Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep review

There is something so right about Kingdom Hearts, no matter where you play it, it just feels right. Could it be that Square-Enix has the know-how to create a good game on either home or portable consoles? Possibly. Or could it be that playing through all your childhood Disney-based memories in one place is always perfect? Definitely.

This isn’t the first time that Kingdom Hearts has made the move from home consoles to a portable one, however the previous versions haven’t quite captured the full power of what you get from the PS2 titles. This time it seems Square really have unlocked the power of the PSP, giving us a game which has graphics that you would be happy with on your even your current gen consoles. Sticking on a positive note, the control system has been lifted into Birth By Sleep in its entirety with a few additions. The normal controls are there, in terms of: Cross attacking, Circle for jump, Square for blocking and the PSP staple assigning the camera movement to the shoulder bumpers. But the main focus here is what you do with triangle, after the card deck element in Chain of Memorieswe have the Final Fantasy-esque command deck. Scrolling through with the directional buttons gives you access to pre-set magic and special attacks. You can the command deck yourself to maximise your character’s combat effectiveness via a option on the menu system. These attacks help to build up a new addition to the series, which changes your character’s state. This state change offers more powerful attacks and can in some cases also offer new attack options. Over the course of the game you can learn various new state changes in addition to improving and levelling up your older ones. While the gameplay might not be the clear-cut play we got with BBS’ bigger brothers, the story is very much so. The story here takes place around ten years before the original Kingdom Hearts and sets us up with three characters that we saw in the secret movie hidden in Kingdom Hearts 2. These characters are Ventus, Aqua and Terra, each is a KeyBlade Master in training and Ventus looks pretty much like Roxas from KH2 and Terra looks like Zack from Final Fantasy 7 and Crisis Core but still. Each character has their own strengths, with Aqua being a mage, Ventus a sprightly attacker and Terra being the brawn. Of course, old time baddie Xahanort makes a return to weave his evil scheme into the Kingdom Hearts universe. Thus the three friends have to make off and save the worlds. Saying that the three friends go off to save the day might be a slight tease as actually the game is split up, you take control of a single character like before, but this time the characters work from separate angles which gives you three different stories to play through. At the beginning after the tutorial you are given the option to choose any of the three characters to start with but you need to complete that character’s story before moving on with the rest. To make you feel less like you’re a Billy-no-mates you can link-up with one of your friends and kind of borrow their powers and abilities for a while. This allows you to take Aqua’s magic or Terra’s powerful attacks to help you out in the tougher situations of the game. This works really well, and you don’t feel like it’s an excuse for not actually having any company on the quests. The mission structure is well thought-out, with various types of missions to keep the gameplay fresh. These missions can be anything like collecting fabric for Cinderella for her ball grown or hunting for the Seven Dwarfs in a mine. Each of the worlds that you visit look wonderful and are brilliantly imagined as you would come to expect from the franchise. There are some negatives in the game unfortunately, first is being the platform it's on. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t work or is broken on PSP, it's just that the game is pretty much a full fat version of Kingdom Hearts which seems to have been shrunk down to fit on the handheld. It almost makes you wonder if it was an experiment by Square to see if the game would work on a portable platform. This leads on to some very unfriendly to portable saving, as the save system is pulled right from the main series, so you have save points dotted around. This can be extremely annoying unless you plan your saving beforehand. Finally the load times, even with the game installed onto the PSP’s memory card are very slow even for the handheld and all its power, which just compounds the saving problem a bit more. To be fair these gripes are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, however they are still noticeable. There is something magical about Kingdom Hearts, as every time you play the series you seem to fall in love with it, however it does seem like Birth By Sleep comes off as more of an experiment of what Sqaure can on PSP, rather than being made into an experience which feels custom made for the system. The above aside though, Kingdom Hearts is still a new full entry into the series which covers a lot of the missing links from past game. If you own a PSP, then it's well worth having this game in your pocket.

Rating: 9/10

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