To be up front about it, I am a huge fan of the idea behind the Kingdom Hearts series – mashing up Disney Characters with Final Fantasy ones to tell a new story is odd and yet the first title manages to fit the two groups together so perfectly that you can't help but think they were always intended to be that way. As the franchise has expanded, they have had some ups and downs, and unfortunately the latest title is a little more down than up.
Although the story may be minimal, Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, starts off in fairly confusing and in-depth fashion for those who haven't played a Kingdom Hearts title before. The game, sort of, takes place after Kingdom Hearts II, and you're still playing as Sora (the main character), sort of. You see, the chronicler of Sora's tales, Jiminy Cricket discovers at the opening of the game that his journals about Sora's adventures have been erased and brings the books to King Mickey to look at. When new, cryptic, entries appear in the book—entries not written by Jiminy—Mickey sends the Sora from inside the journal to figure out what's happening. So, you're playing as Sora, but you're playing as a digital Sora who has no knowledge of what the real Sora's been through.
After that little bit of an intro, the story doesn't really bother you all that much during gameplay. As Sora, you go to various Kingdom Hearts' worlds, destroying the different bugs in the system that have caused this digitized version of the story to become… I believe the technical term is "wonky." You revisit some of your favorite places from past Kingdom Hearts' games, but the worlds here all feel very small, and most of the time, where you have to go and what you have to do is laid out before you and you're given little choice about venturing off on your own to explore.
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