Kingdom Hearts 2 Review
Kingdom Hearts 2 is the sweet spot of the franchise and does everything a good sequel should do. On the gameplay side, it either drops everything that did not work in the previous game or fixes it and refines everything else. As a result, Kingdom Hearts 2 is a great action RPG rather than being a good action RPG dragged down by also trying to be a bad platform game. Some of the overly convoluted plot writing that the series starts to become known for is noticeable but it is relatively minor here.
The game starts with you playing as a new character called Roxas who lives in Twilight Town with his friends, but you will eventually take control of Sora again, who must continue his fight against Organisation XIII that started in Chain of Memories. Your enjoyment of this prologue with Roxas is going to be affected by whether or not you took my advice of not playing or watching Days until after this game and whether or not you have played through Chain of Memories. The reason why I suggested not playing Days is that you will enter this game with too much information about who Roxas is. The prologue is all about Roxas discovering who he is and his place within the Kingdom Hearts universe and all of that will be spoiled if you play Days first.
I think the Roxas part of the game is awesome, apart from needing to grind minigames occasionally, but it is partially a failed attempt to reintroduce characters that were originally introduced in Chain of Memories for people who skipped it. As we play a character who has not met these characters, it’s ok to be as confused as Roxas is. When we move on to playing as Sora though, we find him waking up in a pod with all of his memories of what happened in Chain of Memories gone, and at no point does anyone fill him in on what happened. Whilst not a lot happens in Chain of Memories and you can mostly follow what’s going on, you will feel like you’re missing something if you decide to skip over it. As Chain of Memories was first released on the GBA, a lot of people did skip it and were understandably frustrated. With the series going forward, the series being scattered across multiple consoles made by different manufacturers starts to become a bit of a problem. Fortunately, these HD collections mostly fix this problem.
Organisation XIII is an interesting group of villains because they are a group of desperate people trying to get back an important part of their being and are ultimately following the main villain’s plan because he is the only one with a plan to get it back. The past of most of the Organisation’s members has mostly been left a mystery. This works fine here but will become problematic in future entries that try and bring the characters back through convoluted means which makes me feel like the writers have accidentally written themselves into a corner.
The integration of the Disney worlds is far better this time around. I feel it’s mostly down to better writing and the game doing a better job of putting its own spin on the Disney worlds. Sora comes off as a bit more of a wiseass this time and his interactions with the Disney cast comes off as a lot more dynamic. Riku’s redemption arc and him finally being able to patch things up with Sora after his behaviour is pretty satisfying to see.
Unfortunately, the Pirates of the Caribbean level is an exception and just generally bad. It was even worse in the original version where the battle theme was a really terrible cover of the main Pirates of the Caribbean theme which has fortunately been replaced with the real deal. What can not be fixed is the voice acting. It is not bad, but having the likenesses of the actors from the movie but not their voices just feels off. The undead pirates have a mechanic where they can only be dealt with damage in the moonlight but the game does not give you many options for manipulating the positions of your opponents so it is a really frustrating mechanic. To top it all off, the lessons they have learned about properly integrating Sora and company into the world has gone out of the window and we are back to watching a poor man’s version of the original movie with Sora, Donald and Goofy awkwardly jammed into it. It took a few worlds before the sour taste left my mouth and I remember this is around the part of the game where I originally stopped playing.
Gameplaywise, the focus is on the combat this time around. Areas are designed as big combat arenas with some light platforming and this works very well. Combat is generally faster than before with you hammering the X button to perform big flashy combos. Timing your attacks to block enemy attacks is still there but is generally a lot less important. Resource management instead becomes a lot more important to compensate. Rather than just having your magic bar, you now have a magic bar and a drive bar. Your magic meter does not really increase in size much this time around. When you run out of magic, your magic begins to recharge and you can no longer use magic until after the recharge period. The cure spell puts your magic meter into a recharge state, no matter how full it is which means its a lot less reliable. This creates a situation where you are encouraged to flip between magic and melee as the situation dictates without over-relying on magic.
Limits function similarly to the cure spell in that it will reset your MP gauge and is generally useful to use just as you’re about to run out of MP. They are generally performed with another member of your party and give you temporary immunity as you unleash a barrage of attacks. At the midpoint of the game, I found these to be a lot less useful because the more powerful forms and summons replace your party members and limits start to become noticeably less effective.
Forms and summons both use the drive bar and will replace one or both party members, which is actually a good thing because the rest of your party can be a bit of a liability this time. Unlike the previous game, Summons are really powerful and generally support Sora without actually changing his moveset. I never quite figured out how to properly use Genie, so I generally did not bother using him. It’s also relatively easy to replenish the summon gauge before it runs out, making it very useful outside of boss encounters. Forms replace Sora’s moveset with a generally more powerful one but they all often disable key abilities that make them a little more difficult to use. They are best used in boss battles as they also conveniently replenish your HP and MP gauges when used.
World exclusive party members are handled a lot better here too and are actually useful for a good chunk of the game. All of them start with a Limit attack and can be swapped in and out mid-combat which is useful for conserving resources when a member of the party looks like they are going to drop.
Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix added reaction commands that allowed you to perform context-sensitive actions with the triangle button, but this game makes a lot more use of it and includes a lot of special attacks unique to certain fights that can be performed with the right timing.
The 100 Acre Wood and a plethora of minigames are included and this time there is not a single stinker amongst them. Atlantica returns as a minigame world dedicated to a single rhythm game. The game itself is passable but some of the new songs are a little cringeworthy. The gummi ship sections are also greatly improved being faster paced and featuring dramatic set pieces. You earn a new blueprint after every stage, meaning that you only really have to bother building your own ship if you feel like taking on optional challenges that do not affect other areas of the game.
The crafting system is also vastly improved and is actually usable during the main storyline, as opposed to mostly only being a post-game grinding exercise. I still feel that these things mostly only exist to sell walkthroughs that tell you where to find all the things you need rather than actually being fun, but there are a lot of quality of life improvements that make crafting a lot less painful and provide a couple of interesting dilemmas on how you want to use your crafting materials.
The main issue I found with the gameplay was I felt a general sense that the controls were not really adequate or fair, especially with alternating between playing this game and Bloodborne. Too many commands are fighting for the use of the square button with blocking or dodging dependent on whether or not you are tilting the stick. Blocking is still this long fixed animation that you can not cancel out of which is really difficult to pull off thanks to how fast the game is. The menu system was a little hard to use in the previous game, but with three more commands being added, it’s even harder to navigate without gripping the controller in an uncomfortable way to use the D-pad and the left stick at the same time. You can use 4 shortcuts by pressing the L1 button and one of the face buttons and the shortcuts can be used for items instead of just spells this time but it is never quite enough. There are abilities that let you set the reaction command to perform limits, summons and forms but I often found myself activating them by accident when trying to use other reaction commands.
For the most part, the rough edges of the gameplay only really bothered me during the bonus bosses added to Final Mix. Final Mix adds bonus boss fights against the Organisation XIII members who Sora defeated in Chain of Memories, a new dungeon you need to go through to unlock very difficult rematch fights against every member of Organisation XIII, a new ultra boss, the Mushroom XIII, the Critical difficulty and some more equipment to find and craft. Out off all of these, I appreciated Critical difficulty the most as it fixed the problem, of Proud Mode having a top-loaded difficulty in the previous game due to not giving you access to several key abilities by handing you several skills at the start of the game. The Mushroom XIII are a series of weird combat challenges you need to grind for certain crafting materials, equipment and one of the proof items that mark your progress in the post-game content. They require a fairly specific strategy, with a specific loadout and is the kind of content that I just look at a walkthrough for a solution because it seems like a frustrating waste of time.
All I can say about the graphics and sound is that it is like the last game but generally better. The only notable thing about the sound is that most of the Final Fantasy characters have new voice actors and Aerith’s is notoriously bad.
Whilst there are a few issues, I finally found the first Kingdom Hearts game I can recommend without many caveats. Whilst Chain of Memories is still an issue, the game does a decent job of summarising the events of the first game and you could probably jump in here.
