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Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Hands on - Full story here
The last time we had a chance to sit down with Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep was at last year's TGS show. Yup, Square is taking its sweet time with this one, but it's also apparently working, as my hands-on with the game at this year's TGS was one of the freshest and most entertaining of any game I've played this week.
No joke. This game is looking really good.
The demo kicks off in the same way as it did last year, but this time around there's a whole lot more to see, and we've snagged some additional specifics for you as well. The game features both a story and arena mode (I didn't have a chance to try arena in multiplayer, but I'd assume that's what it's for) as well as three fighters including Terra, Ventus, and Aquas. Terra returns from the first demo, using a modified keyblade and exploring a huge ravine with heartless attacking everywhere. With Ventus I took a trip into the battle arena (alone) and smacked up on some heartless again, and for Aquas the story carried over into the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Unfortunately the game was again in Japanese, so outside of the core Snow White story no other details on the mission were available.
As for the action though, Kingdom Hearts seriously delivers. The controls are both a bit complex but also impressively mapped on PSP, having player movement on the analog nub, camera on L and R, the d-pad used for swapping skills (via "up" and "down"), X is jump, square is attack, and triangle is used for executing the bigger skill attacks. In addition, a quick double-tap on either L or R centers the camera behind your player, a tap of both L and R together locks onto enemies, and holding L and R together brings up the new focus cursor.
The last time we had a chance to sit down with Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep was at last year's TGS show. Yup, Square is taking its sweet time with this one, but it's also apparently working, as my hands-on with the game at this year's TGS was one of the freshest and most entertaining of any game I've played this week.
No joke. This game is looking really good.
The demo kicks off in the same way as it did last year, but this time around there's a whole lot more to see, and we've snagged some additional specifics for you as well. The game features both a story and arena mode (I didn't have a chance to try arena in multiplayer, but I'd assume that's what it's for) as well as three fighters including Terra, Ventus, and Aquas. Terra returns from the first demo, using a modified keyblade and exploring a huge ravine with heartless attacking everywhere. With Ventus I took a trip into the battle arena (alone) and smacked up on some heartless again, and for Aquas the story carried over into the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Unfortunately the game was again in Japanese, so outside of the core Snow White story no other details on the mission were available.
As for the action though, Kingdom Hearts seriously delivers. The controls are both a bit complex but also impressively mapped on PSP, having player movement on the analog nub, camera on L and R, the d-pad used for swapping skills (via "up" and "down"), X is jump, square is attack, and triangle is used for executing the bigger skill attacks. In addition, a quick double-tap on either L or R centers the camera behind your player, a tap of both L and R together locks onto enemies, and holding L and R together brings up the new focus cursor.
