Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance Review

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance Review

By: Ed Beers

Fans of the series who have yet to play Birth By Sleep may not want to read this review, since I will make several semi spoiler references to the game as jokes and the like.

Fans of the Kingdom Heart, spoiler alert it does not reveal when Kingdom Hearts 3 may come out. But fret not, this is still a nice story tease to keep you interested until they release either a remake of an earlier game or number of games, or amazingly actually get a release date for KH3. Sure you'd have to put up with an absurd time limit system, constant pet care to improve your stats and abilities, mostly lackluster ally AI, Disney and Square characters only making cameos and not in your battle teams, poorly rushed through Disney plots so you aren't distracted with any annoying interest for too long, and a new movement system that makes fighting a bit chaotic and platforming puzzles to find hidden treasure pointless, but least the Kingdom Hearts story and all of it's totally not yaoi baiting gets advanced.

The story picks up after the team received the newest canon rewrites from Birth by Sleep. Our favorite characters we are forced to play as, Sora and Riku, are brought to Yen Sid's tower in order to be given a special kind of test, to be given the Mark of Mastery, since for whenever KH 3 happens they'll need as many Keyblade masters they can get to face evil Lenard Nimoy (Xehonort). What's so different about this test? It's set in the dreams of worlds that weren't brought back from the darkness at the end of KH1/couldn't fit into KH2. And before you can say Inception, they're in, just in time for things to go horribly wrong.

The new monsters introduced into this world, are called dream eaters, which come in two types. Nightmares, that 'eat' happy dreams, (though it's never explained what that means or does) and Spirits, which makes up your other two team members are just color swaps of the nightmares, and 'eat' nightmares and Nightmares. And as far as allies go, they make me miss Goofy and Donald. Not only do they simply squeak and trill to 'speak' and means the writers don't need to worry about extra dialog, the combat AI seemed to think 'well you know, you've got this under control it's all good'. More than once after trudging through a hard won battle, I'd looked down to the bottom screen to see my Dream Eaters are stuck all the way on the other side of the map, despite their power to just teleport next to you if they fall too far behind. Course that's just how annoying they are in battle, outside of battle you're expected to pet them, poke them, take photos of them, play with them, feed them, train them. These Spirits are your pets, as well as your set of stat and ability boosts. For the more you take care of these little boat anchors, the more points you get to unlock special attacks, spells, items, or boosts like attack haste or defense boost and so on.

To try and balance out these sometimes screen filling, walking into walls allies they also give you a flashy, bouncing around, sometimes puzzle breaking style of movement and combat gameplay, called flowmotion. With it you're suppose to get around the stage more quickly so you won't worry as much about the 'drop system' time limit. It also allows you to bounce off a wall or certain polls around the stage to go into a special flashy attack to do even more damage to enemies near by. What it does it makes going up the side of buildings without having to find some secret trick or jump you're suppose to pull off to get there, or dodge some attacks a lot easier than the game might have wanted it to be.

You my have noticed I mentioned something called the Drop System. Well, instead of swapping you between the two main characters, or have you play through one character's story and then the other as the story progresses, you are forced to swap mid game, mid puzzle, mid battle even, between wherever one character is, to where the other was last you dropped out as it was. It decreases at a set amount, and you can buy items to 'heal' your drop gauge, but also if you're hit with certain statue effects or certain attacks, the rate it will drop will increase to an insane amount. I suppose it makes sense in the greater scheme of the story they're telling, but I feel it's one of the stupider things to add in a game next to having a stock set of lives in a game. Or having the game be playable in 3D which still makes no sense to me it doesn't change a thing as far as I can tell.

I've put down a lot of the things they've added into the game, but that's mainly because I felt it got in my way of actually getting through the game to enjoy the story, since I felt it actually did what most long running series fail to; it filled in plot holes. Ever wonder why mister hoodie was there at Destiny Island all those years ago in KH1? That's explained. Ever wonder why the emotionless Nobodies were so angry and sad about their lacks of emotions? That's important enough to be addressed. Why do I spend so much time wearing a digital watch? ... Well no it doesn't answer that it's just concerned about the nagging KH questions. I mean sure they make a couple smaller plot wholes, but they're still answering the questions a fan would care about. I just wish it played better.