Let me start by saying that this is not a game for people who know nothing about the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Despite its release, 358 days over 2 is a bridging game, meant to connect the events of Chain of Memories to the events of Kingdom Hearts 2. If you've not played one of these, or worse, neither of these, you will be confused by the story. I hadn't played Chain of Memories, but i was able to keep up to the story, thanks to having played Kingdom Hearts 2 and having watched some online cutscenes for Re: Chain of Memories to fill in the gaps.
You can really feel the love that went into the game, and not just in the homo-erotic way that made the game franchise a success among a certain breed of female fans - though there's certainly enough of that, too.
But enough mindless pre-amble. Let's talk about the gameplay.
Gameplay and Control
Control is solid. The touch screen is pretty much unused, but if it was used, it would only feel unnecessary.
The biggest flaw in control is the flying controls. While B jumps, it's Y that raises you into the air with B, confusingly, lowering you. It's really quite frustrating, especially in the heat of battle. It would seem that such "unintuitive" logic as "jump button increases altitude always" has completely eluded the programmers of Squarenix.
The overall gameplay's largely fun, though the mission-mode system seems like a considerable restriction over the open-world exploration of the Play Station variants. Of course, it's probably just the limitations of the system, so it's largely forgiveable.
Leveling up, abilities, etc are all handled with a "panel" system that you attach to Roxas to give him abilities. At first i was horrified that this might be a menu-hell gimmick, but thankfully most gear of a similar nature (weapons, for instance) are all sort of shaped the same, so you don't have to waste that much time reconfiguring panels after you upgrade. The downside is that individual magic spell casts, potions and ethers are all taken up by an entire panel, severely limiting how many you get per mission. It ends up working detrimentally and forcing you to limit your magic to those "emergency" cases.
My biggest qualm, in general, not just in gameplay, is that killing stuff just isn't any fun. It's more of a needless chore required to level up or gain valuable drops. Everything has stupid amounts of health and defence, so battles boil down to taking advantage of the same attack patterns for every single enemy. Typically it's nothing more difficult than "attack combo" followed by "avoid enemy/dodge attacks". Repeat until enemy dies. And you do this for every. Single. Fucking. Random. Weak-ass. Enemy. There's never a change! Enemy attacks always have priority over yours, so you can't simply wail on them until they die, and many enemies are simply invulnerable to any kind of attack when they are in their "attack combo", so you just have to block or dodge or stay out of the way until they finish up and go back to harmlessly wandering around or standing still.
What's worse is it's not until considerably late into the game when you get strong enough weapons to kill even weak enemies with a single combo. So even the weakest random foe in the level will be handled exactly the same as a boss, for the most part. After a while, i just started to run past any enemy i wasn't required to kill simply because i couldn't be bothered.
Graphics and Music
Awesome graphics and music. I can't complain here. They do what they can with the system. Squarenix has always had awesome music selection and the Kingdom Hearts series is no exception.
Others have complained that the music is just recycled from the other Kingdom Hearts games, and this is true, but it's not actually as bad as it could've been. Ace Attorney: Investigations recycled less music, but still annoyed me with how over-used what music they did have was. At the very least, 358 days over 2 recycled enough music that you never feel annoyed at hearing the themes.
Story
The story crawls and makes it clear it feels no degree of urgency in getting to the point. The first half of the game's story is essentially "Roxas and Axel are friends". Expect countless scenes of Axel and Roxas alone together
Anyway, by the time the real story starts to kick in, you'll likely already have logged 10 or so hours of gameplay.
The story, as i said earlier, is definitely aiming to bridge the gap between games. How well it bridges the games is questionable at times. By the time i got to the end, it certainly felt like Squarenix was simply beating a path to the ending they wanted whether it was done coherently or not. As a result there are many in-story threads that never resolve and are sort of left hanging for the "future" game of Kingdom Hearts 2.
Still, the story's definitely worth it for Kingdom Hearts fans, but expect a lot of draggy mundanities of "life in the Organization" from Roxas' perspective.
Characters
The characters are well developed. You do get to know the Organization members better and they become more than just a bunch of named nameless enemies. In fact, at times you almost feel like you like them. I liked Axel's portrayal, particularly - overt homosexuality and all. But Roxas did come off as little more than an "emo bitch".
There's also a new character that i found particularly unlikeable. She's sort of central to the story, so i can't say much about her. But suffice it to say, not once did i understand Roxas' deep, personal connection to her dull-as-dishwater personality.
The one problem with all the characters is that in missions where you have an ally, they are almost always in your way. They block you from attacking, they stand in your way, they warp into your path in the middle of long distance jumps, etc. It's really quite frustrating at times. I'm told that you can change some setting to fix this, but i never got around to looking through the settings that much.
Final Comments
While 358 days over 2 is not an awful game, i wouldn't say it's the best of the series. I definitely had a lot of fun with the game, but i have trouble pinning down exactly why. I think it is because i started to appreciate the characters of the game a little more. I used to think Axel was little more than a needy sex-starved individual with a crush on his best male friend, Roxas, but now i think he's sort of an interesting character in his own right.
It was also nice to get some background into Kingdom Hearts 2 which had previously felt like a very disconnected game to me.
All in all, if you like the series, i'd recommend this game. You may not find it is your favourite, but it'll definitely add to the experience of the series as a whole.
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