I’ve been fortunate enough to not have played any games during my time with The Outerhaven where I felt “forced to finish” even though I didn’t want to. The only times I’ve felt “forced to finish” are because I usually WANT to KNOW the ending of a game so I can provide a full analysis in my reviews. With my Summer of Kingdom Hearts series, I was happy to finish each title and reflect on my experiences with them. However, that feeling will soon end in this Birth By Sleep Final Mix review.
If you remember my review of KH2 Final Mix (excuse me for calling it Final Remix!), you’ll remember that I said it was the “high point” of the series. I even noted on a recent episode of the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast that I think the series should have ended there. After playing Birth By Sleep for the first time, I can only say that more. The game wasn’t much fun, and I wanted to give up on it on principle several times.
In case you didn’t know, Birth By Sleep is a prequel to everything that came before it. It follows the adventures of Aqua, Terra and Ventus, who inadvertently set in motion everything that has happened so far. For the first time, you play as the three characters individually, embarking on similar yet different stories that intertwine at key points and reveal how certain things happened.
Sometimes it was entertaining to see the development. For example, we entered completely new worlds in the series, including the homes of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and even got to see the first parts of Stitch’s story! And because the three stories were told at “different times,” we got to see each world at different times and in different sequences. You had to play all three to understand how everything happened.
One of the highlights of the game was undoubtedly the voice acting and sound design. While there was some bad acting (I’m looking at you, Terra!), it was fun to hear the voices of Mark Hamill, Leonard Nimoy, and others tell this prequel story together. And just as importantly, the background music for the game’s worlds was lovely. You’ll find yourself humming it long after you’re done playing, which I find very entertaining.
The biggest change to the game is undoubtedly the combat system. Birth By Sleep was developed for the PSP before being ported to consoles, so I guess they wanted to try something different. The problem was that they tried too hard and things got incredibly complicated very quickly.
Case in point: instead of performing attacks on the ground and in the air and learning new techniques as you go, you now have a “command deck.” You have a set of attacks that you can program into your character, and you can then improve those for a time and then replace them with others that you think are better suited to your character. Once you use one of these commands, they take time to recharge, so you have to be smart about how you use them.
While I have nothing against tactical gameplay as I loved Chain of Memories on the GBA, the way this game did it frustrated me to no end. Why? Simply put, the more I struggled in the game, the more I felt like the game wanted me to play ITS way rather than finding a way that best suited me. And then I later found out that by using “certain skills” you can become overpowered very quickly, which is not true at all!
It also didn’t help that my NEP co-host Scott asked me about the “Melding System” when I told him about my difficulties. When I told him I wasn’t using it because the game didn’t recognize it was necessary, he laughed nervously and said I HAD to use it to get through the game better. I managed to complete all three stories without fusing once, and that kind of shows that it wasn’t necessary, even though it was “so important” for improving stats and gaining new skills. Again, the tutorial didn’t emphasize that I SHOULD DO it, just that I COULD DO it. And it was easy to forget about everything else I had to think about in combat.
For example, each character had a special ranged attack that I rarely used because in the heat of battle I forgot it was there! There were also the “Special Meters” that unlocked special transformations and attacks for a short time, and then… there were the D-Links! These allowed you to borrow power from other characters and get a new set of commands until the D-Link meter was empty.
When you’re fighting bosses and hordes of enemies called Unversed, it gets really annoying to remember all of that and then use it effectively. The reason I liked Kingdom Hearts 2’s gameplay was because while it was repetitive, there were simple things that made it special, like the Limit Commands, the different Drive forms Sora can use, the Summons, and so on. These things add to your playstyle without making everything feel too clunky. Yet here, everything felt clunky and I felt like I was really plodding my way through the game rather than fighting my way through each world.
This led to another problem with this game: the difficulty. There were times when Unversed would harass me and kill me repeatedly, even though I was at a high level. In Olympus Coliseum, there are challenges with sometimes ridiculous time limits that I skipped for a while until I reached a much higher level than I needed to… and then it was no longer challenging. The worst were the boss fights. They were so difficult at times that I compared them to Dark Souls, which is a comparison you should only make with Kingdom Hearts once you’ve reached the highest difficulty levels, not the easy ones!
I screamed in anger at the crappy attacks and abilities of characters like Vanitas and Xehanort, wondering how to beat them. I even looked up guides to see how others did it for another clue! My keyboard and mouse were spammed with dodge commands because that was the easiest way to win… and it wasn’t easy in the slightest.
Unfortunately, my final mix review of Birth By Sleep is no longer going to be positive. The reason for this is that while Aqua, Terra, and Ventus’ stories start out as something unique, they drift into backstory pretty quickly and refuse to slow down. The game tries to connect to everything that happened afterward, and it doesn’t have to! It distracts from the core of the plot more than once, and that leads to another major frustration factor: the characters.
While Aqua’s story is the best of all for me, Terra and Ventus’s are frustrating because they are terribly constructed and acted and sometimes make no sense. For example, Terra is the “prototype” Riku battling with the darkness. Unlike Riku, he is not the least bit compelling because he is betrayed at every turn and doesn’t seem to care. Riku was at least smart enough not to trust Maleficent and wasn’t afraid of the darkness to begin with. As for Ventus, they tried to separate him from Roxas and Sora… but then they went out of their way to make it clear that he WAS both… even though he was there before both of them… so that has to make sense.
It also doesn’t help that the game’s “secret episode,” which you unlock by playing all three storylines (and keeping your save data!), only serves to continue the story prequel-style and then herald the numerous games that came after it. If you can’t stand on your own two feet, what’s the point?
There are other things I could nitpick about, but I think I’ve made my point. If Kingdom Hearts 2 was the high point of the series so far in this collection, then my Birth By Sleep Final Mix review shows that this is the low point of the playable games. They tried to do too much instead of really building on what the last main entry did. It wasn’t smart, and it showed.
Next? Re: Encrypted! Sometimes he tells me it won’t take long to get through…
Birth By Sleep – Final Mix Test
Summary
Birth By Sleep Final Mix was a game I really wanted to enjoy, but due to major changes in gameplay, a nonsensical story at times, and a trio of main characters I didn’t particularly like, the game barely held my interest and it was a relief to be done with it.
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Birth By Sleep – Final Mix Test
