Raio Mitsuno (Product Manager for Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]): Kingdom Hearts 3D orKingdom Hearts [Dream Drop Distance] is the newest installment in this 10 year franchise. It picks off right where Kingdom Hearts II left off; it is the continuation story and the follow-up that fans have been eager to play. A lot of new features have been implemented. 

First and foremost, Flowmotion is a brand new feature where Sora and Riku can interact with anything in their environment. If there's a pole, they could spin off of it. If there's a rail, they could grind on it. If there's any wall, they could kick off of it. It's not great just for going from Point A to Point B really fast, but each of those can be linked to a special finishing attack, so if you're in a corner with a bunch of enemies surrounding you, one kick off the wall can land you a really powerful attack that just clears the way for you. 

Reality Shift is a brand new feature. Each world actually has a unique one; as you attack the enemy, you could get a prompt to swipe down on your touchscreen, and if you do so, your character will actually dive into the bottom screen. Each world is different in its own way, but you'll be prompted to do some sort of touchscreen input. If you do it correctly, you'll land a very very powerful attack on all of the enemies in the screen. 

So, the Dream Eaters in this game, like the Heartless in Kingdom Hearts I and the Nobodies in Kingdom Hearts II, in the worlds that Sora and Riku visit in this game called the "Sleeping Worlds", they creatures that exist there are called "Dream Eaters". They feed off of people's dreams. Specifically, Nightmares are the ones that are bad; those are the ones that you fight; they consume people's dreams. The ones that actually consume the nightmares, which are your buddies; they're called "Spirits". You can actually breed them and kind of treat them like pets, and they'll actually fight alongside you. 

We wanted to make sure that newcomers are not completely alienated from jumping in now. What we made sure is that throughout the game, there's going to be moments where, it's called the menu "Memoires"; basically it helps to recap what happened in the previous games so if you didn't play Kingdom Hearts II or you didn't play Chain of Memories, it'll actually summarize it for you so that when you're in the middle of the action, you know what has led up to that point. For long-time fans, we wanted to make sure that everything felt new to them. It still feels like the classic Kingdom Hearts gameplay, but it feels new. One way we addressed that was every Disney world that the players visit as Sora and Riku in this game have never been used in the series so far. 

Kingdom Hearts is known for a very fast-paced action-oriented gameplay, and this one really takes it up a notch. Everything that you do in this game is faster, flashier and more powerful that what you've played in any of the series so far. It really does give you a glimpse that this franchise is constantly evolving and constantly reaching to a new level, so it kind of gives you a lot of hope that after you play this game for what the next one could occult be. 

Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] is exclusively on Nintendo 3DS and will be out on July 31st.