Wow, talk about a gigantic leap backwards. I'll give points for having an interesting premise (the card battle system) and having a fairly entertaining story but that's pretty much all the praise I'll give.
The card battle system is horrifically unbalanced in your favor. Like, I'm someone who got his ass handed to him multiple times on normal difficulty in the original Kingdom Hearts, I played this game on proud mode and I barely died at all. There's really not much to it, you play higher numbers than your opponent - you win and can cancel out any attack they have. If they have a huge sleight super attack coming up, use a 0 card to cancel that out too. There's really nothing the enemy can do to you, and bosses absolutely fall to pieces when using certain sleights like Sonic Blade and Lethal Frame. Nothing really comes close to putting up any sort of challenge and by the second world you end up feeling drained because the game has nothing more to offer up its sleeve. It's the same repetitive crap over and over again, and it never gets any better from there. I basically had 2 decks I made throughout my playthrough with Sora - whirlwind spam which mopped the floor with common heartless fodder, and Sonic Blade spam which mopped the floor with any boss in the game. The overworld is also really terrible - every location feels the exact same in layout, just these bare lifeless dioramas that only exist to get you to the other bare lifeless diorama room and fight the same repeated enemy pushovers a billion times over. I tried putting on podcasts or listening to my favorite YouTubers when playing to take my mind off things but that didn't help much at all.
I then got to play Riku's story after finishing Sora's campaign, hoping that things would change and get a bit better with his gameplay, but it didn't. He has a set deck instead of you getting to earn and pick the cards he uses, but other than that not much else changes. It got to a point in Agrabah where the game froze and softlocked and I just couldn't take it any more. I still haven't fully finished the game, I just watched the rest of the cutscenes on YouTube to see how the story ended. I don't think I've ever done that for any game, and mind you I'm a guy who fully completed both Dante's and Lucia's campaign in DMC2 so I have a fairly high pain tolerance.
I don't even think the visuals are good, along with the boring diorama level design the stage aesthetics and themes are straight rehashed from Kingdom Hearts 1, on top of the music that isn't even the music from the HD version so it just sounds worse. Definitely skip this one, this was just awful
The card battle system is horrifically unbalanced in your favor. Like, I'm someone who got his ass handed to him multiple times on normal difficulty in the original Kingdom Hearts, I played this game on proud mode and I barely died at all. There's really not much to it, you play higher numbers than your opponent - you win and can cancel out any attack they have. If they have a huge sleight super attack coming up, use a 0 card to cancel that out too. There's really nothing the enemy can do to you, and bosses absolutely fall to pieces when using certain sleights like Sonic Blade and Lethal Frame. Nothing really comes close to putting up any sort of challenge and by the second world you end up feeling drained because the game has nothing more to offer up its sleeve. It's the same repetitive crap over and over again, and it never gets any better from there. I basically had 2 decks I made throughout my playthrough with Sora - whirlwind spam which mopped the floor with common heartless fodder, and Sonic Blade spam which mopped the floor with any boss in the game. The overworld is also really terrible - every location feels the exact same in layout, just these bare lifeless dioramas that only exist to get you to the other bare lifeless diorama room and fight the same repeated enemy pushovers a billion times over. I tried putting on podcasts or listening to my favorite YouTubers when playing to take my mind off things but that didn't help much at all.
I then got to play Riku's story after finishing Sora's campaign, hoping that things would change and get a bit better with his gameplay, but it didn't. He has a set deck instead of you getting to earn and pick the cards he uses, but other than that not much else changes. It got to a point in Agrabah where the game froze and softlocked and I just couldn't take it any more. I still haven't fully finished the game, I just watched the rest of the cutscenes on YouTube to see how the story ended. I don't think I've ever done that for any game, and mind you I'm a guy who fully completed both Dante's and Lucia's campaign in DMC2 so I have a fairly high pain tolerance.
I don't even think the visuals are good, along with the boring diorama level design the stage aesthetics and themes are straight rehashed from Kingdom Hearts 1, on top of the music that isn't even the music from the HD version so it just sounds worse. Definitely skip this one, this was just awful