Kingdom Hearts

The Good
At first, the idea of a disney game with a squaresoft type touch seemed incredibly stupid to me, but after I played this game, I figured out my mistakes.

The graphics are nothing to laugh at. This solid RPG offers enough eye candy to play for hours. I probably could play this game over and over. The characters look amazing, as does the hero. All objects and worlds are created excellently, and the game manages to have a great gfx touch along with a cartoony disney touch.

Playing the game is a breeze. While the camera can get disturbing sometimes, this can be easily overcome using the lock on feature. The game was fast, and barely had any slowing down on my system.

The sound and music is also okay.

The Bad
The only thing I despised about this game was the key thing that you had to use for a weapon. I hated it, but since its a disney game, and they couldn't go off with machine guns, Ill let it pass.

The Bottom Line
I give this game a complete <<<<< 5 out of 5 >>>>>

The Good
I'm not really much of a Disney fan but I really enjoy this game. The graphics are really nice (as usual), and the soundtrack is very good, in fact, I actually have the Simple and Clean song and the cool battle music stuck in my head as I type this review up. The battle setup is nothing like any of the Final Fantasy games, but it's still fun. I also found it odd but strangely fun that you could go to the worlds of classic Disney movies and have the hero of the world actually join you (if you replace Goofy or Donald with that character anyway) and fight the Heartless creatures and even fight the villain/s of that world. I'd tell you how enjoyable everything else is, but that would literally take forever and you'd probably fall asleep before I finished, I really, really, like this game.

The Bad
This is tough. Actually, I really hated the camera angles in Kingdom Hearts. It's very tough to remember which buttons control them. That about wraps it up.

The Bottom Line
Final Fantasy/Disney fans will really find Kingdom Hearts a very enjoyable experience. Go out and buy it if you really like Final Fantasy and/or Disney or at the very least, rent it. It's a major shame though, that this game hasn't (and probably won't) come out for GameCube or XBox.

The Good
With the combined prowess of Square and Disney, it is no surprise that Kingdom Hearts is a highly polished game. This 3rd-person adventure/RPG pits the young protagonist Sora against the armies of the Heartless. In order to stop the heartless, Sora must travel to a number of worlds straight out of the Disney movies. Each world Sora visits, along with his AI controlled companions Donald and Goofy, is well designed and instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with the appropriate franchise.

These individual worlds Sora travels to look fantastic. The characters are well voiced and the combat system is entertaining and challenging. The story, while certainly not Square's best (or Disney's for that matter), is interesting enough to keep you playing. In normal Square fashion, there are numerous secrets to find and collections to complete most of which are enjoyable. Overall, the core gameplay is well done and highly polished and is bound to entertain action-RPG fans, Square fans, and Disney fans alike.

The Bad
One of the most disappointing aspects of the game lies within the 'Gummi' ship levels found when traveling between worlds. These levels take the form of an on-the-rail shooter. In these levels, the player flies through a psychedelic backdrop shooting ships, asteroids, and other obstacles and then picking up various parts that they drop. A significant portion of the treasure and secrets found within the game result in additional parts for this Gummi ship. The player can then use these parts to design additional ships with increase speed, firepower, etc. While this could have been an interesting concept, the Gummi ship levels are entirely unrelated to the game. You can go through all these shooter levels without dying once or even being challenged. This eliminates the need for any such ship modification beyond using the ship design portion of the game as a time sink. While this may appeal to some, It was disappointing to me to have a large amount of the treasure and secrets in the game result in something that has a net effect of zero on the game.

An additional problem encountered stemmed from poor camera control in a number of locations. There were numerous times when the player is forced to make a jump they can not see due to issues with the camera.

While the worlds are well designed graphically, several of them are poorly designed from a gameplay stand point. These worlds (the Tarzan world in particular), suffer from extreme repetition in which the player must visit the same locations within that world over and over. This has a tendency to artificially extend the time the player spends in each world running from location to already visited location.

Finally, like most Square games, there are numerous cutscenes throughout the game. This has a tendency to halt the flow of the game. While this may be forgivable due to the high quality of the cut scenes, the fact that the player can not skip the cutscenes is not.

The Bottom Line
While there are a number of flaws in this title, it is hard to not enjoy the game. The seemingly incongruent mash-up of Final Fantasy and Disney works surprisingly well. The core gameplay is enjoyable and the story, while not up to the usual Square standards, is entertaining as well.