King of games? (Kingdom Hearts (PS2))

Member Name: samgriff

Product:	Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
Date:	30/09/06 (137 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great concept, graphics

Disadvantages: Small complaints

Kingdom Hearts, a platinum game, sold millions of copies and quite rightly so. I purchased this game a few years ago basically because I liked the cover of it. I know not a good way to choose but what can I say. Anyway the sequel to this game is out so I thought I might write a review to reminisce a bit.

The story of the game

The story starts off with a teenage boy called Sora who enjoys life on an island with his two friends Riku and Kairi. The three always talk about getting off the island and exploring. One night they get their wish. A huge storm comes across the island and Sora is swept up into darkness. He wakes up in a strange place and encounters strange people who he makes friends with who have their own problems. Goofy and Donald are looking for the missing King Mickey Mouse when they encounter Sora and decide to help him.
Sora is determined to find his friends and travels to many different worlds with Goofy and Donald. Some are friendly, some not so nice but all have many interesting characters and foes to battle. Kingdom Hearts follows the threesome in an amazing journey where they realise certain facts about their friends and themselves in a truly memorable story.

My opinions
I think this is a wonderful game that can keep you entertained for hours. The story is quite good and does keep you intrigued throughout through the usage of secrets and fun things to find. There are many twists and turns that occur within the story which keep you on the edge of your seat. I like the fact that it brings many other known stories into the game such as Aladdin, A Nightmare before Christmas, Beauty and The Beast, The Little Mermaid and many others. These known tales are the same in the game except that the title character Sora has to help out and battle the bad guys, you know Jafar and Ursula. I think they created a perfect game that allows us to be small children again listening to all of our favourite Disney tales.
This game also mixes with the Final Fantasy series, so if you have ever played that you will also be excited. Characters from some of the best selling Final Fantasy series make some appearances here such as Tidus and Sephiroth. It is quite fun to see these characters but what do you expect from a game that has come from Disney and Squaresoft, the latter being the makers of the Final Fantasy series.

The game is quite easy to understand as well in terms of what to do. Sora just has to travel to different lands, battle the baddies and find different items to help him on his quest. This is done by travelling in a gummi ship. Sounds funky but the actual travelling part is quite boring. The three main characters progress through the game by gaining level experience. At the start you are on level one, but the more baddies you kill, the more experience you get, allowing you to kill more easily at higher levels. What I think is also quite fun in this game is that the main characters each have their own weapon, Sora has the Keyblade. I like the fact that by doing certain things you can get better weapons; it makes the game more interesting. The game, I find, is quite easy as I think Sora’s health bar doesn’t deplete that much, it seems to be very generous throughout the game. However if you don’t have potions you can die quite easily.

What I think is quite a good feature in this game is that there is quite a lot to do. Ignoring the actual main game you can have a bit of fun with the game. You can collect things such as Dalmatians; these give you a big prize at the end. You can search for different items and make different things with them. It is also quite a free playing game, such that you cant travel to the worlds at any time, even after you have completed that section. I like this as it gives you more freedom to look for missed items and to gain experience.

The controls on this game are seriously easy; if you can’t get to grips with them then you must be a bit of an idiot. It’s simply a tap of a button to fight and to grab things. The main menu is also very easy to navigate around. The worlds can get quite confusing and hard to find your way, but I think this makes the game a bit more interesting. Who would want a game they can easily complete? Well to be fair this game is quite easy to complete. It doesn’t really have many puzzles or anything like that. Instead it seems to rely on the player being bothered to higher up their experience levels to beat the bosses. It really is a pretty straightforward game.

The graphics on this game is something to be in awe of. It manages to create a world that is highly defined yet still seems a little bit cartoony with a splash of good old Disney themes. I thought the loading times on this game were excellent. With graphics like these I really expected loading times to be hell, but actually they are really fast, you almost don’t notice them. Also the game was never sluggish and the characters always moved smoothly. The worlds looked perfect and they were perfect representations of their respective films. While walking through them you really did remember the films in all of their glory.

One of the best parts about this game is I think how many stars they actually got to voice the characters. Haley Joel Osment, Billy Zane, Mandy Moore and David Boreanaz all made appearances as main characters which I thought were brilliant. Usually in games the voices mean absolutely nothing to you but while playing this the voices made the characters seem even more alive which made you care about them all the more. Also what I thought topped it all off was they actually got the stars that did the voice for the other characters on film to come and do the voices for the game. Aladdin, Jasmine, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and many others provided the voice which made the game seem even more like one big Disney story.

My Overall Opinion
I honestly love this game and it has been one game in my collection that I have played and completed on more than one occasion. I love the concept of this game and the way it blends the Disney stories into Sora’s was just wonderful and worked really well. I love the characters and thought that they were presented wonderfully. They were very 3-Dimensional and each of them had their own stories which were told. It really made you care about what happened to all of them. Sad I know, it is only a game. The graphics are excellent and the game play is worth while. This game can keep you entertained for hours upon hours without getting bored. There is just so much to do and everything gets more interesting as the game progresses. Even Sora can learn new fighting moves so that the battle scenes don’t get too repetitive which is one of the downfalls of most games.

For the price of this game, it is platinum now; I completely recommend this game as it is just wonderful and very entertaining. I would play this before buying the second one as it does get you into the mood of the game and to understand all of the characters.
Overall a brilliant game definitely worth playing!

General information
Price: £11.97 from amazon.co.uk a bargain!
Age: 11+

Summary: Great game worth buying