Mike's Mondays with Mike McGee: Simple and Clean

       So I took my own advice from last week and I literally broke open Kingdom Hearts 3Ds and literally put it in my 3DS and figuratively had a ball while I literally played that game. Unfortunately you have to wait like 3 more sentences before I can tell you about that jank because I was taught that a paragraph had to be between 4-5 sentences. For you guys, I’ll go middle of the road and have this intro paragraph be 4.5 sentences long. This is clearly filler. Now I-

Dammit, Lardopuss! Your eyes were closed!

       If you remember PREVIOUSLY (subtle), I talked about playing the demo of this game. I discussed many a feature and nuance that this game had to offer. Now that I’ve played this game for a while I’m ready to talk about it more. I’ma tell ya right off the get-go’d bat, I’m not gonna say anything about the story, excluding accidental mentions when setting up other points. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone and I barely understand what’s going on in the first place. The only thing I’ll say about the story is that occasionally they’ll throw in little “Chronicles” which summarize the story of previous installments. These usually become available when they reference a previous game so that you go, “oh that’s where that’s from…maybe choosing this as my first Kingdom Hearts game wasn’t such a good idea after all.” It’s a nice touch and I actually read ‘em, so that should put that into perspective. 

Uh-uh...SPOILERS!!

       As you may have guessed or previously known, you get to play as both Sora and Riku in this game, but there aren’t Riku/Sora specific areas. They actually both play through the same worlds. The worlds are like split or something and Riku and Sora are on opposite ends of these parallel worlds that aren’t really parallel. You’ll be playing as one of the hero dudes and then after a clearly indicated amount of time you “drop” to the next character. My first experience with this was kind of annoying because I was fighting a boss with Sora when I dropped and the boss was back to full health when I dropped back to Sora again. Fortunately, you get items that refill your drop meter and slow down how quickly it counts down. It’s really not a problem anymore and it’s a pretty cool mechanic gameplay-wise.

Refighting boss-oh...nevermind

       You’ll be visiting Disney-themed worlds, as is staple. The coolest one so far was The Grid, which was Tron world. They got a pretty good Jeff Bridges impersonator to do of those guys who look like Jeff Bridges in the movie, so that’s prooty cool. The Reality Shift has been the coolest in this world, did I forget to mention that they change depending on what world your in? You basically get to, simplistically, rewrite the enemy/environment code to make them switch targets, blow up, or give you health and munny and stuff. I was definitely off the mark when I talked about the Reality Shifts when I played the demo. These things are invaluable. This world is unique because it’s the only one, so far, that you fight things that aren’t dream eaters. You fight like dudes…pretty sweet. 

JEFF BRIDGES...and co.

       Speaking of dream eaters, which were those things that were following me around in the demo, this feature is a lot more in-depth than I thought. First of all, you can have more than just that fat cat thing. You find recipes and you use these materials that you rip off the exploded corpses of your enemies to make different dream eaters. Each dream eater has an ability path, which gives the dream eater and Riku/Sora access to magic/attack/defense buffs as well as spells and keyblade abilities. These are unlocked by using link points, which are easily built up when you have them in your party. You can have up to three in your party although only two are visible on screen at a time. This definitely adds another 100 layers of depth with all the mixing and matching you can do with these things. It also extends the gameplay time because I could (and have) spend hours petting my dream eaters in their special AR world to build up link points and raise their stats and stuff. Riku and Sora can share the same dream eaters, but why would you want to limit yourself? I can’t wait for the day that I can make myself a friggin’ t-rex and triceratops…someday.

want, Want, WAnt, WANt, WANT!!

       There’s a lot here for fans and newcomers alike. I definitely recommend it to anybody interested…that seems like a useless statement but it’s really not. This is definitely the best entry into the KH (Kingdom Hearts if you’re slow on the uptake) handheld catalog and without a doubt the best one that I’ve play… that is a useless statement due to its redundancy. It’s too early to say for sure, but the story is cooking up to be one of the better in the series. I can honestly say to those who say that I can’t be a fan of this series because I haven’t played KH 1 or 2 that I reciprocate that sentiment your direction in regards to this game. And because I said that I’m not going into the story for reasons, this is probably the last in-depth look at this game that I’m going to give. I’ll give a brief (a sentence or two), general reaction to the game as a whole at the end of a future MMwMM. But until then, do yourself a favor and experience this game by any means necessary that don’t exceed the severity of bodily harm done to yourself or others. Until next time, here’s looking at you, kid.

P.S. I'm not offended by POVs and preferences that differ from my own, but there was borderline too much gay-related content when I searched for pics. Yet I can't tell if I'm upset because I saw it or if I'm upset because I was surprised by it, hmm....