Shoes

Kingdom Hearts has made it’s second appearance on a handheld console in the recently released Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days on the DS. The games story doesn’t follow main series hero Sora but Roxas, the character you briefly (although not brief enough for some people) at the start of Kingdom Hearts 2. The story revolves around a year in which Roxas was a member of Organisation XIII which was only briefly alluded in KH2 and takes place between Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. The plot is mainly filled with short story lines all of which resolve themselves fairly quickly but manage to flesh out the character of Roxas and a few other members of XIII. The events of KH: Chain of Memories are mentioned and play a significant role in the overall story of this game.

The gameplay is great, the development team has managed to recreate the main series combat and control set up brilliantly. The camera control does suffer though without the use of an analog stick to control it. However the game offers you three alternate methods of control, it’s just a matter of picking which one works best for you. The story is mission based with you travelling to a number of the worlds repeatedly. Instead of giving you the ability to explore the full world, each mission has specific areas of each world that you can travel through and only towards the end of the game missions use all the areas available for a world. Mission themselves break down to being either: Investigate, kill a specific enemy, kill a certain amount of enemies or kill a specific amount of a certain enemy.

The graphics are great for what you can do in 3D on the DS.  My game artist knowledge has picked up on a few things which they’ve done to save memory space on the graphics side of things, something I’ve been doing on games alot recently. The games music is good but doesn’t really stand out. The theme songs for both Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 are used and it would have been nice if this game had it’s own theme music.

The game itself is suprisingly long, taking me a good 30+ hours to finish the story and there’s quite a bit of replay value doing all the challenges and playing the mission mode. It may be a while before I finally do finish the game.

The game is a gem and I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. If you love the Kingdom Hearts games then you’ll love this too and I definitely recommend getting it.

The good professor and his assistant Luke make their second outing in Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box. Layton receives a letter from his old mentor detailing the story of the Elysian Box. It is said to kill anyone who opens it and Layton’s mentor is supposed to be close to solving it’s mystery. His curiosity gets the better of him however and Layton and Luke find him dead and the box missing. It’s is now up to the duo find the box, uncover it’s mysteries and find the killer.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box follows near identically the gameplay set in the previous game of the series, Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Everyone in the game will present you with puzzles for you to ponder and solve, some easy, some hard and some just cruel. The sequel takes what was set out before it and makes it a bit grander. There are more, all new, puzzles to solve (150+). The story seem longer and the cartoon cinematics make a wonderful return. My one gripe with them though is they’re not as impressive as the ones in Curious Village with the big exception of the finale.

Some of the puzzles can be very difficult to work out and the hint system in the game isn’t as useful on some puzzles than on others with one puzzle offering trivia instead of hints (based on the style of puzzles though it was understandable). The whole tea making side quest seemed a little out of place. Brew the different types of tea with the different ingredients was a matter of trial and error which seems really out of place and tedious in a puzzle game.

Few bad points aside the game was great, nothing really that new gameplay wise from the last game but the style of game means it doesn’t get old. It’s a style that works and it works well. I’m looking forward to the third game, Professor Layton and the Last Time Travel. I also look forward to the feature length film, Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva.