Reviewed on PlayStation 3
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December 8, 2014
Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix is a dream come true for fans of the impossibly strange marriage of Disney cartoons and Square-Enix RPGs, as well as a great opportunity to become a fan. Containing HD updates to 2005’s Kingdom Hearts 2 and 2010’s Birth by Sleep, it’s a mouthful of action-RPGs that proves that the series has aged gracefully over the past decade…for the most part.
For something originally released during the waning hours of the PlayStation 2’s life, Kingdom Hearts 2 holds up surprisingly well on PlayStation 3. Sure, the opening few hours, in which you play as Roxas, are still a boring string of banal tutorial missions that goes on for way too long. But the second you’re finally back in control of Sora, it becomes a creative, meaty, and fulfilling action-RPG. His upgraded character design, great voice over, and awesome feel in combat make stepping into his oversized shoes a joy.
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As someone who grew up with these movies, characters, and worlds, Kingdom Hearts games are one of my favorite ways to actually interact with them. Hopping back and forth between the worlds of films like Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lion King, and Mulan keeps the 60-hour adventure feeling fresh, and the self-contained stories of each of these locations really nails the tone of their source material. Its colorful and creative representations of these worlds needed only the minor array of upgrades in this HD version to hold up a decade later. The stark neon colors of Tron’s Space Paranoids world look cleaner and better than ever in HD. However, the same can’t be said for the menus themselves, which still look as spartan and bland as they did back in 2005.
While the combat in Kingdom Hearts 2 initially comes across as a button-mashy, the past decade has proven there’s a lot of depth to uncover throughout your journey. Sora’s arsenal of attacks, dodges, and juggles grow as you level up, both in power and with great animations that reflect it, and a deep roster of party members (which includes beloved Disney characters that range from Simba to Tron) all encouraged me to continue replaying this old favorite long into the night.
To test the skill of even an old hand like myself, HD 2.5 Remix also contains a handful of new bosses pulled from some of the later games, including a bunch of raincoat-clad members of Organization XIII. Most of these provide a crazy level of challenge that forces you to really master the combat system: you’ll need to have the best weapons, become adept at managing your magic points, and memorize some of most brutal attack patterns this side of Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!!. Great voice work and a remixed soundtrack add to the atmosphere, and shortened load times make the entire thing more enjoyable to revist.
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The biggest pain point of getting back into Kingdom Hearts 2 was the control scheme. Over the past decade, it’s become more or less standard to bind jump to X and attack to square, but HD 2.5 Remix stubbornly sticks to its “O to jump, X to attack” ways, without offering a more modern and conventional configuration. It certainly didn’t stop me, but being uncertain of my own fingers did slow me down.
The second major game in the 2.5 Remix package is Birth by Sleep, and HD upgrade of a 2010 PSP game (which I, sadly, missed the first time around). As a prequel to the original Kingdom Hearts, it’s filled with mostly new and interesting characters and story elements, which helps make the overall plot much easier to understand. Your trio of playable characters – Terra, Aqua, and Ventus – have unique and intertwining stories that deal with some really interesting themes, including how we deal with failure when we’re surrounded by people who’re succeeding. Each has their own set of abilities, too, which sets breaks the gameplay up into three distinct and varied scenarios. And while you’re visiting the same classic Disney locales, these different emotional arcs still hit me in a really personal way.
Birth by Sleep’s combat is a modified version of Kingdom Hearts 2’s, but instead of relying on magic points to use a lot of your special attacks, each one has a cooldown period reminiscent of modern MMORPGs or MOBAs. After being immersed turn-based combat for a few dozen hours, I greatly enjoyed this real-time combat system’s pacing. Managing constantly recharging skills is a very different task from scouring through items list and finding something that can refill your magic or health, but equally challenging and interesting. It encouraged a level of strategy and on-the-fly planning that previous Kingdom Hearts never really took into consideration.
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