Kingdom Hearts Review PS2

Kingdom Hearts has been made by the RPG masters Square the people behind the classic Final Fantasy series and Disney Interactive. What you end up with is something that mixes hundreds of Disney's classic and well-known characters along with a few new ones, with Square's characters from some of their past games and their experience of the RPG genre. You will now be asking how can Donald Duck and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII be in the same game? Well, a force is dawning on the life energies of a number of interconnected worlds using a horde of shadowy nasties that go buy the name of the Heartless.
As Sora, the innocent looking kid with big feet and a voice supplied by the film star Haley Joel Osment, you will become the saviour of the troubled worlds as you search for your missing friends. You will also have the help of Goofy and Donald Duck who are also looking for a lost friend, Mickey Mouse.

Along the way you will meet some of Disney's classic and famous characters along with some of Squares best loved. I should say that there is much more Disney in this game than there is Square, so if you're a Disney fan you are going to be in for a real treat with Kingdom Hearts. On the other hand though Square fans will also be happy because the game has all the characteristics of a Square game, secret items, mini games, character building and some great boss battles that Square fans have come to expect.

Kingdom Hearts is not a role playing game like the latest instalment of Final Fantasy X, but it does have plenty of the same elements, characters gain levels, spells and special abilities as you proceed through the game. Fighting will feature in most of the scenes in Kingdom Hearts so get ready for some Heartless kicking action. There is also plenty of platform style sequences plus a few puzzles to solve. As well as all this you will be pleased to hear that Kingdom Hearts is a pretty long game, lots bigger than your average 10 hours of game play.

Kingdom Heart works for the main part but its game play can get tedious at times. The camera tries to stay behind Sora as he runs about, but you will be able to move much quicker than the camera, this can cause headaches at times, especially if your playing on a large screen. You can switch to a manual camera but this does complicate things more than necessary, although it does give you better control of the camera. When you get close to a wall or other obstacles the camera will still come out of place. The worlds that you travel through are mostly themed around Disney's films. With this the underlying story line sometime has to take a back seat to a version of whichever Disney movie that world is based on. Its one big story made up of lots of Disney stories in the middle basically.

Kingdom Hearts doesn't always clearly let you know what you should be doing next so this can result in some backtracking. You might have to run about for a while at times to try and find the next checkpoint, usually it will be a dead end that will make you realise that you need to go the other way. The combat in Kingdom hearts is good fun, but it can also get a bit repetitive. To start with you will be able to execute some shot combo attacks using your keyblade, later you will be joined by Donald and Goofy who will fight along side you and draw some enemy attacks away from you. It is good have these two by your side (Others will join you too) through out most of the game but they basically serve just a couple of functions, they will provide you with health at times and secondly they are good at drawing the enemy away from you. You are also able to customise their battling techniques even if you do you will still have to fend for yourself for the most part. Later in the game you will access quite a lot of special abilities including magic and some great looking summoning spells. Enemies will come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; you will be able to defeat many of them just by pressing the attack button until they burst. When you do destroy an enemy they will release little orbs that can be collected to give you money, health or magic power. You will only fight a few different types of Heartless in each area and no matter how many you kill they will keep coming, so you eventually learn evasion is a much better tactic and it will save you a lot of trouble.

The bosses and the battles you have with them in Kingdom Hearts are one of the games main highlights in the game play department. Bosses appear all over the map and they range in difficulty from easy to fairly difficult. Unfortunately if you loose a battle with a boss you will have to watch the pre-fight cut scene before trying beat the boss again. This can be frustrating especially in the later stages of the game when the bosses become a little more difficult. One good thing though is that each boss is very spectacular and they are all very different, so you will be going into battle eagerly to see what the boss looks like. As well as looks the way in which you have to defeat each boss varies and you will have to use different tactics for each. Generally logic will and reflexes will prove the best way to defeat a boss. For the more difficult bosses it generally pays for you to waste loads of Heartless beforehand in order to build up your levels of magic, health and money. If you do this well the hardest of battles will become a cinch.

When travelling between worlds you will be faced with spaceship shooter levels. Unfortunately these don't fare quite as well as other aspects of the game play. It's similar to Nintendo's Star Fox but it hasn't been executed half as well as it should have been. You will be left stuck on "rails" for several minutes at a time as you blast some pretty rubbish looking opponents. You sense of perception will also be a bit out when you're flying through space, for some reason you will find yourself missing some of the targets that looked like they should have been hit.

Everything you see in Kingdom Hearts looks great and the characters all look fantastic, especially the Disney ones. What else is amazing is the characters expressions and their movement, both facial and body, they look just like their brothers and sisters on film even thought they are in 3D within the game.

The voice actors who provide the speech for the game have also done a very good job; all the spoken dialogue is excellent and even better are the cut scenes, they are truly brilliant. You may notice that some of the cut scenes have had more time spent on them then others, Disney have got the art of humour right down to the finest detail. For better or worse you will probably like watching Kingdom Hearts better than playing it at times. The sound effects and music are not on the same level are the spoken dialogue, it's a little disappointing, its very rare to find games that are perfect in every way.

Kingdom Hearts is a good laugh because it captures the spirit of not just Disney but Square too, which is quite amazing to see in a single game. The are two reasons this game has pulled it off the way it has, Squares experience of this type of genre and secondly, Disney's cartoon characters that have caught the imaginations of millions of kids in the world. Like the cartoons this game can be recommended to anybody. Oh, you also are getting you monies worth of game too.

8.0 out of 10