Will get you by until Kingdom Hearts 3
The latest instalment of Kingdom Hearts takes place directly before the events in Kingdom Hearts 1. You play as one of three characters; Terra, Ventus and Aqua. Each character has its own story and the game wants you to play each character to the end in order to unlock other secrets which brings more glue between the series.
Unlike the DS spin off, this is actually a decent game and introduces some really useful features and is very customisable. However, some of its control schemes do let it down and it is all due to the limited amount of buttons available for the PSP. The amount of times I had died in the final boss playing as Terra simply because I would lock on then suddenly I am out of an invisible range and the lock is dismissed then suddenly the boss is at your back. It would also have been handy to do an emergency short cut instead of scrambling to find Curaga when your health is at 10%.
Some of the features such as D-link I felt were not useful enough for me to continually use due to its lack of special abilities and having to scroll around to find the one you want in real time is no easy task, instead I mainly used it to recharge my health if I was low and my cure was still regenerating.
As you may know there are a few names voice acting in this game which you may be familiar with, most notably, Leonard Nimoy who apart from the very beginning when it was more mumbling than talking, portrayed Master Xehanort very well. Some of my favourite Disney universes such as Aladdin were not in this game which was a shame and instead did mainly go to the Princesses of the Disney world such as Snow White and Princess Aurora of which Maleficent's back story for her intentions in Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 are realised.
Not a lot of connections were given and when they were they hardly explained the previous events in the other Kingdom Hearts to link the two and unless you had just completed Kingdom Hearts 1 or 2 within the last year you probably will be like me and not remember too much. However, if you have a PSP and love Kingdom Hearts this is certainly a decent spin off in a good series with tons of cutscenes of many loved Disney characters even if the Final Fantasy series in this game is considerably lacking but to the fact you have to play a lot of the same recycled material through 3 times to get the entire story, I will only be giving this 3.5.
