Kingdom Hearts II (PlayStation 2)

Voice
The voice work for the majority of the characters is excellent. With Disney providing the majority of the American voice actors, we get such notables as Haley Joel Osment (Sixth Sense) and Christopher Lee (Lord of the Rings) and, of course, many of the original voice actors for the Disney characters. Then there’s the other side of the coin. The Final Fantasy voices aren’t near as good. The American voice actors don’t know what they are doing with these Japanese style characters, and it shows. Most of the time, they try to sound cool by being extremely monotone, but rather than cool it just comes off as boring. There’s nothing as depressing as hearing a bad ass like Sephiroth talk about destroying you in a voice that suggests he’s just woken up from a long nap. Well, maybe the fact that then he proceeds to make good on his offer, but I digress. In any case, it’s disappointing that they couldn’t pull it off, considering how good the English voice work was in Final Fantasy X, Radiata Stories, and other Square Enix games.

World Design
Here is where the game is lacking the most. As previously mentioned, Kingdom Hearts 2 has a good number of worlds which the player will visit during their playthrough. Yet these worlds are lacking in several areas. For one thing, they are all very small (The Little Mermaid world has only two screens). In many you’ll cross huge distances without actually seeing any of the inbetween. And all of the worlds are essentially dungeon crawls with a mini game or two thrown in. There is no puzzle element. The worlds are also extremely straight forward and linear. There are few branching paths, and when there are it is clearly marked which way you are supposed to go, or even blocked until later points in the game. Finally, these worlds are nearly devoid of life. There’s one unintentionally hilarious moment in the game when, in Agrabah, Aladin gestures to the forever empty streets around him and proclaims fervently “I love the people of Agrabah!” There are no NPCs beyond those that have a distinct role to play in the adventure. At times you feel like your characters are the only living things in the universe.

This was surprising and disappointing to me, because the first Kingdom Hearts had very few of these problems with the world design. In fact, it was one of the selling points of the game and one of the things I was looking forward to seeing in this one.

In any case, despite these issues, the worlds will keep you entertained on your first time through, but you’ll have little desire to go back and explore them. Don’t be expecting an adventure game out of Kingdom Hearts 2.

Content
Despite the lack of exploration value, there are reasons to go back to the worlds. Mainly, the mini games. There’s a lot of mini games. It’s like the Mario Party of RPGs. Nearly every world has some kind of mini game to participate in. There’s a score that you need to beat for each mini game, if you want to get 100% completion. These scores are not easy to beat, so fans will have a lot to keep them occupied. There’s also plenty of new Keyblades to find, and the majority of your accessories and weapons you’ll have to build by hunting down enemies who carry the right materials. And of course, there’s also a couple special boss fights which only the most hardened players will be able to defeat.

My one complaint with the content which will be shared by long time Square Enix fans, is that once again there wasn’t enough Final Fantasy. While there are well over fifty prominent Disney characters, there is a total of 16 Final Fantasy characters, with all but one of them coming from the post Playstation era. Of these 16, only one fights on your party. In particular, it would’ve been nice to have seen some of the older Final Fantasy characters.