Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is a game unlike almost anything else out there. It is haunting, melancholy, thought-provoking, sometimes frustrating, always beautiful. However, you need to know very clearly what you're playing before you just sit down and pop the game in your PS2.

SotC's plot can be summed up in one sentence: A nameless adventurer is tasked by a disembodied voice named Dormin to kill sixteen Colossi, after which Dormin will bring his beloved back from the dead. You can forget about the plot after this; there are no other people or even creatures to interact with and, other than Dormin's instructions and hints, no further text to read.

In SotC, there are no powerups (at least none the game tells you about; apparently eating fruit and certain lizards' tails can increase your health and stamina). There are no items; health and stamina restores itself over time. You have two weapons, a bow and a sword, and there are no upgrades. You learn no skills. In fact, you end the game in exactly the same state you started it in.


The game follows a three-part process. In the first, you ride your horse, Agro, towards the current Colossus. Holding up your sword will emanate a beam of light which can guide you towards your goal - assuming you don't have to make too many detours, which increasingly is the case as the game goes on, meaning you need to use triangulation. Other than the Colossi, there are no enemies; the only reason you have to find the Colossus is really to experience the incredibly beautiful landscape and its intense feeling of loneliness. There is no music while you wander around, adding to the isolation.


Once you find the Colossus, the battle begins. You need to use your weapons, your horse, the Colossus's own behavior, and the area around you to your advantage to find a way to get on top of the Colossus, or be able to hang onto the fur on its body. Finally, once you are actually on the body, you need to hang on for dear life while finding its weak spots (indicated by glowing sigils) and stabbing them vertically with your sword. When the Colossus's health is gone, he falls to the ground, and you find yourself back at the central shrine, ready to start the cycle all over again.


Do not expect normal play control from this game. You are not an action hero and you are not particularly good at what you do. Because there are no normal enemies, swinging your sword normally is almost always totally useless. Your bow is generally only good to distract the Colossi. You will be using the "hang on/climb" button (R1) much more than the jump or attack button. You can only jump a realistic height, and vertical mobility is most of the challenge in the game. Your horse does not always listen to you and needs constant reminder of where to go and how fast. You can be hurt not only by actual attacks, but even by being anywhere near the Colossi's feet when they come down.


Because I went in without knowing all this, I found myself intensely frustrated by the first little while, almost to the point where I quit the game. There is a very steep learning curve and you need to be prepared for a lot of getting used to stuff. Read the manual very carefully and practice. Some of the controls are very poor choices; while hanging, the same button will jump or pull yourself up depending on whether a direction is being pressed. The camera and controls will sometimes conspire against you, so be prepared for it and don't let it get you down.

Then there's the fights themselves. These are really puzzles disguised as boss battles, with the unusual twist that most puzzles are not hundreds of feet high and actively trying to step on you or smash you to pieces. You can go about this two ways:

1. Have a lot of patience. Explore your immediate surrounding thoroughly. Pay attention to what the Colossus does in different circumstances. Do all of this while trying not to be smushed. Often a leap of intuition is needed to figure out what to do.
2. Use an FAQ.

I have to say I went with number 2. Some of the tricks to beating the Colossi are so difficult to figure out that you will very likely throw the controller in the air in frustration and hopelessness. Even once you do know what to do, it often isn't easy to pull off. I didn't feel that knowing the trick really took anything away from the experience, so if you do feel annoyed, go ahead and use a crutch.


Amazingly enough, it isn't the gameplay that really makes SotC stand out. It's the storytelling. Which is remarkable because there practically is no story. SotC is a deconstruction of what it means to play video games. You do nothing but fight sixteen creatures, some of whom are huge, brutish, and angry, but others of whom are graceful creatures with sad or peaceful eyes.

The graphics are breathtaking - though not in HD or as detailed as newer consoles, the emotions evoked by your journey are astounding, aided by a haunting soundtrack which sometimes is deliberately at odds with your actions. When you first see some Colossi, rather than a pounding, scary track, you are treated to a mournful violin piece. Oh, and pay close attention to your hero's appearance - as you defeat Colossi, his looks slowly begin changing.

Some of the fights themselves are truly momentous. You are literally only a tiny fraction of the size of these creatures. Some of them fly and some are water-based. One battle requires you to gallop at full speed on your horse to keep up with a sandcrawling snake, and jump straight onto a trailing wing to get up on its back.


You will often find yourself hundreds of feet up in the air, hanging on by one hand from a bunch of fur while an angry, glowy-eyed monster tries with all its might to shake you off, and you try to get your balance for long enough to powerfully drive a sword into it. The force feedback adds to the sheer experience, which I truly have never seen matched yet.


Shadow of the Colossus is a groundbreaking game, a real work of art, and a must-play. Just go into it with your eyes wide open, and don't be afraid to get help if you get stuck.

The Enchantment Emporium

Tanya Huff is generally a good author. She knows how to write snappy dialogue, believable characters, a decent plot, and infuses her writing with modern humor. My favorite books by her are The Keeper's Chronicles, a set of three books which are almost entirely straight comedy. With her latest book, The Enchantment Emporium, I get the feeling like she was trying to recapture the feeling of Keeper but with a bit more seriousness, and overall I think she failed.

The story involves a family of witches (well, magical women anyway) called the Gales who live in a small town near Toronto. The protagonist is Alysha Gale, whose life is changed when she receives word that her grandmother has died and left her a shop in Calgary. Said grandmother has apparently gone "wild" (a term that's never really explained) and it's up to Alysha to take over the shop and deal with whatever caused her grandmother's death - or possibly caused her to fake it. If you read Summon the Keeper, you'll be getting some deja vu at this point. The story goes off in a very different direction, but the overall structure does seem to have a similar feel.

Huff has created an entire mythology revolving around the Gales; they're surprisingly incestuous, given that cousins generally marry each other, and there's a whole power struggle sort of thing that goes on. However, we're never given the full picture. While most of it is explained, the corners of the painting are never filled in. Sometimes this sort of thing is good at keeping up an aura of mystery, but in this case I felt it didn't work, and here's why.

Alysha as a character is almost a cipher. We know she's fairly strong-willed, a bit rebellious (though not as much as her hair-dyed musician cousin Charlie), seems to think about sex too much (like most of her family), and is quite possessive. But most of who she is can be defined in terms of her family members. I felt the characterization was unusually weak and it was hard to figure out how she thought, let alone identify with her. In this case, the mythology is a big part of the characters, and leaving it a mystery means that many of the characters themselves are a mystery - which weakens the story.

In general I felt there was little chemistry between the characters, ignoring the romance aspect, which seemed so obvious they could have just imprinted it on a hammer and banged the reader on the head with it. The story begins back in the Gale homestead, where Huff introduces over a dozen characters who get maybe two lines, and then don't appear for the rest of the book. This is fairly overwhelming, and doesn't do a good job of letting us get used to the main character(s). When the main cast is finally more or less resolved, I couldn't feel any real identity in any of them. Alysha lacks a strong foil to bounce off of (like Austin in Keeper).

Finally, Huff seems to be a little confused about where to direct her humor. In Keeper, the humor was obviously parodic and not meant to fit into the story. Here, Huff can't resist adding in a little parody, but it's out of place in the overall more serious story structure. As an example, a character introduced late in the book is meant to be a teenager who'd grown up essentially in Fairyland and thus has no idea what the human world entails. And yet he can be seen spouting lines that seem straight out of Zits, as if "teenagehood" is somehow universal. Things like this devalue the narrative.

Nitpicking aside, the book isn't bad. It's entertaining and a good time-waster. But Huff needs to decide on her direction and stick to it. I'd much prefer a fourth Keeper book than this sort of waffling in-betweener.

And Another Thing...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the true sci-fi classics, and remains as hilarious to read as it ever was. Douglas Adams' work is full of brilliantly warped ideas and a plot that fizzes and ping-pongs off the cranium like a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

After the original "trilogy" reached four books, Adams penned a fifth, Mostly Harmless. This one was much darker and more cynical than the others, and really made most of the characters miserable in one way or another. Worse yet, it ended with a nigh-on guarantee that everyone would really die.

Adams mentioned in interviews that he wanted to work on a sixth book to end on a more upbeat note, but unfortunately he passed away before he could.

Fast-forward to 2009, and his estate (or whoever owns the H2G2 rights) has hired another author, Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl) to write the sixth novel in the series. This kind of thing is always hit-and-miss, though it seems to be happening a lot - a new James Bond novel came out last year, and a new Winnie the Pooh this year. It seems to be the time of revival.

Here's the bad news: Eoin Colfer is not Douglas Adams. Here's the good news: he doesn't try to be, and better yet, he doesn't need to be. Colfer has managed to hit all the high notes of H2G2 - the madcap hijinks, the bizarre nomenclature, the conversational tone, the incisive satire - and infused it with his own style. The result is a slightly softer, faster H2G2 but every bit as enjoyable as the original.

Colfer's writing style is not quite as meandering as Adams's was. This is the most evident in his use of the in-book Guide as commentary on the events that are occurring. Adams used the Guide perhaps a few times a chapter, usually with at least several paragraphs detailing a long, frequently ridiculous entry. Colfer's Guide pops up almost every page, and often only lasts a sentence or two. This is a little jarring at first (it seems the Guide has an entry on the actual characters and events of the book) but it's easy to get used to, sort of like Terry Pratchett's footnotes. These entries are rarely boring and often have a surprise ending that elicits guffaws.

One downside of the constant use of the Guide is the sheer amount of names and entities he has to throw at us. It's almost impossible to think up new ones all the time, so many of the entries reference old favorites like the mattresses of Squornshellous Zeta or the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. Sometimes it feels a little too much like a tribute to the earlier books, and this is true of the first few chapters in general, but eventually he achieves a balance between old and new which works very well.

Colfer has also managed to nail the characters pretty well. Ford and Arthur are the most instantly recognizable. Zaphod is a bit stupider than he was, but this is explained by the fact that his left brain, or LB, has been removed to pilot the Heart of Gold, and that was the smart one. Trillian and Random are back as well, and oddly enough, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, a recurring gag in the earlier books, is now a major character. Ironically, Arthur himself is no longer the viewpoint character (though he is the source of most of the more poignant parts); the narrative is split up pretty much equally amongst six or seven people, which keeps the pace quick and breezy.

One thing that's interesting to note is that Adams's Hitchhiker was written way back in the seventies, and some of the satiric notes are no longer sharp. Colfer tries to keep some of the culture (like "froody" and "cats") but moves the satire in a more modern direction, with nods to the YouTube society and more of a "website" feel to the Guide itself, which is ironic because the original Guide was probably the inspiration for Wikipedia, bringing everything full circle.

Would Douglas Adams have written the plotline for And Another Thing...? No one can really tell. But he can rest easy knowing that Colfer's work is hilarious, sometimes tender, brilliantly satirical, and a plain old enjoyable read.

The Guild

Watching stuff online has never really caught on with me. I like having it on a big screen downstairs away from the madding crowd. However, I've gotten insanely hooked on The Guild. (Pay no attention to the crudely-drawn logo above, it's a live-action series.)

This award-winning web series, consisting of episodes about 5-9 minutes long, chronicles the travails of the Knights of Good, a guild of players in an MMORPG reminiscent of World of Warcraft. An extremely dysfunctional bunch, the series takes great joy out of presenting every stereotype available for gamers and inflating it by about three hundred percent.

The guild members are:

• Vork, the guild leader, a well-educated, balding, middle-aged man with absolutely no sense of humor and a severe cash-flow problem (he eats "Found Object Stew");
• Clara, an overweight, selfish housewife who neglects and practically abuses her three children and husband;
• Tinkerballa, a cynical, extremely rude Asian girl who seems welded to her Nintendo DS and treats men as wallets with legs;
• Bladezz, a teenager with too-pretty hair who thinks he's much, much cooler than he is;
• Zaboo, a naive, lovestruck Indian kid who makes incredibly inappropriate comments and exhibits major stalkerish tendencies;
  
• Finally, there's Codex, the main character, a bundle of nerves with all the self-esteem of a mouldy bean sprout.

Codex is played by Felicia Day, who also came up with the idea of the show and writes every episode. Day is probably better known as Penny from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, a sweet, graceful role which couldn't be further from that of Codex.


Each episode begins with a monologue by Codex spoken into her webcam; these are probably the most screamingly funny parts of the series. She's just so self-effacing and cute, you just want to hug her and let her cry on you.

There are three seasons so far, each consisting of 10-12 episodes. Most of the humor is that of the cringe variety, where you just can't believe that someone could possibly act or talk that way. I often steer far away from this sort of comedy, but it's just so over-the-top and well-done that I can't stay away.

Most importantly, the subject matter (other than the exaggerated stereotypes) is extremely true-to-life. Day herself was addicted to World of Warcraft for several years, so she knows every little thing she's talking about. The dialogue is full of terms like DPS, raid, loot, spawn, and a host of other words even I don't recognize. Obviously she has a great love for gaming, but she doesn't try to whitewash the sorts of characters you're likely to see online.

The three seasons each have their own major conflict; in the first, Zaboo won't leave Codex alone, in a very one-sided and creepy relationship. (The tenth episode, which treats an argument with Zaboo's scary Hindu mom like a boss fight in a video game, is absolutely brilliant.) The second introduces two jocks to the all-nerd cast, and the third piles on even more characters with the Axis of Anarchy, a rival guild led by none other than Wil Wheaton (better known as Wesley fricking Crusher), who's deliciously evil and steals every scene.

(As an aside, if you think Felicia Day can only play somewhat mousy, nerdy characters, try the jaw-dropping Guild music video Do You Want To Date My Avatar?)


You can find all the episodes of The Guild only on MSN due to an exclusive deal, but worry not - they're still all free. Grab the DVD if you want some extras though!

Men At Arms

Men At Arms is the fifteenth Discworld book, but only the second in the City Watch books, which would eventually become the longest thread in the series.

In contrast with the first Watch book, Guards! Guards!, which borrowed heavily from film noir, Men At Arms is much more of a standard police procedural story. Obviously most police cases don't involve talking dogs, werewolves, trolls and dwarfs, but believe it or not, those only marginally affect the overall thread, and you could excise or replace many of them and still keep the core.

The actual plot begins with Captain Samuel Vimes' trouble with the thought that, with his upcoming marriage, he would soon stop being a watchman. In the meantime, Corporal Carrot, Sergeant Colon, and Corporal Nobbs are dealing with three new recruits to the Watch who were hired under an affirmitive-action policy: Detritus, a troll, Cuddy, a dwarf, and Angua, a rather pretty young woman - most of the time. Rather than business as usual, though, the murder of a dwarf artisan begins to tie them up in a sordid affair involving assassins, clowns, and a mysterious artifact known only as "the gonne".

In general, I think of Men At Arms as a transitional novel. It doesn't have the power of some of the later Watch books, nor is it still feeling its way like the first one. I have this idea of Terry wanting the Watch to end up as it did in (say) Jingo, but before it could, it needed to pass through this phase. In the book, the Watch is not the laughingstock it used to be, but nor is it the well-oiled machine it later becomes.

Oddly enough, Captain Vimes is not the main character here. In fact, there really isn't one; the narrative focuses almost equally on Vimes, Carrot, Angua, and Cuddy and Detritus's slow and very violent friendship. This is really the first book that begins to treat the whole dwarfs/trolls dynamic as a shorthand for real-life ethnic and minority woes, something which is explored several times throughout the series and explodes in Thud!

The book also introduces two brilliant characters. The first, Leonard of Quirm, is an absent-minded inventor whom Lord Vetinari keeps around almost out of sheer interest, but refuses to let out into the wild. This version of Leonard is actually quite a bit more down-to-earth than what we see in later books. The second, Bloody Stupid Johnson, is a minefield of comedy and, though we never meet him, he makes many marks on later books (some of them probably made out of something explosive). Oh, and Gaspode the Wonder Dog (from Moving Pictures) also makes a welcome reappearance.

There is also a classic, chilling line near the end that muses on how bad people want to make you squirm, while good people would kill you without hesitation - because they know it needs to be done. It's a counterintuitive but intriguing insight that sheds much light into certain characters' convictions and actions, and probably the most memorable part of the book.

Saying that Men At Arms is not Pratchett at his absolute finest smacks of denigration. This is certainly not the case, because even Terry's worst books are leagues ahead of almost anything else you'll find; there are plenty of moments that are sheer brilliance. Still, I find that Men At Arms as a story is a little less coherent than some books in the series; there are many threads that weave around each other rather than connecting directly. It's a good book and a definite recommendation, but Terry has done and will do better.

Shadow Hearts II

I see JRPGs as having several distinct "waves". The first was on the NES, with the classic Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc. - the sort of games that are completely unplayable today. They started expanding on the SNES, and featured more user-friendly gameplay, deeper stories, and began experimenting with sidequests. On the PlayStation, beginning with Final Fantasy VII, as space increased so did the size of the game, with tons of sidequests, mini-games, and lengthy stories.

For some reason, since then games have started getting shorter, with less content - presumably since more money was being shovelled into making it look and sound good, but possibly because they realized that people would still pay the same amount of money for a shorter game. If they wanted to pad out the length, they would add "challenges" or missions or some such, which made the player go over the same things they'd already done but wait for random drops, or do it faster or on harder settings.

Shadow Hearts II, though on the PS2, is a glorious callback to the halcyon PlayStation days, when RPGs were generally just plain RPGs, and the story and exploration just kept going.

I absolutely hated the first Shadow Hearts. The graphics were awful, the music was forgettable, the plot was laughable, the characters were cutouts, and I especially disliked the Judgment Ring. This gameplay element made it so every move you did in battle (and several outside) popped up a circle with several areas in various colors. A line moves quickly around the circle, and you need to hit the X button over the right areas to make your attacks work. It tired me out and was often frustrating, especially when status effects would obscure or speed up the ring even more.

Finally, I hated the overall aesthetic - the monsters were all horror movie rejects and extremely freaky. It also annoyed me that though the game was, refreshingly, set in the real world, you were limited to one or two streets in major cities, and never got the feel that you were really in those places.

Fast-forward to 2004 and the sequel, Shadow Hearts II (or Shadow Hearts: Covenant as it's known in the US, although for some reason my copy just says II on it). Azure has learned a lot of lessons from the first game and the result is a much more relaxed, better run, and enjoyable ride.

Let's make no bones about one thing, though - SH2 is not top-tier in terms of funding. The character models have maybe two expressions and often move like marionettes. The voice acting (as well as the script) is pretty silly and oddly enough, doesn't match the subtitles at all. The music remains forgettable.


In terms of gameplay, though, this game far outshines its predecessor. Although the Judgment Ring is still there, they've added accessories that slow it down, making it much more bearable, and they've eliminated the requirement to use it outside of battle (except for shops, where you can use it to get discounts). You can even turn on "Practice Ring", in which the game will automate the Judgment Ring, at the price of only doing one attack at a time and never getting "strikes" (hitting the red part of the area, which strengthens the move).

The original game also had the idea of "sanity points", which would go down each turn; once it reaches zero, your character becomes berserk, which essentially means they do whatever they want. The idea is left in SH2, but most characters have far more SP, meaning this rarely happens.

The battle system also introduces "combos", by which you can move your characters together and string together their attacks, which continually increase in power. The downside is that if you miss one, you've lost all your characters' turns. This adds a bit of strategy that makes battles quite a bit deeper than the first game.


In general, fights are fairly easy, although challenges crop up often enough to keep it interesting. I did die once or twice, but I never felt frustrated or unfairly put upon.

In any case, it's not the battle system that makes this game shine. It's the sheer amount and variety of stuff to find and do. Each of the characters has separate skills, all of which are learned in totally different ways. For example, Yuri needs to power up his Fusions (transformations) by feeding them soul energy left by enemies, and going into the graveyard representation of his psyche. Karin finds pages from Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, Lucia finds aromatic oils and tarot cards, Blanca fights in the "wolf bout" over the world, etc.

Then there's finding demon crests, which grant magic spells when equipped. Not satisfied with just finding them, you can use them in the closest thing SH2 has to a mini-game, called "Solomon's Key", which is an intriguing sort of algebraic puzzle. The crests must be placed on a giant painting representing different areas, and you are given hints such as which crest is or is not next to another crest or area. Some of the hints are a bit too ambiguous, but it's a great idea with concrete results (the crests get more spells when an area is complete).

There's innumerable side quests, and unlike modern RPGs, most of them involve new areas to explore, treasure to find and bosses to fight. This is the distilled RPG experience, and very enjoyable.

What about the story? Well, it's audacious if nothing else. It takes place in the real world (or something that can be confused for it at a distance) and along the way you'll meet real-life personalities like Rasputin and Princess Anastasia. There's an overarching story involving demons and world domination and a secret organization called Sapientes Gladio, which has a cool name but not much else going for it.

The characters aren't terribly annoying but nor are they very likeable. I was irked by Karin, who was ostensibly a German lieutenant (yes, a woman Nazi lieutenant) but who quickly becomes a silent, rather emotional floor mat with no real authority, dressed in the kind of clothing that would instantly get her arrested if this actually were the real world in the 1920's.


The horror vibe from the first game is entirely gone. While the story is generally serious, there's a definite comedic undercurrent, with a sort of humor you don't often see in a game. For example, Joachim, one of your party members, is flamboyantly gay, which is played for laughs over and over again. So are the shopkeepers, and one of them requires you to find "stud cards" with rippling male models, before he'll work for you.

About half of the scenes contain some kind of joke or silliness (although there's always these long pauses which kill the timing) and there's even some fourth-wall-breaking, especially with the Man Festival, a sidequest available near the end of the game which just had me going "you're kidding, right?" over and over again. It's beyond me how this entire sequence got past the censors, unless one assumes the censors didn't have the time or energy to finish every sidequest.

Shadow Hearts II has a ton of content and is just a classic, solid RPG experience that'll make you smile much more often than most do. Don't expect a great story, but you won't be bored.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days

Square Enix has been churning out the sequels and side stories lately. The surprising thing is that while none of these games have really been amazing, none of them have been bad. I include Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, and now Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days in this category.

This game is designed to take place between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2. Yes, this is partly the same time that Chain of Memories took place, but this covers the entire time between those two games, including the parts where Sora was unconscious. This time you play as Roxas, as he deals with life in Organization XIII.

Let's start with one thing - if you haven't played both major KH games, you will be incessantly confused here. Don't even bother. The rest of this post will be rife with spoilers for those two games, so you've been warned.

Let's start with the gameplay. Although the basic system is similar to the major KH games (no card battles here), it doesn't follow the classic "action RPG" setup. Instead, exploration and battles are mission-based. Saix will give you a set of missions at the start of each day and you go off to a particular world to accomplish them. Some of the missions are required, some are optional, but you can always go back and redo them later if you want. (Worry not, by the way, you won't have to actually sit through all 358 days. There are a total of about 90 missions.)


Each mission has particular goals: beat X amount of Heartless, collect emblems, do investigation (by examining certain areas), etc. You will often be accompanied by one of the Organization members on your trip. Some missions have optional objectives as well (like destroying a few more Heartless or examining extra areas). You can also find special badges, which unlock challenges for that mission, or allow you to play it in Mission Mode (a multiplayer mode which lets you play as various Organization or KH characters).

(Note: These challenges and missions give you special sigils that unlock prizes, but do not bother doing them if you value your sanity. They are tedious, annoying, and you don't need any of those prizes to finish the game under normal mode.)

One thing I noticed is that you can no longer just slash away at bad guys and heal when necessary. You need to do a lot more blocking, dodging and rolling to get anywhere. This draws some fights out, but overall it's a more satisfying way of fighting.

Also, I was expecting all the enemies to be rehashes of existing ones, but there's a surprising variety of new ones. Many of them are palette and size swaps, but there are a lot of new bosses, some of which are pretty interesting (like the Heartless tank!).


Let's start talking about the visuals. KH: 358/2 Days is possible the best-looking 3D DS game out there. I was pretty amazed at how they managed to shrink PlayStation 2-sized worlds into a DS. The character models are large and look quite good for the DS (some jaggies, but c'mon). There's more than 40 minutes of full video in there too, which is amazing.


The controls take a bit of getting used to, but they did a really great job with them. They had to make do with two fewer buttons and one fewer analog stick than the PS2, and they had some great ideas to do so. For example, tapping the R button will snap the camera back to behind Roxas, while double-tapping R will lock on to enemies. L plus an action button gives you a magic or item shortcut, while the Select button gives you free-range camera movement. It works surprisingly well.

One more thing I have to crow about is the panel system. Instead of just leveling up, equipping items or learning skills or magic, everything goes on the panel grid. (There is no MP, magic works on the original Final Fantasy system of number of casts.) Levels, items, equipment, spells, and skills all need to be dropped onto the grid in order to function. In addition, some skills take up multiple panels; so you can use a "doublecast" skill along with three spells to give two casts of each of them, or get a three-panel Block skill that lets you equip two modifiers (like Block LV+ or Fire Block).


I found this to be insanely challenging and really fun to use. You need to figure out whether you want to use your precious panel spots for abilities, spells, levels, or whatnot, and once the more unusually-shaped panel blocks become available, moving everything around to accommodate them becomes one giant puzzle. You gain panel slots with each mission you accomplish, and eventually you will have more than two full screens of panels. When faced with a new four-panel skill and five single slots scattered around the various screens, I easily spent twenty minutes rearranging everything so it worked perfectly. An inspired idea.

There are some downsides. Like some of the previously mentioned spinoffs, KH: 358/2 Days gets bogged down with repetition. There are only seven worlds in total, and three of them (Agrabah, Halloween Town and Olympus) we've already seen twice. The music is almost entirely ripped directly from Kingdom Hearts 2 (although with surprisingly good quality).

The story itself was actually, I'm amazed to say, really good, probably better than either game that came before it. I say this with qualification, though. It's a shame that several of the more interesting Organization members are gone by the first fifth of the game (unfortunately, they had to do this due to already-established storyline) and I would have liked to see more interaction amongst the existing ones.

The first 20% and last 30% of the game is really interesting, and the last few missions are superbly emotional. However, most of the middle of the game is just mission after mission, with a repetitive scene involving Roxas, Axel and Xion (the new fourteenth member) eating ice cream in Twilight Town. It's easy to get fed up with this, but I definitely recommend keeping your patience for the end, because it's easily one of the best stories to be told on the DS.

Get used to seeing this stuff.

Here's the bottom line. KH: 358/2 Days has quite a few flaws, mainly involving tedium and repetition for chunks of the game, and lack of originality in terms of settings and music. But it's fun to play, and if you give it a chance, you'll be deeply rewarded with a great story. If you enjoyed the earlier games, I highly recommend it.