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