Kingdom Hearts is in many ways an infuriating series, and this is entirely the fault of one man. Artist, Director, Writer, and all round head of the series Tetsuya Nomura has mastered the art of teasing his audience. Go to any KH community on the web and look at the speculation around the Deep Dive and Birth By Sleep bonus videos for the best examples. But like any master, Nomura works on many levels, and in the case of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days for the DS, he told us all up front exactly what the game would be about, with the first announcement and trailers for the game. Then didn't release the game for nearly 3 years. I remember distinctly picking up my own DS in anticipation of this game, and it's been a long, long wait. Was it worth it? Did the game meet up to a very long build-up of expectations? The short version is a resounding yes.
This is in some ways a hard game to talk about in terms of gameplay, graphics, and music, because unlike most games they aren't trying to create a vibrant and immersive world. Kingdom Hearts already has one. No, 358/2 Days has the unenviable task of REcreating an established world designed on and for hardware that beats the DS for lunch money in terms of graphical crunching, sound equipment, memory space, not to mention a control scheme with two more buttons and analogue sticks to play with. And yet, on most fronts 358/2 Days succeeds quite well at its task. While there are cinemas in the game that do use KH2's actual graphic engine, these are unsurprisingly reserved for the most dramatic scenes in the game. However, the rest of the game still manages to capture almost frame for frame the various worlds seen in previous Kingdom Hearts games. The characters have a certain graininess that reminds me of Final Fantasy VIII, but in terms of detail (especially in the face) and fluidity of movement is still much closer to its PS2-based brethren than anything else. I've played a lot of DS games in the past few years, to the point that it's pretty much my main gaming platform these days. And I have to say, I honestly never expected this kind of presentation and fast-paced action in a DS game; there's really nothing else on the system playing at this level in terms of sheer graphical output.
Having played Chain of Memories, I went into 358/2 Days expecting a similar treatment musically, reusing a lot of music from Kingdom Hearts II and a conscious effort to tone down how many tracks were used. This is not far off (although unlike CoM the songs here are in their original form, rather than converted to midi or the like), but the game did sport a smattering of original tracks, ranging from a fresh arrange on the title theme to 4 entirely fresh tracks for the final boss. It's also worth noting that the game featured more voice work than I expected; in addition to battle noise, all the cinema scenes are fully acted, largely bringing back their established actors for their various roles.
Before launching into 358/2 Days' changes to the gameplay flow, it's probably best to get the game's weak suit out of the way; control. As mentioned, KH as a series was designed around having more buttons than the DS can field. While Chain of Memories just went around the problem and tried to negate the need for them entirely with, uh, cards, 358/2 Days instead tries to simply shuffle things around a bit to get by without them. There are actually two control schemes available: one designed for quick access to the camera and the other for quick access to the spell shortcuts and lock-on. For reasons I'll get to in a minute, I opted for spell shortcuts, and only rarely felt the lack of camera control holding me back. However, for all of this trying to mitigate the problem, in the end the Lock-On function was still quite hard to use, requiring double-taps to make or break a lock and inevitably leading to cycling when you meant to break a lock or adjusting the camera instead of locking on. The game seemed to try and make up for this by having the automatic 'soft' locks be more sensative, but this is both a blessing and a curse. At times, enemies might temporarily get out of camera range but, since you're already facing them even if not locked on, you can often just keep attacking and still fight rather than having to disengage and get turned around. But at other times, you might be fighting one enemy, have it nearly dead, then another jumps in too close, draws your attention, and rather than finishing off enemies and lowering the odds against you you're suddenly get attacked by two or three at once. Beyond that, the game also inexplicably reversed the positions of the jump and attack buttons (or technically failed to reverse them from the Japanese controls, but anyway), and I'm not convinced I ever fully adjusted from it. Anyway, whether from having to use swapped controls or from an actual flaw in the system, the game always felt just a little sluggish on the inputs. Nothing gamebreaking, just a little slower than I'm used to for the series.
*whew* For all that my control complaints took a lot of words to explain, they really are very minor and detract very little from the core KH gameplay I wanted. 358/2 Days is very much a Kingdom Hearts game and not only plays every inch like one, it brings a slight shift in focus to the series that rewards strategy and careful observation of enemies. The first Kingdom Hearts, while it could be played this way, could also as easily be played by attacking fast and relentlessly. While KH2 focussed on improving the latter style, 358/2 Days expanded on the former. In particular, making good use of your defensive abilities (Blocking and Dodge Roll) is vital against the stronger breeds of Heartles, and paying attention to elemental alignments is much more important because, without mincing words, magic is much stronger in this game than previous entries in the series. Rather than being spammed against groups of enemies, magic can cut down in one or two castings foes that might take a minute or two of dedicated key-bashing to defeat. Enemies are also strongly patterned, and although there are times I wondered if it wasn't overdone (in particular, some enemies have very long gaps in their attacks, such that you can basically stand right next to them and cast a Cure spell) I still prefer it to KH2's more frantic pacing.
Backing this up is a new character-growth system with the deceptively simple name Panels. In short, 358/2 Days has done away with Abilities, Magic, Items, Equipment and even Levels, and turned them all into panels placed on a single shared grid. For example, a single Potion or one casting of Fire might take up a single panel of 12 you have available. The game then adds complexity by having certain panels take up more than one slot, which restricts your ability to add other abilities but also allows you to equip linked panels to them, granting them additional abilities or parameters. For example, a Skill Gear transforms your Keyblade into Missing Ache, which boosts your strength and has longer ground combos. A Skill Gear [2] does this, but has an additional slot that, if filled with an Ability Panel, gives you Combo Boost, increasing your damage the more hits are in your combo. While somewhat limiting early in the game (afterall, what good's a Skill Gear [2] if you don't have an ability panel yet? How much milage do you get out of one or two uses of Fire? Is one Level Up really worth more than another Cure spell?), as you go and more slots open up, support panels which give you more bang for your buck show up, and so on, the game gives you a fair amount of flexibility in how you play and how powerful you want to be.
The last major change to business as usual for the series is plot and gameplay flow. Where previous KH games tended to present a handful of worlds to choose from, which you'd then play through until some sort of logical story climax, 358/2 Days is entirely mission-based. Essentially, you start off each day of Roxas' life at the summit of the Organization's stronghold, where you can access the menu, shop, maybe get some free goodies from your coworkers, but mostly you talk to Saix and get access to that day's (or set of day's) mission. You're sent in, complete some specific task (typically along the lines of "kill this many Heartless", "Defeat this specific Heartless" or occasionally "learn more about this world") and return, repeating the cycle over and again throughout the game. Since the missions bounce around worlds with a fair regularity, their individual story threads aren't as prominent as is usual for the series. Then again, since 358/2 Days is in large part a prequel to KH2, they really shouldn't be; KH2 deals with those storylines, to do too much with them would just be repeating something that already happened (see also: Sora's mode in Chain of Memories). But even without that, this works because the game is really about Roxas and his relationships with the rest of the Organization. And fittingly, the happenings in the various worlds strongly impact Roxas and typically reflect the current mood of the story, meaning that what 358/2 Days sacrifices in coherence within the specific worlds it gets to make up for by having a smoother flow in the overall plot. Well, sort of; a lot of missions are pure gameplay and, while not required, have excellent rewards, so you tend to do maybe one story-relevant mission for every three missions total.
The plot itself, being billed as "Roxas' life story", naturally revolves around him, his attempts to understand the world despite starting out with no real memories and barely a sense of self, and his life in the Organization, particularly his relationships with friends Axel and new character Xion. I don't really want to say too much about Xion, but I will say that they do a credible job of walking the line between making an important new character in established continuity and not having said character violate said continuity. She does kinda steal the show, but all things considered it's in such a way that it both adds to the continuity rather than derailing it and creates an overall better cast dynamic. I'll also add that this is a very sad game. Not at a waterfall of tears level, but more of a quiet "I'm so sorry". Anyway, what impressed me is this quiet sadness was an undercurrent the entire game, and could be felt in the presentation and general aesthetic throughout, rather than just relying on the fact that, well, we do know how this story ends.
The game has a lot of content outside the main story (throughout the story and not-so-story based missions, you collect badges that unlock various challenges as well as making them available in multiplayer mode), but I never felt compelled to mess around with them. Having seen the other Organization members as allies throughout the game, I imagine Multiplayer is probably worth a few mintues of your time, but at 25 hours I feel like I got my money's worth just in the story mode. Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days stands now as my favorite DS game, and if you've any affection for the Kingdom Hearts series, you should probably be playing this.
Final Grade: 9/10
