My favorite entry in the series and one that I think should be played by all. This remake brought new life into the classic 2002 game with its new updated graphics, while still keeping the charm of the original's style. Though not adding much in terms of content, the base game itself is perfect, an epic tale with amazing combat, items and iconic characters. And the sea travel is my favorite mode of transportation in the entire series, as the sea is full of mystery and perils, making this game truely feel alive.

I played this game for about 20 hours with a friend of mine. I can definitely see this game has a lot of effort and detail put into it, yet it failed to grab me.
I greatly dislike the fact how sporadic everything felt like. I'm fine with a mission turning out to be much bigger than anticipated, but after 20 hours we still didn't complete the first 'main story' quest, because of all the random subquests which showed up. I personally found it difficult to be invested in any of the characters, because the moment someone explained their backstory, their quest was pushed down to the depths of my ever-expanding questlog and a new NPC would tell me all their troubles. It was charming, first, but troublesome later.
I imagine DnD fans are eating good though. Probably everything you ever asked for, and this has modding, which is a good plus.
I recognise this is a good game with lots of passion, but I personally couldn't find a character or story to really latch onto after 20 hours, and the gameplay didn't sit right with me. I personally won't be playing it anymore but wish those who do a nice journey!

Un jeu catastrophique, un super masseur de couille.
Quand même un peu de fun grâce au coop, j'en garderai d'horribles et merveilleux souvenirs avec mon bro ♥

Mon deuxième platine ever. (J'aurais du mieux choisir)

Le disco bus était pixel.

Kingdom Hearts is a series I've had a history with for a long time. I remember the first time I caught wind of the series was when I was at GameStop back when it was called EB Games and saw the cover of Chain of Memories and a banner for KH2 that had Chicken Little on one of the images. I didn't remember the name of the series until a few years later my curiosity kicked in and I looked up the weird Disney game with humans. After this rediscovery, I became very interested in playing the KH games for the reasons mentioned in my 358/2 Days review which eventually led to me purchasing this game. After going back and finally rebeating this game years later, I can safely say that I still enjoyed it just as much as my younger self did.

The combat is extremely fun and the command deck along with the stat matrix are massive improvements over the panel system present in 358/2 Days. The clock gauge while not as powerful as the limit gauge was in 358/2 Days is a cool mechanic that allows you to use a finisher when you max out its level. It's satisfying to pull off and can get you out of some troublesome situations if you max it out in a bind. There are also a variety of finish commands that you can choose such as Faith, Mega Flare, or stronger versions of your typical fire, ice, or thunder spells. The command deck gives you a lot of freedom to choose attacks, spells, or items you want to use. The stat matrix allows you to gain abilities, magic, strength, level-up, and etc by collecting panels across the worlds you visit. I think it's a really clever way of progressively leveling up and strengthening your character since they are pretty common and there are plenty of different panels. Another cool feature you can do with the stat matrix is to change the difficulty at any time. It makes the game more accessable and noob friendly to those who either aren't that good at the game or are new players and it gives those who want more of a challenge to swap to a harder difficulty. It is really a shame most other games in the series do not have this option. Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded also gets a bit experimental as it adds small segments from a variety of different genres such as a stealth segment, a 2d platforming one, and even a part where it turns into a turn-based RPG. Some of them might have fallen flat but its something different and I appreciate it when developers toy with new ideas.

The gameplay may be awesome, but the story feels mostly like a filler arc. There is a small bit of important info that is relevant in the end, but for 90% of the game you're pretty much wandering around the same locations we've all previously been to multiple times just in digitized form. This leads to my other criticism. The worlds in this game are almost exactly the same as they were in KH1 with the exception of Castle Oblivion at the end. All of these worlds are in multiple games and revisiting them with little to no changes starts to get old. 358/2 Days was guilty of this too but even that game managed to add something new to previously visited worlds like Neverland and Agrabah (which is also in this game).

While I can understand the reasons why this game is disliked among fans, I don't think it deserves as much hate as it gets. There is a lot of fun to be had gameplay wise and it is more accessible to people of all skill levels with the added ability to swap difficulties at any time. Unless you only care about the story, I'd give this one a try.