In other words, whereas the first game was a good-natured but rough-around-the-edges freshman project, Kingdom Hearts II was set to finally realize the original's dream: a masterful celebration of Disney and wistful nostalgia blended with brooding Final Fantasy influences, all framed within a gameplay engine that could do it justice. Naturally, I myself awaited it as a supernatural revelation, but what did I ultimately think of it when came out?
"Well, uh, it's pretty good, I guess."
Again, like the first game, this morphed into various phases including "well, it's not what I thought it'd be, but it's still fun" to "I hate this absolute piece of garbage," before finally settling on "it's fine." But enough about my personal history; the point is, anything so ambitious that leaves just a "just fine" impression will never not be disappointing -- IGN's infamous 7.6 review alongside this GameFAQs reader review were the only warning signs it wouldn't meet my expectations -- but while the "Kingdom Hearts vs. Kingdom Hearts 2" debate continues on today (particularly when you factor in the Final Mix editions, but we'll get to those soon enough), its persistence is understandable, as they're kinda different games.
Let's not beat around the bush: stripping away any expectations, Kingdom Hearts II is fun to play. The combos feel satisfying to land, many of the Reaction Commands are convenient and fun to utilize, and there's enough flash and pizazz to keep us staring at the pretty colors. And yet, so much of it consists of shallow bloat that, yet again, cripples its ambitions and render it "just fine" rather than be any sort of revolutionary achievement or even a satisfactory homage to Disney. Like the first game, it's in a tug-and-pull battle to validate its worth, crafting an inverse for every act of good and bad it introduces.
The worlds are the perfect example: while there's no more clunky platforming or confounding map design, gone are the little touches that made them fun to explore. Trinity Marks? Gone. Treasure chests? All in plain sight. Exploration and hidden pathways? To combat complaints of getting lost, every world is completely linear and largely devoid of interaction. Yes, they include the odd mini-game (skateboards being the most prominent) and the occasional doodad to experiment with (Christmas Town's malfunctioning merry-go-round, Land of Dragon's updrafts and explosives), but the latter's mostly just to aid combat.
In other words, Kingdom Hearts II's world design focuses almost exclusively on battle rather than a jack-of-all-trades deal; again, when regarding its actual mission statement, the combat's pretty dang fun: much of Sora's combos auto lock-on to the nearest enemy (a process helped by an improved camera), the segue from ground-to-air combos feel natural, summons are actually useful, and the Reaction Commands/Drive Form fusions are wonderfully bombastic and flashy. This is to say nothing of the pains taken for The Lion King world: with Sora transformed into an adolescent lion, the Keyblade attacks are adjusted to match his newfound speed, and it is never not a thrilling spectacle of whirlwind grit.
And yet, it all just feels empty. Kingdom Hearts II's goal may have been to streamline the overall pacing, but that can't excuse how lifeless it all is, and the wasted potential of framing wildly creative concepts like the monochrome Steamboat Willie as merely ghost town fight clubs stings more than anything else. Yes, watching Sora and pals fight about as 1920's cartoon figures is entertaining fanservice, but "Look, their voices are muffled!" and "Look, there's Clara Cluck walking around!" do not render it any more useful upon completion. When compounded upon with worlds that feel redundant (Aladdin's Agrabah, probably owing to its loose adaption of the trashy Return of Jafar DTV-sequel) or too mission-based (Mulan's Land of Dragons, which leaves an especially mediocre first impression), and not even the game's dedication in having you visit them twice is enough to stave off the lack of replay value. (This isn't even getting into the actual issues with combat: as fun as the Drive Forms, Summons, Limits and magic may be, most battles are easy enough to just mash/Reaction Command your way through; in other words, they're great fun to use, but as the game hardly calls for their use, they feel superfluous).
In fact, they're kinda why the next subject's also subject to the inverse rule: the cutscenes. On one hand, no longer are they stilted or clunky; sure, a couple hiccups from the original persist -- delays between character dialogue still squeak through, and the ugly transitions between voiced/textbox dialogue are never not jarring (again, the Mulan world isn't the best introduction) -- but the character animation is possibly the best PlayStation 2 has to offer (the Pirates of the Caribbean cast looking as good as they do is nothing less than tech wizardry, enough for me to excuse not taking similar pains to properly adjust Sora, Donald and Goofy into a similar style). Meanwhile, Donald and Goofy are actually active forces and aren't limited to 2-3 lines per world, and Sora is now a fully-realized protagonist that grows, thinks and acts rather than strictly subscribing to base "chosen boy" tropes. These sequences are flashy, feel genuinely lifted from the original Disney material (the comedic hijinks being particularly on-point) and compel us to stare at all the pretty colors on display.
The catch is that most of them are really, really stupid.
I'm not gonna lie here, folks: when it comes to Disney -- particularly when Donald Duck and Goofy are major players within an adventure narrative -- it's only natural you're going to have corny dialogue. That's not the issue (well, okay, it's not the only issue); the problem is the story sequences are either completely irrelevant to the overarching story or are painfully embarrassing attempts to be deep. This isn't to say there aren't moments that work -- I think of Roxas's final line in his prologue and a heart-stopping "did they seriously just kill that character off?" scare -- but the bad largely outweighs the good, and naturally, I must over-obsess over it. Take the confrontation between Roxas and Final Fantasy VIII cameo Seifer, wherein the latter confronts Roxas and the gang late in the prologue:
Seifer: Why does looking at you always tick me off?
Roxas: I dunno, it's maybe it's destiny.
Seifer: Destiny? In that case, let's be friends.
(Awkward silence as the camera pans over the sunset)
Seifer: I don't feel like cooperating with destiny.
(More awkward silence as the camera pans down, implying he's about to say something really deep, and then...)
Hayner: When have you ever cooperated with anything?
(Seifer taunts by beating his chest, and then walks away)
While not necessarily as clumsy like the robed man scene in Kingdom Hearts, we're instead treated to a barrage of whys as none of it makes any goddamn sense. Why, exactly, does Roxas bring up the cringeworthy subject of destiny? Why does Seifer not want to cooperate with said destiny? I have read this scene channels Seifer's original Final Fantasy characterization, but whatever sense that may make there clearly doesn't apply here, and we're simply left with an embarrassing attempt at profound interaction. Really, it's interesting how the Twilight Town introduction -- a prologue featuring the troubled youth Roxas, who has a mysterious connection with Sora -- sways in its engagement: when it is focusing on the actual mysteries, it is interesting and even surprising; when it's focusing on the mundane everyday activities of teens doing teen things, it feels pointless and contrived.
Elsewhere, as much as the TRON and Beauty and the Beast scenarios may disagree, the Disney worlds never feel more divorced from the story line than they do here. In the first game, the Disney villains are (initially) set up as the main antagonists in their hunt for the Seven Princesses of Light, and so defeating the likes of Jafar and Captain Hook felt like an actual narrative progression; here, toppling Jafar Again, Scar and Hector Barbossa only serve the purposes of their self-contained stories, which are either stripped-down rehashes of the original films (Mulan) or special after-school lessons ("let's help Simba overcome his daddy issues!"). Oh, they try to make them important in having Pegleg Pete recruit Heartless and new Disney villains, but while his bumbling antics are true to the character, it's never not depressing watching Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent -- the big Disney baddie in the first game -- be reduced to irrelevance, most notably when she reveals her desire to turn "Santa Claus into Santa Heartless".
(And the less we speak about the over-deluge of Final Fantasy cameos, the happier I'll be. There is a difference between, say, Squall Leonhart (or "Leon," as he goes by here) and his Final Fantasy VII posse supporting Sora to having Tifa Lockheart punch a wall, the FFX-2 trio goofing around for no reason and arbitrarily shoehorning Cloud and Sephiroth's feud midway within a massive battle setpiece. Fanservice is fun, yes, but again, let's have it be relevant.)
I could dive further into nitpick territory, be it Hercules waving to an empty coliseum that is somehow producing cheers or how The Nightmare Before Christmas scenario references events from the original movie (which does not make any sense since we explicitly witness Jack Skellington discovering Christmas for the first time) or how many times you have to hear old friends greeting "Sora! Donald! GOOFY!" over maybe 30 times, but I've yet to even touch upon the infamous complicated plot threads that eventually plagued the franchise. While I'd argue this isn't where it gets particularly convoluted, there's still a good deal of unclear concepts involving simulated towns, sea-salt ice cream and what exactly the in-universe Kingdom Hearts is (in the first game, we learn it is not just a fancy video game title, but a magical door that must be closed for some reason, and here it's an...artificial moon, or something. I dunno, I'm sure the Kingdom Hearts Wikis can help me out here, but the games themselves always do a terrible job explaining it.)
Really, there's just simply too much going on that doesn't feed into the overall narrative, and I can't think of any element that suffers more than Organization XII, the cloaked schemers we met in Chain of Memories. Unlike the initial members who held intrigue and moved the plot forward, most of the new guys are mooks who barely have any story presence, with maybe two-to-three scenes maximum and fifteen lines of dialogue respectively (Xigbar, Luxord and Demyx aren't even properly introduced; why, they're not even named!). Granted, this is offset by how their battles like to ramp up the difficulty (Xaldin being quite possibly the series' cheapest boss fight), but it's immensely disappointing given their previous emphasis, and not even Chain of Memories' most striking character in Axel can save it; the sudden details we learn about him render him an entirely different individual -- one who may be more entertaining if he had more scenes, but his throwaway exit remains, to my mind, the most frustrating story element. (Let us also not delve into the events of the final world, which rapidly casts aside the awesome rainy city setting from the Final Mix trailers in favor of operating like a really, really bad sci-fi movie)
Forgive me, I know I'm talking too much about the plot, but it is just that infuriating. At the very least, most of the voicework maintains the illusion it's actually working, and with what was undoubtedly the most expensive game voice cast at the time, you better believe it generally works across the board. Haley Joel Osment still has it as Sora despite the shock of his puberty-laced voice, but within the game's collection of stunt-casting, none surprise more than Jesse McCartney's performance as Roxas: it is unbelievably pleasant, appropriately melancholic for the character's struggles and development in understanding his nebulous purpose (Not that the game is exempt from mismatched celebrity casting: Mena Suvari's Aerith is a painfully flat read, her attempt at channeling the character's soft serenity sounding much more akin to a Malware robot ad).
Naturally, the Disney voices are successful as they should be, with the relevant cast having done their jobs for decades; still, pratfalls exist: Linda Larkin is the only reprisal that stumbles, apparently forgetting how to voice Aladdin's Princess Jasmine without sounding like a screeching wombat. Meanwhile, the Pirates of the Caribbean and The Nightmare Before Christmas soundalikes do a fine job, but watching Cam Clarke and James Horan do, respectively, bad Matthew Broderick and Jeremy Irony impressions for Simba and Scar is a rather distressing experience. Perhaps that is why Scar's model is one of the few graphical failures: to maintain the pride of his evil reign, his eternal grin masks the humilitation he endures from his malfunctioning vocal chords, a morbid facade he cannot drop even upon death.
(as an aside, I'm hardly the only one to harp upon Nomura's fascination with zippers adorning his character designs, but Roxas's room just baffles me; I mean, the entire thing is the ideal case study of making up a "lived-in" environment with no practical use, least of all the giant chain with a hook laying by his bedside. The actual world-building of Kingdom Hearts doesn't really make sense if you think about it long enough -- death's presence is often obscured (if not completely irrelevant for the original cast) unless a specific Disney scenario calls for its presence (The Lion King, Hercules and Pirates of the Caribbean), and the kids practically forget their parents exist -- but the sheer pointlessness of everything here just has me collapsing in laughter every time I gaze upon it (the chain, particularly; I imagine Kingdom Hearts fanfiction has given it explicit purpose I hope to never learn about)
And what better example than the Roxas prologue? We were previously privy to Twilight Town's themes from Chain of Memories, but Lazy Afternoons and Sinister Sundown remain wonderfully evocative of childhood nostalgia in their proper introductions here. Echoing memories long-gone, they complement the tragic mysteries of Roxas in a way that comes full-circle with his own theme: a piano-laden elegy that closes his story with a heart-piercing sorrow (a similar theme is reflected in Missing You, although that's mostly reserved for afterwards).
Meanwhile, with the variety of boss fights within Kingdom Hearts II -- one-on-one duels, enemy swarms, over-towering Disney/Heartless nightmares, small-scale brawls or mission-based objectives -- you better believe Shimomura pulls all the stops to provide appropriate compositions, and their being the game's most thrilling renders them the most successful of their kind in series history. Be it Tension Rising (the swarming frenzy that accompanies the Nobodies), The Encounter (a booming machinery-accompanied piece often set alongside the Disney villains), Rowdy Rumble (sheer goofiness that never fails to induce a grin) or The 13th Dilemma (fast-paced moodiness accompanying Organization XII), there's simply too many good ones to pick, but all excel in framing their respective encounters.
And yet, I can't get over how flat the Disney-related compositions are. Whereas the Beauty and the Beast and Steamboat Willie arrangements are spot-on, others are either "just fine" (The Lion King , wherein the flute is its saving grace), don't evoke much of anything (Mulan), or tends to grate on the nerves (The Underworld from Hercules). With how well the original superbly complemented as well as echoing the source material, this round of world themes largely reflect only the setting as opposed to sounding like Disney, which is a fatal direction (not that Pirates and TRON need to sound all dreamy and whatnot, but that even those two feel forgettable is a darn shame).
(Perhaps it's also the MIDI quality -- while not a pervasive issue, a number of songs do suffer from instrumental quality. Much as I want to adore He's A Pirate being the battle theme for Port Royal, for instance, the sound limitations are instantly apparent, and it's hard not to cringe. Meanwhile, I'm wondering what on earth happened in the transition of Fragments of Sorrow -- once a haunting piece -- from then to here.)
And then there's that "absolute nadir" I mentioned; specifically, this game's "musical" iteration of Atlantica. Cite all the KH1 Gummi Ships and 358/2 Days stealth missions you like on the grounds that they're actually required, but these dance numbers are, by far and away, the most rancid garbage ever included in any Kingdom Hearts game. Forget that any song not lifted from The Little Mermaid is shrill, ear-violating agony that reduces the series to embarrassing Sing-a-Long tripe it has no business associating with ("Swim This Way," the most offending number, tells you exactly what you're in for as the first song), that they can't even function as actual rhythm games renders them the most brain-dead of interactive exercises, relying entirely on timed presses reacting to whatever nonsense unfolds before our eyes as opposed to actual beat or rhythm. If it weren't the voice cast maintaining a scant illusion of professionalism, the absence of anything else resembling that makes a case for nothing but atheism.
*By the way, it is well known that many a Kingdom Hearts fan had the unfortunate experience of having a loved one walking in on their duets with Ariel and co. Should you ever find yourself in this perilous situation, I highly suggest you do what I did: simply pause it, leave the song, exit the world, and do something else in the game.
So really, is there anything exempt from the inverse rule? Well, the Gummi Ship sections, for one: no longer are they pointless exercises in torture, but function as actual rail-shooters. Flashy and full of enemy hordes and boss ships to destroy and bullet hells to dodge, they are captivating intermezzos in-between worlds, and so we are compelled to actually build our own ships and engage in each route's respective missions. And being the Winnie the Pooh fan I am, I'm grateful the 100 Acre Wood mini-games aren't nearly as clunky as before (not to mention concluding with a heartwarming ending)
Really, I've given Kingdom Hearts II more shit than it deserves -- on a base level, the appeal of smashing things and the relevant production values are enough in bumping it up to a solid 7/10 game, but it's the game's failure to provide its promised grand experience that hurts it. Like the first game, it's something that looks and acts grand, but its narrow-minded focus on one element (combat) in favor of foregoing everything else and bloating up the narrative with disconnected filler buries its achievements. It wants to be deep, desires to be the most exquisite gourmet you've ever had, but only succeeds in being a very filling serving of fast-food.
In a way, I regret being so harsh on it -- the mind-numbing realization of having Winnie the Pooh and Cloud Strife in the same game or hearing the words "Sephiroth" come out of Goofy's mouth is a treat you won't get anywhere else, and like the original, perhaps that's why it draws me back on occasion -- but the more you nitpick, the more its weaknesses show. In tempering my passion for the series, it made me realize the series had a long way to go in realizing its thematic/interactive potential. But alas, the ensuing decade-long journey to even reach the third game would be impeded by corporate mismanagement and an incomprehensible narrative, a tale we'll get into over the next half-year.
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