Often with a sequel to a highly successful and loved game, the new adventure just does not cut it. For the most part, Kingdom Hearts II does not fall prey to such a situation. The oddly-fantastic hybrid of Disney’s appeal and Square’s storytelling and gameplay wizardry made the original game a surprise success. I can still remember scoffing at the trailer that came with my Final Fantasy X game, and not believing that this could ever work. But it did, and it was thoroughly enjoyable, and the sequal continues to build on the strengths, and rectify the weakness, of the much-loved Kingdom Hearts.

One of the major gripes of the original game was the camera, which had a tendency to start following anything but the one thing you were try to look at, and, due to the player having to use the L2 and R2 buttons to turn it, often ended up swinging around wildly in a drunken rage. Luckily, that problem is now ironed out, which generally leads to much more enjoyable experience, especially when facing enemies who are particularly fast, as now you can actually follow them so you can see them smack you in the face as opposed to … well, not being able to. The gameplay is actually fantastic. My memories of the previous game generally involved a lot of fun button mashing, a few spells (only when necessary) and something called ‘Ars Arcanum’ which I used against Riku: all of which was great, but this game builds upon that even further.

Certain enemies or battles give you ‘Reaction Commands’, activated by triangle. This is a pretty simple process, but tends to produce some insanely cool and cinematic results, particularly in the fight involving 1000 Heartless. You can shift into one of four ‘Drive Forms’, which basically turns you into ‘Super Sora’, and makes you a much more powerful fighter until your ‘Drive; gauge runs out. Each form has different strengths as well: for instance, the ‘Valor’ form boosts your strength and speed, whilst the ‘Wisdom form’ lets you glide and speeds up your casting time for magic. This can be a double-edged sword though. Each time you ‘Drive’, you effectively swallow up one or both of your team mates whilst you fight, and every now and again, you turn in a fera; ‘Anti-Form’, which, whilst having the fastest attack speed of all forms, is impossible to revert back from, and you cannot heal (this happens most frequently in boss battles). You can also use ‘Limits’, which are joint attack that use on your party members to perfom special attacks against any number of enemies, whilst consuming your entire MP gauge. This is great fun because of the fact you can have around 15 different people in your party, which leads to a great number of available attacks.

The levelling up is again handled with the assigning of AP to abilities, which is great for us RPG-heads who love our micro-management, and there is again that great shortcut list activated on the field using L1 to add to the merits. My only moan about the gameplay would be that it is a bit too simple with the button mashing of X all the time to attack, but the complexity of the rest of the system more than makes up for this.

As with the original game, the storyline is where the combination of Square and Disney comes to fruitation. Each individual world offers an engaging backdrop to lose yourself in, with a mission that is enjoyable to play through in each one, vanquishing Heartless and Nobodies along the way. All of this contributes to overall storyline flowing through the two prequels, concerning Organisation XIII and Kingdom Hearts! So good, so very good. This sort of stuff rivals novels of adventure such as Don Quixote and His Dark Materials in terms of awe-inspiring moments and enjoyable characters. The only bad thing is some of the dialogue is a bit naff, but it is so easy to lose yourself in the game that it’s all relative anyway. If you want to know more about the story, either read a proper review at IGN or Gamespot or something. Better still, go and buy all three games. Now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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