Kingdom Hearts - PS2

This little game is famous for combining the beauty of the Final Fantasy style games from Square with the magical world of Disney. It works to some degree and makes for a fun ride with loads of charm and familiar characters and worlds that will have you running around in awe to explore them all.

You control Sora, a 14 year old refugee from a world that has been destroyed by the Heartless, who are evil beings without hearts and led by Billy Zane. You're looking for your friends and encounter Donald and Goofy, who are looking for their king, Mickey. You join forces in an attempt to find your friends and save the universe from destruction by the Heartless.

The battle system is a lot like the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in that it is real time and you can lock on to enemies to focus your attacks on. It works well and features a robust and easy to use magic system as well. Dodging plays a key role and as you gain powers, it will be easier to get out of the way of attacks and launch your own combos.

I enjoyed this game, particularly in seeing some of my favorite Disney chacters like Jack Skellington and getting to play around in worlds like Halloweentown. The characters are voiced for the most part by the people who played them in the movies and they and the worlds are rendered very nicely and are great to interact with. Also making appearances are some of the Final Fantasy series characters like Cloud, Leon (voiced by David Boreanaz), Yuffie and Aerith (Mandy Moore).

You can replace either Donald or Goofy when you get to new worlds with the respective hero of said world, but other than that you're stuck with them, which isn't a bad thing since they become tanks later on. Not that you need much help since the majority of the bosses are pushovers and range from difficult to very easy. Once you study their patters and figure out the blind spots you can kill them no problem.

My one gripe is the Gummi Ship which you use to traverse worlds. By the time you figure out how to build new ones and get the blocks to do it, you're almost at the end of the game. The same thing with equipment. You can't really buy anything great. You find the stuff you need and sometimes later on you actually earn weapons that are weaker than the ones you're using and have been for awhile. Mixing stuff together to get new items, item synthesis, wasn't handled well either. When you start being able to synthesize, you've missed out on a lot of ingredients and have to figure out the way to get the rest and you have to go through the list at least once if you want Sora's Ultima Weapon.

A fun ride altogether with an ending that is left wide open for a sequel which should be arriving relatively soon though I wonder what worlds they'll use since in this game, most of the Disney properties that are good were used. Give this game a try but make sure you make it past the first level which is Sora's home and utterly boring and could turn you off. After that it picks up greatly and is more enjoyable.