Unfortunately KH Birth by Sleep does not live up to the hype of being one of the best PSP RPG's. Granted I've only completed the Terra scenario, but I don't really feel the urge to play as the other 2 characters as the battle system is not very exciting and I can't really see myself playing 10-15 more hours for each of the other characters as I feel that I've pretty much seen everything this game can do.
Generally I prefer turn based rpg's over the action ones, and I think this is a very good example of why I do. I don't feel that there is much strategy into this game, the battles against generic enemies mostly consist of pressing the X button repeatedly and perhaps throwing a triangle special attack here and there. Within less than an hour, you've pretty much done all that's possible to do in the battles as they get repetitive very quickly. The boss battles on the other hand are super annoying. The gap of difficulty between normal battles and the boss battles is just insane, and I regretted many times having picked the "normal" difficulty level as it required me to grind 5-6 levels many times just to be able to compete with the bosses. I generally don't mind grinding in JRPG's but I don't feel that is was very fun to do here, especially in multiple occasions and that the battles aren't very fun to begin with.
Some other annoyances in the game are mostly with the controls and the camera system. See you can't look up or down, you can only move the camera left or right... but there are flying enemies in this! So you have to hope that it "locks" on the right enemy, and half the game you are fighting against the camera where you can't even see your enemy, unless you want to waste your time turning the camera over and over again (you are busy pressing X repeatedly anyway) . The square button offers Block and Slide, but I found that most of the time it didn't do the one I wanted, which is particularly annoying in boss battles.
The Command system in the game is based on abilities that you find and equip and you can level them up. After being maxed out, you can meld some together to create more powerfuls ones, and as you advance in the game you get to equip more of them. Unfortunately there isn't much strategy to this, the only worthwhile one is Cura (and upgraded to Curaga) and the rest are a bunch of offensive ones that do some damage, but which one you pick is mostly irrelevant as they are mostly similar. Picking the right command in battle can be hard, as the d-pad let's you switch between them, but literally have to stop moving/dodging to use the d-pad for selection. Again this is action elements taking away from the game, I don't think this selection system really works very well in this game.
What I enjoyed the most in the game was the story and the cutscenes, although it's not an amazing storyline, it's still the most enjoyable part of the game and makes you interested in seeing what happens next. The game is mostly linear, even if you have a map to choose your area, there's never more than 1 or 2 that opens at a time so you pretty have much have no freedom. Well you can always go back to previous areas to collect missing treasures, but I found that most of them were irrelevant and had no impact on my progress.
Square is my favorite company of all-time (mostly for the Square years) and I will always check out their RPG's, but I feel that this one is very flawed and has many things that it could improve on. Actually I feel that another Square Enix game does this style better, and it's Final Fantasy Type-O. That one has a good amount of flaws too, but generally it does everything this game tries to do but in a better way. I haven't played the main KH games yet, but it's not looking good for the series if this is considered one of the best.
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I'm playing for the first time in 2.5 remix (I've already seen plot spoilers/cutscenes) and it's fun, but I'm finding the backtracking meh and worlds lackluster/too short... maybe I should have played it before
idk how many playthroughs you're on, but the worlds were made to be experienced differently through all 3 routes, and you see different pieces of each world on each playthrough
there's a solid KH game somewhere in here but it just has too many drawbacks for me like all of the side games do. The backtracking, the balance, the new combat mechanics (the cooldowns and deck building stuff is crap), etc. just had me throwing my hands up. Then the reward is to see a fraction of a not very large world to begin with. Even the HD version bares the brunt of this being designed around the limitations of the PSP.
Love the game for what it is, but I think being a PSP game holds it back. The world's are some of my favourite in the series, but too narrow and small to reward the feeling of exploration that KH1 offers. Combat is arguably my fav in the series though, and the story... 🥺 Feel bad for anyone who somehow didn't play this before 3.