If you already didn’t know, Kingdom Hearts 2 is the sequel of the smash hit Kingdom Hearts. What made the games special was that it had a mix of Final Fantasy characters with Disney characters. With this sequel, it continues where the gameboy advance one left off.
The beginning of the story starts out with a character named Roxas, who is having dreams about Sora’s adventures. After meeting up with his friends, you learn that Seifer, the town bully, has been blaming Roxas and the gang about stealing people’s stuff. What was weird was that they didn’t just steal the item, they stole the word from people’s mouth. This meant that as hard as anyone tried, they couldn’t say the word. After talking to some people, you run into Seifer and get into a fight. After winning the fight, they try to take a picture of Roxas winning the fight. Right after taking the picture, an unknown creature (a Nobody) swiftly runs up and steals the camera, and instantly running off. Roxas then runs after it, leading him to an old abandon mansion. There the Nobody stops, and attacks you. Roxas, armed with a foam bat, can’t damage him even a little. After awhile of being unsuccessful at hurting the thing, the foam bat, which Roxas were attacking with, turns into the keyblade. After a second of confusion, he attacks the Nobody and kills it. When the Nobody vanishes, a bunch of pictures burst out where the Nobody was standing. Roxas then brings the pictures back to his friends, where they notice every picture had Roxas in it. The others leave and Roxas goes home.
That was day one of six days you will play as Roxas for the prologue. Now by the time you finish the prologue and finally get to play as Sora, it will be two hours within the game. In my opinion, a prologue does not have to be two hours, but you can’t change that fact. It is decent, but compared to rest of the game it is pretty boring. Once you get to Sora, the game speeds up a bit and becomes fun.
Anyway the story after that becomes sort of the same as the first games. The Heartless is taking over worlds, and you must stop them. Yet a new addition to the story was the Nobodies and Organization XIII. Nobodies are a new enemy who are a lot stronger than the Heartless, and are a lot smarter too. The Nobodies are controlled by Organization XIII, another new threat to Sora in the game. The purpose of Organization XIII is to find their purpose in life or something like that. It gets confusing over time. Also it helps if you completed the game, which I have yet to accomplish. As for the story, it is very addictive and makes you want to complete the game to find out what happens.
The gameplay is still as addicting as ever, because it is just a rehash of the first game’s engine. An update to the engine was a God of War esque system where you press the triangle button at a certain time to do severe damage. For boss fights, these are essential to defeat them. An example is one of the first bosses you fight, who tips the entire arena and causes you to fall in a ball of dark energy. You are given a second to press triangle to knock it into the bosses face, causing you to get tossed back into the arena. Another update was the Drive Forms, which let you be able to use new powers like in the Valor form, which let you use two keyblades at once. Having the two keyblades give you about three times the amount to make a combo, and have a more effective attack. The thing is, you are only able to make an attack using it for a limit amount of time. Once it is used up, you go back to using one keyblade and making normal attacks. There are more that I have yet to use, but either I will update this or someone else will talk about the other ones.
A lot of the environments are heavily detailed; meanwhile several are not very detailed at all. An example for a heavily detailed level is the Pirates of the Caribbean level. There it lushed with plants, buildings, and other misc. stuff everywhere. That gives you the feeling of a living environment. Meanwhile the Mulan level seems very dead and boring. When you are in the campsite, all that is there is tents and only like three people. You can see the outside of the camp, which is nothing but a dull, flat prairie. Also when you to the mountains, it is still not very detailed. The snow has a very blah look to it, and the rock looks like brown/gray blobs that resemble a rock or cliff just enough. Now I know the reason is because Pirates of the Caribbean is a live action movie, while Mulan was a cartoon, but they could have made the scenery a little better in the cartoon worlds. There is also another problem in the environments; you can’t really go anywhere! You may be able to see some cool area off to the distance, yet you are blocked within an invisible wall. This gives you the feeling of being on a fixed path.
One thing that keeps you in the atmosphere in the level is the music. Most of the music is done very well, making you feel like you are in either a depressing, dead world or an upbeat, happy world. The main theme called Passion is extremely great. Yet with the good music, some don’t fit to their themes and some just plain suck. I’ll tell you now that I hate some of the levels music, like the underworld in the Hercules level. Also remixes of older songs are not that god either. Having to fight in the Pirates of the Caribbean level with a low quality version of it’s theme, gets pretty annoying. The reason being is that I have heard live versions of the song enough, hell I even played the song for a concert so I am extremely used to it being with real instruments. Then I hear it with midi versions of instruments; it kills the song for me.
Voice acting in the game is another good/bad thing for me. Voices for Sora, Donald, Goofy, and many others are really well done. It seems like they are actually talking to each other and not reading off a script. This is a major plus to the game, because most games have horrible voice acting in the entire game. Yet there are the few characters that just yell “I AM READING FROM A SCRIPT AND CANNOT TALK IN A NORMAL CONVERSATION!” Here I am looking with a dead eye to Aeris’s voice acting. One line I constantly make fun of is when she says “Just think of it as a Leon compliment.” Hearing that reminds me of the voice acting in the original Resident Evil games. I am not kidding you, it sucks that much. Another problem in voice acting was the fact it seemed they got new VA’s for characters who had voice acting before. For this, I look at Auron. Now I remember how he sounded like in Final Fantasy X, a cool badass. Then you hear him in Kingdom Hearts 2; he sounds like a thirty-year-old trying his best to be a badass, yet still doesn’t have what it takes. Now if the original VA died, that would be something I could ignore, but some people who did the original voices and are replaced with someone with a lower skill in voice acting, that is no excuse.
In the end of the day, Kingdom Hearts 2 is a well-done sequel, but does not deserve to be on the same level as the original Kingdom Hearts. To me, Kingdom Hearts 2 is more on the lines of Kingdom Hearts 1.5, just with minor updates. The story plays exactly as the first game, where you travel from planet to planet, on a linear course, over and over again. This could be a good thing, and still a bad thing depending on whom you talk too. Because of these problems, I cannot give it a 5.
