Kung Fu Panda 2 | Nintendo DS

Important: Game may not include original DLC, bonus-content, online-pass, season-pass, or other digital redemption codes. Any included codes may have already been redeemed or expired.

Preorder and launch bonuses, promotional or bonus inserts, and bundled bonus-game downloads are not guaranteed. Content supplied on the game disc or cartridge is unaffected.

Kung Fu Panda 2 on Nintendo DS sends Po and the Furious Five into an adventure built around map travel and turn-based combat. The Kung Fu Council asks the heroes to investigate trouble involving hostile animal factions, giving Po a sequence of places to visit and encounters to resolve. The movie's martial-arts characters supply the personality, but the handheld game puts you in charge of their decisions through a stylus-driven interface. You select destinations, follow conversations, choose attacks, and develop the characters as the story advances. Its pace comes from moving between investigation and ordered battles, with a separate card game providing another kind of contest.

The world map organizes the adventure into connected locations rather than a continuous space that you steer Po around with action controls. Tapping a destination sends him to the next stop. Story markers identify places that move the main quest forward, while other locations can offer searches for items or side assignments. This makes navigation about choosing where to investigate and following the information provided by the map and dialogue. The rhythm is easy to describe: visit a location, see what happens there, complete any encounter, and return to the map to decide on the next leg of the journey.

Conversations are an important part of understanding that journey. Static character images and written dialogue establish the task and explain why the heroes are moving on. The text gives the action a sequence of motives and clues, so reading it helps keep the changing objectives clear. This presentation suits the game's menu-and-map structure: you spend time selecting and observing as well as time making battle decisions. A player who wants to follow Po's mission should expect regular reading between fights. The adventure uses the cast's relationships and the disturbances they investigate to connect its individual encounters into a story.

Combat takes place in turns, with attacks chosen from a menu on the lower screen. Po's repertoire includes recognizable cartoon martial-arts moves, such as a belly attack and forceful panda strikes. After choosing an action, you watch its animation and result before the next decision. Health, items, and power-up options are also part of the battle interface. This creates a more deliberate form of kung fu play: the central task is choosing how the characters should act, then judging the outcome. You are directing Po's techniques through the menus, with the DS stylus providing the link between your choice and the move performed.

Attacks also use a color-based relationship that gives the battle system a rock-paper-scissors element. A move's color can make it more or less effective against a particular opponent, so the strongest-looking animation is not the only thing to consider. Checking the available choices and the enemy helps you decide how to use the turn. Items offer another decision when a fight calls for support, while special attacks give the characters larger actions to draw on. Because actions are selected through menus, the challenge is mainly about understanding those options and applying them to the current encounter.

Character levels and newly unlocked attacks provide the main sense of development as you complete missions. A broader move selection changes what you can choose in a fight, connecting story progress with the party's combat toolkit. Returning to the map after an encounter gives the journey a clear stopping point before the next assignment. That structure can suit shorter handheld sessions, because the adventure breaks into destinations, conversations, and battles. It also means the experience spends considerable time on the same recurring systems. Enjoyment depends on wanting to guide the movie characters through a sequence of decisions and watch their growing techniques in action.

Five-Card Fu offers a separate strategic activity based on cards selected from an in-game library. You begin with five cards and place them on a three-by-three grid, with numerical values around their edges determining how they contest neighboring cards. The small board makes placement important: choosing a card involves thinking about the numbers it exposes and the spaces available to the opponent. A strong side helps only when it faces the part of the board where it can be useful. The mode is available alone or with a friend, adding a contest built around positioning rather than the story's battle menus.

The battle scenes show Po, his companions, and their enemies as three-dimensional characters, while the map and dialogue provide a simpler framework around those fights. The presentation alternates between reading a conversation, selecting an action, and watching a short martial-arts animation. The Nintendo DS release carries an Everyone ESRB rating with Mild Cartoon Violence; its fights use stylized animal opponents and cartoon impact sounds. A compatible handheld and usable touch screen are central to the controls. The story adventure is for one player, with Five-Card Fu supplying the additional friend-play activity described for this version.

This DS edition's identity lies in the combination of a location map, developing move menus, and its compact card contest. Following the main markers gets you through the story, while searching other locations and exploring the battle choices gives you more to do within its framework. The familiar heroes provide a reason to care about the assignments, and the turn system gives their kung fu a considered, selection-based tempo. For someone choosing the cartridge, the useful expectation is a portable role-playing adventure with repeated conversations and battles, plus a card minigame that asks you to weigh numbers and positions on a small board.