The Geek Bros

So I recently walked into the local Wal-Mart with the intent of buying a long deserved game and had a hard choice to make for a DS game between Mario and Luigi: Bowsers inside story, and Kingdom hearts. Apparently I picked up Kingdom Hearts in the end when I decided I wanted something a bit different. I don’t regret the choice because this game was beautiful! Though the gameplay may have lacked a little bit or the things seemed to drag and become a little monotonous when I hit one of the cut scenes it became totally worth it. Never have I seen such great art on the DS. I was suprised I wasn’t looking at console graphics on this little handheld. The gameplay itself could tend to get ugly, but I could tell how much I thought  moments of this game utterly priceless.

First the bad, frames were choppy when a lot of stuff happened on screen I saw fps drop to nearly half of what it was normally running and I knew this wasn’t right in the least. The other thing about this game is that as you go on from day to day I found myself completely lost granted I haven’t gone through all of the kingdom hearts series, but I found myself begging for more plot and somehow not getting it at all. In fact as the game ended I found myself asking what the heck just happened I knew I’d liked the story, buttt I wasn’t quite sure what had exactly happened in it.  Also as you progressed in the game I got fed a little bit of story then got sent on four or five mindless missions that didn’t reveal anything. They felt were more like time fillers in the story and I found it hard for me to go back and complete things one hundred percent when I wasn’t learning anything more about the characters and was doing the exact same thing constantly, going into a world beating a few heartless only to come back. Over and over and over again or my all time least favorite mission, go collect random items then come back. I felt like I was really wasting my time even though for some people that could really be a upside to the game to me it made the game drag on longer than it should have.

Last, but most definitely not least the good, as I mentioned above this game has a stellar story as they fed me a little bit of story I asked for more and more and more to the point I really didn’t wanna go back and find the last treasure chest in mission 42 I just wanted to head forward in the game. Though the story is weird and quirky and I’ll admit the slightest bit cheesy it reminded me of the Square Enix I love with deep multi faceted charactered and weird off the wall events that made absolutely no sense at all, but somehow was amazing! Don’t get me wrong it could have been better but it definitely was a good reminder of the good ole days of gaming when it wasn’t perfect by far, but it was a great attempt at an amazing thing. I also will commend Sqaure for creating a different approach at stats and items, the game works by assigning a different block shape to each power or ability or level then slowly as your beat missions you unlock slots in your stat board and you are allowed to assign to abilities to the new empty tiles. It may not be perfect but I sure liked it it was fun and enjoyable and a fresh take on the old cut and dry RPG. Along with this system hours of replayablity were worked into this game by making it so you can hop back to any mission you have completed and do it over to earn challenge awards to get your cooler stronger gear for your character, while not something will be doing all the time any time soon I’m sure I will pick this game up just to try and see how much of the challenges and such I can possibly finish.

The Verdict: I really liked this game a lot though it did drag all the time story wise through the whole experience, even though I completely loved the story that was there. I personally put a lot on a good story and a battle system that works in any RPG that I play.

Score 8.2/10