Dream Drop Distance is a game so mystifyingly poorly outlined in narrative scope and creative ambition that I have a genuine confusion as to its existence as a title. There's a lot of legitimately interesting lore packed into the latest moments of this game that players jumping and tentatively becoming uninterested would have no earthly idea of its existence.

What sees you as both Sora and Rikku world hopping from select Disney properties eventually involves some of the entire KH story's most important figures and integral plots. Not only was the story pacing misaligned, but difficulty and overambitious mechanic additions muddy what could have been a rather interesting title.

Whatever compelled Nomura and company to add another confusing and unnecessarily obtuse mechanic in its Chao-Buddy-Pal Thing system is a mystery to me. Just because you're adding another game in the series doesn't mean you need to reinvent the wheel on combat... just make it playable. DDD adds an entirely new layer and forces the player to learn it for no additional value. Couple this with routine gimmick boss fights and you have a beyond frustrating game to actually... play.

Enemy design is again repetitive, but what is most worthy of scorn is once more the inundated placement of monotonous foes throughout each realm you visit. It's one thing to fight the same group of enemies, its another when you are doing so at every single clearing/zone possible, and its another when you're doing it twice over as the game sees you re-tread each world you visit as both Rikku and Sora. I don't understand the infatuation with the KH dev team to force the player into physically playing the same locations (this is twice in a row now with Birth By Sleep) just to soak in some extra narrative. They explain it in DDD, but could and should have easily been bypassed through other means. It's alright to do things once... sort of, but making you run through everything you've just seen to move the story along is inexcusable.

Dream Drop Distance really could have been something interesting if it pressed the story that makes KH actually interesting into the earlier elements of the game, drip feeding it throughout, instead of waiting until the last moments of the title to do so.

Mediocre beginning, really fun middle, ending could’ve been great but it drags a bit and some of the bosses were real annoying

Coming back to Traverse Town was cool, but idk anything about The World Ends With You, and I didn’t get very attached to any of the characters from that game. Once I started going through all the Disney worlds, I was actually having a great time using flowmotion. I was looking forward to the final world, but it feels like it lasts too long, especially since a couple of the bosses there were just annoying to deal with and unlike BBS, it wasn’t that easy to get the stuff needed to make them feel fair. I wasn’t a fan of using dream eaters for commands and I actually kinda miss melding them somehow. Like before, I don’t think I like the actual story all that much, I just adore basically every character in this series.

I was really hoping for some Sora and Riku interactions and it’s a shame that we pretty much only got that at the very end, but I really liked what we did get

Gonna be honest, I just can’t wait to play KH3 soon

For all the things I enjoy about this game, the music, the later worlds, and the idea behind Spirits, everything for me just ended up feeling unsatisfying. The combat never felt great, there's not as much incentive to experiment with commands as there is in Birth by Sleep, and the story while I didn't outright dislike I felt didn't explore the idea's it introduced and made the journey feel like a slog until the end. I like the idea of Spirits, but they never had a major impact as party members, and basic combat skills being locked behind certain fusions means I was just never going to have the combat flow I wanted unless I went out of my way to grind. The Drop gauge is another cool concept on paper but it should of been used as a narrative tool more than a random 30 minute timer. The world's you visit didn't last long enough to leave an impression, which wasn't helped by the back and forth of the drop gauge meaning I was doing each world twice at almost the same time. The latter worlds in the game I felt did this better, but by then I was pretty burnt out. Don't think I want to revisit this one.

My personal favorite entry into the KH franchise. Booting up the game and learning you have a strict time limit to play before the game boots you out of one storyline and into the other may sound frustrating and flow breaking, the game softens the blow by giving you points based on how much/how well you did which you can exchange for boosts and buffs such as dealing more damage or extending the timer whenever you swap over. After the first world I could easily finish an entire world in 1 sitting and manually swap over without having to break up the flow at all. I am a huge sucker for themes of duality, and this game exemplifies that to a T with Sora constantly struggling with Xemnas and the nobodies in his worlds and Riku getting harassed by Ansem and the heartless in his. The main gameplay gimmick of the game is this strange SMT esque pet collection that are used as temporary party members until you replace them for better ones. Decently interesting, doesn't take up too much time if you don't care and if you do there's an entire Nintendogs minigame to mess around with them.

Gameplay:
Parabéns Square, vocês conseguiram tirar TODAS as melhorias que o Re:Coded trouxe ao sistema de BBS. Esse é o maior passo pra trás em quesitos de gameplay até agora, não foi feita uma mudança de sistema e conseguiram piorar tudo. Porém, flowmotion é bem foda e espero que volte em jogos futuros, porém de uma maneira menos quebrada.
História:
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Not as good as the games that came before or after, but not a bad game by any means. In a lot of ways this game pushes the series foward. It brings back platforming through flowmotion which is a new a central mechanic to this game that I like very much. This mechanic not only expands the ways in which you interact with the world, but also the ways in which you fight you enemies. This addition along with the more open areas and unique gimmicks make the worlds in DDD feel more unique and interesting when compared to the hallways in KH2 and in BBS. The biggest problem with this game are the boss fights. It really has the worst bosses in the series by a huge mile and a lot of the enemies feel very samey. Which is a shame for an otherwise very creative game. Even when the game fails at executing a mechanic you can still appreciate the concept at some level. I guess I'm more forgiving towards this game both story and gameplay wise because I know what came afterwards and I like it very much. It's still a good game like most KH games. It just has couple annoying problems.

I really don’t mind this game too much. Let’s get the worst out of the way first - the writing for Sora sucks and he comes across as a complete idiot #notmysora. However, Riku is good and this is the title that finally made me forgive him for kicking my ass in KH1 over and over again when I was 10 years old. I think this is the side game with the combat I find the least offensive, though it is very easy until the final boss rush. The command deck moves feel snappier to execute than in Birth By Sleep and I like the dream eaters! They’re fun! I remember flowmotion being excruciatingly annoying to control on the 3DS but it’s not so bad in the HD version, though I agree with the take that the way it’s implemented makes a lot of the level design pointless.