One of the best RPG's of all time.
Gameplay, The gameplay is pretty straightforward with a real time battle system where you move your character around and swing your keyblade around, hackin up some heartless while using magic and special moves when you're in a bind. Outside of battle you must equip skills and shortcut keys to use in battle so that you dont have to waste time going through your menu. Finally, there are the gummi ship battles. When travelling to a new world, you must go through a star fox-esque battle where you control a customized ship to battle a bunch of star fox-esque bad guys. This part is one of the few bad parts about this game. It's boring and pointless whereas the normal battles are exciting and get you important items for later.
Graphics are outstanding. You dont know what good graphics are until you've seen the opening sequence of Kingdom Hearts. I have never seen anything as spectacular and realistic looking as the CG's in KH. Unfortunately, they are sparse and the normal graphics are great but obviously not as great.
The sound is fantastic. Utada Hikaru does the opening/closing song for the game and I liked it so much, I actually bought the soundtrack for the game. I've never done that before. The music throughout the game is great too and it actually got me humming a lot of the music throughout.
Now the story. This is what really makes Kingdom hearts shine (as it makes or breaks most RPG's.). Even considering the disney integration to the story, i still enjoyed it a lot. It starts out with a boy named Sora who lives on an island with his two closest friends, A boy named Riku and a girl named Kairi. One day, he obtains a powerful weapon called the keyblade, which is a weapon meant to save worlds and destroy the heartless. The same day his world is destroyed by the power of darkness and he is flung, alone, to a place called twilight town. Here he learns that there are many different worlds (hence the disney places) and many are being destroyed by the darkness. He then goes on a journey along with Donald and Goofy (who he meets in twilight town) to save king mickey (who left to battle the darkness) and to find Sora's friends. There are plenty of plot twists and turns in the game and the end will leave you desperately wanting to find out what happens in the next game.
I recommend this to anyone who likes rpg's or anyone who enjoys a good story. For those of you that hate disney with a passion (like me), i guarantee you will be able to look past it in this game. It actually got me to tolerate disney a little bit. The only problems with this game are the gummy ship sequences and the difficulty (it is a little easy however it's okay because the game is pretty long and the side quest where you have to fight sephiroth will make up for the easiness throughout the rest of the game.) Also there are plenty of side quests so the game won't get boring for a long while.
For those of you who were wondering, I was kind of disgusted by the pointless cameos Square enix put into KH from the various FF games so I didnt really mention it in my review. It doesnt hurt the game at all but I dont like seeing my favorite characters from FF portrayed in pointless ways and making them sound somewhat stupid.