In the last segment I discussed the heroes of Kingdom Hearts 2, concluding that in general it's a really sloppy story at best, if not outright incompetent. It's not that it's the most horrible narrative in the world (that honor goes to Manos: The Hands of Fate), and it's certainly not the worst thing Square ever made (that honor goes to Final Fatnasy VIII, which was largely experimental anyway), but it's certainly not a worthy follow-on to Kingdom Hearts 1 and Chain of Memories--and when I can say it's not a worthy follow-on to a GBA spinoff's legacy that's really saying a lot. Before we move onto exploring the gameplay, though, I want to fill in a few holes I may have left with the storyline as a whole, having taken a character-centric approach as I did.
Maybe the biggest problem Kingdom Hearts 2 faced was overcoming Chain of Memories itself. To this day I find it inexplicable that Square decided to release a spinoff game containing major elements of the continuing storyline on the Game Boy Advance, which the series's entirely Playstation-based audience wouldn't necessarily own. It's the same mistake that EA made in releasing Dead Space: Extraction on the Nintendo Wii. The safe bet they could make was that they could count on their audience having already played Kingdom Hearts 1 or heard it was good, but they couldn't make the bet that their audience would have also played Chain of Memories--the game that Kingdom Hearts 2 was actually a direct sequel to--or necessarily even heard of it or taken it seriously. The titles are just misleading, and I know that anyone who hadn't played Chain of Memories was just incredibly confused in spite of all Square's efforts to structure Kingdom Hearts 2 in such a way that its events would be inconsequential, for instance: trying desperately not to include Namine in most of the plot, putting Riku in Ansem's body so that fans of the first game wouldn't wonder what happened to him too much, et cetera. All this really ended up doing was confusing the rest of the audience who had played Chain of Memories, and it didn't really answer any of the questions the intro to KH2 raised: why is Sora in a pod? When did Riku and Mickey get out of the world of darkness? For anyone who hadn't been following the trailers, Roxas's identity and purpose in the story remained confusing from beginning to end. Just imagine that you haven't seen either the Deep Dive trailers or Riku's ending in Chain of Memories or any of the trailers at E3 and you're playing Kingdom Hearts 2 after beating Kingdom Hearts 1. If you're not thinking, "what the hell!?" I'd say something's wrong with you. Meanwhile for anyone who had been following them it was just disappointing, with the most hyped-up and exciting character ever--he had two Keyblades, for crying out loud--being quickly moved out of the spotlight. He practically became the main feature of the game for fans but was ultimately crumpled up and tossed away like a bad idea.
Really, though, when you come down to it, Chain of Memories hogged all the interesting material that Kingdom Hearts 2 could have used. The question of how Sora and the gang were going to rescue Mickey and Riku from the world of darkness was the big question at the end of the first game, and whether or not you played Chain of Memories it had already been answered by the time the second one started, forcing it to raise all-new questions very hastily in order to generate interest. Unfortunately, with practically everything all wrapped up except for Sora finally going home and the Organization being finished off once and for all (can't stop at killing just half of them, even if they do suck at what they do), that doesn't leave a terribly large number of very relevant or meaningful questions, so it's really no wonder the plot ends up coming off as being a little half-assed.
So, the next question on our analytical chopping block is as to the gameplay--whether it holds water compared to the rest of the game or even compared to its predecessors. Well, it should say something that I enjoyed it enough to buy it a second time at a bigger price. To the game's credit it is genuinely enjoyable, with fluid controls and some genuinely cool features. In an interview Tetsuya Nomura stated that after the Deep Dive trailer, wherein Roxas was seen dual-wielding Keyblades for the first time, that so many people were clamoring to be able to do the same in the next game, and to his credit it was really a smart idea to incorporate a system for it in the Drive forms, which ended up being the big selling point for me. It's the one element that makes me feel like Square really was trying with this game and convinces me that they deserve some benefit of the doubt. I don't really hate Kingdom Hearts--I love it, and that's why I criticize it so harshly.
But in the same way that we often look at stories in games too close to the canvas for our own good, we often lose a lot of the finer points of gameplay. Speaking as a game designer myself, I can tell you that putting together a good game is more than just a matter of coming up with cool features and finding ways to make them materialize in code. There's a lot of balancing issues and questions to be raised about game mechanics and rules--and when you get down to it, making a video game like Kingdom Hearts isn't all that different from coming up with a Dungeons and Dragons handbook or even making a board game like Monopoly. Every feature has some purpose, and you have to ask yourself what it really adds or does to the way the player approaches and thinks about the game. This is the reason a game like, say, Borderlands, where guns are randomly assigned sets of features the developers thought would sound wacky and cool, won't hold up to something like Half-Life 2 or even Call of Duty, where all the guns have very specific strategic niches they're supposed to fill. It's not always so easy to see this in digital gaming especially because we're often so distracted by "immersion," that sense that the game is hidden and that we're entering another reality, interacting with characters and a world rather than game mechanics, variables, and rules.
That said, I'll just come out and say it bluntly: Kingdom Hearts 2 is more like Borderlands than Half-Life. It's not a collection of purposeful mechanics so much as a list of cool features thrown together in a very pretty package. It's entertaining and even satisfying at times, but it's more distracting than it is mentally engaging or challenging, and even overloaded and cumbersome. It took me a while before I even figured out that pressing left and right on the action menu brought up different abilities--mostly because the arrow indicating that this is the case is really obscure until you actually use it and find out that it means something and isn't just part of the cluster-crap of decorations they've put on the thing.
Shallow user interface problems aside, though, the big gripe I have here is that most of the game's elements are invariably directed towards just doing more damage, and there really isn't a lot of strategic significance in using one element or another. In the tradition of this article I've been building up on, though, I'm going to explain each of these elements in turn and why they kind of fall flat.
At its heart, Kingdom Hearts controls like an action game should: with beautiful simplicity, fluid controls, and splendid animation. Attacking falls on a single button, chains from a combo-opener to in-between hits, ends with a combo-finisher, and is simply automated to use different attacks depending on how far away Sora's target is, how many enemies are around, and which attacks you've equipped, with the system skewing towards the most efficient way of taking out enemies that it can possibly take with the resources you've got. It's heavily automated, with Sora taking steps or even sliding towards his targets automatically. It's very simplistic compared with something like God of War or Ninja Gaiden, which involve two different kinds of attacks and demand careful timing with each strike in order to manually build combos, but it gives the visual appeal of fairly hectic combat without too much challenge in just picking up the controls and playing. It's intuitive and easy, as is appropriate for Square's RPG-centered audience, translating all the options from their former titles to an action-based format very competently, including its iconic spell set.
Most of the actual element of play falls, then, on the act of choosing and equipping abilities and weapons. In Kingdom Hearts 1 there was a surprising sense of depth to this system, with players choosing to take one element--attack, magic, and defense--and sacrifice another and the game extrapolating their whole advancement path--what abilities they get at what levels--from that point on. Choosing abilities made you think about how you built your play style and what things you valued in the system, whether it was more defense, more healing potential, better and stronger attacks, or more ability to cast spells and use magic.
The spells themselves were okay--a little awkward for most people to use, and Blizzard and Fire in particular were needlessly indirect since Sora wouldn't actually aim them but instead always shot them straight ahead, even when he was locked-on to enemies. Gravity, Thunder, Aero, and Cure were arguably the best, with Gravity allowing players to snag a group of enemies and crush airborne ones down to within reach, Thunder hitting practically everything in the room at higher levels, Aero as the defensive spell, and Cure as... well, Cure. It heals Sora and resurrects Donald and Goofy if they die. Except for those two needlessly awkward basic spells they had fairly clear-cut strategic purposes.
The really beautiful part of this system, though, was arguably the special attacks--Sonic Blade, Ars Arcanum, Strike Raid, et cetera, which were awarded by defeating certain bosses rather than by level-up progression--so players always acquired them at reliable intervals, and which also ran on MP, giving even melee-oriented players a good cause for making sure they increased their magic abilities. It's exactly that extra boost the game needed to make itself work and to make players weigh decisions carefully.
Kingdom Hearts 2 developed further on these ideas by trying to address some of the gripes people had with the system. Basic melee combat remained the same and was expanded upon with new combo finishers and openers, but Magic was totally revamped, with a new, more straightforward MP bar in place of the somewhat cryptic one used by the original game. In Kingdom Hearts 1 MP was issued in single charges, which actually doubled as Sora's magic stat--as he had more MP, his spells would grow stronger. This is less problematic than the somewhat inconsistent nature of it: sometimes a spell would use individual charges, sometimes it would use all the player's magic at once, and sometimes it would use portions of MP charges. From a game design perspective, this actually makes sense, because the options are more complex than just 1 MP or 2 MP. It sees Cure as not an item in a list but as its own mechanic that should be weighed carefully against the value of all the other things the player could be doing with MP; when you get down to it it's a spell that can totally change the tide of a fight, not to be used lightly. Also, big spells like Thunder or Gravity are clearly more dynamic problem-solving tools than ones like Fire or Blizzard, which are more like basic attacks. Instead of this, though, KH2 employs a single solid bar that never fully clarifies how much MP you do or don't have or how much anything is using. That's fine--it takes up less space than the original did and it's still easy enough to read--but it kind of obscures the differentiation. Maybe the bigger issue is that KH2's gauge will recharge back to full magic as soon as it's used up, encouraging players to spam the crap out of spells rather than weigh them carefully. Need to heal? Just go ahead and use Cure, it won't matter in about 60 seconds anyway. It took a lot of the strategic engagement out of using spells and just turned it into a really standard routine wherein players cast magic all the time. The idea was that if magic were easier to use then it would be a more attractive option, but I feel this was compensating in the wrong direction and that they could have just found a way to do it with the controls instead. One thing I'll say is that Fire and Blizzard are pretty well improved, with Fire being a radial area spell and Blizzard being the only direct projectile, but Thunder got nerfed, Gravity was done away with in favor of Magnet, and Aero was done away with in favor of Reflect, which any Kingdom Hearts expert knows is the most absurdly broken spell in the entire game and can kill bosses. Magnet is equally broken, actually ten times stronger than Gravity ever was by virtue of the fact that it sucks in all enemies in a room as opposed to just ones caught in Gravity's orb, and the recovery time for it is so fast that you can spam it and re-spam it and utterly massacre even the most painful groups of enemies later on in the game with next to no effort.
The biggest issue is that Kingdom Hearts 2 does away with all of Sora's special attacks in favor of Limits, which all now use all of his MP instead of portions of it. It was a nice idea to try and involve the party members a little more in Sora's routine, but this actually ends up making them a less attractive option in the long run, especially since most of them are pretty outrageous and indirect compared with something as straightforward as Strike Raid. It also completely defeats the purpose of upping Sora's magic abilities for those not interested in magic--after all, why boost MP if Limits always consume all of it anyway? Additionally, they're not as easy to access any more with the strange flip-flopping that's been added to the menu; I know you can check off the option to use the triangle button for them when you're able to, but this isn't a very good option either since the game conditions you--and I'll get to this later--to mash the triangle button whenever you see the Reaction Command prompt appear. The design choices all serve to diminish the element which helped to balance out magic and melee in the original game, taking away a lot of interesting choices in favor of upping the feature's face impact. Final Mix brought them back as an option for when Sora's using "Limit Form," but this is even less attractive in a lot of ways since it takes both a whole Drive gauge and a ton of MP to get off the ground.
Finally, mounting on all this chaos is the Drive Forms, which are completely independent of these other systems and are just an option that takes away from the appeal of using Limits, Magic, or even normal attacks. What really makes them hurt is that they depend on their own, independent gauge rather than some other resource. To Square's credit it doesn't recharge on its own the way MP does and thus the player is in a mindset where they should use it when they really feel like they need the boost, but it still reduces the need to depend on something like Limits and makes trying to manage the balance between melee and spellcasting even less interesting. I'd hate to see Drives leave as a feature--as I say, they were the most satisfying aspect of the game for me--but they actually detract from a lot of the game's balance more than they add to it and in my experience players use them at every possible opportunity anyway, relegating them, as with magic, to routine rather than any sense of strategic engagement.
The developers also decided that certain abilities--mostly pertaining to Sora's mobility--should have to be earned by leveling up the Drive forms that represent them. Big problem here? Sora has to get Wisdom Form in order to get Quick Run. Sora has to wait until halfway through the game in order to acquire the equivalent of dodge roll in the first game, which was essential to the game. In effect the player has to wait an unreasonable period into the game in order to obtain the most basic defensive abilities, which is just inexcusable. This is just the first way that the advancement system of Kingdom Hearts 2 fails, though. As I said, in the first game you got several completely different progressions of abilities, all of which would eventually see you get every ability at level 100 but had them spread out differently. It made the choice at the beginning contemplative and interesting, even on multiple play-throughs, and it changed the way the player thought about the abilities he or she received. In this one, there's exactly one progression of abilities and stat increases and all the choice at the beginning does is determine starting stats, which become completely moot the instant you exit the introduction. Why anyone would choose to specialize in magic when they have to go through the first five hours of tutorials without any spells or magic of any kind is completely beyond me. The idea was to eliminate the unattractive choices; again, purportedly most players chose to ditch magic in the first game and take defense and offense, but it takes away an interesting element of challenge and depth in the game. Players take the abilities they get for granted rather than thinking about them, and even the course of advancement becomes wrote routine rather than decision-making.
I keep bringing up the element of routine; what this basically means is that success at the game falls to following a pattern. Attack-attack-attack, use Cure if you take too many hits, attack-attack-attack, use a Limit to speed up killing the boss, attack-attack-attack, use Drives whenever the gauge is all full. If you sit down and think about it I bet you could write down exactly the routine you used for every single fight in the game in a simple list form, and that's just boring. In general routines just aren't as enjoyable as variables that you have to manage strategically, and that's where Kingdom Hearts 2's real downfall comes from. Any time a reviewer complaned about it being "too easy" it wasn't a matter of difficulty so much as a matter of everything feeling too "automatic" and unengaging.
Reaction Commands exacerbate this issue a great deal. Every so often during certain fights against certain enemies, Sora gets a green prompt indicating the triangle button over the action menu. If the player mashes triangle when this pops up, he executes a special attack that's lovingly hand-made to each enemy and boss in the game. It's a nifty feature, bringing in elements that would otherwise not be present in the game to give it more of a cinematic feel and add more unique elements to combat that could otherwise not be included in limited rulessets, like being able to dribble a big orb-shaped foe like a basketball or running up the side of a building to chase after an enemy. Unfortunately this setup doesn't add a whole lot of depth, especially since the player is never penalized for using reaction commands. Effectively the game prompts with the triangle button: "MASH BUTTON NOW TO DO A LOTTA' DAMAGE! :D" and the player will always do it. Occasionally there's a little more thought put into it, but it's always prompted as a "reaction" to an enemy attack, and so it ultimately comes off as a gimmicky way of filling the great big gaping void left by dodge roll rather than a feature that deepens gameplay. They're cool to watch, but they substitute the coordination and thought involved with defending against an attack with, again, routine, and one that never changes throughout the game. See the green icon? Mash it. Doesn't matter what it is, mash it. On Square's part it was an okay effort and an interesting experiment, but I wish the time and energy they spent animating all of these reaction commands went into something else. It may put in something that rules can't communicate, but remember that Kingdom Hearts is a game and games are defined by rules. Imagine if you were playing this as a tabletop RPG and the Dungeon Master said to you, "okay, so, you can guard and do an attack roll to try and stop it, you can try to go for a dodge roll instead, or you can do a reaction command, automatically defend against the attack, and spank the enemy in the process." It's not an interesting choice, is it? Now, if it cost you a Drive gauge worth of energy to do it, that would be interesting, but as it stands it's another one of those elements that, while shiny and attractive, takes away from the game's sense of engagement rather than contributing to it.
And this is what I wish they had spent that budget on instead of reaction commands. Kingdom Hearts 2's number one biggest failure is irrefutably its level design. I will concede that even by today's technical standards it is difficult to find game art that looks as pretty as in this game, but the actual interaction of the different worlds in is staggeringly sparse.
The first game featured a mixture of platforming along with all its RPG elements and also used a lot of minigames to break things up. There was genuine variety, with each place you went to seeming to have its own rules. As a few examples:
Wonderland and Halloweentown both had a way of turning the player upside down, with Wonderland doing so quite literally with its crazy abstract logic and platforming segments and Halloweentown doing so by disguising a lot of things like doorways--some of which were one-way only--in that whimsical Nightmare Before Christmas fashion. In short, nothing was as it seemed in either of these worlds.
Traverse Town was just what it was: a town plagued by Heartless, with a few obligatory easy enemies and secrets here and there interspersed with safe havens, shops, and recurring characters to be interacted with and re-visited frequently in the form of side-quests. The Dalmatians especially were a great touch, encouraging players to explore every level while also encouraging them to re-visit the Town itself.
Olympus Coliseum was... well, a coliseum. That's all it was, that's all it had to be, and it was a fan favorite, presenting a downright insane amount of content in one location for a PS2 game.
Agrabah was especially nice in that the Cave of Wonders comes to life replete with pitfalls and a fistful of traps, really making it feel like the dungeon it is.
Atlantica, with its jet streams and unique three-dimensional take and controls, is one of the finest underwater levels of all time, with all manner of nooks and crannies to explore. Every time I play it there always seems to be some alcove I didn't notice.
Finally, Hollow Bastion was a pure mindfuck of crazy platforming segments and difficult enemies, and its scale made it even more overwhelming, drawing players into the broken world further by having them explore its ruined halls and trying to re-activate the castle's transporters. And don't even get me started on the surreality of the End of the World.
In general every level had its own way of bringing players into the world it was trying to represent just through the sheer design of it. There were a few minigames here and there, like Tarzan's tree-sliding game, but they weren't boring and served to deliver experiences from those worlds to the player.
Kingdom Hearts 2 has none of this going for it. The platforming has been all but phased out completely in every level, Hollow Bastion offers none of the incentives for re-visiting it that Traverse Town had going for it, neither does Twilight Town, and where Hollow Bastion was a mindfuck in the last game, The World that Never Was--as cool as it sounds--is just the same as everything else, consisting of nothing but a bunch of rooms with monsters in them. There's a few gimmicks here and there, but compared with the variety in the first game they're altogether disappointing and even annoying. I'm not sure anybody liked the morale-based missions of Mulan's world, and the "pirate ship" gimmick from Port Royal is shamelessly recycled later for Tron's world, and the developers don't even try to disguise either of these segments as derivative "challenge" segments that essentially amount to "kill all enemies to get out of this room," and these are something that this game is replete with but that Kingdom Hearts 1 never needed to fall back on in order to make itself interesting. What's more, every world uses it at least twice--hell, Timeless River re-uses it four times in a row under the same restrictions and penalties but in slightly different featureless non-interactive rooms. The minigames, meanwhile, are half-baked at best, ranging from the dull routine of lighting the lanterns in Beast's basement to the present-shooting in Christmas Town. Because who wants to fight the Heartless, save the world, and take on the most dastardly villains of animation and video game history when you can do contrived menial chores! :D
It's all incredibly flat and uninspiring. It says a lot that for the climactic battle of Mulan, instead of putting you on the roofs of the Imperial Palace like in the movie they just put you in front of the door. What's more, some of the storytelling choices don't make a lot of sense. Instead of exploring the Palace or the city rooftops at Agrabah, Square decided instead to re-tread the Cave of Wonders and put the player through a dull carpet-riding segment. Think about it! Doesn't it seem a little odd that there isn't a single shot of the inside of the Palace in Kingdom Hearts 2? Of all the places to keep Jasmine trussed up Jafar actually makes the strange choice of shackling her wrists to a door outside the Palace, which I'll never understand. It's especially strange because they went through all the trouble of re-modeling every single detail of the world, including the Cave of Wonders itself, only to flatten the world out and make it less interesting to explore. And don't even get me started on Atlantica. If people didn't have to go through this segment to get Ultima Weapon, I don't think anybody would. What's especially strange about this one is that they had all the infrastructure in place to use the same kind of gameplay as in the first iteration of it, including the swimming controls, but ultimately ignored it entirely in place of a series of fully animated and composed songs with huge quick-time events behind them. Frankly I can't speak to the quality of the actual songs because, well... I really don't want to hear Sora singing, especially along with Ms. "I sold my soul for a vagina and a man I don't know! :D" It would disturb me greatly.
When you actually break it all down, Kingdom Hearts 2 is inferior in almost every way to the first game, with sloppy mechanics that depend more on wrote routine than actual strategic thought, flat, uninspired and boring level design, and a story that just all-around has less going for it, actually cheapening previous entries into the series in the interest of making itself look better. If it weren't executed with so much polish, if it didn't control so fluidly and didn't have such beautiful artwork and character design going for it to mask its flaws and wasn't the second (well, third) in an outrageously popular series with a ready-made audience, this would be regarded as an all-around bad game. It's satisfying enough to play just because of the superficial pleasure of beating Heartless to death with a pair of free-floating telekinetic keys, but more like a really high-tech toy in a lot of ways than an actual game, depending on the player to fill in most of the enjoyment. Comparatively the boss fights are incredibly good, reaction commands aside, and I think these probably fuel most of the interest in the game. I'd elaborate on this conclusion a little bit more, but after 23 and a half pages of this analysis I think I've probably talked on it enough.
Still, I'm going to do one more segment, because I recognize that some fans will disagree with me--and the only way to prove that Kingdom Hearts 2 is not perfect to them is to show how it can be done better. That, then, is my next topic--a list of ways Kingdom Hearts 2, by the account of many an awesome game, could have been a better one; a little constructive criticism aimed at building it up as opposed to all the tearing down I've been doing.