Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is the final HD compilation before Kingdom Hearts III. It contains the HD remaster of the previous 3DS exclusive Dream Drop Distance, the brand new Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, and Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover, a cinematic film.
Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD
Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD was originally a 3DS exclusive. For this HD collection, it was effectively remade in order to work for controllers. The game takes place after Kingdom Hearts II in which Sora and Riku take on the Mark of Mastery exam in order to improve their abilities to fight Xehanort. By this point, the Kingdom Hearts story has been a convoluted mess and Dream Drop Distance doesn’t help that much in understanding how everything wraps together. All you need to know is that there is a reason for Sora and Riku to explore the various worlds again.
The best part about Kingdom Hearts has always been the Disney worlds that you get to explore. While the previous few spin-offs seemingly reuse the same worlds again and again, Dream Drop Distance finally introduces several new worlds. The end result is that it feels a lot fresher. Coupled with the openness of the levels again, with the worlds not being as linear and it is a lot of fun to explore. Despite the 3DS origins, Square Enix has done a commendable job at remastering it into HD. While it may lack some detail, the cartoony look and sharp lines help mask that. The end result is a great looking game.
The battle system is an evolution off Birth by Sleep’s. You still got the X button to attack, but you have a command deck to use magic and special physical abilities. Instead of MP to regulate your magic use, you cycle through the deck and press triangle to use an attack. Then it’ll go into cooldown and you have to wait before you can use it again. This means you don’t have to worry about conserving MP and can experiment more. You buy, find and earn these commands as you progress through the game.
The flowmation battle system is new and is supposed to make the combat more fluid. The main feature is that you can travel quickly by grinding on rails, or use the environment to your advantage. It has a mixed result since you can also dodge into enemies or jump against walls and then execute attacks. There will be instances where you miss where you were aiming at, or the animations are too quick so it gets confusing.
Instead of Heartless, the enemies are now Dream Eaters. There are good and bad ones, and the good ones you can create and then recruit into your party. You can have up to three Dream Eaters on your team, with two on the field helping you fight. There’s a whole system built into this with friendship bonds, skill trees and the like. The game has a lot of mini-games. The major one is Flick Rush, where it is a card based game. It’s got its own tournament, an involved strategy and animations. The other mini-games tie into the friendship system, and they can be fun in short bursts.
Each world has its own gimmick that you can activate to help in combat. One may allow you to use certain environmental objects as bombs, while another allows you to grind against enemies to damage them. However, the key gimmick of the game is that you control both Sora and Riku. They are split into two different versions of the world, and you can “drop” into either one at any time. There is a timer whenever you’re using a character, and once that expires, you’re forced to drop to the other character. Therefore you cannot exclusively use only one character, and at certain points, the story doesn’t progress until you’ve progressed far enough with both characters. Both Riku and Sora play exactly the same apart from a few special moves that can only be equipped on one or the other.
You can’t help but feel that the drop gimmick is a way to artificially extend the game. In effect, you end up having to complete each world twice, once as Sora and once as Riku. While they have different stories, they involve the same Disney characters from that world (although there are one or two surprises in terms of characters that turn up). Some worlds are better than others, where Riku and Sora’s paths are completely different, while others are exactly the same. Some of the environments have poor design with the reliance on crappy platforming. On the other hand, there are a lot of little secret areas hiding treasure chests, and it really brings back the awesome exploration aspect of the maps from the original Kingdom Hearts.
As you progress through the game, you obtain a summary of the story events of past games. These summaries are a super condensed version of the events and spells out what had happened. These provide an interesting read and help you understand some things but at the end of the day, Kingdom Hearts has a story with a lot of potential but is told terribly.
The game takes around 18-25 hours to complete, depending on the difficulty and how much you explore. The final section of the game from the boss rush itself takes 1-3 hours to complete since there are a lot of story cutscenes. At its core, this is a simple story and it has an easy to understand ending. It tries to wrap up all the various plots of the previous games and explain it but it is still too easy to be confused.
Overall, Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD, despite its spin-off handheld origins, is an extremely fun game. The combat builds upon Birth by Sleep (which had the best combat system in the series at the time of its release) and the amount of nooks and crannies in each world means it’s great fun the explore. The downside are typical Kingdom Hearts flaws, such as the float platforming mechanics, overly convoluted story and the combat require specific types of play styles on the higher difficulties.
Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage
Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage is, as you can tell from the messy title, is related to Birth by Sleep. It is set after that game and tells the events of Aqua as she journeys through the Realm of Darkness. It is completely new, uses a new engine and is like a teaser to what Kingdom Hearts III would be.
Being built from the ground up for PS4, naturally this is the best looking Kingdom Hearts game to date. Since it keeps the cartoony aesthetic, the characters themselves don’t have a crazy amount of detail and so can look somewhat weird. The environments, despite being overly drab and depressing since it is set in the Realm of Darkness, have a stunning amount of detail. Perhaps the most impressive aspect are the effects from combat, in particular, the magic spells as they light up the screen.
The combat system harkens back to the mainline games. Gone is the Command Deck from Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance, instead, it returns to using MP for magic. You can map the magic spells to the shortcut of a combination of the L1 button and a face button. Since Aqua only has access to four spells (Firaga, Thundaga, Blizzaga and Curaga), there’s no issue with this. You press X to attack and square to block and dodge. If you block at the correct time, you can counter. It wraps some of Birth by Sleep’s combat mechanics here, including if you manage to chain together attacks you can unlock powerful finishers. Finally, Shotlock returns in which is an overpowered special move that involves a short minigame and can easily mow down the health bar of bosses.
Boss battles can be hectic and difficult. You cannot go into it intending to just wail away. Bosses will kill you with their attacks if you don’t dodge and defend at the correct time. If you’re coming this straight from Dream Drop Distance (and there is a high chance that you are), then the level design will feel a lot linear. There are efforts made to make the maps open, and encounter exploration, but due to the way the game is designed, each “world” is only one small-ish map. However, there is a heavy reliance on gimmicky environmental travel and hazards in order to progress. You’ll have “puzzles” and platforming as part of the story and they’re not exactly the reason you play Kingdom Hearts for. Aqua retains her double jump ability.
The story follows Aqua pretty much straight after Birth by Sleep. She is travelling through the Realm of Darkness, overcoming the weakness in her heart. She is trying to find and save Terra and Ventus. Aqua travels through the fragments of various worlds (there’s only a very limited Disney influence). This was supposedly a story that the developer wants to tell within Kingdom Hearts III but would have broke the pacing. Truth be told, nothing much important happens here anyway, the ending is a neat tie back to previous games but feels ultimately inconsequential.
If you think of A Fragmentary Passage as a demo for Kingdom Hearts III, then the 2-3 hours run time is fine. It is not long enough for a satisfying experience in terms of the combat and leveling up, since nothing is added to the combat system after the tutorial. There are a bunch of in-game objectives / challenges and treasure chests to entice you back. The optional challenges are tough and upon completing your first playthrough, the hardest difficulty is unlocked and more treasure chests will spawn. Interestingly enough, there are a bunch of costume parts for Aqua that you can equip on and off to your preference.
Overall, Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage, as a teaser, is pretty solid. The graphics are phenomenal and the combat, given that it only had two hours to play with, combines the best aspects of the various games in the series. The story is simple and not that meaningful. It might not be up to the level of a full standalone game and you can’t help but feel that the developers had to fill in something to justify it as a collection; ultimately it is a decent experience.
Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover
Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover is a cinematic film that is set during the events of the mobile spin-off Kingdom Hearts X. Unlike the cinematics of Coded and 358/2 Days, this is brand new and is not just a HD compilation of the cutscenes. Also unlike those two, X Back Cover does not have any trophies.
It uses the same engine as A Fragmentary Passage and thus it looks fantastic. Unfortunately, like the other HD cinematics in the series, it is quite boring and has poor pacing. It is roughly an hour long and even then, it feels somewhat pointless. Characters also feel like they’re talking just a tad bit too slow. It is recommended to have played the mobile game (which is free-to-play) because otherwise, you will have no clue how it is related to the Kingdom Hearts series. Sure, it speaks of keyblades and worlds, but it doesn’t directly connect to any of the games thus far.
The story takes place far before the events of any of the games, at a time when all the worlds were still connected. The Master of Masters has six apprentices, and bestows each of them a book foretelling future events. Once the Master leaves, the six apprentices, each with their Union, collect pieces of light to stop the world’s destruction in the future. A traitor is present amongst the six, and this causes a rift within the group as each starts to doubt the other. It sounds cooler than it is because the cinematic is basically just the same few characters standing around in the same few environments and spouting a ton of dialogue.
Overall, Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover is definitely the weakest in the collection. It’s story is already not that great, and to have it all played out as an hour long cinematic wasn’t such a good idea. It looks pretty… and that’s effectively it since it’s hard to feel that the story has any actual consequences.
Overall
With Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue containing one full game, a three-hour demo and a one-hour cinematic, it is not as value packed as the 1.5 and 2.5 HD Collections. Despite this Dream Drop Distance is a strong game and is a lot of fun. A Fragmentary Passage shows us the potential of what a Kingdom Hearts game could be using better hardware and there’s not much to be said for X Back Cover. Overall, Final Chapter Prologue still provides plenty of value, and while A Fragmentary Passage and X Back Cover may feel like filler to round out the package, the fact is, the developers didn’t have to do that at all but they did, so it is appreciated.
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