Reality Shifts have been altered significantly to make do without a touch pad (kind of defeating their original purpose frankly). examples: the bubble Reality Shift in prankster's paradise no longer requires you to shoot bubbles at enemies before riding the large one, it just takes you straight to the large one. same deal with faithline, a network is drawn for you so you don't have to do anything. traverse town's RS only needs you to aim and press X. mirage split/nightmare's end only allow you to move up or down to aim where to place the cursor, and you only perform a horizontal slash. the grid's RS just requires you to press the face buttons and CotM's only needs one flick of the thumbstick in a given direction. Frankly, reality shifts are a shadow of their former selves.
the balloon minigame has become slightly harder as it requires the touch pad, which cannot display where the balloons are about to land, so your presses are likely to be less accurate. (i find it sorta helps to hold the controller right up in front of your face) the water barrel minigame has become more pinball esque and frankly a lot harder to handle. you'll probably lose at least one of your spirits off the bottom of the screen almost immediately, but i find that actually makes it easier. the treasure goggles are replaced with a "candy goggles" game where you just throw candies at spirits as they run past the screen. three new spirits have been created (i won't spoil which ones), and all spirits can be obtained without use of things like AR cards. spirit bonding makes use of the thumbstick and touch pad.
all portals are visible on the field as well as the map (which can only be viewed by pressing the touch pad). a lack of streetpass unfortunately means you can no longer receive portals from other players, although in-game portals (as well as special and secret portals) are still available. none of them have names anymore, unfortunately. which i don't really get why they removed those, they were cool. this also means the "sora" battle portal at memory's skyscraper (the one that would change its criteria every time you walk away and back over to it) is no longer available either.
besides these, the Ps4 version is more or less the same minus the controls (have fun getting used to the attack and jump buttons being swapped if you're not playing the JP version) and some extra content. the camera is zoomed out a bit and the game runs at 60fps. Critical mode is still only available after beating the game once, but at least you can still carry your spirits over (and get superglide right at the start
). the shoulder buttons and the D-pad are now used to cycle between the command deck, the link deck and the spirits deck for performing link attacks and swapping out your spirits on the fly. flick rush requires you to manually select cards and throw them up to attack and down to defend. the "memento maniac" (save at least 20 photos) and "frequent friend" (make at least 30 link portals) trophies have been replaced with the "ribbit reaper" (defeat lord kyroo) and "keyblade conqueror" (obtain every keyblade) trophy. the drop gauge itself has also been slowed down, though i didn't really notice the difference myself.