Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep review

You’d better clear 700MBs of memory because anything other than a full install will result in some of the most heinous load times I’ve ever encountered on any system. Having not played a lot of Square games on the PSP, I certainly wasn’t prepared and I know I had to struggle and hastily delete stuff to make room once I could no longer tolerate the load time of a partial, 400MB install!

If you know the KH formula, you should be able to see the problem coming. Here’s a typical five to ten minutes: Enter world, cutscene, battle, cutscene, explore area, move to next area, cutscene, battle. Now imagine each comma in that sentence represents almost a minute of load time, and consider how poorly that suits portable play.

That said, I had a blast with Kingdom Hearts… but then, all I demanded was an improved combat system and a deeper plunge into the realm of King Mickey, thus I can overlook the fact that Square seems to have by and large ignored how games have advanced since 2005. So while series fans who’ve been waiting to play the first full-featured Kingdom Hearts in almost five years may find their loved returned tenfold, PSP owners who simply desire to play an A+ exclusive might not get what all the fuss is about.

Sep 8, 2010