If you're a devoted Kingdom Hearts fan, you've likely been lamenting the fact that your weak little American mobile phone doesn't get sweet episodic games like Japanese fans get (yeah I'm not sure why that is either, but we keep getting screwed). Well, fear not. Square Enix and Disney have taken the stories of Sora and the gang that appeared on Japanese cell phones, and repackaged them into one DS cartridge: Kingdom Hearts Re:coded.
While technically considered the "final chapter" of Sora's story, Re:coded is more like an alternate tale. Jiminy Cricket's journal has mysteriously erased itself. As the Disney kingdom tries to recover the data, the memory of Sora plays out his adventure from the first game... sort of. Due to glitches and tampering, this isn't the same adventure as before, and each world presents new challenges.
Fans of the Kingdom Hearts series are going to be familiar with a lot of the worlds presented, because they're the same places Sora visited in the first game. The first one we got a chance to play was Wonderland (the very first Disney world Sora ventures to in the series). In the demo, Sora meets up with Alice, the White Rabbit, and other denizens of Wonderland, who seem to be suffering from memory loss. The Cheshire Cat gives Sora some vague and mysterious advice, and Sora sets off to help everyone remember. Scattered around the world are these things called Inklings, each with a specific detail, like the name of a character, or an object. In order to find the Inklings, Sora has to travel through Wonderland, fighting off Heartless, and sneaking past the Queen of Heart's playing card guards. A lot of the Wonderland section is stealth based and mystery solving.
By comparison, the other world we saw, the Olympus Coliseum, is a more traditional role playing game level. So traditional, in fact, that the battles are actually turn based, presented in a Final Fantasy VI style. The Coliseum has been turned into a huge labyrinth. Attacking a Heartless triggers a battle, and Sora and Hercules get sucked into a fight. The moves are the same, Sora can select attack or one of his spells, then the enemy gets a turn. It's a very rudimentary battle system, but it was kind of cool when presented as a glitch in the game that is forcing you to battle like that.
The normal, non-Coliseum battle system feels very similar to the previous Kingdom Hearts games, especially 358/2 Days on the DS. A is the attack button, and Sora auto targets the nearest enemy (unless you manually target a specific one). Repeatedly attacking will chain combos together. Holding L and hitting a given button will select a spell. Instead of using MP, the spells have a recharge time before they can be used again. As Sora battles, he builds up a meter that makes his special attacks stronger. When the meter maxes out, Sora can unleash a devastating special attack.
More interesting than the battle system is the level- up system. A chip board, known as the Stat Matrix, operates as the upgrade sheet. As Sora fights enemies, they'll sometimes drop chips. The chips can be placed on the Stat matrix to activate them. Most of them do something like raise Sora's level, HP, or attack stats. Others are blank chips. By chaining the chips to certain locations on the board, you can earn new abilities and even cheats to alter the games difficulty or item drop rates.
So far, the best thing about Re:coded is that it doesn't feel like another Kingdom Hearts game. In the same way that Chain of Memories was interesting because it was different, Re:coded has me intrigued, and I want to see how they've changed all the worlds that I've traveled to before.
Kingdom Hearts Re:coded is like someone taking your original game, glitching it out, then making you replay it to fix everything they screwed up. Only it's fun and not horrible like this analogy.