If you’re put off by A Fragmentary Passage's three hour running time, you'll be happy to know you'll get a couple dozen hours out of the HD remaster of Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. There's little in the way of true character progression, although various challenges allow you to earn cosmetic items like dress patterns and Minnie Mouse ears. The smooth combat sees her whacking aside fiends with her keyblade while double-jumping, building chained attacks, and casting spells. Light puzzles dot Aqua's journey, including some that have her chasing down gears to repair a bridge or using mirrors to tinker with gravity.
It's the best Kingdom Hearts has ever looked, frankly, and that's a good thing, since the engine (and the final cutscene) suggests A Fragmentary Passage could be considered a visual demo of sorts for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III.Įven if it feels a little like playing the Kingdom Hearts games of a decade ago without all the additions in between, it's fun to play and often feels more fluid and focused. Length aside, it's a rich and beautiful experience filled with effects that show off Unreal Engine 4's ability to render realistic details on surfaces like water and cobblestones without sacrificing the overall cartoony aesthetic. It also takes a mere three hours to finish. Aside from a text-based recap, it does little to prepare you for talk of characters like Ventus and Terra who haven't been in any of the recent games. 2.8 is likely most appealing for fans who love the series but didn't feel like bothering with the 3DS or mobile games. Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage picks up where the secret ending of Kingdom Hearts II: Birth by Sleep left off Aqua and her Keyblade facing Cinderella's castle in a realm of darkness where the shadows are preying on the lore's more brightly colored locales like Aladdin's Agrabah. If it's original content you seek, then you're in luck-it's the best part of the package. It's a jumble that suffers somewhat for its lack of any real cohesion among its three parts, but at least two of those components are strong enough to warrant a return visit to the world that believably drops Final Fantasy and Disney characters into the same universe.
If nothing else, the awkward, mile-long moniker hints at the impressive breadth of content available: an HD remaster of the Nintendo 3DS' Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, a short-but-entertaining coda of sorts to Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep for the PSP, and an hour-long cutscene based on the mobile game Kingdom Hearts X. What's in a name? As much as you can cram, or so Square Enix seems to think with Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue.
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