The game is very immersive and has an amazing story and engaging characters. All in all, it has a quite high replay value, and some *interesting* guys to defeat. A major let down is that each world in the game has a tiny bit of story in it and not too much gameplay. For instance, I was done with Wonderland in under 20 minutes. However the overall experience lasts much longer than just the sum of the story in each world thanks to the numerous mini game and other things to do which hesitantly can be called sidequests, e.g. getting all the 99 dalmatians, all trinities and so forth. If one really has time on one's hands, one could chronicle each and every character in Jiminy's Journal ^_~. The camera is evil in this game, but the good Lock-On mechanism sort of compensates for it. (let me hear it for Link's Z-Targeting ^_^). As for the fighting system, it is very refreshing because sometimes it's much more fun to beat the innards (the innards apparently being HP/MP balls and other items the Heartless and other enemies swallowed for some reason - play some Bard's Tale for another remark on that one ^_^)out of your enemies tap by tap on the gamepad rather than doing it turn-based. At times, the 3 quick-spell buttons are just not enough to satisfy fast battle conditions, especially with tough enemies, where you have to navigate to the Magic menu, then to the spell you want, and if it's a Summon, there's another sub-menu. Same with Items. You travel from world to world in a nice little Gummi ship. Well...Nice and Little only at the beginning. Eventually you can upgrade it into a huge monster which vaporizes everything on screen without an effort :) Quite fun. There are various enemies in the game, either the heartless which are apparently the result of people's hearts being consumed by darkness and the various worlds' characters who become infested with darkness as well. What's interesting though, is that there are various battle tournaments you can partake in, and eventually a Gold and *Platinum* matches open up. the Gold Match is you fighting against a huge Ice Titan from "Hercules". it's tough, but not unbeatable. the Platinum Match is another story. In it you fight against the beloved Sephiroth. (And i'm not saying Beloved for no reason... just look at GameFAQs' Annual Character Battles from the past few years ^_~) It is by all means an impossible battle. The final boss of the game seems like a Level 1 Heartless near old Seph. You need to be at an incredibly high level with enormous STR and DEF, which means if you want to beat him, you'll spend loads of time after completing most of the story of the game, just running around killing things, just to level u and stand a chance against him. Unfortunately, I was not one with enough patience to do so, so I decided to cheat a little, and i leveled myself up to level 100 with STR and DEF at 100 as well. Didn't help. I took a hefty chunk off of his HP, but at a certain point he starts casting a nice little spell which leaves you with 1 HP and MP. On its own, that doesn't sound so bad, and I just Elixired myself the second he did it if I didn't hit him in time to stop it. Then at a certain point, the Elixirs ran out, and old Seph was quite eager to run after me at full speed after i had 1 HP/MP left and kill me. You decide if he is worth your time. The Graphics in the game are very good, in PS2 standards of course. The textures manage to stay sharp as much as they can, and most of the worlds are made quite believable to their original Disney counterparts. There are several places where the FPS take a hit, where many enemies are on screen or a lot of nice and shiny spells are cast. But still, it manages, in the most part, to look better than many other games. Hopefully, Kingdom Hearts III will look better in real time than Kingdom Hearts II's FMV's ^_^ GO PS3 ^____^ The sound in the game is very well done, and the voice acting, the little of it that there is, is good as well. The game takes up only 2.8GB on the DVD, so in my opinion, they could have sticked a whole lot more voice acting in there and make many conversations less dull. Props to Utada Hikaru for a very cool theme song, the Japanese version of which i like much more ^_^. Another sound problem, if you could call it that, is when you play the Hades Cup tournament. You have 50 battles to go through, some tough, some easy, and what yo hear time after time is "That's the power of the Keyblade" or such victorious phrases. except there are only about 3 of those phrases, and at some point you might just turn off the PS2's sound and put some other music on, just so that you don't hear that anymore. Generally, I think this game is great, despite its few little flaws, and it has a great replay value since, well, you can admit it, hacking and slashing is just fun :) I recommend this game to everyone. Now i'm gonna go play Chain Of Memories, while droolingly waiting for Kingdom Hearts II. P.S. - If i had not had a PS2, I would get one for this game. (but also for Tekken, Final Fantasy, Dark Cloud and a few more great games)
This game has been one of the best action RPGs I've ever played in my life. At first I didn't want to like it cause I had the normal, "Don't mess with the childhood Disney legacies." But after I finally tried it I abso... Read Full Review
This game right here is the start of a great series! The first Kingdom Hearts started off a great collaboration between Square and Disney which now spans three games and two systems. This game really caught me by surpr... Read Full Review
