If you’ve started playing Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, you’ve already encountered the unavoidable annoyance. I’m talking about the frequent, and often overbearing, loading times. I could barely bring myself to wait for the first save point before returning to the home screen, plugging my PSP in, and heading straight for the data install option.
Thankfully, the data install process is relatively painless. Tedious, but painless. It could take a pretty long time for some users, perhaps a half hour, but it will be worth it. My PSP was fully charged and plugged in and I went with the largest installation, 600mb, and it took about 10-15 minutes.
First, you need to make sure your PSP is charged. Anyone who’s done the data install option before, say on Dissidia: Final Fantasy, will recall that your PSP will need to have over 50% battery power for the game to allow you to perform a data install.
There’s a good chance it’ll already be charged though. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep requires firmware 6.20, so if you’re the kind of person who only updates when its absolutely necessary (like me), your system will probably be all ready for the process.
Now, when you start a notification will pop up. All it’s saying is that if you change your system’s language after performing a data install, you’ll have to redo the process. So don’t worry that you’re doing something wrong when it comes up.
There will be three data install options to choose from, 200mb, 400mb and 600mb. I recommend the 600mb installation option if you have enough memory to do so. The loading times drastically decrease, and the game just seems to even flow better with it. The 200mb option didn’t seem to make much of a difference, as I tried that first in an attempt to conserve space.
After you perform the data install, you’ll need to turn the data install option on in the options menu. Just open the menu in game, choose the configuration section (the second to last menu option, in case you can’t read Japanese) and then go to the data install option in the next menu that shows up (again, second to last option) and set it to on.
I was a little surprised that Birth By Sleep really needed the data install. Typically, PSP loading times don’t bother me too much, and Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep was the first time I actually caved and did the installation.
I was also disappointed at how long it it took to get to a point where I could turn on the option to use the Data Install feature after the first save point. I had to wait until Terra reached Sleeping Beauty’s world to access the options menu.
