Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded Review — A Kingdom Hearts Game for Kingdom Hearts Fans » 30ninjas

Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded Review — A Kingdom Hearts Game for Kingdom Hearts Fans

Share on Facebook posted 01-11-11 by Angelo D'Argenio

Our favorite Disney/Final Fantasy crossover franchise continues with Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded, and after we got to see Terra kill his father in Birth by Sleep (OOPS SPOILERS) we couldn’t wait to see what screwed up depths of darkness this game descended into. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as dark as we were hoping for, but fortunately, there were plenty of other pleasant surprises that kept us playing until the end.

Let’s start with the story, which is simultaneously the best and worst thing about the game. Make no mistake, this is a game made for Kingdom Hearts fans and Kingdom Hearts fans only. If you are a newbie to the franchise, do not start with Re: Coded. You will have no idea what’s going on.

Then again, it’s actually not that much better for veterans fans of the series. The plot of Re: Coded is a Kingdom Hearts spin on a combination of Tron and Silent Hill 4: The Room. (You heard me!) Jiminy Cricket’s journal, which holds all the events of Kingdom Hearts 1, has suddenly become blank. The only thing left inside it is one sentence at the end that reads “Thank Namine” and Jiminy didn’t write it. So, instead of searching the kingdom for some punk kid with an eraser, Mickey has Chip and Dale put together a machine that can scan the journal atom by atom and build a virtual world based on that data. They then code in a virtual Sora (that’s you) into that world, in order to figure out what’s wrong, which is all well and good, until Mickey and friends find themselves locked in their room with events in the virtual world affecting the real world.

Let’s be honest, the story is a stretch, even for a Kingdom Hearts game. It makes absolutely no sense at certain points, and although the aesthetic of “virtual Sora beating down computer viruses” is kind of cool, it seems so out of place in the overall Kingdom Hearts storyline. However, amidst the crazy randomness that is this game’s plot, there are actual pieces of info about the next mothership title in the series: Kingdom Hearts 3. These small little hints are bound to create a buzz in the Kingdom Hearts community, and honestly, the game is worth playing for them alone.

For whatever issues the game has in its story, it easily makes up for it via gameplay. At its heart (I apologize for the pun), the combat system is very much like Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Other than your simple attack, you have a command deck filled with actions that operate off of recharge times instead of MP. For each command slot you unlock, you actually get two slots in your “command matrix.” Putting two commands into one command slot merges the two into a third more powerful command, and this is the command you can use in battle. As you fight with your commands they gain levels and become stronger, and if you max out the levels of both commands in a command slot, you can permanently merge them to an even stronger version of the merged command. Lather, rinse, repeat, until your command deck is filled with ludicrously powerful techniques.

Instead of command styles, Sora has an “overclock” bar that fills up as he attacks enemies. Each time it fills, Sora gets a new passive effect, such as attack up, or reduced flinching, or something like that. You can control what abilities Sora gets via a flowchart on the touch screen, and if you reach the end of a flowchart and fill the bar one more time, you get to execute a finishing command, which is essentially a powerful attack that sets your overclock bar back to zero.

Sora levels up via the “stat matrix” which is a spin on the system from Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. It’s basically a giant circuit board that you place chips into. Each chip has an effect, like strength+1 or HP+2, or even the all important “level up” chip which increases all of your stats, which you get automatically by gaining enough experience. If you connect a string of chips to a CPU, the chips activate and you get their bonuses. However, you can also use chips to connect two CPU’s together which will give you twice the bonus each chip would normally give. In addition to all this loveliness, there are also special circuits built into the board, and if you connect them to a CPU via a string of chips, you’ll activate them. These special circuits do lots of different things. Some give you new abilities, others give you passive bonuses like extra equipment slots, and still others activate “cheats” which let you tweak different aspects of the game to your liking. For example, you can exchange a portion of your max HP to tweak the item drop rate. If you are gutsy enough to go down to ten percent of your normal HP, the item drop rate will skyrocket to a whopping 16x normal.

Sora travels through all the worlds he visited in Kingdom Hearts 1, but in each one the world is a little off. This is a bug in the system and it can only be fixed by finding “back doors” that let Sora into the Tron-esque server worlds. In these worlds, Sora is tasked with finding a certain number of “bugged” enemies, and defeating them in order to make the world normal again. Though there are sidequests and special items you can receive by doing well in these worlds, they are easily the most boring part of the game. It’s really nothing more than pixel bitching around lame blocky environments trying to get a specific set of pretty easy enemies to spawn. It’s tedious.

However, Square found a good use for the hokey plot by using it as an excuse to include many different types of gameplay. You see, the world you are traveling in is all virtual, and thus the rules of this world can change at any moment, and they do! A few times in every world, the genre of game you are playing totally changes! In Traverse Town, the world becomes flat and you are put into a 2D sidescroller. In the Olympus Coliseum, battles are executed in classic Final Fantasy turn based RPG style. There are many more game types to experience as well. Throughout the game you’ll end up in a racing game, a space shooter, an RTS, a stealth game, and more! These genre switches don’t feel like throw away mini-games. They feel like well thought out conversions of the Kingdom Hearts system. This is easily the most innovative and fun part of the entire game and the game is worth buying just for this alone.

Finally, you can’t really complain about the game’s presentation. The menus and worlds all have this cyber aesthetic to them that enforces the game’s virtual nature. All the jargon in the game comes in the form of bytes, servers, and processors, and while it doesn’t make any sense it does constantly remind the player that they are in a virtual version of the actual Kingdom Hearts world, which, I guess, is what it’s supposed to do.

The graphics are more than solid, pushing the DS to its limits. Though you won’t find anything on Birth by Sleep scale here, the cinematics are plentiful and are a real treat to look at. The in-game graphics look only a small step below the Playstation 2 graphics that made the franchise famous. Unfortunately, most dialogue in the game is expressed via still portraits and text, but there are many of these still portraits, far more than you would expect a game that uses still portraits to have. It almost gives the game an action comic book feel, which isn’t that bad. The voice acting is all very well done as well, bringing together iconic voices from the Disney universe with Kingdom Hearts voice actors that we all know and love.

So, is Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded the game for you? Are you a Kingdom Hearts fan? If so, then, duh! In fact, that’s the only type of gamer this game could possibly be made for. The convoluted story makes the game totally inaccessible to newbies, but the foreshadowing of Kingdom Hearts 3 makes the game a must have for veterans. So yeah, if you have any idea what Kingdom Hearts is then buy this game. Otherwise, why the hell are you even reading this review?