Kingdom Hearts II

"Mostly well-planned sequel"

This review is based on the Japanese version of the game and thus will not include anything about possible extras for the English version or comments about the English translations, voices etc.

Graphics/Sound: 10

As one might expect from a collaboration of S-E and Disney, it doesn't really get much better than this. The worlds, interface, and character models look great, and moreover the character animation and stage directing is superb. They obviously have a highly talented team of artists and writers who know exactly when to start/stop music, what lines to write, where to put special effects for maximum impact. In particular, character facial expressions and movement is detailed and true to the character, up and including Donald Duck's wild flailing when frustrated and Jack Sparrow's flouncing gestures.

Another plus would be the slightly different animation and artstyle used in the Timeless River and Tron worlds. They've managed to simplify the models enough to render the somewhat dated material into 3D and still make them convincingly true to the feel of the original. It was also a pretty good design decision to have the protagonists change to reflect the worlds they're in, though every now and then there is some disparity, such as in the Pirates of the Caribbean world where it seems a bit odd that no one bats an eyelid at the giant talking duck.

The music is very atmospheric, and they've done some brilliant remixes of the Disney themes, including some of the musicals from The Little Mermaid (translated quite well into Japanese, even). Once again, Utada Hikaru provides a lovely title song, and the style of the music suits the central themes of the game very well.

They did use some high profile voice talent for the character voices, and for the most part have managed to capture the correct tone and feel for the Disney characters, even if it is a little odd to be listening to Goofy speak in Japanese. The Square and original characters naturally sound great, and dialogue is well-written and flows from one scene to the next with minimal awkwardness.

Story: 9

The game starts out somewhat slow, and pulls surreal nonsensical progression combined with flashback/recap for awhile, but once the plot starts rolling and a few revelations are made it picks up pace right up to the end.

The story and setting is mostly a massive crossover, but there's no really interaction between the various Disney worlds; instead, it's a variety of mostly self-contained settings loosely tied together with the overarcing plot, which may be slightly disjointed at times. The original atmosphere of the Disney worlds is maintained very well, and for the Disney side, they obviously planned for the sequels with the original - there was enough in the original from each of the worlds to make a satisfying story, but certain elements have been retained for this. They also wisely decided to not implement worlds like Peter Pan that already wrapped up all their plot in KH1, instead adding a couple of new ones like Port Royal and Timeless River. Each world is fairly short compared to the first installment, but you get to return to most of them multiple times for a change of atmosphere.

As the worlds are mostly based on Disney productions, the world-specific plot is for the most part lighthearted and fun. It helps that the protagonist is essentially the perfect audience for the Disney worlds - a kid who reacts naturally to the surrounding environment and is still young enough to get all excited about Christmas and Santa, for instance. For most of the game, it's a cheerful, nostalgic trip.

Which really does catch you off-guard when the serious plot hits, because Disney being Disney is WAFFy and cute by definition. The game's setting and comparative time spent on various plot is about 70% Disney and 30% Squeenix, most of the Square characters being condensed into the Hollow Bastion minus their original storylines but retaining their personalities and character histories. Like the first installment, they're sort of bizarre AU versions of themselves, although as they're all crammed into the same world there's some amusement in watching characters from different FF series interact.

The underlying original plot is serious and even somewhat sad at times, especially when you discover the full significance of the opening sequence. It turns out kind of like Super Robot Wars - the protagonist and friends are sharing the spotlight with a lot of protagonist-class characters, but they still manage to have a chance to shine without overshadowing or trivializing the borrowed worlds. The original storyline's a bit complicated, though fortunately there's a recap and notes to go with it in the Jiminy Memo. In fact, there's a cute photo album complete with pictures and scrawled comments/emoticons/doodles by Sora, apparently handwritten by the director.

Unfortunately, without having both played the previous two installments and a decent grasp of the Square/Disney characters and their backgrounds, some of the plot progression seems like it could be quite confusing. They did their best to implement recaps, but I'm not sure it would make much sense to a newcomer. Also, while the main plot wraps up the loose ends from the first game quite well, the characters and plot threads introduced in 2 and Chain of Memories didn't seem like they got enough development, especially the new set of antagonists, who seemed like they were going to have a lot more background than they actually did.

The ending seems to suggest that the developers would not be opposed to making a KH3 or at least a side story should the opportunity present itself, but the main plot of this game is self-conclusive. The story about the main protagonists that started in KH1 has been wrapped up, but there remains quite a lot about the world and background that can be expounded upon.

System: 9

For the most part the system of the game, menus, interface and travelling options look great and are simple and intuitive. There are nice explanations for what everything does, a convenient Exit To Worldmap function at just about every save point, and while the story progression is linear you can choose to do things in a different order or stop in the middle of plot to go poke around somewhere else. And as you can warp directly to any save point you've visited from the World Map, you can come back and pick up exactly where you left off.

A very nice feature is the ability to skip event scenes. As the game is very event/plot-heavy, this is excellent for if/when you gameover. And speaking of gameover, continuing during multi-stage combats brings you back at the stage at which you died, instead of making you start from the beginning of the entire sequence, which is vast relief in extended fights.

The only things I could have wished for were a Load, or at least a soft reset function, and maybe some way to skip past the couple of credit screens in the startup sequence as load times are a bit on the long side. Otherwise, save, movement, menus and explanations are very intuitive and well done. In fact, you can feel the time and effort that was put into developing this game with all the little details - individual icons/explanations for every item, different menu frame for each world, different effects for all the weapons, etc.

There's a system for synthesizing items from various random enemy drops, though thankfully they're for the most part not that difficult to acquire and don't require grinding through lots of repetitive monsters. The items in the game are fairly simple: weapons, armor, accessories, consumables, quest items, and synthesis junk. There's also a random holographic moogle shop next to a lot of save points, so you don't have to run for the shops every time you need to buy potions or turn in synthesis items.

Speaking of items, a great idea is the Jiminy Memo, which records exactly where you are in the plot progression, which treasure chests you've collected, and what has been going on in each of the worlds. It's great for keeping track of what you have and haven't done, and reducing time spent looking around for things in the wrong place. There's also some background/recap information and a character summary, though those don't always change to reflect event progression.

The new Drive system is interesting and lets you do some pretty neat tricks, especially early on. However, it is somewhat tedious when trying to level the various Forms, especially as continuous use of them appears to trigger an Anti-Form which doesn't give you Form exp. The other downside is that as you need regular party members around to use Forms and Summons, they're unavailable in half the boss fights.

The method of regenerating MP after awhile makes it much easier to focus on playing with magic if you so choose, which alleviates the balance issues between physical attacks and magic (namely, that physical attacks don't require a finite resource to pull off and magic does).

Also, the person who thought up the system for Pride Land needs to be handed a trophy - it makes great use of the Lion King setting and is absolutely adorable to boot. The faster movement compensates for the vastness of the areas, which in turn is almost necessary in order to convey the feel of the world.

Gameplay: 7

The gameplay suffers from the same essential issues as the previous installment: they still haven't managed to condense the controls down to the number of buttons available on a standard PS2 controller, which is unfortunate as you have to pick things off a menu, traditional RPG-style, while attempting to move in an action game interface. The overall result is that some of your available abilities rarely get used as they're more trouble than they're worth to try to find in a hurry. Instead of the too-complex camera controls, perhaps they could have let you map some useful commands like Combo or Drive to the R2/L2 shoulder buttons. In certain places the button mapping doesn't seem to have been planned out well enough; for instance, the Auto Combo skill, which is very useful normally for not having to sort through menus, is quite frustrating and detrimental in most boss fights because they want you to be using the Triangle button to activate the Gimmick of the Day, but you wind up triggering the Combo attack instead.

A much more irritating feature, however, is the ubiquitousness of minigames. Back in KH1, there was the 100 Acre Woods and the Gummy Ship, and that was more or less it for the minigames. Now, they've implemented minigames in half the other worlds, most of them compulsory in order to advance the game. The net result is amusing at times but more often than not simply frustrating and completely pointless. The problem is that while creative interfaces are certainly welcome, there are some things that the basic control system, camera angles, and button mapping are not ideal to handle. There's a reason why people complained about the Atlantica world and its control interface in KH1; re-implementing more or less the same in Agrabah doesn't really help. At least make them non-compulsory, or centralized in one or two worlds and leave the rest alone.

One minigame that has been improved, however, is the Gummy Ship interface, which now moves a lot faster is just just quite fun to look at, if not especially challenging. The addition of sub ships is also quite amusing, and there are a lot of customizable parts and unique models, including things like the giant flying Moogle or Tonberry.

The new combat gimmicks involving the Triangle button are somewhat ambiguous. It does allow you to do some neat tricks in combat, and adds a bit of variation to highlight the differences between various monsters and bosses. However, it's also very overused: just about every single boss encounter is has these gimmicks. They're interesting ideas, maybe, to highlight the differences between bosses or whatever, but after the third or fourth one it just gets really old and I find myself wishing for a nice, straight up fight with no strings attached. This is especially irritating when not enough explanation is given as to what exactly you're supposed to be doing to actually hurt the boss, or when they want you to be mashing not only Triangle but Circle as well and suddenly pop you into a shooting game interface. Last I checked S-E's official site claims KH2 to be an RPG, not a shooter/casino/3D flying game. I shouldn't have to relearn a different set of controls every time there's another boss encounter.

That said, the action does progress fairly fast, and during those times when you're not worrying about gimmicks the combat and movement system feels very smooth and respond well, and individual skills and abilities make for some variation with combos and possible attack patterns. The game uses the normal 3rd person 3D interface with the camera usually behind the character you're controlling, but since combat goes all over the place the camera controls get a little bit frustrating; it's somewhat easier to adjust the camera than the first installment, but they still haven't struck the ideal balance between "can't see much" and "dizzy from all the spinning", especially involving, say, huge bosses that don't fit on the screen or are flying around or whatever. Thankfully, they did implement a new spell, Magnet, which draws all of the monsters in the area to one convenient spot.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't really include any real dungeon exploration or puzzle solving elements, but I suppose you can only have so many instances of bringing random glowing object A to location B. Overall, the difficulty of the game isn't very high.

Overall: 9

The superb everything else almost makes up for the annoyances of the minigames. They would, were it not for the fact that this is a trend that goes all the way up to the final boss; being told in the middle of a plot sequence that "all the minigames have been unlocked, here's your chance to complete them!" breaks the atmosphere something fierce.

The main issue with the minigames is that they've developed a game interface that does one thing well (standard combat, exploration) and are trying to make it do a lot of other things that it's not really optimized for (complete 3D movement during combat, fighting the camera angle to play bumper cars). It's like trying to cram Mario-style jumping puzzles into Tetris; it doesn't add much to the experience, and if I wanted a game with jumping puzzles I'd get an action game whose controls are optimized for jumping puzzles. The key to action (or action RPG) game combat is to learn a monster's moves and attack patterns, and respond accordingly. Not "mash the magic Miracle Button". That's mostly based on individual tolerance for this sort of thing, so your mileage may vary.

Otherwise, KH2 is a very enjoyable experience, and the care and attention that was obviously put into developing this game can be felt at every turn. The animation, staging, scripting, and overall presentation of the story and environment is amazing and one of the best I've seen in any console game. It does get a little campy at times, but that's something that comes with the Disney territory. The Square side of things, as said, is mostly condensed into one world, but does have its share of interesting interactions between various characters from different FF installments. They could have spent a bit more time fleshing out the overarcing plot, however. While the action is fun at times it's mostly a story-driven game, and has a high ratio of cutscenes to gameplay. Those who are more into exploring long dungeons and puzzle solving would probably be disappointed, as there really isn't much of that in the game.

Fans of the original Kingdom Hearts would probably enjoy this as it's a very well-thought-out sequel and captures the same basic style; I'm not certain the plot would make too much sense without playing the original, though just looking at the various worlds provides some measure of amusement in and of itself. As bizarre as the concept may sound - when I first heard about Kingdom Hearts I thought that the managers at Square had finally flipped - it actually does work out surprisingly well and has a very distinct flavor of its own, so if you enjoyed the original, or are just tickled by the bizarreness of the concept, I most definitely recommend giving it a try. However, given their track record with KH1, there might be an Ultimate Version With Extra Stuff or something, so if you really care about that sort of thing it might be worthwhile to wait a bit and see if there do turn out to be different versions.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/06