Kingdom Hearts: Re-coded

Back in January of 2011, the fourth installment of the Kingdom Hearts series was released for the Nintendo DS in North America. Kingdom Hearts: Re-coded takes place after the events of the Kingdom Hearts 2 and follows Mickey, Sora, and company trying to debug a digital version of Jiminy’s journal from the first game and find the lost data. This installment revisits most of the worlds from the first game, and brings a new “puzzle element” to it.

The story is basically the first Kingdom Hearts game, but redone with more flashy colors, different game play, and a different premise. For the most part, it’s just a review of what we already know. It begins with Jiminy Cricket organizing his journals, and pondering over the line “Thank Namine” which was the only clue Sora, Donald, and Goofy had to what happened before they woke up in Twilight town in the beginning of the second game. Mickey brings in Chip and Dale to make a digital version of the journal, in hopes that they can restore it, and discover what everyone forgot. Once the journal is copied, they discover that it is full of bugs that are blocking the information that they want. Luckily, they are able to make contact with a digital version of Sora, and send him to various worlds from the original Kingdom Hearts in order to clear out the bugs and restore the journal. The problem with this is, that it’s already been done. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories forced you to revisit the worlds of the first game, and followed a similar plot line with slight different circumstances as well. For fans of the series, everything is a little too redundant, and it gets old pretty quickly.

The game play is more or less okay, but isn’t exceptional like it is in Kingdom Hearts 2. The selection menu is the same as the previous games, the worlds are the same, and you still wield the Keyblade. The differences are that everything is cluttered with Blocks, the combat system and the equipping systems have changed. The combat itself is similar to the PS2 games, but the need for magic points is replaced by a quick load system and fills up the more you hit things, and to change things up, the type of combat changes from place to place. It goes from various things like a Sonic reminiscent 2D scrolling mode, to the turn-based system that the Final Fantasy games are known for, to a rerun of being stuck in Hallow Bastian without a Keyblade from the first game. Most of these deviations just make the game more annoying and less enjoyable. The manual camera controls and jumping in general is just plain clumsy. Most of the time you spend more time trying to get to the top of something without dying rather than actually getting along with the game. Re-coded brings back some of the signature abilities from the first game, like 'glide', and then add some new features, like 'auto-jump'. I never quite liked auto-jump for two reasons: 1) it made it pointless to even have a button designated for jumping, and 2) it was incredibly inconvenient when it came to bouncing blocks because if you got too close, they would push you away. One of the bright points in the game play is the new Stat Matrix, which is where you equip all of the ability chips that you picked up in battle in a type of circuit board like fashion. Here you have the option of turning certain abilities on or off, depending on whether you like them or not.

Then sometimes you have to go through extra challenge courses in “Debugging Mode” to bring back the door you need to move on. The game basically makes you hunt down the portal to the debugging zones like you’re using a metal detector, then makes you wager some of the points you earn on how fast or how many enemies you defeat, and then if you succeed, you are rewarded with more points that you can used for more ability chips, money, or experience points. These are mostly placed around to give you more opportunities to get items and experience points, and aren’t particularly related to the plot.

The graphics are about as good as they can get on the DS. Like the fifth installment of the series, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, it leaves behind the 2D, battle showdown format of Chain of Memories. The animation resembles the formatting of the main two games for the PS2, but isn’t the same quality. The world layouts are basically the same, but are littered with bug blocks, which represent that the world has been bugged, to the change the platforming and levels around. Then the Debugging zones aren’t the most interesting and look similar to Tron’s world, the Space Paranoids, in Kingdom Hearts 2. The game includes fully voiced cut-scenes, which may not seem like much to a gamer who’s usual platform is the PS3 or Xbox, but I believe it’s a major step up for the Nintendo DS. It actually has more voiced cut-scenes than it’s sequel, 358/2 Days, which has a few.

I quite liked the Stat Matrix, in the fact that I always had room for more stuff. While playing 358/2 Days and the previous Kingdom Hearts games, I always ran out of ability points, which was annoying. I was generally okay with the combat system, when it was normal and I could use thunder and cure over and over, when I wasn’t whacking the Heartless silly with the Keyblade. Though, one of the major cons for me, is that the games seems to be unreasonably fond of giving you time limits in which to destroy blocks or kill Heartless. Most of the time that you spend in Hallow Bastian is spent trying to hit certain levers in a certain amount of time, except that there are blocks in the way and you don’t have a Keyblade, and must rely on Donald and Goofy to break them for you. After about 15 minutes of this and the knowledge that there were more time trials to come, I basically abandoned playing the game.

Overall, Re-coded disappointed me because it doesn’t quite measure up to the other games in the series and is rather like a different version of Chain of Memories. The storyline isn’t that original, and the game play can get annoying after a while. It was fun in the beginning, but gradually got tiresome, and I mostly kept playing so that I could say that I played it. For the most part, this is a game that you can go through life, and on to the next game in the series, and be perfectly fine without playing it. This game is like the black sheep in the family of excellent games, and I would give it a 6.5/10 at best.