Kingdom Hearts Review
Kingdom Hearts is a game that meshes together two unique worlds, those being Disney and Final Fantasy, to create a creative and compelling piece of interactive entertainment. With a great mix of excellent story, intense battles, and worlds to explore Kingdom Hearts is easily recommended to anyone, but is a must buy for any die hard fan of SquareEnix games.
One of the most appealing things about this game is to find out about the world created from mixing Final Fantasy and Disney together and how that all comes together in the story. Throughout the story of Kingdom Hearts there are tons of cameos from both protagonists and antagonists of both universes with characters ranging from Mickey Mouse and Cid to Oogie Boogie and Sephiroth. The story begins with Sora's desire to find his friends Riku and Kairi after something happens on their island, but quickly escalates into something far more epic. I'm not going to spoil anything, but the story can and will hold your interest.
While the story is great, this is a game and as such it has to have great gameplay to be a great game. In battle,
it is all real-time, action-oriented gameplay and you control only Sora while your two teammates (normally Donald and Goofy) are controlled by AI that you can adjust the behavior of. You can choose between attacking, magics, summons, and items in a battle. You can also parry your enemies attacks by attacking at the same time (if its physical) or casting a magic that would counter it such as casting fire against blizzard (in the case of magic). To enhance you battle capabilities you need to equip abilities, which are pretty similar to the badges in Paper Mario. Each ability gives you a new skill, such as adding another hit to your combo or gaining MP when you take damage, but each skill cost a certain amount of ability points or AP, of which you only have some many. The abilities you choose can change how you can tackle battles.
Exploration is also a big part of any RPG and of course with the vast variety of IPs from Disney there are myriad world to explore, like Agrabah or even the Hundred Acre Wood. The only problem with this aspect of the game that is like with most RPGs there will be one or two spots in the game that take me forever to get through because I have absolutely no clue what I'm supposed to be doing. So I kind of just wonder around for a good half-hour using the guess and check method and eventually I find that cutscene that lets me push forward.
Kingdom Hearts has a great story and gameplay that never gets stale. Between hidden boss battles, ultimate weapons, and an extra difficultly setting this game has plenty of stuff to keep you hooked for a while. I really enjoyed Kingdom Hearts and I can wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go.
