GAME REVIEW: KINGDOM HEARTS

You're either going to love this game or hate this game. This game could easily be classified as weird. Kingdom Hearts is basically a massive crossover between the Final Fantasy characters and Disney characters, however it leans heavily on Disney. I was a little skeptical and curious about Kingdom Hearts to begin with so I figured, why not, it might be interesting. I'm not sure what this game is supposed to do for Squaresoft or Disney, but maybe it's like a declaration of the two companies merger of ideas and resources. This could be either a bad or good thing depending on what direction it's taken in. Business aside, Kingdom Hearts is certainly going to get talk from fans of the Final Fantasy series, and bring up heated debate. For sure, this game just smells pungently of "ca$h in" on the popularity of Disney and Squaresoft characters. There are times in which you think you are playing a giant ad for every blockbuster Disney movie produced over the last 60 years.

The visuals in Kingdom Hearts are not as stunning as games like Final Fantasy X, but they are certainly better than average efforts. The renders of Disney characters are actually very good and they exemplify their animated traits very well. The environments are based on various Disney films, like Alice In Wonderland, Tarzan, Hercules, The Little Mermaid, 101 Dalmations, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Sleeping Beauty, and even Tim Burton's: The Nightmare Before Christmas. Most of these are lush with color and detail, each distinctively unique, however some of these area's or "worlds" are somewhat small, and seemingly constrained. Although I understand the childlike motif of the Gummi Ship space it certainly would have been nice it was a lot more epansive and there were more ships.

It's pretty simple to play Kingdom Hearts, most of the time you can simply hack and slash your way to completion of the game. There aren't a whole lot of amazing things about the gameplay here. Your health is displayed as a round green gauge that encircles an image of your character's face, and the magic guage encircles that guage, and is increment based. As you gain levels or abilities your guages grow larger, furthermore an element taken from the Final Fantasy games, you can cast soells that use MP, like fire, thunder, cure, aero, etc. I found myself using the destructive magic spells only occasionally considering whacking away at the attack button proves so effective. I did use the "cure and cura" spells quite often though. You dont' have or carry much active equipment, but what you do have you can upgrade. Sure enough there are Summon spells, but um...you know I practically laughed myself to death when I summoned (drumroll please...) Dumbo, the Flying Circus Elephant! Yes, you can summon, Dumbo, but that's not just it, you also can call forth Bambi, Tinker Bell, the Genie from Aladdin, and Simba from The Lion King. Ah...yeah...whatever? Your character Sora is accompanied by Donald Duck and Goofy throughout the game, and they pretty much control themselves, with pretty decent AI, they attack, cast spells, and self heal themselves all on their own. Throughout the game your enemy, "The Heartless" morph out of nowhere and often regenerate even after an area is cleared. To defeat them you simply whack away with your keyblade until their finished off, each time leaving behind health restore pellets, magic pellets, and "munny." Sometimes they drop items like Mythril Shard, or Lucid Shard, etc. The bosses of the areas are either difficult or easy. Using a simple rule of thumb from RPG's often will prove effective in Kingdom Hearts, just spend some time in an area defeating the endless hordes of "heartless" and you'll continue leveling up and defeating the bosses will be fairly easy. As it is, defeating bosses involves little innovation, rather just smashing X as fast as you can while pressing the jump button. There was one boss battle in "Atlantica" (Little Mermaid World) that's wasn't simple, considering you had to cast the right magic into her cauldron and then you were able to attack, even after you defeated this battle, you had to fight another battle against her face. The one in "Aladdin world" with the giant Sphinx head was noteworthy as well, considering you had to climb up onto the Sphinx's face to hit it in the eyes, while dodging lasers from it's eyes and enemies flying out of it's mouth while the head sways wildly around and shoots flames, that was a tough one let me tell you. Battles at the Coleseum with Cloud, Squall, and Yuffie were on the tough side, I've got to give them credit for that. Once you complete a world, you can leave it and you travel between the worlds on a "Gummi Ship" A Gummi Ship is a ship made of toy blocks, like LEGOs. You will often find rare Gummi Blocks in the game to improve your Ship, once you buy a better computer from Cid Highwind. This is probably one of the most useless parts of the game toward completing the game. Despite all this I think I only encountered the Game Over screen about 3 times through the whole first play of the game on the Normal setting. Nothing you do in "gummi space" affects your characters, and it's too bad that so little attention was paid to the whole "Gummi Ship" aspect of the game. I liked the whole ability to customize my ship and add lasers and engines to it, designing it the way I wanted it to look, but even if you found all those rare Gummi Blocks it didn't do you much good to have such a powerful ship, cause each course was so brief and easy in nature. To be honest there is a place in my heart for Spaceship Shooters, and sadly this genre has died, I loved the fun of just blasting away at stuff in space with a ship that I could add cool weapons and shields to (remember Gradius III, Raiden Trad, UN Squadron, ). I had fun iwith the Gummi Ship thing, but unfortunately it was short lived.

There are usual sound effects in the game, but the background music leaves much to be desired. Most of the music comes directly from Disney movies, which doesn't make it bad, but what gets totally irritating is that the same refrain of the song repeats virtually every 30 seconds so by the time you are at the end of the level you are in agony over hearing the "Under the Sea" theme song to "The Little Mermaid" 1000 times! The voice overs of the Disney characters are very accurate with the original stars and comedians who voiced characters from the original movies saying the lines of their corresponding characters in the game. Some of the voice acting for the Squaresoft characters though were a little ineffective and less believable.

There is a plot to the game but often time it seems quirky and weird. The beginning seems totally corny and pointless. Basically you start as this character Sora on some puny island in the middle of nowhere and there's a guy who looks like a junior version of Sephiroth named Rikku (yeah same name as the Albed chick from FFX), and Kairi, (A girl who resembles Yuna from FFX), essentially there's some corny extange about sharing the PaoPao fruit with Kairi, and about going on adventure on a Raft, and then at night there is this storm and Rikku gets sucked into this void sphere of darkness, and somehow Sora also gets sucked in but before hand he is given a thing called a "Keyblade" which will repel the Heartless. The whole premise of the games involves Sora traveling from Disney world to Disney world finding and locking the keyholes to the world before the minions of the Heartless find them and get to the heart of the world. They also want all the 7 princesses to unlock the ultimate power. Somehow king Mickey Mouse finds out about the Keybearer and goes searching for why the worlds are disappearing, he leaves a note behind for Donald to find the Keybearer, and then Goofy tags along. They find each other in Traverse Town and are helped by Squall, ahem, "Leon," Aeris, and Yuffie. They are explained about the fate of the Keyblade and the Heartless. The game is innundated by brief cameos from characters like Squall, who changes his name to Leon because he didn't like his former self (which is a character from "The Bouncer" a crappiest Squaresoft game I've played), Yuffie, Aeris (spelled the Japanese Translation, Aerith), A junior version of Selphie, Tidus, and Wakka, Cid Highwind, Moogles. Of course there is a plethora of Disney characters, including Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, The Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, Hercules, Ariel, Triton, Ursula, Flounder, Tarzan, Jane, Jimmy Cricket, Geppetto, Peter Pan, Pinnochio, 101 Dalmations, Tinkerbell, Alice, Aladdin, Jafar, Jasmine, Iago, The Carpet, The Beast (From Beauty and the Beast), Merlin, the Fairy Godmother, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, the Owl, Rabbit, Chip, Dale, etc. I think just about every major and supporting Disney character both good and evil were in this game. One of my favorite aspects was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was called "Halloween Town" and Jack Skellington joined your party. Even Sora, Donald, and Goofy are dressed in costume. It was a nice touch, and I've always been a fan of Tim Burton, from Beetlejuice to James and the Giant Peach. I would love to play a whole game in that style of world, it's too bad "Halloween Town" was so small, that would make an awesome game environment to develop a whole experience around. Across the game you will discover pages to "100 Acre Wood" which open up various mini games and "Winnie the Pooh" storyline elements. I remember a lot of these scenes from the show when I was a kid, so in a way you'll be like, "yeah, this seems all too familiar" They all essentially appear in their respective worlds, but do not follow you to other worlds. The dialogue in the game is rather simple and not exacly what I could consider of any depth. I would assume that the audience for this game is about 9 - 13, its not entirely boring, but the premise of the game is a little straightforward. A good example of dumbing it down is when, you have an item that, "Increases Defense by a lot" verses an item that "Increases Defense by a little bit" as the description. Without giving away too much of the plot, it's safe to say that most of it is pretty corny and infantile with forced dramatic effects that don't work, and odd snippets of emotion that seem out of place.

This game was addictive to the extent of just experiencing the oddity of it, seeing old Disney characters I had forgotten about from when I was a kid, and interacting with Squaresoft characters. It wasn't hard to play this game as much as it was in some aspects tedious and repetitive. I don't think fans of Final Fantasy will dig this game, because it's nothing like Final Fantasy, aside from all the cameos. If you are a Disney fan, then is is probably the best game with Disney characters to come along yet. I enjoyed it to a point, laughed at the stupidity of it at other times, and in a way rekindled memories of watching the Disney channel when I was a kid. This game didn't do anything massively innovative in terms of redefining a genre, but it maintained the same predictability and level of steady moderate challenge from beginning to end. I bought this game, and I can imagine that if you have younger sibling in the house this would be the kind of game that perhaps both of you could play together, and provides a good nonviolent gaming choice for little kids or overprotective parents (usually practacing Christains) concerned with exposure to graphic violence in video games.

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