Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Hands-on

August 3, 2008 - Yesterday, we brought you trailer impressions of Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, the action RPG that's being developed for the DS and will be released later this year in Japan. Today, we managed to get a hands-on session with the game to see just how it is to be Roxas in this new title. While we only had a short amount of time to play the game, we were able to play one entire level of the single player experience and get a sense of the multiplayer game.

The single player stage gave us control of Roxas, with Axel as an additional party member. Appearing in a courtyard, Roxas and Axel discovered that they were blocked from moving through an archway by a large energy field. However, it didn't prevent them from fighting their way through a number of Heartless that kept spawning in front of them. Fortunately, Roxas was very capable of defending himself. Tapping the A button in quick succession allowed him to land quick combos, while the B button let Roxas jump, which could be used for aerial strikes. The Y button let you dodge incoming strikes, while the X button gave you access to commands, such as magical spells or special attacks.

Luckily, micromanaging Axel wasn't necessary, as he performed his backup role within the party admirably. In many cases, he would land two or three strikes before we had a chance to, which was particularly useful when we were surrounded. This helped us as we moved through each area of town, defeating enemies and collecting their hearts when they were defeated. Every now and then, we'd also need to trigger a switch or two to gain access to a new location. Eventually, however, we came upon a large Heartless suit of armor, whose joints needed to be individually targeted to destroy it.

While we only had a little time to check the single player mode out, we also had a chance to quickly check out the multiplayer mode, which was similar to the single player mode, with the sole exception that players were given options to choose between one of seven members of Organization XIII to fight Heartless with. At the end of a mission, each character would be ranked on a collection of stats, such as the number of enemies they killed and hearts collected. It was a pretty creative way to have a multiplayer session set up, but would definitely be a lot of fun, especially with a group of friends.

Thoughts:  Great looking game, I'm really excited to get my hands on it, more KH story plus having the gameplay of KH 1 and 2 on the go makes it great.  I'm going to be missing from the site for a few days when this game launches both when it launches in Japan and I import the game and then when it's released in the states and I finally get my story fix.

Wut?? A KH thread not by Soriku?? Shame on you!!

OT: Looks great... o where do I find the time to play all those great RPGs on the DS....

In the hyperbolic time chamber where else??? Oh crap that's right Piccolo blew up the door -_-

Sounds pretty cool. I was skeptical towards this to begin with, but it's shaping up to be nice, I think.

it looks pretty good

This is old, but the game does look great.

Seriously I've seen some video of this game and I've never seen anyone make a DS game look so close to something you see on PS2, I mean the models are great, things look very much like KH on PS2, just everything is slightly smaller and way lower polygon of course. But everything is made up with artstyle and how the game runs in motion. Really something special and I love how S-E has been really supporting DS the past couple of years, they've shown what the DS should be and am more excited for their DS games over Nintendo's.

Ah crap... this is old... I saw it under their TGS list.... >_