Review: Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days is an action role-playing game for the Nintendo DS. It was developed by Square-Enix and h.a.n.d, in collaboration with Disney. It the fourth Kingdom Hearts game and is set between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II and alongside Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.

Roxas and Axel in the middle of a fight. The bottom screen shows the map and how close the player is to completing the mission.

Roxas is the amnesic newest member to the mysterious Organization XIII, a group of Nobodies who seek to gain hearts. As one of the two wielders of the legendary Keyblade, Roxas can collect hearts by defeating creatures called the Heartless. But as the days pass Roxas will learn the sinister motivations of the Organization, the origins of his friend and fellow Keyblade wielder Xion, and his connection with the mysterious person “Sora”.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days is divided into missions that take place over the course of a year. The goal of most of these missions is to either defeat a set number of Heartless or a particular Heartless. There are other missions, like looking around an area or collecting emblems, but defeating Heartless is usually the main goal.

Combat is carried out by using the A button; by pressing the A button repeatedly Roxas swings his Keyblade. There is not much strategy to it, just press the A button until the Heartless goes down and hope Roxas is not killed in the process.

There is the possibility of using strategy. Roxas can block or dodge attacks with the Y button, but the game takes a long time to register when the Y button is pressed, making it almost impossible to block in time. Also, it will not work if Roxas is in the middle of an attack. Dodging works slightly better for some reason, but Roxas does not move that far out of the way. At least the player can make him jump out of the way with the B button.

Roxas can use magic as well, which is implemented in an interesting way. During the game Roxas collects panels, which are placed on a grid. The panels come in unusual shapes and have to be fitted together like a puzzle. These panels do things like make Roxas stronger and give him magic abilities. For example, if the player puts one Ice magic panel on the grid, Roxas can cast magic once in a level. Adding more magic panels increase the number of times Roxas can use magic during a mission. It is a pain at first when Roxas has only a few panels, but becomes a fun challenge when Roxas has more panels and a larger grid.

The graphics looks really good. They look like a PlayStation 2 game shrunken down onto a DS, with three dimensional characters moving on a three dimensional plane. It even has animated cut scenes every so often. The graphics look a little pixilated, but that is a minor quibble.

The game play is extremely repetitive. The mission objective is usually kill a certain amount of Heartless, and with the mostly mash the A button combat this game uses, this can become tedious over the almost one hundred missions. The eight levels are mostly based on Disney movies. At first they are interesting, but each level is made up of only a couple of rooms. The game boils down to going through the same couple of rooms over and over again, pressing the A button or whatever button magic has been assigned to.

The story is severely harmed by it taking place between the first two games in the Kingdom Hearts series. The fate of the main character Roxas and his friend Axel, as well as everyone else in the Organization, is already known to anybody who has already played Kingdom Hearts II. The only mystery is the new character Xion, and she is not interesting enough on her own. Most of the story is of the Organization messing around for a year, and it only gets interesting near the end when the player finds out how all the characters wound up where they were by Kingdom Hearts II. The ending was extremely poignant, but it just highlighted how pointless the entire story was. Worst of all it does not elaborate or explain any characters motivations or actions in other games.

The game comes with a mission mode, where players can team up with a friend to see who can complete missions first while collecting the most crystals scattered about the level. The competitive aspect makes the missions a little more exciting, but not enough to overcome their dullness.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days is an ambitious attempt to make a three dimensional game on a DS that is marred by its very repetitive nature. Only really die hard Kingdom Hearts fans will play through it until the end.