Kingdom Hearts is the first game of the unusual Disney-Square crossover series: "Kingdom Hearts"... and it is awesome!!!
The bads: The game itself might feel "childish" for older players. Disney characters look better than the Square characters which makes the game somewhat disappointing to Square fans. Game is fairly easy to go through with little strategy necessary (this might be a good thing for the game, depending on who you are). Everyone hates the Gummy Ship mini-games.
It is really quite unusual to know that Disney, a company known for its many light hearted and famous characters, is in collaboration with Square Enix, another big company known for its RPG and action-adventure success and their habit of creating spiky-haired characters. Yes, it is really strange for these two "opposites" to actually come up with a game together...but they did anyways. And as much of a surprise as it already is, it worked out! Really, really well.
The Plot for the series all begins here (duhhh !), so what exactly is going on? It all starts when many "worlds" begin to disappear all thanks to an evil force called the "Heartless". This is also starts the introduction of the main character, Sora, whose name in Japanese actually translates into "sky". He becomes the chosen wielder of the mysterious Keyblade and is forced to save all other worlds from destruction. He, by the way, will be most of the time accompanied by magic-man Donald, and gentle-knight Goofy, who both traveled to find Sora and have him help them find King Mickey, also trying to stop the Heartless in his own way. Along the way, they will meet new friends, and encounter new foes.
Among those new friends include a vast collection Disney's and Square's greatest. But get real! The Disney characters far out-numbers those from Square. If you expect to stumble across every one of your favorite Final Fantasy characters, you might as well forget about it. If your a Disney fan however, then this may be what completes your life, because you'll see over a hundred of them (really, the back of the cover tells you so!)! But for the Square fans out there, you'll likely love most of Kingdom Heart's gameplay similarities to any Final Fantasy game, such as the character customise features, hidden items, minigames, and the impressive boss battles!
The gameplay itself is easy, wth no necessary strategy (good for some people, but annoying to others). The only real difficult thing of the game is the default camera, which attempts to follow Sora from behind wherever he goes. The manual camera just makes things more complicated, but kinda makes things a tad bit easier for you to see everything...just a tiny bit. And of course, there's the Gummi Ship minigame which is arguably the most stupid feature of the game (Tip: go through it once and never do it again!)! Over all the gameplay would give any gamer above-average satisfaction which a great thing for any game. Some of the best features of the game is simply how it looks. Surely, it is not the most impressive in terms of a PS2 level but it is certainly close to the top! The characters, also looks great, and their emotions are beautifully expressed... well at least Sora and most of the Disney characters anyways (the Square characters aren't as defined but they still look awesome). You are basically playing the game for the sake of knowing the story further and how the cutscenes shows it, and it shows extremely well. The sound is also a plus. The game, well, sounds great! Sora happens to be voiced by former child star Hayley Joel Osment and most of the Disney and Square characters voiced by their original actors or else actors who can still sound like their character and are able to capture that character's personality. Each world also has a musical theme that is familiar or at least captures that world's essence, which makes the level more interesting to play.
Final words would be that this an awesome game that you can enjoy over and over thanks to its many wonderful traits that would even make the Gummi Ship not look too bad...much!