Game Review 2 Kingdom Hearts 358/2

The game I decided to review this time was Kingdom Hearts 358/2 for the Nintendo DS. I am a big Kingdom Hearts fan and when this game came out I was really excited because I like playing them. The first two games Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2, I thought were really good games. The action and interaction was really fun. The games would show you characters that you remember from childhood since most of the characters and worlds you travel to, are from Disney. The rest of the characters are a mixture of Final Fantasy characters. This game takes a different approach.
In this game, it takes place between the first and second Kingdom Hearts. Sora the main character from the first and second is now a Nobody named Roxas, and is in Organization 13. Roxas doe not know what is going on or who he is, and finds out throughout the game that he is important to the Organization because he can collect hearts for Kingdom Hearts. The goal of the Organization is to collect hearts from Heartless to open Kingdom Hearts and ultimately get hearts for themselves, because as Nobodies they do not have hearts. The only way hearts can be collected are from those who have a keyblade, which is only Roxas and Xion. The game goes through many of the Disney worlds that are in the first and second ones and you see characters, but are not able to talk to them, because the Organization wants you to keep a low profile.
The game sends you on all kinds of missions that test how well you are performing in the game and these missions are to the Disney worlds. Most of them being, fighting heartless, or collecting information about the worlds you travel to. Like I said before, you see many of the characters that you befriended in the first and second games but are not allowed to talk to them. This is a little hard because in the other games when you befriended them you got to fight with them, and they made the story line fun and exciting. Some of the worlds you get to travel to are; Agrabah from Alladin, The Beast’s Castle from Beauty and the Beast, Halloweentown from A Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wonderland form Alice In Wonderland. This of course is only a few worlds there are a few more.
The story line was what made the game for me. From the first game to the second game there are a lot of questions that I found myself asking and when I started playing this game I realized that some of those questions were going to be answered. In the first game you end as Sora, but in the second game you start as Roxas. What happened in between that caused this shift? And who is Roxas? You find out who Roxas is in the second one, but not for a while. I wanted to know more about what happened when he was Roxas and this game does exactly that. Plus I am a big kid at heart and still love my Disney movies, so to see Disney characters being incorporated into big name games is exciting for me, because I love all of them.
Another reason the game was a good choice was the graphics. For being a game on the DS with such a small screen I wasn’t too sure how the graphics were going to be, but I was greatly surprised. The graphic for this game I felt held up to the other from Playstation 2. They had bright vibrant colors and the action scenes were done very well. The only thing I was disappointed about were the characters faces while they were talking. The lips never moved just the head in general would move to show their mood. So if they were sad, if you looked carefully their lips were still in a smile. If you wanted to see their emotion you had to pay attention to their faces on the dialogue boxes. That showed how they were feeling, whether happy, sad, surprised, so on. This was just a small detail and I did not let it bother me too much, because I did not think that was a reason to say it is a bad game.
The sounds tie into the last comment I made. Most of the talking is done in dialogue boxes which I found a little disappointing. I like to hear the characters voices but there are only a couple cut scenes that the characters actually talk to each other, the rest of the game you have to read what they are saying. That got a little annoying because I did not want to read anymore. The other sounds were pretty good. The music for each world was different for everything. The general music would change whenever there was an enemy around so you would know to keep a look out. But like I said, in each world the music changed a little bit to give that worlds’ sound to it.
For being a DS game I barely used the touch screen. This was fine with me because some fighting games are very hard to play on the touch screen. The only use the touch screen gave in this game was to turn the view of the character around. Which I found I could use select also and I used that most often. I like the touch screen for some games but it was not necessary at all in this game. Most of the game it held the room map, which came in handy to find a way out of the room.
In all, I enjoyed this game and would recommend it to anyone who liked the Kingdom Hearts game. It answers a lot of questions that I had so I am assuming there are others that had some of the same questions after playing the second game. Plus the story line is fun, the graphic are good and the sounds are pretty good. This was an interesting game and a fun one at that.