Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep A Fragmentary Passage Review
let me just get this out the way. Wow, what a mouthful of a title! There is logic behind the naming scheme of Kingdom Hearts games but the name of this one is incredibly unfortunate. What this mouthful of a title is trying to convey is that this game is an extension of the secret episode at the end of Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep Final Mix. Things got a bit pretentious with different parts of the episode being given different chapter names. The final episode was called A Fragmentary passage and teased a second volume for Birth By Sleep. The name of this game is an unfortunate attempt to remain consistent with a really silly design decision.
With that addressed, 0.2 tells a fairly easy to follow story that lasts under 4 hours where you play as Aqua who is trapped in the World of Darkness after the events of Birth By Sleep. Here, she is forced to travel through several of the worlds from Birth By Sleep which have fallen into the World of Darkness during the events leading up to the original Kingdom Hearts. As she does, she has to deal with the world itself trying to eat away at her will. Whilst simple and short, I found the story quite engaging. The retcons near the end may bother some people but it is par for the course for Kingdom Hearts at this point.
In terms of game play, the game is quite easy to describe because it plays very similarly to Kingdom Hearts 2 but with the Shot lock and style switching mechanics from Birth By Sleep. Personally I like games where you constantly are being forced to tweak your move set and customise things so I will miss the command deck system from the last two games but what is here works really well. The system for style switching is a little different. In addition to styles, you can also earn the use of more powerful versions of your spells. This time styles and these powered up spells are now queued up for you to activate with triangle at any point but you will lose the opportunity to use them if you wait too long. There are now two pages of shortcuts which means you can map almost everything to buttons and barely ever have to use the menu. The game also has some pretty good level design with some fun puzzles. Levels are quite large but more detailed and has space for large combat arenas and platforming spaces. The platforming is actually a lot of fun too rather than being frustrating like in Kingdom Hearts 1.
There are only really a handful of negatives. The way movement works feels really odd at first but you do adjust to it as you play. When you change direction, Aqua’s point of rotation is the back of her foot rather than her torso in most games which is more realistic but takes a lot of getting used to. Shot locks also seems to do less damage and it is harder to charge up the focus gauge than before so it is mostly useful for the temporary invulnerability. Unfortunately, the only Shot lock Aqua has access to is one that takes a lot of time to charge up which limits it’s usefulness. I was also disappointed to find that you had to complete the game first in order to unlock critical mode. Personally, I like to only have to play through a game a single time so I prefer to do a single play through on the highest difficulty. The game is designed for multiple playthroughs with a list of challenges to overcome in order to earn cosmetic items for Aqua. This was probably great for fans who where eagerly waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3 to arrive but at this point it is probably better to move on to the next game. There are a couple of incentives to do a second play-though so I may come back to it at some point.
Overall, 0.2 is a great teaser for Kingdom Hearts 3 but is also a solid little experience in it’s own right.
