The last major addition to the portable Kingdom Hearts formula is the "Reality Shift" ability. Once you weaken an enemy, a glyph will appear over them, prompting the player to slide the stylus down the touch-pad to initiate a special offensive ability. Each world has unique Reality Shift requirements to complete. "La Cité des Cloches," for example, requires that you connect orbs on the touch-pad to initiate a sliding dash attack between enemies. "The Grid" requires that you select two like-colored phrases from shifting screens of code to perform a special attack or machine hack. Reality Shifting is perhaps the most "gimmicky" of features in Dream Drop Distance. Reality Shifts certainly look cool and generally deal good damage, but they also completely interrupt the flow of combat and aren't all that useful beyond the bonus damage they deal. That, and messing around with the touch screen while playing a game that uses both the thumb pad and the face buttons feels a bit clunky.
Finally, Kingdom Hearts 3D introduces a new mechanic to split the time players spend with Sora and Riku more or less evenly. Unlike Birth By Sleep, which allowed players to play with whichever hero they wanted in whatever order they'd prefer, Dream Drop Distance introduces a "Drop" mechanic, which essentially acts as a timer. Whenever players take control of a character, a gauge appears alongside their character's portrait. This "drop gauge" steadily decreases as time passes. When the gauge reaches zero, your character will go to sleep and control will automatically switch to the second character. While there are items that reduce the rate at which the gauge decreases (or can reset it altogether) there is no real way to avoid dropping between characters.
Poorly managing the gauge (by which I mean, ignoring it) can result in some awkward and irritating drops. I dropped twice during boss battles because I ignored the gauge and played the game normally. Since you cannot change your deck (and equip a drop-affecting item) mid-battle, I was forced to drop, losing any progress I made during the fight. Boss fights aren't particularly long or arduous (except the final bosses, which are insane), but the drop mechanic certainly created some inconvenience. There is a plot-driven reason for the drop gauge, but the mechanic feels a bit ham-fisted in its implementation. One could argue that using drop-reducing items negates the inconvenience that the mechanic presents, but switching drop-me-nots in and out of my deck to circumvent a drop feels tedious nonetheless. Besides, one character cannot get too far ahead of another anyway. The game will literally stop you from starting the next set of worlds until both characters have finished the first set. This makes the drop mechanic feel superfluous, since there's already a check in-place to keep the story relatively evenly paced between characters.
Kingdom Hearts 3D does a fantastic job of explaining the events of past games in the series, making it extremely accessible to players who may have missed a game or two, or are unfamiliar with the series as a whole. Kingdom Hearts 3D feels like a genuine sequel to Kingdom Hearts 2 rather than filler, in that it explains what characters from said game (and subsequent Kingdom Hearts titles) are doing at the same time that Sora and Riku are diving in between dream worlds. Without spoiling anything, Kingdom Hearts 3D does a great job of setting up the scenario for the conclusion of the Xehanort saga with Kingdom Hearts 3 (whenever that comes out). All in all, Kingdom Hearts 3D adds plenty of new gameplay mechanics to the battle system we've come to know and enjoy (I truly hope Flowmotion is here to stay). It is a title definitely worth playing.
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Game details:
- Genre: Action RPG, Adventure
- Developer: Square-Enix
- Website: http://kingdomhearts3dgame.com/
- Platforms: Nintendo 3DS
- Release: 07/31/12 - Available now
NY Console Games Examiner articles ©2012 by Gabriel Zamora; reposts permitted with link back to original article. All other rights reserved.
