initial layouts pulled from the KH1 or KH2. Arbitrary, unnatural barriers and invisible walls intended to herd the player along are also used more often than I would like. The voice acting's okay, but absent except in fully rendered cutscenes; the text dialogue is accentuated by a horrid assortment of chuckles, grunts and sighs that gets very stale very quickly.
I will likely continue to play these games until well after they cease to deserve my attention. I'm enjoying 358/2 Days for the low-key plot and likable characters, but the gameplay is significantly less than spectacular. At least it's not Lunar: Dragon Song.