Review: Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts is a fun action-RPG made by Square and Disney. It has, at its, core, the rather bizarre pairing of a typical Square hero with various Disney characters in a meta-plot that is typical Square that abounds with subplots that are straight out of Disney movies.

To clarify, you (Sora, the main character) and your two partners (Donald Duck and Goofy) go from one disney world to another (for example, Wonderland, Halloween Town, and Neverland), meeting up with characters from those movies, and defeating the enemies in those worlds. Meanwhile, you've got the meta-plot of trying to find your friends and save the universe. It sounds silly, and odd, but works amazingly well.

As for the gameplay, it's a third-person action game, along the lines of the Destroy All Humans! franchise, or, say, God of War. You directly control Sora, and Donald and Goofy (or whoever happens to be your allies at the time) tag along with you, acting on their own - though you can give them basic instructions as to when to use items, how often to use special attacks, etc. It's pretty good, though fairly one-dimensional - mashing x to hit people with your keyblade is often all you need to do to beat enemies, even bosses. There is magic, and it is useful, but the limited nature of it usually means that the spell you're going to be casting far more than any other is Cure, since the other magic, while useful, can simply be replaced by hitting people with your Keyblade.

You also have abilities that you can assign to your party members - special keyblade attacks, for example, or simple status or spell boosts, or new abilities like high-jumping or gliding. The customization aspect here is nice, but didn't really feel like it was all that it could be. Your choices never felt like they made that much of a difference. Still, it's something.

The enviroments also are worth noting - they are very pretty, and quite true to the movies that they are based on. However, they are huge, and often labyrinthine - you spend lots and lots of time wandering around the worlds, looking for that next place to go. Some people applaud the world design of Kingdom Hearts (at least compared to Kingdom Hearts 2), saying that the exploration of the Disney worlds was fun and cool - however, I like having a more set path to follow in my games. Exploration is all well and good, but getting lost and wandering around until you find what you need to do should be a gaming trope that no longer exists.

There's also the Gummi ship levels - levels that happen between worlds that are reminiscent of Star Fox. They're all right, but not really all that fun, at least to me. All the gummi levels felt the same, and I never really felt any incentive to play them over again. There's also gummi ship customization, which is nice, but I never really saw the draw of it, as there were no real objectives to gummi-shipping other than to get from point A to point B. The levels themselves all were very similar graphics-wise (a technicolor background with occasional rocks, rings, or other obstacles) and didn't really vary gameplay-wise either.

There's not that much more to talk about - the story is good, and very true to its sources, and the gameplay is fun, if frustrating or one-dimensional at times. Overall, a solid, fun game with a few moderately-sized flaws.

Things to learn:

Mixing atmospheres (Square and Disney) can work surprisingly well! As with Paper Mario, the idea to take away from this is that anything can work if it's done well, no matter how crazy it might sound.

Making your gameplay fast-paced is often a good thing. Fast combat is fun, more often than not, in my opinion.

Providing multiple viable options in combat makes combat more fun. Kingdom Hearts doesn't offer enough options - compare this to, say, The Force Unleashed, where you have many different viable options to kill mooks. The latter really gets quite a bit of milage out of its gameplay, whereas Kingdom Hearts really does start to wear thin towards the end in its "press x until the bad guy dies" style of gameplay.

If you're going to make transitionary levels (such as gummi ship levels), make them interesting. Don't just slap something in there to make your gameplay more diverse. You want them to be fun, good breaks that don't necessesarily need to be as deep as the main gameplay. What I'm trying to say is that these sorts of levels (and mini-games in general) should be both fun and different, not just different. It sounds obvious, but too many mini-game type things try to make things just different and forget to make them fun.