YMMV / Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-

• Best Boss Ever: Zodiac Aqua is comparable to Lingering Will in how she's an entirely reactive boss whose moves follow a pattern and offer distinct tells of what you can and cannot block versus what you must dodge, counterattack, or Counter Blast, making besting her a pure test of the player's memory and reflexes. She's outrageously difficult and provides almost no room for error, especially on Critical, but beating her after hours of repeated failures can be immensely satisfying. It's doubly impressive for being an Author's Saving Throw for the development team, who in their previous installments relied on A.I. Roulette superboss design that was poorly received.
• Broken Base: While many loved the superboss for reducing many of the random elements and reliance on Game Breakers that plagued Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance, others consider it to be one of the weakest examples. Complaints leveled against it include forcing the player to only be able to combat it one highly specific way, heavy abuse of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, relying on certain mechanics that the game never even hints at (such as jumping out of a guard), and lasting entirely too long.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Flame Cores. Little balls of fire that are relatively passive at first, firing long-range Fire spells or assaulting you with bullets of fire from afar, but when you strike them with significant damage, they go completely ballistic and light ablaze, charging around the area while completely invincible before rising up and slamming the ground where you're standing. If you don't hit them with a Blizzaga/Blizzaja first, they will always do this, and they're almost always guaranteed to hit you on the first pass. They're especially nasty on Critical Mode, where Aqua has very little maximum MP and may not have enough Blizzaga rounds to take out all of the Flame Cores in an area even if she never misses with the spell.
  • Neoshadows return with a vengeance. In addition to being just plain annoying, they have a tendency to pop out of the ground next to you and slam you with a spin attack, or charge straight at you for massive damage. These typically have tells and are otherwise simple to handle, but much less so when you're taking on four or more simultaneously, which the game likes to do later on.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Doomed by Canon is in effect, and we know Aqua can't escape the Realm of Darkness just yet, but the story does end off on a high note of her fighting spirit being reinvigorated even if she has to persist just a little bit longer. Come Kingdom Hearts III, she didn't hold out and has seemingly performed a full Face–Heel Turn.
• He Really Can Act: Willa Holland and Jason Dohring caught some flak for their wooden performances as Aqua and Terra in Birth By Sleep, but they show much improvement here, especially Dohring, with the scene of Terra resisting Xehanort's attempts at reasserting control of their body being a standout instance.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When the title of the compilation was revealed, numerous jokes ensued about Square's increasingly ridiculous numbering scheme for the compilations, such as a hypothetical "Kingdom Hearts 2.9." The Epilogue cutscene of 0.2 is actually called "2.9 - The First Chapter."
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A complaint that some in the Broken Base hold, since it's basically more of a glorified demo for KHIII than a proper game. Even getting 100% Completion will take three hours, at most. In fairness, this was never billed as a full game and was always stated to be only a demo of what KHIII would be like, with promotional material describing it as being approximately the length of one world from KHIII. It helps that it's a part of a compilation and not a standalone title.
• Low-Level Run: Beating the game once unlocks the EXP Zero option in the Options menu, so you can attempt playing the game at Level 50.
• Memetic Mutation: Almost immediately after the trailer revealing the customization features was released, fan art of Aqua with the Minnie Mouse ears became inescapable.
• Narm: How does this game confront a tiny Continuity Snarl in the fact that Mickey was in his signature Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal design in the original game? By having a random hit from the Demon Tide cause his shirt to evaporate. It's as ridiculous and out-of-place as it sounds.
  • Even worse is it didn't even fix the Continuity Snarl entirely as Mickey's shoes in this game have blue straps on them while in the same cutscene in the first Kingdom Hearts game, there are no straps on his shoes at all.
• Narm Charm: By the same token, some actually like the above moment because of how much attention to detail was put into explaining something so trivial that could've been easily done away with via Retcon.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Dwarf Woodland area is astoundingly unsettling, especially the warping stones area. Not helping is if you fall down the bottomless pits, a monotone version of Aqua's voice starts talking, telling Aqua she's a failure. The entire area is alive, and it's trying to break her will.
  • The last part of Enchanted Dominion, featuring a veritable swarm of Darksides.
  • Dying has always been startling in the series, but this time Aqua lets out a scream when she's defeated that may genuinely kick a player's twitch reaction if you're taken down without warning. And if that wasn't enough, death by Heartless has always meant one losing their heart (albeit usually by floating away rather than anything truly disturbing), but this is the first time in the series you get to see it fly out of you mid-death.
• Polished Port: Just like III, playing this on a PS4 Pro wasn't great, as it barely got into the 40s with its frame rate, with no way to toggle it to cap at 30 unlike III. Xbox One X allowed it to be at a higher and more consistent frame rate, but not the highest it was designed to get, thanks to the better technology of the X. However, playing it on a PS5 or an Xbox Series X finally gets it up to a full 60 due to the even better hardware in those consoles than even the One X.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: After beating the game once, the EXP Gain option is unlocked in Options. Setting it to "Off" is functionally identical to the EXP Zero Ability from previous games, but is now a toggled setting instead of an Ability.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: After II, the last game to use this particular combat system, was derided for being "Mash ▲ to Win: The Video Game," 0.2 took a huge leap forward in terms of difficulty; enemy aggressiveness has been greatly tuned up, the enemies in general are far more annoying and will often break out of stunlock, and on higher difficulties, regular Heartless can quickly chew through all your HP in just three or four attacks.
• Special Effect Failure: The cutscene graphics of the game's E3 demo—especially in the scene where Terra appears—were widely criticized for appearing unfinished and plastic-like.
  • By game launch the graphics improved considerably, suggesting that the E3 graphics were indeed unfinished; however, there's still a slight doll-like quality to the characters at times.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The switch to Unreal Engine 4 brings incredibly detailed visuals and special effects, but the lighting effects tend to emphasize the oddly smooth, doll-like skin on the character models.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: As an Unreal Engine 4-based game, the lighting effects are incredible, and the game just looks gorgeous.
  • A particularly standout example is if you use the Wayfinder Style at certain points in the final battle: Aqua and Mickey will use a new attack that looks absolutely stunning and beautiful!
  • Try casting Thundaja for the first time. The astounding visuals look like a Summon attack pulled out of Final Fantasy XV.