When I first purchased it I was an unapologetic Kingdom Hearts fanboy, and you'd better bet I was excited as all hell--and when I played it I was excited too, putting in a 36-hour marathon the minute I got it home in order to unlock every one of Sora's transformations before I went to sleep. Hey, give me a break, I was in high school and it was vacation time. Something about it didn't seem to have as much of an impact on me as I thought it should, but I wrote this off to the lack of sleep and had faith that on a re-play it'd ring better with me. My re-play came when Final Mix + was released and I went to all the trouble of importing a copy and modding my PS2 to be able to experience the new content, albeit at a more reasonable pace.
These days I look back and can't help but think that the money that went to both copies could've been better spent...
Yes, many years after the game's original release I've developed some serious gripes about it. I'm an aspiring game designer myself, so naturally I spent a lot of time analyzing these games and trying to understand what worked and what didn't work--and if you ask me, Kingdom Hearts 2 just didn't work. Most people I talk to, though, tend not to want to see things my way when I try and explain why I don't like this game, either giving me the standard dismissive attitude that blatant non-fans have held towards the series since before the original and treating me to a "what did you expect? It's Square," or else flat-out not willing to see the game's flaws and insisting that it's gold. It's a really tough spot I've found myself in, both loving the original game but unwilling to admit that the second is the gaming gem everyone seems to think it is, so I want to take a chance to give a point-by-point of my grievances and help people see where I'm coming from.
For brevity and readability's sake I'll break my argument into a couple of sections, starting with villains, then moving into heroes and gameplay before summing it all up.
First off, we have the villains. Both Disney and Square are renowned for some of the most famous and iconic bad guys in animation and gaming, respectively. Bearing this in mind, if you really take a hard look at what exactly that means you start to understand why Kingdom Hearts 2 is so full of fail.
This seems an appropriate place to start since we can introduce a few things about the game to the less KH-savvy. The Heartless are essentially the major force of evil in the Kingdom Hearts universe, pitch-black shadows formed from hearts that have been torn out of people's bodies. They're like the Borg. They exist to kill people, take their hearts, make more Heartless, destroy worlds, and assimilate what's left of them into their collection. In the first game they're presented as an enormous and grave threat, with the Heartless even going so far as to destroy Sora's own home, the Destiny Islands, right at the introduction of the game. Every time they take another world, a star goes out in the sky, and it's as if millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced. And for all that, their forces grow and they get just that much bigger. They're a simple but powerful antagonist, not very complex but too big a threat to look away from.
In Kingdom Hearts 2, though.. well... uh... well gosh darn it! They're just pests! They keep getting into Merlin's pantry and made a mess over at Mickey's house!
It's as if Square forgot the whole world-destroying aspect of them completely and just made them into generic mindless monsters, comic foils, and servants for the game's other antagonists, those being Pete and Organization XIII. In the first game this didn't hold water, and for playing with darkness and underestimating the Heartless' power, intelligence, and agenda, they get burned big-time.
It says a lot that now they're actually willing to take orders from Pete of all people for most of the game, and it says even more that the most threatening ones from the first game took the form of demons and dragons while the most threatening ones from this installment are obnoxious cartoon hotrods and hammers fresh out of Toon Town. After the nearly apocalyptic events of the first game unfolded, it's just underwhelming to face such a non-threatening bunch of monsters and never even see them escalate. It's like going up against evil gods and huge demons only to be bumped back down to killing rats in the town sewer. Somehow these guys just never lived up to the promise of upping the ante that Kingdom Hearts 2 seemed to suggest. It's especially galling since early trailers for the game showed images of Wyverns, Neo Heartless, and Behemoths--all major enemies from the first installment--as fairly common opponents. In general, the Heartless of KH2 just have no bite, and for that the game really loses its sense of urgency.
Seriously. I have two words for everyone: ass zipper.
This goes beyond character designer Tetsuya Nomura's personal aesthetic indulgences, though. I think many will agree that he's even less threatening than the Heartless, essentially presenting the bumbling, cowardly, "used car salesman" persona we've become so familiar with since Goof Troop first aired. There's nothing necessarily wrong with having a comic foil as a villain, and Pete's fit that role well in the past, but he's presented as the main antagonist coming from the Disney side of the collaboration and is following Maleficent's act. As a follow-on to the Mistress of All Evil, he just doesn't cut it, and he only serves as an unwelcome and eye-rollingly annoying distraction from bigger, meaner villains.
It's really disappointing, because when I heard Pete was going to be the villain, my mind instantly leaped back to my earliest childhood memory of seeing him in A Disney Christmas Carol. And I was excited. Know why?
Scrooge McDuck, horrified at the sight of the open, empty grave in front of him, asks tentatively, "Spirit... whose grave is this...?"
The silent, dreadful, and enormous Ghost of Christmas Future turns to him, and from beneath that hood we hear him reveal in that overbearing, growly voice, "... Why it's YOUR GRAVE, Scrooge! EEYAHH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!" His hood falls off, and we see Pete, burning cigar dangling from his lip while he cackles with sadistic glee, his face lit by the fires of Hell as they burst forth from Scrooge's empty grave to drag him down.
"Wait! Spirit!" Scrooge pleads, "I'll change! I'LL CHAAAAANGE!"
Too late. The spirit has no sympathy. Scrooge falls into the open coffin and it slams shut behind him, the last tiny wisps of flame and smoke fading from around the edges. At the age of 3, I am traumatized for life.
That's the Pete we should have gotten--cigar and everything; a remorseless, cold-hearted son of a bitch representing everything corrupt and dastardly in the world, in contrast to the ideal of purity and goodness that we see in King Mickey. This is the classic characterization before the age of Disney musicals, having developed from his humble beginnings in Steamboat Willy to being Mickey Mouse's arch-nemesis in films like The Prince and the Pauper, and this would've been someone the Heartless could have rallied behind. Give him power over time, his own personal scythe (or.. maybe just a sword), and a more tasteful outfit that hides his girth rather than throwing it into scathingly sharp relief, and you've got one seriously badass villain. And you know what? He deserves it. His history should put into perspective just how influential a character Pete really was. When Donald and Goofy talked about him being exiled from Disney Castle, it should have come off like Ganondorf being banished from Hyrule, not Jar Jar Binks being banished for "crashin' the boss's hay-blibber," and when you fight him, you shouldn't be rolling your eyes and going "oh, jesus, not you again," you should be wondering how you're going to take down such an enormous threat. Again, there's nothing all that wrong with having villains around that are comic foils, but he's a major, recurring antagonist, and he ought to at least be interesting to fight rather than something you want to get over with so that you can go back to dealing with Organization XIII.
What really cheapened Pete's character, though, was the fact that they felt the need to bring Maleficent back, especially as early on in the game as the introduction, and she hardly even does anything in this game other than yell at Pete for being a bumbling moron and make him do her dirty work. That makes both of them come off as lousy, un-threatening villains--Pete because he's on Maleficent's leash rather than a stand-alone villain, in spite of being an earlier character in the Disneyverse and being Mickey's arch-nemesis, and Maleficent because she's depending on Pete to do her dirty work! Yes, this guy is the best hired help she can get now that she's been taken down by a kid with too much hair gel and a giant friggin' key. Isn't that just pathetic?
Up until now I'm sure that most people are willing to agree with some of the points that I've brought up, but this is where we're going to start running into some controversy. Get ready for a ton of exposition here, because there's a lot of build-up to these guys. Contrary to what you might think about this series as being a Square-Disney crossover, it has an incredibly intricate story and the developers didn't spare an iota of thought into the in-universe logic behind things like the Heartless and the Keyblades, so you'll have to be patient with me as I build up to my argument against Organization XIII. It's very difficult to explain unless you already know the game, and I'd like people from outside the fandom to be able to understand it.
In the Kingdom Hearts universe there are Heartless, and then there are Nobodies. The Heartless are peoples' hearts ripped free from their bodies, consumed by darkness, and transformed into monsters. The Nobodies are the leftovers of this abomination--an imprint of the person's body, mind, and personality but without any humanity left in it, completely emotionless and remorseless. Most of them take the form of creepy, slippery, amorphous things in gimp-suits, but a handful of them are left over from people with such strong wills that they're able to retain their human forms.
Now, I can nitpick a ton on this concept's uneven execution alone. Roxas and Namine, the Nobodies left over from Sora's brief transformation into a Heartless and Kairi's spell outside her body during the first game (that's kind of a long story), both clearly express guilt, remorse, regret, loyalty, and other emotions, but honestly I don't have that big of an issue with it as the concept is very metaphysical in nature. It isn't necessarily something the characters of the game can understand, much less generalize on, and it isn't that far-fetched to think that over time a Nobody could develop a personality and emotions of its own. In fact, that's part of what makes them an interesting concept. Aside from being a logical progression of the pseudo-sciencey ideas behind the Heartless, they're a great way to put physicality to the idea of a developing personality. Every so often, even as I get into my 20's, I find myself looking back and unable to shake the idea that I'm someone completely different from who I was ten years ago, as if I'd started with a blank slate with every major change to my life.
But, that's getting very off-track. We're here to talk about a specific group of Nobodies right now, that being the main antagonists of Kingdom Hearts 2: Organization XIII. The whole story is that in the first game, Ansem was a scientist operating out of the world of Hollow Bastion, which served as the home of the Square-Enix characters. He conducted experiments regarding the power of the human heart and eventually came to the conclusion that its nature was pure darkness and that its natural state was to transform into a Heartless, and so he, together with his apprentices, sought to cast off their bodies and become Heartless themselves that they could go forth and lead the Heartless to destroy worlds more efficiently, returning everything to the darkness whence it came. A seriously cracked evil scheme, to be sure, but close enough to real-life alien-worshipping cults and serial killers to ring true.
Organization XIII are, as their name implies, a group of thirteen nobodies led by Xemnas, the nobody of Ansem. Some of them are his original apprentices, some are newcomers who've joined since they originally formed the group, and all of them are nobodies who were strong enough to retain human form. Their goal?
... Umm... well, it's not all that clear, really.
According to Saix, the group's second in command, Ansem's plan was evidently completely bogus and they all realized just how much it sucked to not have hearts, so they're trying to get them back and become their old selves again. To this end they've built their base of operations just beneath Kingdom Hearts, which is apparently a giant heart-shaped moon where the hearts of all the Heartless go when they're slain, hoping that Sora will eventually kill their Heartless and send their hearts back to them. To speed things up they frequently make efforts to hijack the keyblade for themselves, even going as far as to induct Roxas, Sora's own nobody, into their ranks as the thirteenth member.
So far everything seems pretty okay. They're a group of morally ambiguous and egomaniacal antagonists with a few sympathetic elements to them. At least, it sounds like that on paper. To put it simply, I don't think Organization XIII make good villains at all. They try to look and sound threatening, powerful, and mysterious with pseudo-dramatic dialogue, but they're terribly shortsighted to a degree that no typical villainous excuse can possibly begin to explain. I'll give Square credit for the fact that as bosses each one is genuinely challenging to fight and well-designed (except Demyx, but we'll get to him later), but I think this is the only reason that anyone perceives them as such powerful antagonists to begin with. I'll have to apologize for the length of this, but there really is no way for me to make you understand just how lame their plans are without discussing them in detail.
Their first appearance is in Chain of Memories, where they make genuinely badass and conniving antagonists led by Marluxia, the group's 12th but second most powerful member. Their goal is to use the power of a place called Castle Oblivion to steal Sora's memories and reduce him to an empty shell that they can puppeteer to their liking--and by the time the game's done they've come frighteningly close to doing it. A lot of things go wrong, though, with too many of them getting too close to the "experiment" for their own good and suffering the fallout, being killed by Sora, an evil clone of his best friend Riku that they tried to slap together from his memories to subdue him, and even the real Riku himself. By the end of it the whole Castle Oblivion plot has failed and a little less than half the Organization's members are dead--but it was a good try and they genuinely did some damage, forcing Sora into hibernation for a year so that Namine can reconstruct his memories, and if Riku hadn't been wandering around things might've gone differently.
In Kingdom Hearts 2, however...
Somehow, somehow, after having seen Sora and Riku kill half their number as well as Ansem's heartless in the first game, and after a year or so without so much as shoring their numbers back up, they still go around saying things like "You'd better watch out, kid! I'M with Organization XIII! Heh heh heh..." as if it actually still means something.
UGH.
Aside from this line being this game's equivalent to Superboy Prime going "I'll kill you to death!" in DC's Countdown miniseries, this is by far their biggest and most spectacular failing, taking all the strong points that I've mentioned so far and sending them straight into a train wreck of incompetence. Never, at any point during Kingdom Hearts 2 does it cross their mind that maybe Sora's just a wee bit out of their league, but they keep antagonizing him, taunting him, and revealing and exposing themselves to him as if to say "bring it on" and invite him to kill them. For the most part they write this off to incompetence on the part of the other Organization members, and you could argue that they figured it was more on account of Axel's manipulation in Chain of Memories that they all bit the dust, but come on. Are they really going "oh, Marluxia must have tripped or something"?
It wouldn't be so bad if they had some kind of plan like in Chain of Memories, but they go most of the game without so much as filing a bleedin' status report, let alone showing up and actually doing anything. Yeah, for being the main villains they sure aren't around a lot. Pete is actually more the main bad guy a lot of the time, depressing though that thought may be. Rather, each one has their own little sub-plot or scheme that they're pursuing on the side, generally ignoring Sora and being outright surprised when the kid who basically plays Superman to the entire Disneyverse crashes the party on them. The thing is, even on an individual basis most of their plans make no sense, particularly not with respect to their broader scheme. For completeness's sake I'll go through them one by one.
Does nothing important. Appears twice to basically just harass Sora with bad sitar music--once in the Underworld of Olympus and once just before the big battle with 1000 heartless. The first time he appears carrying a magical crest that unlocks all of Sora's special powers in the underworld, but it's never really explained why he has it or what he's supposed to be doing with it.
What's more, Demyx is generally agreed to be the most obnoxious member of the team, with the easiest fight, the stupidest haircut, and the most incompetent and bumbling personality among them, even going as far as to check the freaking manual to figure out what he should do when encountering Sora. Again, there's nothing wrong with a comic foil, but given that this guy's among the ranks of bloodthirsty killers like Saix, Xaldin, and Xemnas it seems really out of place.
Does nothing. Xigbar appears once at the beginning to deliver the eyeroll-worthy "I'M with Organization XIII! Heh heh heh..." and shows up as a boss at the end, but otherwise lends no contribution to any evil plot. He is completely ineffectual and unnecessary, there merely for the sake of filling out their numbers.
Harasses everyone in Port Royal--the Pirates of the Caribbean world. Intends to use the cursed Aztec gold from Isla De Muerta to create a special, undead, invincible Heartless that Sora can't kill. It's never really explained, but presumably the idea here is that the Organization can use it as insurance against him, which is a good idea but not really worth a payoff outside Port Royal's sub-plot.
Harasses the Beast at his castle. Seeks to turn him into a Heartless so that the Organization can claim both the Heartless itself and the Beast's nobody as allies. Because of the execution of this scheme and the drama that's still there to be had between Belle and the Beast--their world not having been used in the first game--this comes off as a decent bit of menacing, actually slightly addressing the problem of their ranks, but when you get down to it what purpose does this really serve? If the Organization is trying to reclaim their hearts, why would they want to make more nobodies? You could argue that they want to figure out how to put them both back together by using the Beast as a guinea pig, but that's not very menacing either. It's mean-spirited, but not exactly up to par with the Heartless destroying worlds in the last game, and again, it doesn't really seem to lend itself to any greater threat or scheme. It's just the Organization being pests and grabbing at power for no real reason.
Aside: Given that every organization member's name is their original name scrambled and with an "X" thrown in, I gotta wonder what Axel's name used to be. Ale? Lae? Ela? Lea? ... Yeah, not figuring this out.
Anyway, where Axel was a cunning, manipulative, magnificent bastard in Chain of Memories who managed to get all the traitorous organization members under Marluxia to essentially destroy themselves, his only motivation here is to reunite with Roxas, who we're supposed to accept was his BFF just because the game spent five minutes telling us so. Kidnaps Kairi to lure Sora to him so he can get Roxas back, cocks it up, needlessly sacrifices himself to make amends and show Sora how to get to the Organization's homeworld. Obviously not the most effective member of the Supereme Cabinet of Evil.
Sora's own nobody. I've got a whole 'nother entry coming up for him. Appears in the intro, gets crammed back into Sora's body just after we find out who or what the hell he is, spends 40 hours not doing anything, shows up for a short tantrum near the end.
When Axel kidnaps Kairi, Saix takes custody of her and holds her hostage in the interest of breaking Sora's will and forcing him to continue fighting Heartless for them. The thing is, Sora wouldn't have known that they wanted him to kill more Heartless if Saix had never told him, and he'd have obviously continued doing it if the Organization had left him alone. What's more, kidnapping Kairi only brings Sora straight to the Organization's doorstep, where he then proceeds to kill every single one of them.
To top all of this off, though, Sora actually does fall to his knees at Saix's feet and pledge his allegiance to the Organization.
And Saix just says "no!" and walks away.
... WHAT!?
The Organization's central motivation is to slay Heartless and get their hearts back. They've been trying for two whole games, three if you include 358/2 Days for the DS, to get a keyblade wielder on their side, and this blue-haired clown blows it and just walks away right when Sora's giving them exactly what they wantp. This is exactly where I draw the line: I can't believe that they'd actually waste an opportunity like that. Xigbar has the worst dialogue, Demyx has the least dignity, and Xemnas's name can also spell "Mansex," but Saix, to me, is the dumbest Organization member of the bunch for failing to make so many logical conclusions in a single scene. To me, he's proof that these villains either suck at what they do or that Square has the laziest friggin' writers ever. You fail Saix. You fail a thousand times!
If he has a master plan, his minions sure aren't showing it. Personally I think Pete exercises better management skills than this guy. He basically only shows up at the end of the game--which worked fine for Ansem, but Ansem had a lot of speculation and mystique surrounding him from everybody else in the main plot talking about him. Xemnas just comes off as a superficial repeat of the same trope, but I'll have more on that when I talk about DiZ in the heroes section since half the reason that Xemnas is so underwhelming is because of what DiZ does to his whole sub-plot. Maybe the most problematic thing of all, though, is that Xemnas doesn't really do as much here as Ansem did in the first game. In KH1, Ansem destroyed Sora's world, possessed Riku's body, manipulated Maleficent into releasing a deluge of Heartless into the Disneyverse, and coordinated the Heartless, by proxy representing all the bad things that happened in the game. In KH2 Xemnas... doesn't really do any of that. His Organization fails to capture a keyblade user, fails to hold Kairi hostage, fails to create a few powerful Heartless, and otherwise just seems like a shady group of bad guys whose plans run parallel to Pete's rather than being inclusive of them. He's just another Organization member where Ansem was a symbol of evil. Also: Major plothole in that since Sora destroyed Ansem (his heartless) in the first game he should already have his heart back.
To top all of this off, the Organization as a whole doesn't really do anything. The interactions I've described are the full extent of the player's perception of them, and they're all just brief fragments. The only scene with all of them together is when they show up at the beginning to taunt Sora; otherwise, two of them are rarely ever onscreen at the same time, let alone interacting with anybody or doing anything other than taunting Sora. As such the only one to come off as a remotely three-dimensional character is Axel, and the rest are just stock villains. They're unbelievably weak in this game, impressive only for the fact that their boss fights are so intense and for the fact that Pete and Maleficent look so damn undignified next to them.
Yes, if you really think about it, Square actually had the gall to take some of the most beloved villains in animation history and make them look dumber in order to make their contrived legion of doom look cool.
To sum this all up, even forgiving the plot holes and lazy writing, there's not a single villain here that we can honestly take seriously or that actually presents a major threat the likes of which was seen in the first game or even in Chain of Memories. Nothing that they do creates a sense of urgency, and the only thing that keeps the game moving forward is the player's enjoyment of whacking things with a big key, earning Drive Forms, and the promise that at the end of all this there'll be some kind of resolution to the events set up in the previous two games.
Unfortunately, we've only started to scratch the surface. This is just the villains' side of the story. I haven't even gotten into the protagonists or the gameplay yet. So stay tuned...