Review of the PS3 2.5 HD Collection Version
It’s been a while since I have completed a Kingdom Hearts game.
Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II are both on my list of all-time favourite games and my reviews for both, along with Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories we’re among some of my first reviews on Grouvee.
Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep is chronologically the first game in the KH franchise, disregarding the mobile games, and was originally released on the PlayStation Portable. The secret movie unlocked in KH2 foreshadowed BBS’s release by showing armoured figures fighting a mysterious man who controlled the darkness and it looked insanely epic, taking place in a huge Keyblade graveyard.
At the time of release, the movie hyped people up for the next game, sparking rumours and theories about a Kingdom Hearts III but this game ended up becoming another subtitled game, disappointing the fanbase at the time but nowadays is looked upon more favourably. So the question is does BBS fulfill those expectations of being equal to a mainline game or does it fall short?
I actually started playing BBS immediately after finishing KH2, excited to find out what has happened in the story’s past. I played through Ventus’s story first but only got to the Cinderella world before putting the game on hold for three years.
I just wasn’t feeling it back then but, this summer I was ready to take on the game and see what it had in store for me.
The first thing I want to talk about in BBS is the game’s structure.
The game has an unprecedented three different playable characters to choose from each with their own separate story campaign to play through and the game encourages you to finish them all in order to understand the game’s deeper truths.
This on paper is an exciting concept and each character has their own unique play-style and personality and I really enjoyed playing as all of them. But the way that the separate stories play out after playing them one after another really drained me. You end up going through the same Disney worlds three times and end up fighting the same enemies three times and see mostly the same cut scenes three times and even fight some of the same bosses three times. It was exhausting. I felt like I was playing Chain of Memories again with all the repetition. Granted each campaign comes with mostly different content in terms of how their stories are told and the characters that the player comes across will be different or will meet the same characters under different circumstances and each of the stories connect in a neat way but it doesn’t excuse the fact that the game is repeating itself to the point of exhaustion.
The core gameplay is essentially the same as the previous kingdom hearts games. You still use a Keyblade to attack enemies while mixing in spells and special moves and the game does a great job of making you feel overpowered even on harder difficulties. I actually played on critical mode for my first two Playthroughs as Ventus and Terra and that’s where I noticed some balancing issues.
Critical mode makes it so that every enemy encounter is either so trivial and easy that you might as well be playing on easy or you get one-shotted and must grind and it’s pretty frustrating. So on my last playthrough I switched to proud mode and it was a lot more manageable so I recommend playing on proud. Little did I know playing on proud actually screwed me over but we will get to that later.
What makes BBS incredibly unique when compared to the previous games is its command deck system. Gone are the days of the magic metre and spamming elixirs to make sure that you have enough MP to use a spell. In concept I much prefer this system because special attacks and spells are now both on cooldown instead of requiring MP to activate and you can switch between them quite easily by shuffling through your command deck. Being able to customize your deck to your own play-style is really rewarding and adds a lot of variety to the gameplay but there is a lot more complexity to the system that bogs it down especially for new players.
The player can actually combine two different commands to create a new more powerful one but you never really know what you’re going to get unless you look up a guide and to make things more complicated the player’s abilities are tied to levelling up each command by melding commands with a crystal and different crystals can grant you different abilities and the only way to make these abilities permanent is by levelling up a command with the ability to the max. It’s hard to understand so let me give you an example. Leafbracer is an ability that has existed since the beginning and is important because it lets you use healing spells without getting interrupted so that you don’t die while trying to heal and in previous games you would unlock it by levelling up but now the only way to unlock that ability is by melding two specific commands together with a specific crystal and then levelling up the resulting command to max level and none of this is explained by any tutorial. This could’ve all been forgiven if the game explained it better to the player but it didn’t and so most of my first Playthrough I was underpowered because I had no abilities because I didn’t know that they were tied to the command melding system. Now that I learned the system it’s a bit easier to manage but it makes the game a matter of constantly switching out your commands to make sure that you’re levelling them all up so that you gain abilities so that you aren’t underpowered later in the Game. It also doesn’t help that you never really know what spell or command you’re going to make through the melding system or ability you’re going to receive. I can see a lot of players actually enjoying this system as it encourages experimentation with different melding combinations but even with the knowledge have an entire melding chart it makes unlocking abilities and upgrading spells more of a chore and grindfest in my opinion.
Another thing that is new to BBS is the shot lock command which I actually enjoy simply because it’s another way to make the player overpowered. By holding both bumpers you go into a first person view and aim your reticle on an enemy until your focus metre is consumed enough to unleash a powerful spell that just wrecks everything and the best part is that you’re invincible throughout the entire animation so it ends up being invaluable during Bossfights. You can also level up the shotlock and meld them to create new ones so it adds more customization options.
In KH2 there were two systems in combat other than spells and your Keyblade that made Sora feel like a complete boss and that was the Drive forms and summons. Both of these have been replaced by different and in my opinion, inferior systems in BBS.
Drive forms are gone which means duel wielding Keyblades are gone which kind of sucks but in their place are these Command Styles that the player can enter and some of these are unique to the character that you’re playing. These work strangely because the style you enter all depends on the commands that you use building up this metre and once that fills your attacks change and are more powerful. They all look pretty awesome and come with a powerful finisher and the best part is is that they can stack so you can switch styles on the fly but the downside to the system is that you can’t really control when you go into these styles and the animation kind of interrupts the flow of battle and there’s no convenient way to really strategize which style you activate because that requires knowledge of what commands you have to combine to enter each style and that’s just a lot of thinking that the player isn’t going to do so I just ended up going with the flow and using whatever style pops up in that moment but most of them are cool so I’m kind of OK with it.
Summons are gone and are now replaced with the D link system which kind of really doesn’t resemble summons all that much. Throughout the game you’ll forge D links with different Disney characters and when you go into D link it actually restores your health to full and you’re given a brand new command deck and they’re unique to each Disney character that you meet you can also have D links with the other main characters. I ended up not really using these because while the healing is useful early on, I would always just end up using Curaga instead and the command decks that you’re given are usually limited compared to what you have in your standard form anyway so really they’re kind of a downgrade. Never mind Zack’s D link looks awesome WHAT!?
Another thing about BBS that really grinds my gears especially when compared to the first KH is the lack of exploration and the way that the game kind of puts itself into a formula. Each world is tiny to make up for the fact that you have to visit it three times in three different Playthroughs and so there’s not really a lot to find. You can find items and new commands in chests that are kind of out-of-the-way but not really hard to find. The main collectable in the game comes in the form of stickers which you can arrange in a sticker album for bonus items but really it’s kind of just window dressing.
The mini games took a big hit too. Most of them are in Disneytown which has the most abysmal song for any world I’ve ever been to in a KH game, it makes my ears bleed. The mini games are also horrendous and not really engaging. The only optional challenge in BBS that could even be considered slightly worthwhile is the hidden unversed challenges, which I only did one but it wasn’t bad. I don’t know what you get in return for completing them all with a perfect score but I wasn’t really interested.
It seems like most of the mini games that made KH special are kind of gone in BBS. Instead we have the Mirage arena which I did not visit until my three playthroughs were already finished and I found out that I needed to play the Mirage arena to get the secret movie. The Mirage arena seems like a leftover from the portable version of the game. It even makes you create a custom avatar for some reason, so I imagine that you would do these Mirage arena missions with other players but I couldn’t really do that so it ended up feeling like a replacement for the Colosseum except the rewards didn’t seem all that enticing.
Another thing that really bothers me and was a obvious leftover from the PlayStation portable version of the game are the command boards. I played them once and it seemed like a half-baked Mario party-esque board game where you get commands I guess and it seems like the point was that you played with other people but I don’t know why you would because it was really boring.
The worst part about the command boards is that you can’t even visit the 100 acre woods because it’s reduced to just a command board. No interacting with Winnie the Pooh or piglet or Tigger or rabbit or kang or Roo or Eeyore, no emotional dialogue between any of those characters, no fun and interesting mini games to play, so I already knew by this fact alone, disregarding any of the gameplay changes or even the story that BBS was an inferior game to both kingdom hearts one and two.
I only half-jest. (I just REALLY like Winnie the Pooh 🥺)
While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the gummi ship missions in kingdom hearts one and two, they would’ve been a welcome surprise in BBS but were absent completely.
Another thing about BBS that bothers me to no end is the complete lack of secrets to find. I love KHI because there were so many different hidden bosses to find and fight and most of them are pretty cool and while I was a little let down that there was only two secret bosses in KH2, I still really liked them. BBS has only one hidden boss so that is sad, and it doesn’t help that the rest of the main bosses are almost completely forgettable outside of the Xehanort/Vanitas encounters.
The main thing about BBS that made the experience worthwhile was the story and characters. The game felt like the Star Wars episode III revenge of the Sith for kingdom hearts. A lot of the time during cut scenes and when story events would happen I felt like I was watching Star Wars because it all seemed very dramatic with character moments involving tragedy and anguish and betrayal and it was just all very interesting.
You really felt for the characters when shit didn’t go their way and Xehanort is portrayed as an absolutely diabolical villain who actually becomes fleshed out with a personality and backstory that’s also incredibly intriguing, kind of like what they did with Thanos in infinity war. When reading the Xehanort reports you really understand what he’s trying to do and why he’s doing it but you also see the pain he has inflicted on others so that you know that what he’s doing at a basic level is wrong but can still understand why he feels his means justify his ends. He really is the perfect kingdom hearts antagonist.
It really sucks though that I found out that even after collecting all the Xehanort reports and finishing two of the campaigns on critical mode and the other on proud mode that I still needed to complete the sticker albums for the final mix version of BBS, I wasn’t able to view the secret movie so I looked it up on YouTube and I can say that I’m pretty hyped for dream drop distance and kingdom hearts three.
Overall, though I feel that BBS is a little over hyped.
The game itself suffers mostly from repetition. I found myself bored outside of cutscenes, running through the same environments over and over again, watching some of the same cut scenes over and over again and fighting the same enemies over and over again. BBS just became mind numbing to the point where I was comparing it in my mind to Re: Chain of Memories which is not a good thing. Thankfully, the core gameplay does elevate it above chain of memories and it’s not like it’s repeating a game that I’ve already played (seriously come on, Re: Coded also rehashes KH1 and I think Nomura has more nostalgia for that game than the fanbase does) it’s just repeating itself and the story overall is interesting enough to really make the game worthwhile but none of its side content is compelling enough to make me want to complete the game like Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 did.
In conclusion Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep is a good game but disappointing when compared to the heights achieved by Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. While the story is an amazing setup for what is to come, I really don’t see myself playing it again anytime soon.
