Kingdom Hearts II (2005)

One of the first things to notice in Kingdom Hearts II is the smoothed out controls. Right off the bad, it feels more comfortable. Ditching the left trigger/right trigger camera control of the first game in favor of the right analog stick, it feels a lot more normal and modern. Additionally, combat includes a new reaction feature. When attacking certain enemies, a triangle prompt might appear, allowing for a new quick attack. It spices up the battles even though it's a small thing. Additionally, it's nice that they decided to have triangle be the "open chest/save" button now.

You will also notice that the game makes absolutely no sense. It opens with a new character, Roxas, and his group of friends in Twilight Town. Occasionally, he dreams flashbacks of the first game, but otherwise, there's no real information on what has happened with Sora, Goofy, and Donald, who were last seen heading on their way to find Riku and King Mickey. It turns out that Roxas is a Nobody made from when Sora was turned into a Heartless. After a few hours of hanging around, doing literal chores, and moving from cryptic cutscene to cutscene, you eventually learn that Sora has been asleep for some time and are ready to awaken.

If it feels like you're missing a pretty critical piece of the story, don't worry. You are. It turns out that Kingdom Hearts II isn't so much the sequel to Kingdom Hearts as much as it is to the Gameboy Advance game Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. That's right, they released a game that continues the story of the first one, on a totally different platform. If you didn't own a GBA, the beginning of KH2 can really drag. It's boring, long, and makes no sense.

Apart from being extremely cryptic, it also drags. The cutscenes last too long and there are far too many of them. Battles are very stop and go, with one-and-done battles to give you a sense of the controls. However, the problem is that they're over before you even really get to experience it. If the beginning of the game is supposed to give you a moment to learn the controls, it helps to actually let you play the game.

Eventually, the game does take off and the adventure truly begins.  When it finally lets you play the game, and remembers what made Kingdom Hearts fun, it's still fun. Definitely more heavy on exposition, and this time made worse by its overly convoluted story, but it still features mostly fun gameplay. A welcome addition is different forms. Now as you battle, you charge up a new meter that allows you to change. Each form grants different advantages. That, too, spices it up. 

In terms of combat, much has been ironed out, but it isn't all perfect. In addition to the new quick commands activated with the triangle button, you can now join powers in limit break attacks. Yeah, sounds fun, huh? Kind of cool, right? Well, except that the prompt shows up whenever your allies get close enough, and to activate it is also triangle! This gets extremely frustrating at times. Several boss fights require the quick commands, and you will waste a lot of MP accidentally using limit breaks instead because it's the same button.

Boss fights can be quite frustrating. Not so much in that sometimes they are chalk full of unfair nonsense; rather, they go out of their way to change up the gameplay constantly for each fight. If the combat is what makes Kingdom Hearts fun, it doesn't make much sense why at the most challenging times, it completely mixes it up. So much is going on sometimes, you'll spend most of the fight wondering, "What is happening? What am I doing exactly? Oh...there's no block button?"

Part of the problem with Kingdom Hearts in general is that as great as the worlds might be, it's pretty boring just reenacting the movies. Sure, it gets more interesting once you can return to those worlds and the Kingdom Hearts story takes precedence. Until then, trucking through each world's story is boring and tedious. For whatever reason, it just feels even worse in the sequel. Maybe part of it is that the original story also starts to get to full of itself and collapses under its own weight.

As far as an RPG goes, it doesn't take too long to beat. You're looking at putting in maybe thirty hours. Not bad. However, the game feels so tedious with its constant breaking up of gameplay and gameplay style, its overly complicated, convoluted, and confusing story, and its dragged out exposition and cutscenes that by the end, I was eager to just get it over with. Generally, it's not a good sign when you're at a critical moment of the game and all you can think is, "Who cares? Can this be over now?"

The first game was something of a pleasant surprise. A game that mixes Final Fantasy characters and Disney characters could have easily come off as stupid, and given its appeal to children, it's actually tough enough that it isn't really aimed at them. (Which then sort of begs the question of who was it targeting? Especially after it starts getting super wonky.)

A lot of people like the sequel better. Certainly, there are improved gameplay and combat elements. The ultimate problem is that it doesn't really let you experience combat as frequently as you would like. On Metacritic, Kingdom Hearts II has both a higher Metascore and higher User Score, which means that I'm evidently in the minority. Still, I can't help but feel like this game benefits largely from nostalgia and fanboyism.

None of this is to say that it's a terrible game. Of all the games in my library that I've played in Project Replay (my probably impossible quest to replay and review my entire games library), this is only the second one that I really haven't enjoyed. (The other being Spider-man 2: The Video Game.) It's not as bad as that game, but when all is said and done, I do think that a lot of the design elements of the game are bad, and that the overall experience was very frustrating and lackluster - especially by comparison to the first installment.

But again, take that with a grain of salt given that everyone else seems to love it.