Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance is far from being one of the best entries in the series. It has some good ideas, making exploration a more engaging part of the experience, but its narrative is too sparse and unfulfilling, having nothing new to say about its themes while refusing to advance the overarching story until the last moment. In that sense, Dream Drop Distance is much more akin to Re: Coded than something meaningful like 358/2 Days.

The plot exudes that yawning-inducing stench of a filler. Sora and Riku are summoned before Yen Sid and told they have to pass a test to be granted the title of Keyblade Masters. This “Mark of Mastery” exam is supposed to prepare them for the final battle against the series’ main villain, Xehanort. They are to go to seven “sleeping worlds”, solve their problems, and wake them up from their slumber.

In other words, the plot is just an excuse for putting the main characters in different Disney-themed worlds. They don’t have a meaningful goal in sight, just hoping the experience will make them wiser in the end. Narrative-wise, Dream Drop Distance is one of the weakest entries in the series and it’s easy to explain why.

Kingdom Hearts has always struggled with making the Disney worlds narratively important, basically just recounting the original material’s story – and badly at that – while throwing one or two lines of dialogue to link it thematically to Sora’s journey. Kingdom Hearts is at its best when it’s doing its own weird thing and is at its worst when it’s using the Disney material as a crutch to pad its length. Here, the Disney worlds are the meat of the story. Until the final one, the events of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tron: Legacy, and Pinocchio are all there is to the overall story of Dream Drop Distance.

Sora and Riku go to The Grid, for instance, and witness the battle between Sam and CLU and the point of the two hours that you spend in this world is just a brief, obvious parallel between CLU and Xehanort. Sometimes, there’s not even that. Riku makes us revisit the inside of Monstro’s belly once again and there’s no point to the events that take place there.

The game also butchers some of its inspirations, failing to convey the importance of some of their scenes and lines while also removing the more complex themes from the conversation. During the climax of Hunchback’s world, for instance, the protagonist lifts up Esmeralda and shouts “Sanctuary!” But only fans of the movie will get the weight of that line, since the game never shows the scenes that served as the build-up to the moment. Meanwhile, the discussions about religious persecution, tyranny, and lust are all removed.

Consequently, the events lack dramatic weight, happening too quickly, with the game skipping past important parts of the original work, making it impossible for them to leave a lasting impression. The best thing about Hunchback’s world is the score, which sounds like something from Radiant Historia.

To make matters worse, you have to visit each world twice, once with Sora and then once again with Riku, which adds to the padding. It’s the so-called “Drop” system, in which after a time Sora or Riku go to sleep during whatever they’re doing, and you must play with the other one. The Drop Gauge depletes with time, but after the first hour you get access to a cheap item that resets it, so you never have to bother with it again and just change characters whenever you wish to. In the end, the Drop system is quite irrelevant.

The developers tried to do some things to make the experience less repetitive, but they are superficial changes: Sora and Riku participate in different parts of that world’s original story and often go to unique places in that world, for example. But this means that the main problem persists: the events they witness are meaningless to them and to the overarching story, so you are just doing useless things twice – making the scenery different doesn’t change that.

Even in the few moments when the writing stands out, Dream Drop Distance is still retreading old ground. The words of a certain character from The World Ends With You, for instance, speaks directly to the series’ main theme, connecting friendship with identity (“By ourselves, we’re no one. It’s when other people look at us and see someone – that’s the moment when we start to exist.”) but that connection has already been established to death.

Only during its last hours that the overarching story decides to wake up from its slumber. It still falls into the cliché of the villain going on for hours about his master plan – and it makes things even more convoluted with time travel – but at least it’s something after 15 hours of nothing.

The gameplay is where Dream Drop Distance shakes things up. The game presents a “Flowmotion” system that basically opens up the entirety of the levels from the get-go. In past Kingdom Heart games, you had to go back to levels to find chests after acquiring a certain ability, like the high jump or the glide. Here, on the other hand, everything is within your reach from the start.

When Sora and Riku dash against specific objects, enemies or any wall, they gain a Flowmotion move: a special jump or a long, prolonged dash. And if you dash again against a wall after using one of these moves, you gain another one. This means that you can keep chaining dashes and jumps to get anywhere in the levels. It’s even funny the moment when Sora and Riku eventually acquire the high jump and the glide abilities, because they don’t open new paths anymore, making it clear for the player how useless they have become now with the Flowmotion moves.

To accommodate this change, levels also have to be bigger, larger, with more empty space, with a focus on verticality. You can easily climb to the top of almost any building in the game and observe the levels from up top. “Almost” is a keyword here, though, as the level design isn’t top-notch, having a plethora of invisible walls blocking you from getting to a lot of places. By their very nature, invisible walls are not intuitive, so it can lead to some frustrating moments when you are trying to reach a specific spot, but eventually hit a wall and discover that you can’t for arbitrary reasons.

The other change in the gameplay is the Dream Eaters. Here, with specific materials, you can create the very creatures that you fight against. They form your party, with two of them fighting their evil counterparts alongside you, although their role during battles is never crucial, as they deal little damage. The important thing about the Dream Eaters is their ability chart. By fighting alongside them – or bonding with them with boring minigames – you unlock nodes in their “skill tree” that give you support abilities, active skills, and spells. If you give them your time – bonding with them – they give you in return early access to the best abilities in the game. This leads to grinding, however, with the player having to start from scratch every time they create a new, more powerful Dream Eater.

Dream Drop Distance – on the normal difficulty, at least – is a very easy game, so you don’t need to bother with the Dream Eaters if you don’t want to – although this makes chests frustrating, as they usually reward you with recipes for new monsters or materials to make them or bond with them. The game is much like Birth by Sleep in this regard, as having the best abilities is usually enough for you to win any battle: you don’t need to think about how and when to use the abilities; you just span them and use regular attacks while they recharge. Flowmotion makes things even easier, as you can bounce on a wall, jump and strike down with a Flowmotion attack that deals AoE damage – and keep doing this without penalty since regular monsters will rarely be able to hit you back.

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance is the last big entry in the franchise before Kingdom Hearts 3 and it unfortunately disappoints. The game doesn’t make the best use of its new ideas and it never manages to properly mask its filler nature.

March 22, 2021.