1.5/5 ★ – izacreynolds's review of Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD.

I never thought I'd abandon a Kingdom Hearts game. To walk away from one with so many negative feelings about it is depressing but, it is what it is. Dream Drop Distance is a disaster of a Kingdom Hearts game and I don't know where to start to explain why. It has the gameplay of Kingdom Hearts 1 yet the battle mechanics of Birth By Sleep/358 2 days but doesn't feel as fleshed out or satisfying as either previous titles. No combo chains. No command forms. No aerial combat. You know what it does have? Dream Dashing or whatever it's called and Dream Eaters. The Dream Dashing allows you to grind rails, bounce off of walls and dash almost infinitely and it works quite well and it can be linked with specific attacks. See that sounds great...on paper. This was clearly the substitute for regular combos. Only problem is, using this for combat as apposed to world traversal becomes extremely tedious and it isn't satisfying in the slightest. Grinding rails and wall hopping is all well and good but the worlds are designed in such a way to compensate for that so in that fashion some worlds feel incredibly lifeless and empty, more than ever before. Now the next thing...Dream Eaters. Goodbye Disney companions, hello Dream Eaters. Okay, the Dream Eaters SUCK! I hate them, they barely help in battle, their link powers a often useless or pointless and they're crazy ugly and over-designed. Why...why these things? Why couldn't we have had classic world companions? Or better yet, instead of these original yet boring and disgusting dream creatures, why not pull from existing franchises? It'd be so much better to have some Final Fantasy creatures fighting by your side! Or maybe even some C tier Disney characters? Bernard and Bianca from The Rescuers? Lady and the Tramp? Baloo from Jungle Book? Sabor from Tarzan? Mushu from Mulan? Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland? Literally any animal character from any Disney movie would be one million times better than any of these ugly dream eater trash. I hate them so much. Their progression is annoying and useless, previously stated, they barely help in battle anyway so the progression is utterly redundant. They might as well not be there. Some boss fights are so poorly designed. They're made in way with other mechanics in mind. Some of these boss battles like Rinzler and 2nd from Ansem would be fine if it had the battle system from Kingdom Hearts 2 or even Birth By Sleep. But the battle system here is just so lackluster and so pathetically un-fun that I can't even describe it. The music and the worlds are so painfully dull too. I found myself ignoring the story for the better part too, it didn't engage me or seem very grand or epic in scale due to it all being a 'test' or 'a dream'. I was un-invested. This is by far the worst Kingdom Hearts game and from my perspective, the only bad Kingdom Hearts game I've played so far, and there's only 2 left I haven't played (Melody of Memory and 0.2). I'm aware that this was a 3DS game that was up-scaled to HD, but I was hella invested in 358/2 Days when it came out and is my favorite of the KH games storywise. And Birth By Sleep is still a good game after being up-scaled. There's no excuse. DDD is a failure and it really is depressing to walk away from this hating it.