The Royal Flush of Video Games

Introduction:
This game was played primarily on a Toshiba 27' standard television, as well as a PS2 (naturally.), just so you know what I'm working with. Additionally, I have played Kingdom Hearts, but I have not played Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories. There are minor spoilers in the "Story" section of this review, so you may want to watch out for those.

Gameplay: 4.5/5
Kingdom Hearts I had a fantastic battle system. Despite some problems with the camera, defeating your enemies and overall exploration was clean, concise, allowing for simple button presses to expand into Heartless-shattering combos. However, again, besides the camera, one problem began to grow key to everything - by the end of the game, battling was reduced generally to a simple method itself: Cast Aeroga for protection (a wind spell that not only defended against all attacks, but also caused damage to opponents nearby), then run up to the enemy and repeatedly mash the attack button. Cure when necessary. Only in the hidden boss fights was any other method necessary. Magic was essentially useless other than in these two instances, as your magical abilities were relatively weak, and the combos began to look incredibly repetitive after awhile.

Thankfully, this game does not suffer from quite so much of the same - of course, if you decide to max out the game, completing 100% of the optional subquests and miniplots, naturally things will look repetitive after maxing out your characters, but for the actual game things seem to have a good amount of variability in normal fighting.

Enter the Drive System - four unique forms that combine Sora, our hero, with his allies open up incredibly-powerful combos and, in some cases, attacks that just end up looking pretty to watch on screen. But just getting these forms isn't enough - you can also level up these forms, gaining new abilities that expand your own character. This system alone totally revamps the battle system as, in a way, a single form can turn the tide of the entire battle. Especially if utilizing the last form.

Additionally, the white-washed later battles of the third game had a simple reason why you could simply repeat the combo over and over - the amount of magic you had allowed you to cure multiple times, and Aeroga protected your character for a large span of time. In this game, cure, when used, uses up all of your remaining MP - be it 1 mp left, or 100, but all of it's gone after a cure. Additionally, Aeroga has been replaced by a spell called Reflect that lasts for a second or two but "reflects" enemy attack damage back at the enemy, making it almost more useful.

There's still the quick-spell/item feature, binding certain spells to keys pressed in conjunction with L1, but there's also a steeper learning curve towards getting summons and some other commands to work as well as you want in the middle of a heated battle. To get around this, "Auto" commands were added, binding these attacks to the triangle key, but in many cases they aren't available, and often this will get in the way, as the triangle key is also used for "reaction commands," which are used to react to an enemies attack and generally disable the enemy - using a limit command instead can cause your defeat instead of help you in any way, shape, or form.

Lastly, and to some most importantly, the camera has been "fixed"...or more accurately, fixed to the right joystick on the controller, allowing the player to position the camera as he sees fit. There were a few problems where the camera would zoom up under Sora in the middle of the battle, obscuring vision, but otherwise the camera system works fairly well.

Overall, the battle system's revamps have reinvigorated one of the central parts of this game: exploration, and destroying the enemies that would destroy you. My only worry is if/when the third game comes out, major revamps seem like they will be difficult as the battle system, while it does have flaws, would probably only grow more complicated instead of easier to use if more features were added.

Graphics: 5/5
I would love to shout long praises into the night about how mindblowing the new Kingdom Hearts II graphics are and how they alone have made the old Kingdom Hearts game a thing of the past, but, from my memory of Kingdom Hearts I, the game shows no vast improvements in the overally resolution and quality of graphics. Sure, everything looks cooler, but this is not because of any massive update to the graphics engine but more of a more mature character and the clothes to go with it. However, the CG video(s) at the end of the game, and the beginning, demonstrates the advances in video technology and overall quality of the movies themselves, but really they're not that much better than the first game. Essentially, all the things that were really better graphically about this game lie in the more mature atmosphere, as Sora is a year older, or improvements to the designs of major Final Fantasy characters (due to the recent release of Advent Children) and design improvements to the major characters simply coinciding with the new game. The reason for my 5/5 is that this system was the same that worked so well on Kingdom Hearts I, and didn't really need to be updated, especially as hardware-wise the PS2 doesn't have a tremendous amount more to offer the game in terms of realism. If this was the PS3 I'd have issues with the graphical quality of the game, but as it remains on the PS2 I'm more than satisfied with what they've done.

Story: 4.5/5
What? I didn't give this fantastic RPG a perfect story score? Why not!? Well, simply because this game, while it makes a good-faith effort to catch players up on the events that occured in Kingdom Hearts I and Chain of Memories, it doesn't. Of course, as a sequel it shouldn't have to, but this does limit the story's scope to many gamers, especially due to the use of symbolism and the likes in the actual story of the game. Additionally, I support the other reviews that mentioned the story has a steep learning curve - as the game progresses, a good majority of the story will quickly become apparent before even the characters, who seem to be playing a bit short of a full deck at times, figure everything out. Additionally, a great deal of the story is discovered when you meet a more advanced character (DiZ, King Mickey, the Enigmatic Man) who basically explain the entire story to you in drawn out cutscenes. The rest of the story is left for you to figure out on your own, read in Ansem Reports, or in some cases is hinted at and left there for you to wonder about til the next game.

Additionally, many of the worlds seemed "dumbed down" in this game - treasure chest hunting was almost unnecessary as the treasure chests lie in the open for all to see, and each world was short - some as little as thirty minutes long. However, this was, according to Nomura, due to the fact that they ran out of space on the DVD for the PS2 due to their focusing on wrapping up as much of the story from Kingdom Hearts I as possible. Yes, the Disney worlds in some cases seemed only to be tacked on to the overall story, but this was to allow a greater focus on the main plot instead of taking to a meandering, roundabout story that could possibly lose the player. These short worlds were to make sure you, the player, would not forget why you were playing, would not lose yourself in this new, exciting Disney world, but instead would long to solve that world's problems and continue your journey...much as Sora, throughout the game, seems to long.

However, that is predominantly the negatives of the game. As this game is a sequel, I really only took off the half a point because it gets old when everything that's happening in the game has to be explained to you by another character, and you don't seem to discover a huge amount of what's happening on your own. Otherwise, this story, in conjunction with the other games, is one of the most enriching, engrossing stories I have encountered, drawing me in to the point where I played the game through twice in less than a week. Which brings me to another note.

The only way to get the hidden ending is to play the game on Proud Mode - as I was unaware of this, I started the game on standard mode, and, watching all the cutscenes and as a rule not leveling my character at all, completely finished the game in about 38 hours. I restarted the game in proud mode on a whim and, skipping all the cutscenes and leveling my character for 2-4 hours total to make the battles easier, beat the game in about 16 hours. This demonstrates just how much of the game itself is cutscene and non-interactive. Personally I enjoy games like this, where it is in many respects a move (see: Xenosaga 1 and 2), but many would find issue with this. Reviewer beware.

Sound: 5/5
This was one of the areas that initially I was unimpressed with, but over time the sound has grown on me. The initial song, Sanctuary in the english version and Passion in the Japanese, again in this game sung by Utada Hikaru, just as in the first, is incredibly surreal and quite the deviation from Simple and Clean. However this song is just the opening to an entire soundtrack that, with elements from the first game, and excusing the used Disney songs, was almost entirely original. Chords were crisp, clean, synthesized for most of the game - which in some cases would be bad, but these synthesized melodies made the orchestral songs that much stronger. Besides some of the surrealism in the theme song, the game has the same originality of the first game, yet maintains a great deal of the atmosphere created by the first game - I found this particularly impressive, as in my experience the music of a sequel is either entirely based off the first game, or entirely original, but Kingdom Hearts II plays with the haunting undertones of Passion, weaving the song throughout the game to create a single, coherent harmony to the game's audio track.

Integration: 5/5
Simply put, did one particular element of the above stand out in particular, completely overshadowed by the others, or was the game balanced, integrated correctly? The beautiful thing about Kingdom Hearts is that the game manages to balance the line between a fully integrated game and a game whose parts each stand out individually - this is true as every above part was fantastic in its own right, but only stood out because they were supposed to. The game was weaved together masterfully, and it's no wonder Square Enix is predicted to make so much money this year from this game alone. There's nothing that can really be said to encapsulate this message, however - you must play the game for yourself to understand my meaning.

Overall: 4.75/5.00