Kingdom Hearts II comes off the success of Kingdom Hearts I and the seemingly decent success of Chain of Memories and in the story, comes at the end of the game, 358/2 Days. It's the best way to describe the story in chronological order. It released on the PS2, and it came out to much acclaim. To be fair, it's unfair to compare this game to Chain of Memories, so let's make it more comparable to KH1. However, it may do another injustice with this as we get the next iteration to the story of Kingdom Hearts. So what's this game done well? What did not go well? All that and more below!
Positives:
1. Sora's story continues to progress and be terrific. However, this being intermingled with Roxas makes it better. You see the greatness in both but also how mystifying it is for Sora, and how infuriating it was for Roxas, to have this happen. However, in the end, it made it all worth it.
2. The incorporation of most of the Disney worlds here made the game well worth it. Personally, I found Pride Rock and Land of Dragons being the best with the Coliseum being third. I think they got the most of the characters, the landscape, and the story overall. Also, the boss fights in all of these are pretty good overall (and makes for some historically terrific one-liners and advice.)
3. Reaction commands worked for the most part very well. Yes there are some flub-ups with input, some delay, but I feel if they kept with it to make it less of a delay, you would have seen this perfected going forward. I felt this was a good start overall though for this feature.
4. Obviously the soundtrack, the graphics are fantastic. This shouldn't be much more noted than this.
5. The newer, non-Disney, worlds and their stories are fantastically done as well. The story revolving around those are terrific. The last world and the back story and continuance of it are splendid and well worth the praise.
6. The fight for Riku is also noted here and I like that they continue making progress to this. It's a major plus to what goes on with Sora and Roxas. It's a solid part of the story that continued with the Kingdom Hearts franchise.
Negatives:
1. The fact that they made Namine and Kairi essentially non-existent is just.. rough. Yes they play roles, but they should play much larger roles in the story. Unfortunately it's something that they don't do and it's something they should have done.
2. There's just some worlds that don't matter. Pirates doesn't play a large role, Pride Lands is practically irrelevant, and Atlantica is just something that exists. It would have been fantastic for every world to play a much larger role than it actually did.
3. Everything just feels slow in the way of combat and the exploitation of the mana system is just too prevalent to not mention. It is a step up from KH1, but something that still needed to be better overall.
4. Exploration is non-existent but also I feel that it wasn't something that was prioritized given the story and the worlds and depth of the game. It would have been cool that we had something that led to great treasure, like in KH3, or some side content/story, or a super boss. However, it wasn't to be and that is fine too.
Rating:
KH2 is worth an 8.5 to a 9. It's well worth the play through, either OG or Final Mix edition. It's a great story builder for the game that allows the game to press forward after what happened in Chain of Memories. It's a great game that teeters on being excellent overall
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