Review: Kingdom Hearts 2

What do you get when you cross Disney and Final Fantasy? Kingdom Hearts 1. What do you get when you cross Disney and Final Fantasy and then throw them in a pot and poop all over it? Kingdom Hearts 2.

Story
Oof. Where to begin. Kingdom Hearts 2 opens with a tedious five hour intro focusing on an unknown character named Roxas who kinda looks like the main character, Sora.  During these five hours, you will do exciting things like deliver mail and find missing purses for old ladies. To put it bluntly the opening is mind-numbingly slow, it's almost as if the developers didn't want people to play the game at all - heck, it's the reason this game is in my backlog!

The banality of Roxas.

Once you get over the intro-hurdle, you are put back in control of Sora, Donald and Goofy and set out on another adventure across various Disney themed worlds. Some of the worlds were rehashed from KH1, but most were new experiences. Seeing the different worlds and being able to walk through the scenery from some of my favorite Disney movies was my favorite thing about the game. But the individual stories that each world told were atrocious.

You are basically tasked with helping the good guys of each world complete the major plot points of their respective movie. However, your existence in the story always feels tacked on and shoe horned in. On top of that, the stories are completely neutered from any and all upsetting imagery, thereby eliminating any emotional investment I would have had into helping these characters. Think about that. They are censoring Disney movie plot points. Like the death of Mufasa in the Lion King world. Shown in full emotionally destroying detail in the film, only to fade to black when the same scene occurs in the game. This is the case across every world in the game, and was a full disappointment.

Ooh, so scary.

On top of all this you have Sora's main quest to find his friends Riku and Kairi, whom got separated from him at the end of the first game. This quest is being thwarted (for some unknown reason) by this group called Organization XIII. A group of pretty-faced men who wear turbo-trendy black trench coats and are all "dark and evil" and stuff. You also have Malificent and Big Bad Pete working against you, but then, strangely for you. It's a hodge-podge mess of a story that has trouble focusing on anything in particular.

The motivation for the villain simply isn't there. I have no reason to hate the final boss, he's clearly doing something bad, but damned if I can figure out what the hell they're talking about. The biggest shame of all is the fact that these themed worlds do not connect to the overarching story in any meaningful way, meaning 85% of the game is simply a gigantic, cleverly disguised level-grind. And when you come to realize that after finishing the 30+ hour game, you certainly feel a little more than gipped.

Gameplay
The gameplay is built on the same Action-RPG blueprint from the first game, but adds a toilet full of complexity to it. You're basically button mashing your way through hundreds and hundreds of enemies, and you can simply press the X button for the entire game and never touch the upgrades or special abilities, negating any real need to dig into it in the first place. But its likely that you'll get bored of pressing the X button if you have an IQ over 10, and will want something extra to do.

Overly simple yet overly complicated battle controls

So what you see in the picture above is your battle menu. This is pretty standard for a turn based RPG when you have time to think about and plan what you want to do. But this is an action game. You don't have time to contemplate using a potion or risking it and attacking again. The example in the picture above is only half of it. Press left on the D-Pad and that list will change to "Attack" "Magic" "Item" Drive"  - so that's seven options BEFORE you dip into the submenus of six of those seven choices. Now, you can press L1 to bring up a magic sub menu which you can assign magic to so you don't have to scroll through all your spells, but overall its a cumbersome system that leaves you all thumbs more often than not.

I feel like the gameplay suffered from the same design mentality as the story. I feel like they made it overly easy for the younger audience, but added a whole heap of complexity for older players. The problem is, it's too complex. I just figured out how to perform a summon with like five hours left in the game.

Equip your abilities, it's super serial important

Then you have your abilities. This includes magic, increases to melee attack combos, defensive upgrades and so on. Some of them are quite helpful, but the game lacks a much needed help system. For instance, the first ability you get is "Guard". It says that you can block enemy projectiles using the square button. I tried it a couple times early on and was not able to do it, so I figured I was doing it wrong and eventually forgot I even had the ability. I got to a boss that was exclusively projectile based and was forced to go back and figure out how to use it. Now maybe I'm an idiot, but I felt like I didn't have the right info on more than a few occasions.

Again, same as the story, the gameplay just felt like the developers threw a bunch of solid ideas into a pot and expected them to form into a delicious soup, and it just didn't. It was like a toothpaste, tomato, and car tire stew.

Presentation

Presentation usually is 50% visual and 50% audio. If the game has voice acting, break the audio into 50% music/sound effects, 50% voice acting. With those numbers in mind, the game gets a 75% in the presentation department.

The visuals in this game are incredible. They managed to recreate the charming Disney artwork in 3D without resorting to cel-shading, and without them looking like clunky 3D game models. Really excellent work. The other visual treat was the change in appearance your characters got when entering a new world. With Tron and the Black and White worlds being the coolest.

The fantastic 3D art

The music is fan-flippin-tastic, even from the title screen, you get a sense that they really wanted to squeeze a great story out of this one, but just couldn't deliver. Nonetheless, I often sat through the entire opening song before loading my save file, just cuz it was so good.

Bliss.

Then we have the voice acting. Mughhh....
Well, its not so much the performances as it is the voice direction and script writing. I know this was made in Japan and that sometimes the gravity of a story gets lost in translation, but they were so heavy handed with the plot delivery, it almost became a joke towards the end. It's like when you tell a joke and then over explain the punchline and ruin it for everyone. There would be points where I would make a connection in my mind and be all excited that I figured something out and then - oh. They just told me. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Gud vus Evah.

Overall, the game gets a 50%. And I don't mean that in the failure sense of the number. It does half of the things very well and half of them very poorly. It is truly a half baked experience. I will never ever play it again.
It's tedious and boring and likely written by an attention starved 12 year old.

Stuff I Loved:

• Multiple Disney worlds to explore
• Fantastic transposition of characters to 3D models
• Delicious music
  

Stuff I Hated: 

• Terrible, terrible story. Just awful.
• Way too easy gameplay on the surface, cumbersome, confusing gameplay underneath. 
• Voice direction is atrocious. Has anyone ever taken a story telling class?
  

Review in Ten Words or Less:
A recipe for a delicious stew with all wrong ingredients 

Finished: Kingdom Hearts 2

 

Completion Time: About 30 hours

Mode: Normal

Oh my God what an awful game. I'm seriously considering snapping the disc in half.

OK it wasn't that bad. A lot of cool ideas and stunning production value - all of which just didn't cook together properly...

Proof, yo

Almost There...Kingdom Hearts II

Yes, the light at the end of the tunnel is fully visible at this point. The final world is now available to jump into, but I need to level up about 10 levels before I get in there.

As far as my last few hours of playtime, its been more of the same. Frustrating combat that's difficult for the wrong reasons and an intriguing storyline ruined by trite writing. I've actually found myself skipping almost every cutscene either because:

A) I got the point about 5 minutes ago
B) It's too corny to even care

The thing I was most excited about when I bought this game were the cool new levels - specifically the Tron level and the '20s black and white level. Both of those levels were so painfully short and were actually subsets of larger worlds - so they didn't get the full attention of the full levels like the stupid effing Little Mermaid world.

Retro = Money

Tron is teh coolest!

I'm actually interested in seeing the ending of the story, I'm just dreading the process of getting there. About 6-7 hours to go. Hopefully finish this week.

My Current Distractions from Kingdom Hearts 2

Broken Sword: Director's Cut HD

Puzzle Quest 2 HD

As you may remember, I received an iPad as a super sweet birthday gifts a few weeks back. It has been distracting me from my main mission of my backlog for two reasons:

1) I own a new Apple product and I have to use it as much as possible until it becomes part of my natural life.
2) Most of my gaming time occurs after my wife goes to bed. I usually go to bed with her, read for a bit, then head out to the living room and boot up whatever gaming system I am playing. Problem is I'm lazy, and its been super cold lately. So I usually don't want to get out from under the covers and I end up playing one of these babies on my beautifully large screened friend.

So, I figured since I am losing all this time to them, why not talk about them a bit?

Broken Sword is a point and click adventure game that was originally released in '96 for PC and Mac. It was ported to various platforms over the years before most recently landing on the iPad. In the game you follow the story of two characters, a female photo-journalist and a male American tourist. The story takes place in France in present day but focuses on historic, sometimes ancient, clues and story threads. It's certainly intriguing aside from the ATROCIOUS voice acting of the tourist dude.

Yeah, and you're the worst voice actor in all of Paris.

The gameplay is perfectly suited for the iPad's big screen. You drag your finger across the scene and if something can be inspected, a small indicator pops up and you can interact with it in various ways. The puzzles are clever and there is a helpful hint system in case you get stuck, but the hints are just that: hints - not answers. They'll point you in the right direction or get you thinking differently than you had been. If you're skull is still too thick to figure it out, you can keep spamming the hint button until it simply gives you the solution, but then where's the fun in that?

--- --- ---

Puzzle Quest 2 is an unbelievably addictive puzzle game. Have you ever played Bejeweled? If not, play it here. Puzzle Quest 2 is based on the Bejeweled formula of matching three same-colored gems but adds in role playing elements. So instead of just playing endlessly for a high score, you're actually fighting monsters by matching gems. This works much better than it sounds like it would. You and your opponent take turns moving gems around the board. The standard colored gems will add to your magic, and once you have enough you can use magic spells to alter the layout of the board, give yourself extra turns, or deal damage to the enemy. There are also "Skull" gems which deal damage directly, and "Action" gems which allow you to use an equipped weapon for much greater damage.

Spells on lower left, a good view of the skull gems, action gems are the gloved hands.

There is also a story throughout your quest. And while it's usually a "Please kill this monster! It stole my babies!" mission, at least you have some hint of motivation to your quest - although you really don't need it. You spend 95% of the game in gem-matching skirmishes and it never gets old. Ever. I could play it for years and not get tired of it. For serious.

I also made a little progress in Kingdom Hearts II last night, but I'm really starting to hate that game. There are broken mechanics that make it frustrating to play and near impossible to enjoy. I'm almost done with it. Then it will live amongst Donkey Kong Country for all eternity.

HAHA

I have literally made no progress in Kingdom Hearts since the last post. But this is really freaking funny.

Over Half Way - Kingdom Hearts 2

I was able to get a good few hours into KH2 this weekend, and I have to say that my impression of the game has flipped. I was kinda bored with the combat, but intrigued by the story - now its the opposite. Right around the half way mark, the difficulty goes through the roof. I actually had to start thinking strategically, adjusting my equipment, using healing spells and actually use my brain to play it - all of which is great.

The story on the other hand took a giant nose dive. Well, I wouldn't say that - the story finally picks up the main plot again around the same mid-point. Dealing with Sora's search for Kairi and Riku, the mysterious Organization XIII, Mickey shows his face a whole bunch and Maleficent - your main nemesis - starts causing all sorts of trouble. The problem is the delivery of these plot points. The cutscenes BEAT YOU OVER THE HEAD with the obvious. There is no room for you to do a little deductive reasoning.

Whoa, I think I just saw that scary dude from Organization XIII out of the corner of my eye
Goofy: "Gawrsh, do you think that was the fella from Organization XIII?"
Ugh...

It's just that spoonfeeding of the plot that is so infuriating. So many times I found myself screaming "Oh my God, I GET IT!"

And then I had to deal with this $#!T

Yup. And they MADE you do that before you could continue.

There's certainly enough to keep me playing through now that the combat is improving, and while the delivery of the story is awful, the actual plot is interesting enough. Hopefully take this out soon.

Still Playing: Kingdom Hearts 2 (and iPad)

Oh Steve Jobs. You've done it again.

So last Friday was my birthday and my wife surprised me with an iPad. Well, more like shocked me with an iPad. I didn't necessarily ask for it, and I certainly wasn't expecting it, but I was drooling all over it. Yesterday I finally went to get a case and a iTunes card so I could get a few games on the thing.

Since my portable collection isn't being counted into my backlog, I won't count iPad games either. I will however be playing them parallel to my backlog journey. So while the iPad games won't get a full write up, I'll throw out a review here or there. I am currently fully dissolved into the wonderment of Puzzle Quest 2 on the iPad. What a glorious game.

Legit crack.

Now - Kingdom Hearts 2. I'm about 12 hours in and just got to the Pirates of the Caribbean world. I'm starting to get reacquainted with the story but the combat is just tedious. Most reviews of the game have complained that while you have access to spells and upgrades and special techniques, you only need the "Attack" button. You rarely even need to heal. So really the only thing you're doing is mashing the X button over and over without any thought or strategy or consideration of your health or MP or whatever.

I still enjoy the game's varied worlds and decent story, but I just find the combat to be an exercise in tedium. Even boss battles are button mashing affairs with maybe a context sensitive button press at the end to finish it.

By most accounts, KH2 is 30-40 hours, so I'm almost halfway th...oh sorry. I was thinking about Puzzle Quest 2.