Kingdom Hearts

Now, don't get me wrong--there's a lot that's not right with this game. We'll start, as most people do, with the camera. These developers should be ashamed. I've met people who've failed out of community colleges that could have done a better job. It's simply awful. There's no other word for it. The camera gets stuck on things. The camera forces its way into awkward positions for no apparent reason. At several points I felt as though the level designers had specifically tried to use the horrible control on the camera to make things more difficult. Even .dot//Hack, which is not comparable to this game in a lot of ways, managed to build a camera that was responsive and let you keep your eyes on what you were doing. The levels are poorly designed for as terrible a device as they're using, and there's simply no excuse for this kind of shoddy workmanship.

Another annoying problem for me was the dialogue. It's not that it was badly done (though there are some points at which the players don't deliver their lines in quite the fashion they were intended to)--it's that whoever scripted this thing didn't put enough in it. There were several points in this game where the dialogue simply cut off and you were abruptly switched back to floating text boxes. Very disconcerting and it did a lot to dull the experience for me. And just as an aside--I know that it's the theme of the plot, but did the designers really have to try and set the record for most uses of the word "heart" in a ten minute span? There are plenty of synonyms available, people--use them.

All of that aside, though, this game still succeeds admirably despite its flaws. The combat system, while not perfect (I didn't much like the ability system, and I particularly didn't like having to stick items on your characters before a fight) is remarkable. The menu system is quite effective and the AI for your party companions is....well, it's terrible, but it's better than most of the ones I've seen in similar games. The plot is involving and scripted better than normal for Square. Rather than spiraling out of control near the end (as their stories so often do) everything remains tight and compact. The characters feel real and you actually care about what happens to them. Graphically, this game looks better than an awful lot of what I've seen on other platforms, and never mind how inferior the PS2 is supposed to be to the other two major consoles. Square, as usual, has assembled a great looking product. The music is also tolerably good, though perhaps not up to the standards fans of the Final Fantasy series might hold. The mini-games are there for you to play, though once again you're forced to jump off of the plot in the middle of the climax and go slog through all the worlds you've already been to if you want to accomplish everything. The game clocks in a little shorter than most Square RPGs (I finished up in a little over thirty hours with about half of the mini-games completed, and I spent a fair amount of time jumping into walls I wouldn't have had to if I'd gone to a walkthrough), but frankly I think most of their games run a little on the long end anyway, so that worked out well for me.

On the whole, I'd recommend that any PS2 owner who's entertained the notion of purchasing this game go ahead and do it. For twenty dollars, this is probably one of the best values that you can get.