Kingdom Hearts 2
(10.0)
Exceptional – Win
*Spoilers for story are in this
I vividly remember hearing the scathing news of Disney dipping its decisive feet into the RPG gaming pool with Square™/Square-Enix™/P Diddy™/Sean Puffy Combs™/Puffy™. I also vividly remember mocking, mimicking, flaming and sarcastically subverting Disney’s storytelling prowess by sallying their characters I loved and age groups who willfully and shamelessly expressed their excitement for it. ‘Tis a shame. Maybe I caught the holy ghost, or maybe I was a sheep following those elitists on boards who consistently pushed for shitty and poorly executed games like Final Fantasy VIII, X, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (wait just a darn second – this game had a storyline? Shock!), when in reality, they just sucked.
Jesus decided to spend a couple minutes with me, heart to heart, to chastise my self-instituted ignorance and I’m here to rectify my passed assholery. Kingdom Hearts 2 improves on everything that Kingdom Hearts did well: story presentation and battling. That means that despite some of Kingdom Heart’s excessive puerile scenes, Kingdom Hearts 2 balances a storybook tale and injects more maturity into Disney’s established characters. Perhaps Disney’s established characters were granted with more maturity because their essential full tales were discontinued in the first installment for the sake of moving onto the main storyline. But I digress, let me make a fairly superficially outlined review with a rehashed format.
Without examining much consideration of Kingdom Hearts universe plot or to Kingdom Hearts: Chains of Memories for the DS, Kingdom Hearts 2 starts off with the happy life of Roxas. Sora’s character is slumbering in a laboratory because of issues from exploration in Chains of Memories. Nonetheless, I was sort of pissed not being Sora. I don’t read the premises for games anymore, and didn’t know the truth of Roxas’s character until I delved further into the story; but, there is one thing I can’t blindly deny due to fangirlism and it’s the storytelling.
One of the main themes of Kingdom Hearts 2 surrounds the the idea of world and physical belonging. Roxas happens to be the quintessential character in eliciting this theme. He is a Nobody, who exists in the shell of a person who lost their heart to Darkness, and balances the discourse Nobody-Run-Organization XIII’s idealistic endeavors in Kingdom Hearts to rectify their shortcomings, while also realizing that owning a heart should not stipulate whether one is sanctioned to live. After some key plot scenes, he blends with Sora, and Sora unknowing of Roxas’s existence, hops along his merry way to find Kairi. Though they make Sora completely flippant and oblivious in Kingdom Hearts 2, it is really Roxas’s character, Axel, Riku Mickey, Donald, Goofy that shine when they get their window of opportunities. One would say that since Roxas and Sora blended together, that Sora would essentially be a shining character but I disagree! Roxas, in his incomparable minutes on-screen manages to outshine Sora greater than all 120 stars from Super Mario 64. I feel the need to escape explaining the storyline in depth because of disconnects between it compared to the Kingdom Hearts canon. However, I can note that Sora manages to appear even more oblivious and still childish despite all the characters maturing in age.
But the battling is where Kingdom Hearts 2 scores all of its club scout points. Exploration, Gummi Ship customization – all of those can be scrapped in terms of mentioning the battle system. Though I hear there is dissent to this opinion, KH2’s battle system is the best out of the series. It is better than Kingdom Hearts, KH 358/2, god forbid anything isn’t better than Chains of Memories . . . Right. Anyway, because the series relies heavily on the archaic hack-and-slash style which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it adds a bit more slash to its style. It makes it stylish, rather. This covers up the constant hacking, random Magic use and redundancy fairly well. The triangle button becomes a vital piece as Sora (I believe, through the skill of Roxas) is able to evade – and not just block – and to counterattack! – during boss and regular battles. It becomes an invaluable button as it takes out a good chunk of damage. The catch-22 is that because it is a reflexive button, you have to time or realize the patterns of your enemies in order to effectively press it in time when it pops up on the screen. It’s easy peasy. It really is. The bosses pretty much stick to a linear attack pattern as do the enemies, and to be frank – you can press it interchangeably in case you don’t pick up the pattern easily, which increases your chances of still counterattacking. The triangle button also makes battles seem more simultaneous. We all favor simultaneity, right?
Sora is capable of equipping various keyblades with different attributes, that also have a Limit mode exclusive to them. In short, there’s Magic, Attack and later a combination of the both. Unfortunately Magic doesn’t become useful until you’re near the mega computer story arc (because Magic jettisons beams at enemies, therefore allowing you to attack further away and save your ass), but Attack and the later combination are invaluable. Each have their different stats and effects. Equipment is extremely similar to the first Kingdom Hearts, so understanding it is below rudimentary. I found that I received less AP-related items to increase equipment in this installment. This was not too bad until I realized that Goofy got spaces slower than Donald. But besides the usual trio, when you enter worlds, the main character joins your party and you have even more unique skills and Limits that you can do. It just keeps adding on to the foundation that Kingdom Hearts laid out.
Exploration is not anything particularly special. Unfortunately you do not have many worlds to choose from, so I suppose that is why developers added multiple story arcs to each planet. At least the multiple story arc requirements allow for you to pretty much see a quick and short resolution to each planets’ issues, IE no more Emo Beast . . . well. I don’t digress, but as I was thinking about emo, the DO have a completely and utterly useless planet and that’s Atlantis. All you do is sing, and if I wanted to play a singing game, it would be Parappa tha Rappa. The music is especially nice and the graphics are much more solid making it easier on the eyes. But the most important thing about Kingdom Hearts 2 is that it is a definitely playable game, that it added more lights and bells to the actual battle system which was a main grievance of mine in the first installment, and the storyline was not too Alice in Wonderland anymore. 10/10. A game that I could easily recommend to someone realizing that they have little chances of hating it is a go in my book.
Filed under: RPG Chatter , kingdom hearts, kingdom hearts 2
