Dream Drop Distance is probably the most I've enjoyed a non-numbered Kingdom Hearts game so far. It's definitely still a bit messy as-is tradition for these at this point - jamming 1 trillion mechanics in without fleshing them out, being extremely unbalanced, having a handful of story moments that seem out of place, a couple worlds that I dislike etc. but overall it's just a solid game.

The flowmotion mechanic is a lot of fun, letting you style on enemies and giving you something to do in combat while your commands are cooling down, as well as letting you zip around the massive environments and Mega Man X style walljump up every vertical surface. The dream eater and reality shift mechanics seem a bit superfluous when it comes to the flow of combat, but they certainly don't detract from what is probably my favorite iteration of the command deck style combat system so far. It's also nice that you have a more deterministic way of acquiring commands via the dream eaters than you had in Birth By Sleep, taking that randomness away means you can build out your deck to your liking much more easily. Even if building it to your liking just means having 6 balloonras and 2 curagas by the end game.

I also quite liked the story overall too. The focus on Sora and Riku's relationship and seeing the multiple angles of each world was really enjoyable. There were a couple reveals that actually had me hyped as fuck in a way that I did not think this series was capable of, I genuinely didn't realize the overarching narrative had its hooks as deep in me as it does. Sure, this is yet another game that is pushing the cast towards the inevitable final conflict in KH3, but it feels like it's moving things forward in a way that hasn't been felt in the prequels and games that spun their wheels (cough cough re:coded). The TWEWY characters showing up was pretty neat too, Joshua and Riku's dynamic was really delightful.

Dream Drop Distance’s platforming gameplay felt very fresh during my marathon of the series and I think it was so pivotal in my enjoyment that without it I would not rate this game highly whatsoever. I am not a fan of the Kingdom Hearts 1 styled visuals but the combat is closer to Kingdom Hearts 2 than the first which is really great. The dream eater pets are tied to move progression and they were a hassle to manage but were worth it in the end as the moves you unlock were great. I don’t remember much from this game. I just know I enjoyed myself but I was way more excited to just get to Kingdom Hearts 3

I'm gonna be honest, this was definitely my least favorite Kingdom Hearts game. Many of the issues with Osaka team games rear their heads and are at their ugliest here. It's also just plain the worst of the command deck system.

I didn't like how abilities and commands were locked behind the Dream Eaters, and I miss the styles and command melding of Birth By Sleep.

Flowmotion has a good idea but it's marred by poor execution. The insane amount of damage Flowmotion attacks do render getting Combo Pluses null because you do more damage per attack. It gets really irksome in bosses particularly. Many of the action commands are also pretty damn useless.

It's a shame because there are fun moments and boss fights here such as Rinzler and some of the final bosses. But others are either not fun to fight or are marred by utter bullshit (looking at you Black Cloak Nightmare).

I'm staying cautiously optimistic for when I eventually get to 3 after 0.2, but it'll have to wait and see. I got Sonic Frontiers to go through first.

Fool Reviews Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD
"Wake Me Up, Wake Me Up Inside, Can't Wake Up, Wake Me Up Inside":

I haven't felt this way since I finished the first Kingdom Hearts game, but instead of anger and frustration I'm left with just utter confusion and disinterest.

On an inherent level, Dream Drop Distance is a worse Birth by Sleep in pretty much all aspects. The story is worse, bringing in elements like Time Travel (which we all know rarely ever pans out well in video games), Dreams within Dreams, etc. The gameplay is a major step down, locking abilities and moves behind Dream Eaters, Flow-Motion giving me motion sickness and needing to rely on it too much, boss fights not being all that interesting.

I guess to start, the story of this game just sucks. I already knew about the Time Travel aspect of this game and got a pre-game bias against it just from my dislike of using time travel for narratives. It's a sign that a creator has written themselves into a corner, which Nomura definitely has. Honestly, like with all of the other games post-KH2, I shut my brain off for a majority of the game. I found the premise stupid, but honestly by the end I just didn't care... unfortunately shutting my brain off didn't just apply to the plot.

Gameplay here is very stale for me. Firstly, your regular 3 hit combo (back from good 'ol KH1) sucks dick and barely does damage a majority of the time. You will be forced to rely on Flow-Motion early on as it is pretty much your only way (until you get Balloonra, more on that later) to deal decent damage to the enemies you will face in this game. Flow-Motion actively made me sick for the first day of playing this, I felt incredibly dizzy and motion sick because Flow-Motion has a blur effect that also has light around it. It hurts the eyes. I was able to adjust, but the fact that that was even an issue actively knocks this game down a grade.

Another issue with Flow-Motion is how it has effected level design. Levels are absolutely gargantuan to the point of ridiculousness, and to make it worse there are no NPCs outside of cutscenes for a majority of the game making these massive levels feel completely empty and lifeless. This has been a problem since KH2 honestly, but it is at its most noticeable here because the game actively wants you to fly around these sprawling levels. I got lost in Traverse Town during the opening hours of this game. Traverse Town. They bloated the level design so much I had no idea what area connected with which and it just made me numb.

The worlds overall aren't that interesting, with exception to Symphony of Sorcery, the world based on Fantasia. It is easily the highlight of the game, with sound effects being changed to instruments, and classical music playing the entire time. It was a blast, too bad the boss fights were utter garbage, specifically Chernabog, christ what did they do to him.

Speaking of Chernabog, let's talk about my least favorite part of this game, Diving. You remember that one mini-game in KH2, the one where you go skydiving with Winnie the Pooh? Imagine that replacing the Gummi Ship Levels from 1 for every single world. It got grating really quickly, it doesn't help that you have less versatility than you do with the Gummi Ship missions, but they're just a bore to go through, and they make the Chernabog boss fight one of these... ruining the entire moment.

Back on regular gameplay, if you want to absolutely break this game in half, get the Balloonra spell as soon as possible. It will cut this game's challenge in two as the move easily cleaves through mooks and bosses galore. Of course, that's if you unlock it early and now it's time to get onto a gripe on Dream Eaters.

Dream Eaters actively anger me. They take the customization of BBS and lock it behind raising these little pets and stuff. As someone who didn't like the Chao Garden in the Sonic Adventure Duology, I do not care for this shit at all, but at least the Chao Garden was optional unless you were going for completion. Dream Eaters are required in order to learn new moves and even abilities. Want Curaga? You'll have to grind one of your Dream Eaters to learn the move. Want an ability like Once More? You have to grind your dream eater. Want Magic Haste and Attack Haste? Well, you gotta both grind your Dream Eater and never swap them out because the moment you do you can lose several abilities that you would normally get to keep. It mitigates customization by making it so that you are crippled when you switch to a new Dream Eater. It's like the Class System in Final Fantasy 3, but worse. Because of this, I spent most of the game using Dream Eaters I created on the first level because I didn't want to lose all of the abilities I had unlocked. If the devs wanted me to use all sorts of Dream Eaters, they shouldn't have limited them to this extent.

That's just talking about them as Allies, as Enemies they are just so unfitting to this franchise. They are too similar to Pokemon for me to think "Oh yes, this is Kingdom Hearts enemy." At least the Unversed, while completely unoriginal, felt like they belonged in this franchise.

I'm sorry but when it comes to Dream Drop Distance the entire experience is just one big shut-off for my brain. I don't think I'll ever touch this one again, and I honestly would recommend skipping it and just watching the cutscenes.

This game is a Dream I plan to Drop for good, and hopefully it'll be a long Distance away from that point forward.

Anyways, only Fragmentary Passage and Back Cover are left before I begin my final journey through Kingdom Hearts 3. I'll see you then.

I really love this entry in the series, it was one of the first KH games I played when I was 12/13 which might've added to it but playing it again 10 years later I still enjoyed myself quite a bit. Already the combat sytem is so much more refined than Birth By Sleep (using commands in mid-air??? Nuts!) but I will say collecting commands from chests or dream eaters didn't feel as rewarding as the command melding from that game. Having said that, putting the time in with the dream eaters to get all these powerful commands was still engaging. The bosses are vastly improved from BBS and some of them lead to some absolutely bonkers moments that utilise the dream setting in fun ways, not even mentioning the final sequence of bosses which are so much fun on both narrative and gameplay levels. The world design here is amazing too, some of the most fun I've had just exploring the worlds since KH1 in no small part thanks to the addition of flowmotion. The aforementioned motion of flow can be abused pretty severely to ignore level design but in most scenarios I feel like you have to be actively going out of your way to not have fun if you play that way. Fun selection of Disney worlds too! I'm a Tron Legacy apologist and it was nice to see follow up on the Tron world from KH2 even if it didn't really lead anywhere and worlds like the Country of the Musketeers and Symphony of Sorcery were nice surprise picks.

The dream eaters were fun little additions; I'm a big fan of monster collecting elements in games so this felt right up my alley, giving them all stupid names like Kevin the Meow-Wow and his two brothers Bevin and Devin. Would've been nice if they was more than just 3 minigames to help with leveling them up but they were fun little diversions in-between fights. In regards to the story, it's definitely very unconventional with how it relays information to you. It's very jarring in the beginning where you're thrust into all these situations and then are prompted to watch a flashback to explain why person A is saying that 'darkness within darkness' awaits person B but that's only really an issue in the early game and I was invested by the end of the first Disney world. I'd also like to make special mention of the use of The World Ends With You's characters here since they fit so well on a thematic level in addition to just being really damn good adaptations of the source. Loved seeing more of Neku and the gang. This game is the first real step forward narratively after KH2; gelling the prequels' ideas into the current events and I adored Riku's journey throughout with all the parallels to KH1 and 2 in the ending section. Good ass video game

Dream Drop Distance is really good. The gameplay and combat is flashy and fluid and it is awesome to play through a story starring Rikku and Sora, even if it is convoluted and doesn't make any sense.

The combat is pretty standard Kingdom Hearts, with commands from Birth By Sleep making a comeback (minus form changes) in a simplified form. They also add Flowmotion and Dream Eaters, which are both pretty great.
Flowmotion! DDD adds a combat trick that you execute by throwing yourself at the scenery. Depending on what you collide with, you can trigger a context sensitive special move that does a ton of damage. This makes the combat very fluid and dynamic and gives it a different feel from previous Kingdom Hearts games. You also use it for traversal when not in combat -- bouncing off walls, grinding rails, spinning on poles, etc...
Dream Drop Distance also replaces your usual companions with pokemon-esque monsters called Dream Eaters. These are varied and cute and leveling them up grant Sora and Rikku permanent abilities, sort of like commands do in Birth By Sleep. There are some tedious, optional mini-games you can use to get more out of these, but I skipped all that entirely and just leveled them up the normal way. I liked collecting these and seeing the new ones as they were introduced and gaining abilities in this way is always awesome (Final Fantasy IX again!).

The story isn't really worth talking about and hardly makes sense. It is very connected to the other games, for better and worse, and it is just... way... too much...
Luckily just playing through a game as both Rikku and Sora is pretty cool, so you can largely ignore the plot.
Both characters have to go through every world, but there are more differences between them than in Birth By Sleep. I genuinely felt like Rikku and Sora were working together here, which is pretty cool.

I really like Dream Drop Distance. It is up there with Birth By Sleep as my favorites in the series. I like how these side games take some chances with the basic Kingdom Hearts mechanics. It is a shame that the story for this series is so convoluted and this entry definitely suffers for it, but it is still worth playing if you want an action game with interesting mechanics.