WOOT! Kingdom hearts 2 is out at last! After numerous delays and level adds, it's here. Well, after playing it, it really exceeds the first one by quite a bit. I'll start with the story. Picking up after the first one, you play as a completely different person that at first really has no importance in the story....or so it seems. He soon find out who he REALLY is and many story twists happen from there (none of which I will reveal...but they are good). But there is one problem: it takes 3 HOURS to introduce the game! Although this passes quickly, I thought it was a bit too much considering that 2/3 of the whole intro is spent watching cut-scenes that slowly but surely deliver the story. But after that, you get to the disney worlds and there aren't as many cut-scenes to watch. But honestly, the huge battle at the end of it makes up for the rest completely. AS for the gameplay part, they couldn't have done much better. The combat feels like zelda mixed with final fantasy type combat systems. There are different things you can mess around with in battle that will effect how you fight (like weilding two blades at the same time) or give you new skills (like parrying). The combat feels good and you really FEEL every hit you give the enemies,which is good. Exploring the landscapes for treasure is fun and you can always find something to do on every planet. Getting to those planets on a ship is kind of odd. You have to play a shoot everything style minigame in space without dying to progress. By all means it's fun, it just isn't as polished as the rest of the gameplay...but that doesn't matter becuse you don't do it too much. Everything else is fine except for the combat getting a bit boring if you play it too long. The graphics are simply amazing for a PS2 game. They don't have the shading and stuff of, say, halo 2, but they really do look great. All the worlds are perfectly made down to the last little detail and all the animations are handled very well. I didn't encounter very much slowdown at all and not too many rough edges either. Now the value factor is kind of hard to decide. The game is a pretty good length (about 30-40 hours depending on how you play through it.), but after you beat it, there's not much to do after you're done. You can always play through on another difficulty though....but not much changes. Overall, this game really was about 10x better than kingdom hearts and deserves a spot on the PS2's best games. 9/10.
Create an Account
Member Login
