Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep

Kingdom Hearts, a great series with awesome gameplay and a pretty good story as well. All of these things are a MUST to make a great video game and Kingdom Hearts is indeed, a great game series

The newest game in the series is Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep for the Playstation Portable. The story takes place ten years before the start of the first Kingdom Hearts game. It follows the quests of three Keyblade masters named Terra, Aqua, and Ventus. As keyblade masters they are destined to defend the balance between Light and Dark, but this balanced is upset by a masked keyblade wielder who controls a new enemy based on his own negative emotions.(Kind of a rip off of Heartless, but heartless did not invade the worlds yet so we needed something to whack to death.) The story will unveil some new things on the characters we have grown to know and love, and also added some new ones to the list.

The gameplay is smooth and solid like the other games but added a feature that I personally love. Instead of waiting for that long MP bar to reload you are now able to use all your abilities with out having to choose one over the other in a sense. This new system is called Deck Commands. You start out with a limited amount, three on most difficulties, of slots to fill with abilities you find over the course of the game. When you use one of your abilities it has its own load time so you can still use your others with out having to worry about having enough MP for a different attack or spell. Everything but the characters basic attacks is used through deck commands. Items, Magic, and Special attacks. As you use the abilities and gain experience the abilities also level up.

The game also has other features for you to explore when taking a break from the main storyline. There is a game mode called the Mirage Pit which allows you to use the abilities you gained on the main quest in a tourtement type game where you fight rounds of enemies. You also can go online through the Mirage Pit and team up with your friends to fight as well as compete with each other to see who the is the better keyblade master. Another mini-game is called the Command Board. It is a board game style mini game where you can gain more abilities and items to use on the main quest.

The game did have some downsides. It had many frustrating boss battles, but they were more toward the end of the game. The worlds also get very repetitive because you visit the same worlds three times, once for each character. Those are really the only Con's I can think of really. It is one of my favorite games in the series, next to the first and second. I would have to give this a 9/10. It would definitly have a 10 if it had made each character visit different worlds to make the game a little less repetitive, but I digress. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the game as much as I did.